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Star Wars: Galaxies
Developer(s)	Sony Online Entertainment Electronic Arts
Publisher(s)	LucasArts
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows
Release	26 June, 2003 7 November, 2003 23 December, 2004 (discontinued November 2005)
Genre(s)	MMORPG
Mode(s)	Multiplayer

Star Wars Galaxies (often abbreviated SWG) is a Star Wars themed MMORPG for Microsoft Windows PCs developed by Sony Online Entertainment and published by LucasArts. "There has been no MMORPG that has caused more controversy than Sony Online Entertainment's (SOE) Star Wars Galaxies" according to MMORPG.com. It has drawn much criticism from former players for the last two years, mainly due to drastic changes implemented to the game engine in order to try and draw in a larger population of players.

Gameplay features

As with all MMORPGs, the feature set of Star Wars Galaxies is subject to change.

Timeline

The game events are set between the events of Episode IV: A New Hope, and Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

Geography

The game covers 10 planets: Tatooine, Naboo, Corellia, Talus, Rori, Dantooine, Lok, Yavin IV, the forest moon of Endor, and Dathomir. In the 2nd expansion Rage of the Wookiees, the Wookiee planet Kashyyyk was added. In the 3rd expansion Trials of Obi-Wan, the planet Mustafar was added. Each of the original 10 planets are represented by approximately 225 square kilometers (15 km x 15 km maps) of game space.. In contrast, the expansion planets of Kashyyyk and Mustafar are smaller, constructed differently (e.g. zones, instances) and in some cases imposed different rules than the original planets.

Graphics

The game is generally praised by reviewers for its realistic character models, detailed architecture and lush environments.

Points of interest and cameos

Examples of characters and points of interest that players can visit within the game include R2-D2,C-3PO, their escape pod on Tatooine, the Naboo Royal Palace, the abandoned Rebel bases on Dantooine and Yavin IV, the notorious pirate Nym in his stronghold on Lok, Ewoks and Rancors.

Species and professions

The 10 species available to players include: Human, Twi'lek, Zabrak, Wookiee, Trandoshan, Rodian, Mon Calamari, Bothan, Sullustan and Ithorian. There used to be 34 non-mutually exclusive professions, but after the NGE, there are now 9 mutually exclusive professions: Force Sensitive (Jedi), Bounty Hunter, Smuggler, Commando, Spy, Officer, Medic, Entertainer, and Trader. In addition to these professions, a character can also choose the Politician and Pilot sub-professions.

Combat mechanics

Ground combat is currently real-time and clicky like a first-person shooter. Unlike most MMORPGs, whether an attack hits is not solely based on the character's skill numbers. The player must aim a targeting reticule at a target and left-click the mouse to fire. Auto-aim and auto-fire features are available, creating a more traditional combat experience, but players eschewing those options are rewarded with an increased chance to do maximum damage. As characters gain levels, they gain access to additional combat abilities called "specials" which are activated by using the right mouse button. These specials usually have a cool-down period. In addition to providing especially powerful damage attacks, specials are also used to heal, buff, debuff and crowd control. Players gain the ability to use more powerful weapons as they advance in level.

Player housing, guilds, and cities

Characters can erect, own and decorate a variety of buildings, including houses, cantinas, guild halls and city halls. These buildings, when grouped, can be organized into cities, with members of the Politician sub-profession serving as mayors. As cities grow in population, they become eligible to add services and facilities such as vehicle repair garages, shuttleports and cloning facilities. They can show up on the planetary maps alongside canonical cities such as Theed and Mos Eisley.

Other features

• Single- and multi-passenger ground vehicles: (landspeeders, speeder bikes, and swoops)
• Player-run economy where player characters are responsible for creating many in-game items, from blasters to starships, all from player-collected raw materials.
• An extensive set of emotes, moods, and associated animations, which affect not only an avatar's physical appearance but also the text used to describe a character's speech, and even the shape of the speech bubble displayed on-screen.
• Standard MMORPG features such as player guilds, chat functionality, and other community features.
• The ability for players to place bounties on opponents that kill them in PVP. Player character bounty hunters can then pick up another character's "bounty mission" on the terminals and track the character down. A bounty can be claimed at anytime, regardless of the target's PvP setting. Up to three bounty hunters can be tracking a character at any given time.
• An extensive character creation system. Characters can hire Entertainers to change their appearance in-game, with even more options than those available at creation. Every visual aspect of a character is thereby changeable at any time after character creation except species and gender.

Initial release and expansions

An Empire Divided

The base game, titled Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided, was released on 26 June, 2003 in the USA and on 7 November, 2003 in Europe. A localized version for the Japanese market was published by Electronic Arts Japan on 23 December, 2004. Japanese acceptance of the game was low, and in November 2005 the servers were shut down and existing accounts migrated to US servers.

In addition to the initial cost of the game software, SWG charges a monthly subscription fee (like most other MMORPGs) of $14.99USD, with discounts for 3, 6 and 12-month commitments. It is also accessible via Sony Online Entertainment's "Station Access", which allows access to all their MMORPG games for $29.99USD per month.

At the time of its initial release, the game was very different than it is now. Vehicles and creature mounts were not yet implemented. While player housing was in the game, player cities were not. (Those features were added in November 2003.) Each character and creature possessed three "pools" (called Health, Action, and Mind; or "HAM") that represented his or her physical and mental reserves. Most attacks specifically targeted one of these three pools and any action the character took also depleted one or more of the pools. When any one of those pools was fully depleted, the character would fall unconscious. Combat, then, required the player to carefully manage his or her actions to avoid depleting a pool.

