First days in SWG Awakening

Introduction: A long time ago…

Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) appeared like a dream come true to a huge number of Star Wars fans who wanted an MMO that would quench their thirst for a game that let players enjoy their favourite world.

SWG was the MMO that we all loved. Then one day Sony ruined it. Some say the Combat Upgrade (CU) ruined it. That didn’t do it any favours, but it wasn’t ruined in my mind. I still loved it and didn’t think the CU was at all bad. The deathblow to the game was the New Game Experience (NGE) or whatever it was called. This well and truly killed the game. For all of us. The exodus away and all the account cancellations pretty much signed the end of times for the game. We weren’t happy.

Then came the genius of a small group who re-engineered the game. Removing Sony’s code and working it back up to the game it was before CU. There are a couple of really good servers out there now. SWG Emu and SWG Awakening are two I would recommend in a heartbeat. They won’t hand you a Jedi. They won’t claim their servers are easy to play on. But they will boast the best communities.

So after playing for a fair while on SWG Emu, i decided to give SWG Awakening a look and see how their systems were different to SWG Emu. Both are fairly similar to be honest. One thing I do know is SWG Emu doesn’t have the syncing issues that seem to plague Awakening (I’ve found myself needing to “soft log” multiple times an hour. This is simply a disconnect/reconnect (not exiting the game fully)).

And here’s where I begin my journey into the world of SWG Awakening…

After setting up my account, I was able to log in and create a new character on SWG Awakening. Some may remember my name from Ahazi, Sau’Rai Luess. While the name stayed the same, my race didn’t. I’m human this time round.

Selected the location to start on (of course I picked Mos Eisley). Then proceeded to check out the local population in town. Was a bit shocked to see there were only about four or five people in the area. Had been hoping for more.  I’m sure there’s probably some well visited hubs that are more densely populated (I hope)? I’ll find out sooner or later, hopefully sooner.

So my first day back in Mos Eisley. Actually proved to be a productive one. Stopped in to the cantina and got a free mind buff from a dancer/musician in there by the name of Berami. Armed with my stronger mind, I ran out to grab some missions and start earning some credits. In part so I could actually tip Berami in the near future, also because I needed some new weapons (I started with Scout and just got stuck with the crappy hunting knife. Should start with Marksman or Artisan). So off I ran to find the trainers for Marksman and Brawler. Then off to the bazaar to grab my weapons. These were pretty scarce on the bazaar too. Low tier ones at least. I know new players aren’t the most profitable investment. But to all the weapon smiths out there in the SWG world (on any server), please stop and think about the new players. We can’t afford anything and you try to sell a simple CDEF weapon or the next tier up for far too many credits. I did however find a weapon smith who did sell low tier weaponry. The price was reasonable too it seemed. So I started out buying some of his inventory to get me going. Thanks Ibbi.

I decided to start off with working my way up the rifle tree in Marksman. I’ve never been a rifleman before and thought I’d give it a try this time. My plan is to try every profession in the game this time. It was always a goal I’d had in the past but as with everything, time and reality get in the way. So I’m taking it one profession at a time, not sitting there grinding them out meaninglessly. Although I may resort to macro’s for the Entertainer professions. I’m not sure I can stomach sitting there trying to earn XP for those at the keyboard.

The real goal is to unlock my Jedi again. I cannot lie, when I unlocked it in the original game, the game became so much more fun for me. Even the perma death didn’t deter me. It just made things better. However, there’s no perma death in Awakening. Just massive XP loss as far as I’m aware. So really this blog is about my journey to becoming a Jedi again. Where many have failed, I’m not giving up. I did it once before, I can do it again (in fact I did it twice before. As I had to unlock my wife’s account too, although granted that was a bit easier, since it just meant a lot of time in the Village on Dathomir).