A Farewell to Galaxies

[Dastardly]

A Farewell to Galaxies

Dennis Scimeca returns to Star Wars Galaxies one last time before the servers shut down, and finds himself wondering if it was ever really the game he thought it was.

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Really, the problems with the game came with the decision to include player Jedi. This unfortunately means it was inevitable, if one makes the unfortunate statement that Star Wars equals Jedi.

There's simply no real way to make something "rare" in an MMO. Not fairly, at least. Making it hard to get simply delays the eventual day when everyone has it--and make no mistake, if it's the uber-class, everyone will want to have it. Hard-capping it is unfair, as it excludes newer players from the possibility of enjoying all the content. Permadeath is seen as too draconian, as it represents the loss of real hours of effort (and expense), but even that doesn't make them rare.

So no matter what, Jedi were not going to be rare. Just wasn't in the cards. Add to this the fact that Jedi are supposed to be disproportionately strong fighters, and you see the problem: Jedi are the only thing worth being. And then you've got folks that don't want to be Jedi, because they feel there's so much more ground to cover in the Star Wars universe... so it became necessary to weaken Jedi a bit and introduce a foil -- enter the Bounty Hunter.

All the way up until the NGE hit, "class balancing" was simply a mixture of tweaking Jedi (Master Sabers/Master Powers in most cases) and Bounty Hunters (Bounty Hunter/Combat Medic combos, usually). Everything else was on indefinite hold. The folks behind the game then quite wrongly blamed the problem on the fact that a skill-based system couldn't be balanced... so they went to professions with the NGE.

Before it became a lightsaber simulator, this was a game about living in the Star Wars universe. Not being the hero of the galaxy, not being Luke or Han or Boba Fett, just being "a person" in this beloved universe.

But LucasArts has had a strict "sell more lightsabers" policy for a long time now. The original trilogy showed us a whole world of stuff happening, which included Jedi... but most of the war was fought by soldiers and smugglers and diplomats. But lightsabers, man. They sell. LucasArts also has an obsession with forcing canon "iconic" bits and bobs into everything. Everyone across the galaxy uses the same slang ("bantha poodoo," references to rancors, etc.). Han Solo appears in the middle of novels that really have no use for him, just as a way of saying, "See? It's STAR WARS!"

It really shrinks a universe when there are only three jobs, everyone talks the same way, and you run into the same five people everywhere you go. So I don't blame SOE for the decay of SWG (they have their own sins to answer for). I blame LucasArts, and their obsession with Jedi.

 

[Crimson_Dragoon]

Yes, blame the customer. That's how you do it. Blame the people who had their favorite game... their favorite past time gutted and flayed before their eyes. This article is cauldrons of nothing along with this smug, obnoxious sense of "oh, everyone who quit was wrong! It's all THEIR fault!". I was expecting a heart-felt goodbye to one of the jewels of the golden age of MMOs, but no... all I got was insults and condescension as an original SWG player. This is a bait-and-switch in the worst possible way.

EDIT: Also, MMO players are nomads. Why fucking blame MMO players for their nature? This article is just bad. Nothing new is contributed, nothing thought provoking is discussed... it's just some internet nobody who thinks he's better than me insulting people who left SWG for good reasons.

Umm, are we reading the same article? He didn't blame the players at all. He was blaming the developer for poorly implementing bad updates.

 

[Ukomba]

I loved Galaxies, but it wasn't just NGE or CU. The writing was on the wall when they changed how you got a force sensitive.

I don't mind that they changed the perma-death for force sensitives, but they ended up making it too easy. The class was terribly unbalanced, which was ok when it was so difficult to unlock.

 

[Lex Darko]

It really shrinks a universe when there are only three jobs, everyone talks the same way, and you run into the same five people everywhere you go. So I don't blame SOE for the decay of SWG (they have their own sins to answer for). I blame LucasArts, and their obsession with Jedi.

I agree. I don't completely blame SOE for the NGE I blame Lucas Arts more and I always have. Fact is that even people who worked for SOE didn't know that the NGE was coming so the player base was left with community managers talking about creature handler, smuggler updates in the works that would never see the light of day.

