![]() The idea was, originally, quite a good one. ![]() Under pressure from both players and LucasArts to give Jedi a more prominent place in the game, the studio began to take the lid off the game’s elusive Force Sensitive system. SOE should have learned from this that balance was uniquely important to Galaxies. What it frequently was was a game where players in identical armour holding knuckle dusters queued for buffs from a man in a coat in the rain. What it could be was a game where evocative Star Wars narratives were generated on the fly by a complex set of social systems. You have to understand Star Wars Galaxies both in terms of what it could be and what it frequently was. Doctors, realising their clientele were in a hurry, relocated to areas outside of starports on hub worlds. Roleplayers inclined to play the game ‘as intended’ struggled in the new ecosystem, which was defined by space karate. It was a form of Star Wars kung fu invented for a fighting game on the original PlayStation and, through developer oversight, it came to define early Star Wars Galaxies. A niche combat discipline, Teräs Käsi, was discovered to be much more powerful than any other way to play. ![]() When it did not work, in those early days, it was because of balance problems. Nonetheless, these efforts are a sign of how passionate the original Galaxies community was – and how far some are willing to go to save the game they loved. ![]() The servers exist in a legal grey area, too, with uncertainty created by SOE’s recent sale and rebranding. These are small communities and, with limited official support, large parts of the game have been redeveloped from scratch. Others, like ProjectSWG, take the game as it was pre-NGE. SWGEmu is an emulation project that allows users to run servers using modified versions of the game, typically from before the Combat Upgrade. It was an ideal fit for the type of MMOG that Koster and the Galaxies team set out to make.Īs the game’s end came into view, a number of community projects sprang up to rescue it. The expanded universe treated Star Wars as a world with depth upon which the original films had only touched. It has a place in a line of Star Wars work that begins with the original trilogy and extends through novels by authors such as Timothy Zahn and Michael Stackpole, the Dark Horse comics, and simulator-style games such as X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter. Star Wars Galaxies was, then, far more influenced by the work done in Star Wars’ expanded universe through the ’80s and ’90s than it was by the new films being produced by Lucasfilm. The game’s development overlapped with the early part of the prequel trilogy, and its developers had chosen to set the game in the period between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. It was a less strange fit for the Star Wars licence than you might think. If an aspiring Han Solo wanted a drink, then they should be able to buy one from a player who – for whatever reason – aspired to be that bartender from the Mos Eisley cantina. If the player wanted to be an adventurer, the logic went, then they should be an adventurer in an ecosystem that also included craftsmen, doctors, dancers, pilots and farmers. In the view of Koster and his team, an MMOG was a persistent world driven by systems that emphasised player participation at every level.
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