Star Wars Galaxies Falls In Sarlacc Pit

[Dastardly]

Star Wars Galaxies Falls In Sarlacc Pit

Permalink

In truth, watching SWG for the past few years has been like watching a beloved pet suffering with an untreatable illness. There's a relief in seeing the suffering end, but a sadness when one remembers the earlier game and all its potential.

Star Wars Galaxies started off as an experience that allowed players to create their own characters and live as they choose in the Star Wars universe. With the NGE, however, it became another "Carbon Copy Hero Simulator," in which you had to step into the role (if not the body) of one of the iconic characters and follow their story.

Unfortunately, The Old Republic seems to be starting on the exact opposite end of the spectrum as SWG--a tightly-structured experience in borrowing someone else's prefabricated character.

From the sandbox to the pine box, a little corner of my heart is reserved for SWG.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

You mean people still play that??? I thought that had died years ago.
BTW, what was this NGE thing? I've never heard of it before. Was it really that bad? ...wait, considering fan's tendency to blow things waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of proportion, I'll just assume it wasn't.

I still play on occasion.

NGE pretty much took away everything that made SWG amazing. for instance, it used to take MONTHS to be a jedi and jedi were rare and powerful. NGE came out, storytelling turned sour, everyone was a jedi, and the vast majority of players left. it was bad. There's still fun to be had, but yes, it's pretty much dead now.

So instead of the Jedi being something mystical, mysterious, and powerful that took work to become, they were reduced to that of a commonality. Yeah, I could see how that alone could turn a quite a few people off. Sometimes you have to wonder who's making the decisions when these kinda things come down and just what the hell they were thinking.

 

[Raddra]

So.. any news if The Old Republic will allow players to play some actual star-warsish races?

SWG had such a great selection at launch.. I was a Rodian Medic type. My friend played a Trandoshan Bounty Hunter type. Last I checked ToR just had about 6 different colored humans available, that wasn't star wars to me so I lost interest.

 

[Worr Monger]

Not that I had any interest in SWG.... but this is one of my big problems with MMO's.

Unless there's some kind of goofy DRM attached to a regular game, you don't have to worry about someone shutting down a game that you might still enjoy playing.

 

[oathblade]

I am still angry about the NGE, after six years of not playing the game because of it. I loved Galaxies before... RIP Galaxies.

Hopefully they won't do that to ToR. Thankfully, that game won't be in Sony's hands.

Agreed. Id tried everything else and not found it close to the feel of SWG even with the broken Beta feel it had to times (Jedi Butt Scoot). I ended up having to go to my bank to get my money back from Sony - Something they were forced to offer later. In reprisal for that my EQ2, EQ, Plaetside, etc was permanently banned.

I wont touch a SOE product to this day. I try to avoid Sony electronics. So do my friends.

So.. any news if The Old Republic will allow players to play some actual star-warsish races?

SWG had such a great selection at launch.. I was a Rodian Medic type. My friend played a Trandoshan Bounty Hunter type. Last I checked ToR just had about 6 different colored humans available, that wasn't star wars to me so I lost interest.

Alas no wookies yet. But realistically they shouldn't be running around it should be the sorts of races in 1-3.

 

[Zipa]

You mean people still play that??? I thought that had died years ago.
BTW, what was this NGE thing? I've never heard of it before. Was it really that bad? ...wait, considering fan's tendency to blow things waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of proportion, I'll just assume it wasn't.

I still play on occasion.

NGE pretty much took away everything that made SWG amazing. for instance, it used to take MONTHS to be a jedi and jedi were rare and powerful. NGE came out, storytelling turned sour, everyone was a jedi, and the vast majority of players left. it was bad. There's still fun to be had, but yes, it's pretty much dead now.

So instead of the Jedi being something mystical, mysterious, and powerful that took work to become, they were reduced to that of a commonality. Yeah, I could see how that alone could turn a quite a few people off. Sometimes you have to wonder who's making the decisions when these kinda things come down and just what the hell they were thinking.

If the NGE never happened the game would still be full of jedi today, massive amounts of people were trying to unlock because of the alpha class that jedi was. So either way jedi everywhere would of happened.

 

[oathblade]

The SWG space simulator is higher quality than Black Prophecy or any other flight sim currently coming out.