I played a Zabarak who was a force sensitive, bounty hunting, carbineer with touches of combat medic; who was also a fighter pilot and had a house on Lok.

When the NGE was released I was given two class choices, both supposedly iconic. Be like the pants on head clone trooper Cody, or be like the too stupid not to fall into a giant hole in the ground Boaa Fett. I took the third option and canceled my account.

SOE may be shutting down the servers in December 2011 but as far as I'm concerned SWG died November 2005.

 

[JaredXE]

Gold discs and launch veteran. Played it for close to two years and just gave up in disgust after the CU. The game became shit. It was buggy to begin with, fine, launches never go smoothly and I can respect that if the devs were working on fixing things. But they never did. NEVER. There was a disappearing house bug that hadn't been fixed A YEAR after it was discovered. Nope, the devs kept adding new things, but never fixing the old. They called it looking forward and adding content, I call it laziness and an inability to listen to their customers.

I had many cool experiences in SWG. My guild built one of the first player cities in the game, right next to the Krayt Graveyard (guess how much traffic we got . I helped in a player wedding, hell I was one of the guys that got dev teleported protesting their draconian measures.

CU and eventually the NGE fucked things up. I was so happy to have been spared the NGE, but I can understand the player's pain. I'm glad you're dead, SWG.

 

[Arisato-kun]

Galaxies was my first MMO. Loved almost every second of it. I knew I wanted to earn my way up to Jedi and just before I could the NGE hit. So, I picked Jedi as my class. I solely stuck on because of my guildies and all of the awesome people I had met in the game but I ended up quitting.

Two years ago I bought a month of game time for one last hurrah and I couldn't believe how much it had changed. Tons of changes to combat, more AFKers than I could count and most importantly, almost all of my friends gone for what were most likely the same reasons I had left. I came back at the request of a friend and for my last day I traveled out to my player town and presided over a wedding. Married my friend to his RL gf through the game and then literally just walked off into the wilderness and logged.

Galaxies, you will be missed.

 

[Hashbrick]

It's about time... I have no regret or remorse for leaving after the CU. I have no sympathetic attitude to the players that continued after the CU or the players that joined in at a later date. Those of you that stuck to it all helped a bastardized company milk your money away. To hell with anyone that supported the POS it had become. RIP SWG the light is finally at the end of the tunnel.

 

[The_State]

I loved the article, as it reminded me of my wonderful days in Anchorhead, sitting in the cantina and chatting up the entertainers while working on my crafting. I would have treasured that game so much more if I'd known that the future of MMOs was combat-oriented diablo-esque loot grabs. I miss the days of not having to be a fighter in order to advance. I was an architect/chef. I built and designed my own restaurant (which suddenly disappeared one day, giving me all the incentive I needed to quit), filled it with food, advertised in the main town (player cities hadn't been finalized yet), and simply enjoyed the social aspects of being a person in a community. Not a hero in a city full of also-heroes, but just an average Joe getting by day by day. I truly long for another experience like that, but the genre evolved in a wholly different direction.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

If we're going to assign blame for who killed Galaxies, however, the people who fled the NGE in a mass fit of pique might have to accept their rightful share.

I think that's unfair. They put it down, rather than killed it, and it wasn't purely the NGE (though that was the major portion).

What happened in the NGE affair wasn't just that Jedi's proliferated, but that the economy shifted towards Jedi. Especially as the economy had been dealt the deathblow of making all the weapons dependent on player level. Your level 10 blaster pistol did the same as the level 10 ion cannon. So the only thing that was left to build was Lightsaber crystals.

Then there was the duping. Given that you could tip dancers, duped credits were given to players - who were then banned. Protests? Port them into space.

Then there was the killer. Han shot first.

In a strange parallel to Han and Greedo, the player character started off as a pleb. He was grown a pleb and grew to become a hero. Then he met Han.

With the NGE though...You meet Han first.

He rescues you.

HAN SOLO rescues YOU.

And then dumps you on a planet.

So...all of your carefully constructed battle against the tyranny of the Empire is swapped away for "YOU'RE IMPORTANT!" - "NOW YOU'RE NO-ONE".

Like Greedo shooting first, what was once a character arc is now a mess of emotions.

And there was something really special in SW:G. The PC Dancers (that fulfilled a valuable roll), PvP that wasn't just about first shot ganking, a mining/crafting system that was semi-realistic and made you think, player housing that appeared in the main zone, RP that was not just accepted, but enjoyed.

It was the Jedi, like Dennis said, that killed it. And I don't think the Veterans were to blame for that. They just saw the Death Star coming.

And what did TOR announce as their first big announcement? Sith versus Jedi.

 

[Stall]

Umm, are we reading the same article? He didn't blame the players at all. He was blaming the developer for poorly implementing bad updates.

"If we're going to assign blame for who killed Galaxies, however, the people who fled the NGE in a mass fit of pique might have to accept their rightful share."

"While SOE may deliver the deathblow, the veterans who asked for refunds and canceled subscriptions are just as responsible for killing Galaxies. The world it represents didn't go anywhere. We did."

Seriously dude. Did you even read the article? It's clear as day and night that the contributor is blaming the players for the death of SWG as much as the developers. Seriously.. it's ironic that you accuse me of not reading the article, when one of the quotes I showed you is in the little quotation box thing.

The contributor blamed the players. Don't deny it. The text contradicts anything you try to claim otherwise.

 

[faefrost]

Ummm? what amazes me is how few seem to grasp why SWG is closing? It's not SOE being mean or making harsh business decisions. It's not the playerbase or even NGE (although that huge tanking in subscriptions does play heavily into the equation).

SWG is a licensed property. SOE's license for Star Wars is ending and Lucas has chosen not to renew it. The license holder would prefer that SWG not remain operating to avoid muddying the waters with the new licensee EA/Bioware and their forthcoming new game. No amount of server compressing or population shifts would have prevented this. (oh and about those emulators. Fully expect them to be stomped on come winter. Currently as the outgoing licensee SOE has no real incentive to aggressively protect the license or waste time money and resources to shut them down. Once the ball shifts to EA expect a literal crap ton of C&D letters everywhere.)

 

[Strazdas]

well technically it is always payers who leave that make the game collapse. if they had stayed the service would have been going on. however, you cant really blame the players for leaving after developer pulls a stunt on them of this sort.

 

[Awexsome]

Umm, are we reading the same article? He didn't blame the players at all. He was blaming the developer for poorly implementing bad updates.

"If we're going to assign blame for who killed Galaxies, however, the people who fled the NGE in a mass fit of pique might have to accept their rightful share."

"While SOE may deliver the deathblow, the veterans who asked for refunds and canceled subscriptions are just as responsible for killing Galaxies. The world it represents didn't go anywhere. We did."

Seriously dude. Did you even read the article? It's clear as day and night that the contributor is blaming the players for the death of SWG as much as the developers. Seriously.. it's ironic that you accuse me of not reading the article, when one of the quotes I showed you is in the little quotation box thing.

The contributor blamed the players. Don't deny it. The text contradicts anything you try to claim otherwise.

Two paragraphs in a multi-page article. What's the rest about? Exactly.

To not accept any blame would make you stupid. You can tell yourself all you want that it's not your fault, it's all to blame on the devs. I'll just pity you.

 

[snow]

As a game, it wasn't that very good, but it had the necessary tools to be very engaging in terms of roleplay. Something that a lot of modern day mmorpgs seem to lack. Doesn't mean you can't rp in them, just... They don't compare to the fun I had in SWG.

 

[Nurb]

Galaxies summed up: A lot of fantastic ideas all executed half-assed. (I mean seriously, weeds and spawn points popping up between buildings in player cities?)

But how can you possibly blame the people that left? What's the first thing people say when someone says they don't like something about a game? "YEA WELL LEAVE IF YOu DON'T LIKE IT!!"

