Battlestar Galactica Online Hands-on Preview

10 Feb 2011 at 06:56:03 by Peter Parrish

What's your favourite episode of Battlestar Galactica? Mine is the one where the no-name pilot scans asteroids for ten minutes and investigates a cluster of space-debris while training to be 1% better at dodging missiles.

Actually that's not true, my favourite episode is the one from the original series where Boomer reprogrammes Boxey's robot dog-creature to sing offensive 1970s football terrace anthems at maximum volume. Wait ... that's not true either, because that episode only exists in my mind.

Ok, I know, criticising Battlestar Galactica Online for not sharing the tone of the reinvented TV series is pretty unfair. After all, it's not like the player activities in Lord of the Rings Online are all that close to the books or films either (you don't spend all your time reading about scenery or skipping over elf songs, and nor are you Sir Ian McKellen.) BSG Online is simply using the setting (space) and canon references (Viper Mark II ships, a resource named Tylium) from the show as the basis for a free-to-play, browser-based space dogfighting MMO.

There's nothing wrong with this decision. Much as I'd love to be playing an MMO rich in political intrigue, character studies and dialogue trees, that's not what BSG Online is or what it's ever going to be. Instead, it's hoping to use the familiarity of a popular setting to pull players in and keep them hooked.

Adama Ant

Prompted to pick my side, I plumped for the good ol' Colonials over the Cylons. Maybe because I was itching to receive orders from twenty different people named Adama, or maybe just because I wanted to have more personality than a dishwasher. A brief tutorial eased me into the controls and tossed a bit of plot in my direction. You can use either mouse or keyboard (or both in unison) to pilot your craft, though every approach comes with related issues which we'll get to later.

In the character creation section I carefully sculpted a pilot named 'LatexTurtle,' equipped with blond, flowing locks worthy of the original 1970s series, handbar moustache and a pair of hipster lenses. The customisation options aren't exactly endless, but you can adopt a fair few preset hairstyles and faces (plus beards,) then stick your creation inside one of a handful of flight suits. Easily enough for me to craft a fashion disaster inspired by Starsky & Hutch. Both male and female characters are an option, with (at present) one body-type each. That's Butch McLargeHuge for the guys and Miss Invisible When She Turns Sideways for the ladies.

BSG Online is browser-based and uses the Unity web player, my knowledge of which extends to typing out its name just then. Load times for different scenes (such as transferring between space and a ship, or different sectors) are fairly good, though sometimes it can take a few seconds for various 'bits' (planets, other ships) to pop-in. Prior to the character creation boxes showing up I was left gazing at the inside of a hanger wondering what to do, and clicking on a nearby engineer's arse had little effect. On a couple of other occasions, I was stuck loading a section in what seemed to be an infinite loop - through a refresh solved the trouble in both cases. For a closed beta, these issues don't seem at all bad, and they'll hopefully be tightened up before release.

Prevent Horizon

A bit more irritating was the slight lag which sometimes cropped up between control-input and on-screen movement. In a firefight this can get a touch frustrating.

Not, though, as frustrating or strange as the decision to give space in this game an 'up.' At present (and again, there's no telling if this will change before release,) you may be trying to loop and twist through the void, only to find your craft 'righting' itself against an invisible horizon with a curious spin and ending up pointing in the opposite direction because it's not allowed to fly upside down. If this happens when you're trying to do something innocuous like scan asteroids for materials it's aggravating, but when it disorientates you in the middle of a dogfight it can be maddening.

Controlling your ship with the standard WASD keyboard set-up causes it to lurch across the blackness like somebody desperate to receive a DUI from the space rozzers. Using the mouse is slightly better (you either click the right button at where you want your ship to point or hold it down and kind of guide yourself around) but feels out of place for piloting a space vessel and a little unwieldy. I don't doubt you could get used to this method with enough practise, but at present the control scheme feels like something to tolerate rather than an intuitive experience. Why, for example, can thrust speed only be adjusted by keypresses or manually moving a slider around with a mouse-click in your HUD? Surely it would make sense to have this optionally mapped to the mousewheel? Handling of your ship can improve as you upgrade and learn new skills (though as the skills tend to increase things by 1%, this would take a long, long time,) but this too seems a curious design decision. I'm not sure new players will be prepared to grapple with the controls long enough to grind out enough experience points to mitigate the issues with upgraded abilities.

The best combination I could find was using the mouse to steer the majority of the time, using WASD only for rapid turns and keeping the camera pulled as far back behind my ship as possible so I could keep track of the enemy.

Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Gaming In Space

BSG Online comes with a relatively familiar MMO structure. You receive daily assignments from Adama (unless you're a Cylon, in which case you'll presumably get them from a glorified food processor,) earn experience points for completing these tasks or downing enemies (whether AI-controlled or in PvP) and can spend the points upgrading your skills in piloting, gunnery and the like. Learning skills happens in real-time, with low-level stuff taking fifteen minutes and the upper tiers potentially taking a full day.

Resources such as water and Tylium can be mined from asteroids, to be sold for the in-game currency (Cubits.) The spoils of war can also be sold as salvage. Cubits are used to purchase ship upgrades like improved missile systems, fancy engine boosts or something better than fibreglass to cover the hull. In this beta, we were all given a daily 'ration' of Cubits and materials to boost progression, though this will apparently not be in the final release. Said resources can also be spent on 'boosts,' granting double experience points for a brief period or flat out depositing 5,000xp in your account. Whether these will make it to the release version of the game isn't clear, but as BSG Online will be free-to-play the creators will be looking to earn some money somewhere. The ability to purchase Cubits with real money has already been confirmed.

Adama's assignments comprise of patrolling sectors (ie; flying around them for a bit,) scanning asteroids, downing AI-controlled drones, investigating debris for salvage and various other space-courier tasks. Asteroid scanning in particular scratches that very peculiar MMO itch of a seriously repetitive action that makes the sporadic rewards seem more interesting than they perhaps should be. As you'd expect, assignments gradually increase in difficulty as they're ticked off. For example, early sector patrols occur on your front doorstep, but later ones force you to employ your jump drive and hop around some dangerous sectors.

Cylons Of The Lambs

In total, there were around fifty of these separate sectors collectively forming the area of space I was in. Wrestling for control of these is an activity which really showed off BSG Online's potential.

With enough presence in a sector, one side or the other is able to call in an outpost. Much like the Galactica, these provide a place for pilots to land for repairs and retooling. More importantly, though, they provide a symbol of dominance in the sector - and a prime target for the other side. When caught in the middle of one of these sector-encounters, the ensuing dogfight chaos and missile trail carnage can be momentarily thrilling. It helps that the game looks rather impressive for a purely browser-based title.

At one point, having been quite badly damaged in the middle of a sector-skirmish, I had to jump out back to the Galactica for repairs. Excellently, this revealed that jump times are extended from twenty seconds to a full minute when you're in the midst of a battle. The lengthened period of time only made it more satisfying to escape by the skin of my shattered hull.

It's moments like this which hint that BSG Online could be a viable, casual alternative to the hardcore space antics of EVE Online; and there's certainly a niche for its quick 'n dirty online space fighting in a multiplayer setting. For this to happen though, the BigPoint team needs to take a fresh look at the control system and expand the variety of assignments on offer. It also wouldn't hurt to flesh out the interactivity with NPCs (Galactica itself currently has about four people you can talk to ... in three rooms.) Luckily, there should be plenty of time to address these issues and bulk up the content as the game has only just left closed beta.

If you fancy giving BSG Online a try for yourself, open beta began on 8 February with three servers : Caprica and Scorpia for the west and east coasts of the US, and Tauron for players located in the EU.

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