This is something I think people overlook with how they butchered the ground game and tried to FPS it.

I have one friend left who used the space game as their flight simulator of choice. Jump to Lightspeed really was a fantastic mini-game and sadly was supposed to be in the release but was foolishly sidelined. You could just enjoy that part of the game and be quite happy.

 

[Binerexis]

You mean people still play that??? I thought that had died years ago.
BTW, what was this NGE thing? I've never heard of it before. Was it really that bad? ...wait, considering fan's tendency to blow things waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of proportion, I'll just assume it wasn't.

Imagine having the ability to be anything you wanted, a cross of Bounty Hunter and Medic or Entertainer and Smuggler, or hell... A tamer and fashion designer. You could do anything and be anything -- except sometimes Jedi, but that made sense. Then imagine that being taken away from you... then seeing Jedi everywhere. Everywhere.

Considering the afor mentioned tendency to blow things waaaaaaaaay out of proportion, I'm going to assume you're exaggerating a wee bit. Although that still does sound rather shitty.

No, really they fucked the entire game up. That single update, cut their subscriber updates in half, the playerbase never really recovered.

Said subscribers consisting primarily of the afor mentioned fans which blow things waaaaaaay out of proportion. Not at all surprised.

Sorry if you've had a group of angry fans come here to school you already but here goes nothing.

Pre-NGE, you really could be a combination of any group of classes you wanted. For example, I had a character which was a Scout, Musician and Pilot (Although pilot wasn't really a full class but whatever). Not only did this have interesting mechanic opportunities but the potential of roleplay that could be had was just huge. Jedi characters were crazy-hard to make as you had to do it by unlocking a force sensitive character slot which went through about five different iterations to make it easier for people to get. Even then, in my few months of play, I only ever saw two or three Jedi.

All of that was taken away over night. A number of classes just disappeared and a good number of others were slammed together clumsily to make generic MMO fare. Jedi also became available from the start as the kind of generic warrior class. Imagine having unlocked a Jedi the old-school way and then find out that everyone can be a Jedi now. I'd be pissed off.

The original game had a lot of freedom and it was all taken away with no regard for the fans. I wouldn't say that it was all blown waaaaaaaaaay out of proportion but more that people felt betrayed by the fact a game they really enjoyed was just turned into by-the-books bullshit.

 

[Binerexis]

So can any MMO experts tell me what was worse:

This NGE update for Star Wars Galaxies;
Or the ridiculous changes to Runescape in 2007 including the creation of the Grand Exchange, removal of free trading and removal of Wilderness pvp?

The introduction of the Exchange (from what I'm told, it functions like an Auction House) seems like a good idea to me. One of the things I remember from playing Runescape was the ridiculous arguments over the worth of items and an auction house very quickly settles arguments.

No PvP in the Wilderness does sound really quite silly but Runescape always felt like a safe starter-MMO for kids to me so I suppose it's a sign of the developers dealing with all the gank complaints.

 

[AdmiralCheez]

I found the gameplay to be rather dull, both before and after the updates. What I liked most about the game was the roleplaying community. Depending on what server you were on, walking into the Mos Eisley cantina was like walking into three different stories unfolding at the same time. Even if you weren't participating, and just getting some buffs from an entertainer, it was like having your own personal Star Wars theater.

Some great times, and surprisingly deep roleplaying came from that game, and that's the thing I'll miss most about SWG.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

You mean people still play that??? I thought that had died years ago.
BTW, what was this NGE thing? I've never heard of it before. Was it really that bad? ...wait, considering fan's tendency to blow things waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of proportion, I'll just assume it wasn't.

Imagine having the ability to be anything you wanted, a cross of Bounty Hunter and Medic or Entertainer and Smuggler, or hell... A tamer and fashion designer. You could do anything and be anything -- except sometimes Jedi, but that made sense. Then imagine that being taken away from you... then seeing Jedi everywhere. Everywhere.

Considering the afor mentioned tendency to blow things waaaaaaaaay out of proportion, I'm going to assume you're exaggerating a wee bit. Although that still does sound rather shitty.

No, really they fucked the entire game up. That single update, cut their subscriber updates in half, the playerbase never really recovered.

Said subscribers consisting primarily of the afor mentioned fans which blow things waaaaaaay out of proportion. Not at all surprised.

Sorry if you've had a group of angry fans come here to school you already but here goes nothing.

Pre-NGE, you really could be a combination of any group of classes you wanted. For example, I had a character which was a Scout, Musician and Pilot (Although pilot wasn't really a full class but whatever). Not only did this have interesting mechanic opportunities but the potential of roleplay that could be had was just huge. Jedi characters were crazy-hard to make as you had to do it by unlocking a force sensitive character slot which went through about five different iterations to make it easier for people to get. Even then, in my few months of play, I only ever saw two or three Jedi.

All of that was taken away over night. A number of classes just disappeared and a good number of others were slammed together clumsily to make generic MMO fare. Jedi also became available from the start as the kind of generic warrior class. Imagine having unlocked a Jedi the old-school way and then find out that everyone can be a Jedi now. I'd be pissed off.

The original game had a lot of freedom and it was all taken away with no regard for the fans. I wouldn't say that it was all blown waaaaaaaaaay out of proportion but more that people felt betrayed by the fact a game they really enjoyed was just turned into by-the-books bullshit.

Yes, I've already heard it from other angry fans. And I'll admit that does sound like one hell of a dick move. The kinda thing where you're left wondering what the FUCK were they thinking?

 

[Ravison]

I had an Ithorian Teras Kasi novice when NGE launched. Glorious character. Opted to change to medic when NGE launched only to discover that medics would be killed by absolutely anything almost instantly. Then tried rolling a Jedi only to get kited by a yoshi for fifteen minutes and killed by acid spit because it was significantly faster than me. After that, I played the starting quests to the Bounty Hunter class, found it to be the same boring combat without the options and haven't played since.

 

[13lackfriday]

I played this game from release to the Combat Update. The Combat update dropped the game population by 25%, the NGE by over 50. The game was a mess before, but it was OUR mess to make do with, and we did quite nicely, then SoE bungled it beyond imagination.

Truegalaxies.org has been working on a F2P, pre-CU version of SWG, but progress is ridiculously slow, if you're a modder and wanna help, hit them up.

I still have fond memories of being a BH/CH with a Giant Grual pet and a double-sliced, Krayt-LLC. Wrecked everything in PvE, got destroyed by TK/Doc, Combat Medic/Rifleman, and Commandoes that used the OP as shit flamethrowers and Composite armor (OK, I had a set of that too).

God I'm getting nostalgic...

Sounds like they really had something there.

I kind of wish LucasArts would just overhaul it to its original form and build from there with community input.

The whole sandbox play-any-role-even-if-it's-not-light-side-or-dark-side-pigeon-holed-into-some-arbitrary-conflict aspect really sounded interesting to me. It had something unique that seems to be dying after WoW arrived and every MMO after just seems to aspire to be its clone (a direction TOR seems to be heading in).

 

[Arehexes]

SWG seems to be a textbook case on what to avoid when building an MMO or expansion.

The delays in getting the game out, announcing an expansion before the game is even available to players, setting the game in a time period already flooded with too many characters and information, then not having much content at launch which thankfully the players generated on their own, not smoothing out the glitches after years of being in operations, trying to change the game with the NGE to compete with WoW when the original player based loved the sandbox structure of the game, allowing force sensitive characters to do as they pleased with no consequences, and now simply shutting down the game.

LucasArts and GL keeping it classy, and keeping their bank accounts well padded.

And still Final Fantasy IX did much worse haha . But I guess it's time to throw out the old and in with the new.

 

[Darkong]

I would also say that this game was the first casualty in the whole WoW-clone thing that MMOs have had going on. With the changes they made they were clearly trying to make SWG more like WoW, wheras with the levels of complexity, customisability and tight community, it was more like EVE.

After upsetting so many of their players they were left competing with WoW for new players and WoW just did what it does to all competitiors, it bulldozed them.

Its a shame because there was potential here and it was different enough that it could have carved out its own slice of the subscriber based MMO market, in the end its just another sad casualty.

 

[rayen020]

....what? galaxies has been up and running for 8 years? i had been anticipating that game and saved up all my coins then i heard it was cancelled. i never heard anything after that and i haven't been able to find a copy anywhere. wtf? i really wanted to at least try this game... 8 years? i... it's just...

well i guess no loss for me. i thought it never even got out of the studios.