The only problem I have to date with the new Star Wars: Galaxies expansion “The Trials of Obi-Wan” is that every time I visit the new planet, Mustafar, I keep humming the tune to “Mustapha” by Queen. Well, that and the blatant disregard for any sense of continuity or consistency with the Galactic Civil War time period (a gripe that firmly places me in the category of ubergeek.) Oh and the blatantly cynical marketing tie-in with the imminent release of the Episode III DVD. But apart from that I’m quite enjoying it.

On arriving at the Mensix Mining Facility spaceport, I bumped into none other than the rest of the bloody server who had all obviously bought the pre-order too. This caused an intense amount of lag and a couple of clipping/graphics issues (like falling through the floor and ending up surrounded by nothingness – easily rectified by using /unstick.). The place is pretty in a red kind of way. There’s a lot of thought gone into the design of the mining facility and the scale of the place impresses me. Actually, the same can be said of the rest of the planet too.

As far as missions go, the first two virtually compulsory ones are ingenious. Well, okay, not so much ingenious as so blindingly obvious that I don’t know why there aren’t similar quests on other planets. The first is a mission to explore Mustafar by going to waypoints in the 7 areas of the planet. Clicking on a map board object in the first room of the mining facility, which is a usual change from talking to a random NPC, gets the quest. The reward is a copy of the map board, which means you can set up your own tourist information centre in your own home. The next mission is to activate a set of mining markers scattered around the different sections of the planet. Clicking on these markers also brings up some background information about the planet, which is a nice touch (although I tended to skip them.) The ultimate goal of these quests is to get you to see the whole of the planet that you may not bother doing otherwise.

I get the impression overall that the design of the planets has been thought out quite well (and suggest that the person who designed the fjords around the volcano receives an award). The art is quite impressive generally and each area does get a feeling of uniqueness which is lacking on other planets. The lava flows seem to be a bit graphically basic but the overall effect is quite pleasing. However, despite enabling the new “Heat Shimmer” option, I haven’t noticed much of a difference and the smoke effects do seem quite pixellated close up.

Overall, so far, so good. I do have a couple of issues but that’s more with poor design choices rather than the quality of the expansion itself. I managed to delete the Desert Skiff reward (which, by the way, is fantastic! Expect to see trips to the sarlaac pit soon!) on the first evening after it was disabled in combat and it occurred to me that since this was a one off, non-tradable reward item, I would never be able to get another. Fortunately for me, a kindly CSR restored it so that’s okay. But when you consider that the 180-day Luxury Yacht reward is also untradeable but has a permanent deed and can therefore be deleted from your datapad should you desire, it seems harsh that they don’t design the skiff in a similar manner. Needless to say that I won’t be so foolish again.

Besides all that, I give the new expansion a big thumbs up.