Well that's what those players did, they voiced their opinion by stopping their subscription, but SOE didn't listen to what customers wanted. Customers are not to blame for doing what everyone tells customers to do and talk with their wallet

I left early when the mystery of unlocking force sensitive character was revealed not to be a random selection, not GM selection, not based on roleplay, not based on deicision, but instead based on HOLOCRONS that told you to grind 3 professions to their max level.

That was the first mass exodus, but it's not MY fault THEY made a decision that made people leave. It was a stupid idea to make Jedi a pure grind to unlock, and it was stupid to make them a starting class that had to be balanced with the weaker classes.

 

[Dastardly]

A Farewell to Galaxies

Dennis Scimeca returns to Star Wars Galaxies one last time before the servers shut down, and finds himself wondering if it was ever really the game he thought it was.

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I also have to say that I'm in complete agreement on things like housing, crafting, entertaining, and the like -- these were the things that elevated this above an online adventure game and made it a virtual world. That's the sort of thing that used to be worth paying monthly "rent" on that virtual real estate.

And these were left almost completely untouched by the awful (and "iconic") NGE update, because they were seen as inconsequential. The most dynamic and enduring aspects of SWG were treated like the least important, and that neglect is the only thing that kept them around long enough for me to have re-subscribed more than once over the intervening years.

No one does these things anymore, either. And I have to ask, "WHY NOT?!" Adventuring has seen very little progress over the years. PvP in any game is only as good as its playerbase, and a lot of those hyper-competitive folks have pretty short attention spans (or they get bored fighting the same 30 people all the time). The token "housing" instances other games have are just storage space, because they serve no purpose in the world that brings other people to them. Crafting in other MMOs is just a simple one-step collection game (get widgets, make them into armor).

In a sense, the NGE isn't the biggest problem. The fact that the NGE killed SWG is the problem, because it shows how the MMO world gave up on making game worlds that were worth continuous payment schemes. Since then, folks pay monthly out of habit alone, never asking why they're not getting anything deeper than a single-player, ten-years-old RPG.

 

[Stall]

To not accept any blame would make you stupid. You can tell yourself all you want that it's not your fault, it's all to blame on the devs. I'll just pity you.

Actually, the shutting down of SWG has much more to do with SOE not wanting to continue to pay the license to use the Star Wars name than anything. It actually has very little, if anything, to do with the current sub base of the game.

Great research, and wonderful use of assumption, by the way.

 

[Jas0913]

The guild i was in when i used to play WoW originated from Galaxies and they would always talk about the downfall of Galaxies and why they all left it to join WoW. I actually played Galaxies on a private server about 2 years ago, most likely the one you referred to in your article, and i am sad to say that i was not impressed at all. The combat was clunky and slow and i didn't find much to do. The cities were larger than they needed to be and getting from place to place was a hassle. On top of that the server had a number of issues including a high lag and constant server restarts so i couldn't really enjoy playing it. Seeing SOE unplugging the servers to this should comes as no surprise to anyone especially with the upcoming release of the new Star Wars MMO. I just hope that Bioware and EA take into account the things that made Galaxies so great and builds off of it.

Great article BTW.

 

[rsvp42]

And what did TOR announce as their first big announcement? Sith versus Jedi.

Probably for the best. If they tried making them special or rare or extra-powerful, they'd just cave to fan/critical pressure eventually. You can make a Star Wars game where players can't be Jedi, but you'd probably miss the mass market and end up as a niche title, thereby making a large budget unjustified, in turn either lowering the quality of the game or creating an unsustainable title.

I guess it's a question of what's more palatable to the masses, a Star Wars game that tries to mimic a living world or an MMO with Star Wars classes and stories? Does the game or the lore/world reign supreme? I suppose we'll find out after TOR's release (I don't think they've compromised the lore terribly, but I know they've had to make concessions). My suspicion, based on WoW's success is that it's more about the gameplay and achieving the critical mass of players to reach that tipping point where people join to be with friends. Warcraft has/had a lore but it became a vehicle for new content instead of an attempt at crafting an overarching story.

It's a vicious cycle though; until someone creates a smash hit game that's more of a sandbox, no one will take a big budget risk on a sandbox, so smash hits will be difficult to come by, and on and on. I can see why it would be frustrating for sandbox fans.