Battlestar Galactica Online

I recently finished watching the entire Battlestar Galactica Series. It was... interesting. I noticed that a game was released for it called Battlestar Galactica Online. I decided to play it and have spent two hours playing on three different servers trying not to lag die.

Getting frustrated I wrote on their forums in a huge rage/suggestion/bug post. Here is what I said:

I am a big fan of MMO's. I am, however, not a big fan of browser based games. Their are many reasons for this and I shall explain the problems I have had just today with BSGO.

1. I was playing the tutorial (cause I'm a noob) and they said to shoot some target drones. Well, lucky for me the drones didn't spawn for a full five minutes afterward. Besides being annoying it is a complete waste of time.

2. A client side application would allow for better graphics and textures. This means that planets could actually look like planets *gasps*.

3. Would lower bandwidth requirements. With us not having to download every map every time we want to go there (well, at least most of the times) the strain on the server would decrease dramatically. This means that we would spend less time rage lagging and more time actually playing (this is a good thing).

4. Levels would actually load. While this may seem similar to number one this problem occurred on the first mission I went on (after the tutorial). While driving around a gray asteroid looking thing I noticed a bunch of scattered debri. I went to investigate and then a ship appeared around me. A client side app would mean that this could be avoided.

5. My latest reason for hating the browser based game is because it gets me killed. Allow me to explain. I was in a dogfight with three raiders. Me vs them. I took one down easily taking no more than 50 dmg. I turned on the next one and selected it. As I neared for my attack nothing happened. As I passed the raider nothing continued to happen. Annoyed I attempted to turn and try again. My Viper seeming not to listen continued moving forward. When I finally managed to turn my ship around the raider disappeared again to appear behind me. Luckily my Viper decided it was a good idea to fire backwards so I did get one shot off. This continued for another two passes. Then everything just stopped shooting and it got really peaceful. I was at about 200 health. Two seconds later I exploded.

6. Load Times would decrease. Besides the waiting 15 minutes to download BSGO every time I want to play it. Besides waiting five minutes to load a new room. Besides all of that it would be really nice if it didn't take ten minutes to undock from Galactica.

Now you all might be thinking: "Get a better computer." or "Upgrade your internet's" or any of the other miscellaneous comments that are similar to these. My computer is better than average with 4gigs of triple channel RAM, a 460 Fermi and a Triple Core processor running at 3 ghz. My Internet is also not bad downloading at about 300 kb/s. These are not the problems.

While I like where BSGO is headed it is not there yet. The servers are laggy, the graphics are less then superb and the controls are abysmal (though this might be due to lag). I can't see myself being a member of BSGO for very long without a client that I can run from my computer.

Also here is a list of some other problems and errors I have encountered along the way:

1. You can not change your side once you have joined a server.

2. The game continues to function even while in a background tab (I have clicked three buttons and walked across a room while writing this).

3. Enemies have a tendency to disappear and appear in different places. In other words their movement is hardly realistic.

4. Lag...

5. WASD controls are terrible and impossible to use. The Right mouse method is not much better.

6. Nebula clouds are blinding.

7. Lens flares are enormous!

8. You bounce off planets and ships.

9. The "Jump" button in the FTL Nav screen is hard to see.

10. If you haven't seen the show you are left wondering "WTF is a cylon?" (Luckily I have seen the show)

11. Ships you can dock with should have a special color assigned to them. At first I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to dock.

12. Asteroid's, Planets and Large Ships don't hurt you if you hit them.

13. You can't rotate the player model during creation and, since you are going to spend most of the time staring at the back and not the front of them, you should probably be able to do that.

14. Conversation's are flavorless and without sound (granted adding sound to a browser based game would slow it down ever more)

15. If an "Attack at X" or "A Large Force of Y" or something like that pops up in the middle of the screen you can't click buttons under it. This is most noticeable in character creation.

To finish it all up: Nice idea, fun game but, for the sake of the gods, fix the frakking servers and give me a frakking client!

If I had to rate the game I would give it a 6/10. Why? because it is full of holes. The idea is great, the game play is fun. But the servers lag, the graphics are annoying and it's simply not done yet.

If you want to see the replies you can go to the forum post here. If you are interested in playing the BSGO game then you can check it out here. It's free and you don't need to download anything.

If you haven't watched Battlestar Galactica yet I suggest you do that. It is a very well done show. You can buy the disks from Amazon or watch them from some other site: