Others say...

"Everyone loved Pre-CU?"
I played the first week of retail and I like the game better today, than I ever did before. There were some fun parts about Pre-CU, but overall it was extremely complicated for new players, and so challenging that it lost fun. Course then macroing came to be cause it was so hard to grind. I love the NGE, there are some downsides but overall its a very fun game, very easy to get into and overall it offers way more than Pre-CU ever did.

"Improving with age"
I have been playing SWG since 2 months after launch. I endured the CURB and went through the typical player tantrum after the NGE.........and now I am back playing SWG full time.

I have tried just about every single MMO out there and Beta Tested a few not yet out. SWG still has the most immersive environment for the rounded player. No other game comes close to the complexity and interest level in the field of crafting. (I know crafting has taken some hits but the new BeastMastery Bio-Engineering is going to rock the economies and help push crafting back to what it once was.)

The Developers are constantly improving the game in two ways. 1, they are slowly adding old features back to the game, just compatible with the NGE. 2, they are adding new concepts to the game to make it more fun for all players. Both the Rebel and Imperial Themeparks are slated to get upgrades in the next few months.

Most of the negaitve reviews written about SWG are those by players upset that someone moved their cheese. They will claim that the PreNGE SWG was the Grail of MMO's but their posts on the SWG Forums prior to the NGE never reflected that sentiment. The EULA states that a game may change at anytime and Sony certainly lived up to that clause.

If you want an MMO that will draw you in and allow you to have a virtual second life in a Star Wars setting, SWG is the MMO for you. If you are seeking the Grail of MMO's, you won't find it here or anywhere else.

"SWG - Paradise in Limbo"
I bought this game when it originally came out. I played off and on for the better part of 2 months before the real world took my attention. I missed the whole CU thing.

When I came back was shortly after the NGE upgrade. I have been playing ever since. SWG was my first MMO. I loved it and still do. I have many, many friends on the server I play on (Valcyn).

Unfortunately, SWG has lost it's way. As desperate as the Developers and LucasArts are to see it be succesful, many more MMO's have arrived since and people have moved on. I myself now split time between SWG and LOTRO. If I didn't have so many friends on my SWG server, I'd probably have left my now.

I hope, that SWG finds new ways to return to it's former glory, but I fear that soon the lights will go off and we'll all be in the dark.

"AWSOME!!"
First off im not a kid...Second, dont listen to anyone that says this game is crap cuz its THE BEST MMO out there. I tell you I never get bored. EVER. games like guild wars are fun and all but it only has a max lvl of 20 and the campaignes are short. Once you get everything you want theres no more point but to start all over with another character and do it all over again. Now i wasnt around before NGE of this game but Galaxies...its just great. I was on before the Expertise system came out though. and i gotta tell you even then it was fun. there is ALWAYS something to do. theres so many repeatable missions that are great fun. for example, fighting the droid army, killing HK (from KOTOR), fighting the mighty Sher Kar (giant scorpian boss that is absolutely HUGE and sometimes he drops an Old Republic Lightsaber hilt that is great). Theres lvl 500! Dark Jedi Sentinals on Yavin that you can fight how cool is that. The max lvl on here is 90 btw. There player events are great like the Battle of Restuss. Come on when that started I think I played that entire day, it started last year and I think its still going on. It was a large scale PvP event in a city and they blew it up while we were fighting. You can also get bounties on your head from killing other players. And dont tell me Jedi are weak, with the right expertise build you can kill almost anyone. Example I had a 2mil bounty on my Jedi and I had 2 lvl 90 Bounty Hunters attack me and i killed them both. Also killed a Commando, and 2 Bounty Hunters all lvl 90 at the Theed spaceport. was killed when 5 more came in though(cant kill em all after all). You can own your own homes, Your inventories are gigantic. you can fight in space. The things to do on this game are almost endless. It's just the funnest game out there. Dont let people tell you it stinks. at least try the 10 day trial. They made it to where you can do anything on the trial that you can with a real account whereas before you could only stay at the tutorial. Trust me, this game is worth every penny. WoW, Matrix, CoH and CoV and Guild Wars combined dont equal this game.

"a game with serious problems"
I am willing to give a lot of leeway to a game if it allows me to play in the Star Wars universe, but this game has so many problems it's nearly unplayable.

* The graphics are extremely dated, like something from the mid-1990s. Compared to beautifully rendered games like Guild Wars... it's just no comparison.

* The controls for the game make the most basic tasks -- targeting an opponent and then attacking them -- an exercise in frustration. Essentially, it's impossible to simply select a target and attack them, as you can in every other game I have ever played. Guild Wars, again, is the high water mark here.

* The Player-vs-Player mechanics are utterly borked. There is no separation between areas that are "safe" and areas that aren't -- there are no safe areas. If PVP is enabled, it is enabled everywhere. There is also no separation or discouragement for players of wildly different level attacking each other, meaning that anyone who enables PVP is instantly killed unless they are at least 70th-80th level.

* The game only permits you to have two characters per server. Two. 2. T-W-O. That's ridiculous. Every other MMO game I have played permits at least six.

The last straw for me was the idiotic name filter.

I had played a Jedi up to level 20, and was working on another character when I ran into a peculiar error message. When attempting to create a character named "Siobhan", I got an error message that said names of famous Star Wars characters and planets were not permitted.

Um... what? Since when is the name "Siobhan" a Star Wars character or the name of a planet?

So I went on the Star Wars Galaxies forums and asked if this was a famous planet or character that I'd somehow never heard of. The answer was... ye gods, it's just too ridiculous. The answer was, "Because the name filter won't permit any name that has the letters H - A - N in it."

Ethan. Chani. Hannibal. Vaughan. Nathaniel. Siobhan. "...han..." is a very common series of letters in names. And none of those names are permitted? You're kidding me, right? They weren't kidding.

You know, there are so many, many things wrong with this game (I have listed only a few), but I struggled through and persevered for a couple of weeks because, by gosh, it's Star Wars. I will go a long way and forgive a host of faults just to play in the Star Wars universe.

But that was just the last straw. Any game with that level of obnoxious, overt stupidity built into it is simply not worth my time.

I really, really look forward Bioware's MMOG.

Finally, a word about the "New Game Experience". A great many forum posts and reviews focus on this game update from 2005. News flash: this is 2007. GET OVER IT. Complaining about something that happened in 2005 is just pathetic, particularly when there are more than enough things to complain about in the game as it is TODAY.