Some pictures I've taken during my adventures
My Galaxies characters
An overview of the original game interface
So what is it? | What does that mean? | Friends | Guilds | Galaxies Addiction | The Death of Galaxies | The End
|
|
|
|
|
Some pictures I've taken during my adventures |
My Galaxies characters |
An overview of the original game interface |
Star Wars Galaxies (shortened to SWG or Galaxies) is a MMO or MMORPG. That's Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Game.
Well, you can think of it as an online only game (no offline content) in a persistent universe. The server runs almost constantly, so stuff happens even if you aren't online at the time. It offers an almost unlimited range of opportunities, from exploration to crafting, politics to combat. Combat itself was divided into two types: PvE and PvP. PvE is player versus environment. You fight animals and other characters, but they're all server controlled. PvP was player versus player. A lot harder since you've got an intelligent human fighting against you.
It was actually a group of my friends that got me into the game. They'd been playing for a while and invited me to join them. After one or two tentative adventures, I was hooked and soon found my feet in the game.
I was a member of two guilds in Galaxies. My first was ID (Imperial Deathbringers). That guild kind of fell apart after a scandal with the guild leader, who started a new "associated" guild that was for PvP only guild. He then asset stripped the guild and sold his character on eBay.
The next guild was ORR (Outer Rim Resistance). It was originally based on Tatooine and then moved to Rori (Naboo's moon). I eventually made my way through the ranks and became the guild leader when our own leader Grace stepped down.
Be warned! Galaxies, like most MMOs, carries a heavy risk of addiction. A lot
of gamers become addicted to the game, feeling compelled to play as often as
possible. That's not to say this is a bad thing. I believe that SWG actually
saved me money. So how can a game that costs $15 (approx £7) a month to
play save you money?
Well, I'm an avid gamer, but playing Galaxies for so many hours a week meant
that when the Next Big Thing came along for the PC games market, a new game,
new peripheral, etc, where I would normally buy it, instead I would ask myself
'How much will I really play this new game?'
And bizarrely, this meant I spent less money per month.
It's sort of like when you buy a card that gives you unlimited films at the cinema. Although it costs about £10 a month, this saves you money because it's less than the cost of all the tickets you'd have bought during the month.
The Galaxies game is still running, but it has managed to drive away a lot of its core gamers. But to explain this, I must tell you a story.
I joined the game when it had its original combat system. This system had a
queue of combat commands that the character would execute while in combat. It
was good for a MMO, because it was simple, but it had it's flaws. The worst
of which was buffs. Buffs were character enhancements that only doctors
could apply to you. These were a fudge to allow characters to wear armour, since
without them the armour's encumberance was too high for your character to don
it. Put simply, the armour weighed too much for your character to wear. The
buffs also made you uber strong, which negated the original need for a medic
to accompany any hunting party to heal them.
The doctors made a good trade applying buffs, usually setting up queues outside
the major starport on Corellia. Worse still, the buffs only lasted about 3 hours,
so a long night of combat would start with a wait for a doctor, and would be
periodically interrupted by the need to return. This also, of course, put a
damper on the amount of profit the players could make in a night.
My friend Eoghann put it best when he said
"I can't just jump online to Galaxies and play for an hour, because half of that time will be used up waiting for the doctor, and then I won't accomplish anything."
So a new combat system was proposed in May 2005. It was called the Combat Update, or CU. The original system was labelled the pre-CU. We as players were given plenty of time to adjust, even allowed to try it out on the test servers to get used to it. While there was a lot of complaints, most players who gave it a chance agreed that it was superior and a definite improvement on the game. No more buffs was only one of the changes. There were cool downs (you had to wait before doing the same combat move again), and returned you to a point where medics were an essential part of any hunting group.
I love it. It made the game vibrant and no longer could you sleep walk through the game.
But then the rumours started spreading. The rumours were that LucasArts, who
owned the licence for the game and Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), who ran
and maintained it, had had a falling out. Rumours spread that the licence was
going to be pulled and the game cancelled.
These eventually proved unfounded.
SOE soothed the customer base by saying that they would never change the combat system again without advance warning, and would consult the users about any changes.
So about six months later (in November), SOE was releasing another expansion. The first one had given us space combat, the second gave us the wookie planet of Kashyyyk (an adventure world) and the third gave us the lava planet Mustafar, where Anakin had his little accident and became the Darth Vader we all know and love.
Then the bombshell hit. One week after this expansion went live (and people had paid for it), SOE told us they were changing the game system to make it more "iconic" and "Star Wars-y" (their words). There would be little or no time to test it out for the players. And worse was to come.
They called this the NGE.
Players said this made everyone into cookie-cutter templates. They said we were playing a game that was still in development, and it was indeed highly bugged, had a lot of problems and seemed 'incomplete'.
A lot of players were furious.
The removal of creature handler and bio-engineer were given a sensible explanation: Only 2% of the players played these fully (a lot more had skills points in these professions, but didn't use them as their main career). SOE removed these from the game, since only 2% of people played them and they were sure these players would change professions. One player gave the follow reply to this.
"We've discovered that 98% of all people playing rock, paper and scissor only play as rock, so we're eliminating the professions of paper and scissor. Game of rock anyone?"
The Jedi players were the most put out. Even if you dedicted hours a night to the game, every night, you'd still need to play for nearly a year to unlock the Jedi profession. They were the elite of the elite. They knew the game inside and out. And now you could just choose to start out on that profession. Even ignoring that this wasn't cannon (the game is set between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back), it meant everyone went for Jedi.
Here's what my friend Mark had to say about it in his diary:
And now here’s the latest on the SWG New Game Enhancements (NGE). Yes, overall I am much impressed. There are a few mini-bugs that will no doubt have the forums awash with vitriol, but I'm sure these will all be addressed in time. Can't seem to call my droid in my house. I had to step outside the house to do it. Also, if you stand too close to a harvester and try to use the structure radial menu, it appears so far above the harvester that you can't see the radial menu unless you zoom your view right out. Which is very annoying because every time you travel or hop on and off a vehicle the game returns you to "just over the shoulder" view mode. I totally aced the new combat system last night. I figured it all out quickly and I now know what I'm about. It took some getting used to but I'm reasonably happy after all is said and done. Of course, everyone and their dog have chosen Jedi as their new profession at the moment. They may as well have called the NGE – Jedi Academy.
With the change being made just after the game came out, a lot of players cried bait-and-switch. This was shown to be incorrect, but it was reported that it might be fraud. Whatever the truth of the matter, SOE eventually refunded everyone who had bought the expansion and then quit the game after the NGE. Tiggs, the community liason who worked for SOE had to move positions and eventually quit because she'd been forced by SOE to tell players that there was no change coming even though she knew it wasn't true.
Then the real bombshell hit.
It turned out that the LucasArts had been unhappy with Galaxies for a while now. The CU was SOE's attempt to make the game more like Star Wars. LucasArts didn't like it and insisted on the NGE. Several people who quit SOE (some over this issue) have voiced themselves that SOE, as a long standing operator of online games, should have tole LucasArts that what they were suggesting wasn't a MMO and should have told them 'No!'
They didn't, and the NGE went it. A few (literally a couple of dozen) players were invited to SOE's HQ in Austin, Texas to test the NGE. SOE naturally didn't invite any creature handlers, bio-engineers or Jedi players.
Eventually most of my friend cut back their time on the game, or quit completely. I eventually quit after one of my real life (called RL in MMO circles) friends, Eoghann, quit. Mark and I followed him shortly after.
It was deeply upsetting for a lot of us. I loved playing this game, had a lot of friends online that I'd never met in RL and really enjoyed playing the game. I'd acrued a lot of equipment, artifacts, art, cloting, vehicles and starships in the game.
And now, SOE were forcing me away from it because the game was (for me) fundamentally unplayable. I gave it a chance. I waited for them to iron out the bugs, but sadly it just didn't get any better.