Character progression was vastly different at release as well. Characters started out in one of six basic professions (Medic, Brawler, Marksman, Scout, Entertainer, or Artisan) and could pick up any of the other five at any time after character creation. Each profession consisted of a tree-like structure of skills, with a single Novice level, four independent branches of four levels each, and a Master level which required completion of all four branches. Characters purchased these skills with experience points gained through a related activity. For example, an Entertainer could purchase skills to get better at playing music, but only with Musician experience points. Dancing experience points were entirely separate and could only be used to purchase dancing skills.

In addition to the basic professions, characters could specialize into advanced professions such as Bounty Hunter, Creature Handler, Ranger, Doctor, and Musician. There were a total of 24 advanced professions, although there was no way for characters to obtain all of them at once. Each advanced profession had certain skill requirements from the base professions that had to be met, some more restrictive than others.

Jedi were not available as a starting profession, or even as an advanced profession. The developers stated only that certain in-game actions would open up a Force-sensitive character slot. The actions required were left for players to discover. It eventually turned out that characters had to achieve Master level in six random professions. The identity of five of those necessary professions could be learned via looted objects called holocrons, but the sixth had to be found via trial and error. The first Force-sensitive character slot was unlocked on 7 November 2003.

Jump to Lightspeed

This first expansion was released on 27 October, 2004. Two new races were added: Sullustan and Ithorian. The expansion added space combat. Characters could choose one of three factions in the new Pilot sub-profession: Rebel, Imperial, or Freelance. The playable sectors include the space surrounding the 10 planets of the game as well as Kessel and "Deep Space." Combat is real-time and twitch-oriented like a first-person shooter and can be played with a joystick at the player's option.

Rage of the Wookiees

This second expansion was announced on 9 March, 2005 and released on 5 May, 2005. It added the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk and its corresponding space sector. Kashyyyk is different from the previous 10 planets: rather than being 16 square kilometers of openly navigable area, it is divided into a small central area with several instanced "dungeon" areas. Other content added in this expansion included the ability to add cybernetic limbs to a player character. A substantial portion of the content for this expansion was adapted from the film Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith which was released to theaters at approximately the same time as the expansion release.

Trials of Obi-Wan

The third expansion, Star Wars Galaxies: Trials of Obi-Wan, was announced on August 19 2005 and released on November 1 2005. This expansion added the ground planet of Mustafar to the game. No new space sector was added with this expansion. Like the previous expansion, much of the content is related to Revenge of the Sith, which was released to DVD at about the same time as the expansion was released.

Reviews and subscriber base

Reviews for the initial launch of the game in 2003 were mostly positive. The game was praised for its lush graphics, liberal use of the movie soundtracks, massive world size, character customization, creative creature ecology, complex skill system, player economy interdependencies and its sandbox approach. Reviewers criticized the overwhelming complexity of the game, PVP/ PVE combat imbalances of the professions, bugginess and lack of quest content. The reviews for the first expansion, Jump To Lightspeed, praised the new space combat but criticized the ground game for its lack of sufficient improvement. The reviews for the second expansion, Rage Of The Wookiees lauded the new quest content for current subscribers but lamented the CU and the continued bugginess of the game. The third expansion, Trials Of Obi-Wan, once again recommended the new quest content for current subscribers but also railed against the NGE.

Veteran designer, Raph Koster, helmed the development and initial launch of the game. Many industry professionals expected that the subscription numbers would exceed the one million mark, a feat accomplished only thus far in Asia by MMORPGs such as Lineage and more recently by World of Warcraft. Based on NPD figures as of February 2004, SWG sold more than 300,000 boxed copies at retail for a total initial revenue of over $18 million dollars. Sony Online Entertainment confirmed in March 2004 that there were well over 200,000 monthly subscribers making it the 2nd largest MMORPG in North America. The company later reported in 2004 that they had 250,000 subscribers. In August 2005, Sony Online Entertainment reported that they had now sold 1,000,000 boxed copies of the game. In early 2006 after the NGE, "hacked" numbers showed that only 10,363 subscribers were playing on a particular Friday night. The President of Sony Online Entertainment, John Smedley, denied that subscriptions had fallen this low: "Have the numbers in Star Wars Galaxies gone down? I will tell you that the concurrent numbers have gone down. Are they as low as what was shown there? Absolutely not." Media sources reported that the subscriber numbers have fallen substantially since the release of the CU and the NGE.

Controversies

Jedi

Players who wanted to play a Jedi character first had to unlock their Jedi slot by fulfilling an unknown list of criteria. Not a single player had figured it out in over four months. The Jedi forum at the official site erupted into flames as subscribers accused the developers of lying about the Jedi system being in place. The first player unlocked their Jedi slot on Friday 7 November 2003. Lucas Arts game producer Haden Blackman stated in an interview on 20 December 2003 with Gamespy: "We're confident in the system because the feedback from players has been extremely positive. Not only are Jedi players happy with the system and the powers they are receiving...." This caused a backlash by players who felt this statement was misleading. Gamespy noted: "GameSpy's mail was so flooded with reports from the Galaxies community that we started researching this feature to present both sides of the story." Because the time commitment to unlock a Jedi was substantial, players complained vigorously that permadeath of the character after 3 deaths was overly harsh. The developers eventually relented and lowered the penalty to skill loss in January 2004. Players complained that the process of unlocking the Jedi slot, known as "hologrinding", was overly long, painful and disruptive to the social fabric of the game. So in March 2005, the developers released a quest system as the new path to unlocking the Jedi slot. With the NGE (see below) in November 2005 allowing all players, including new ones, to play a Jedi character, there were complaints that the overpopulation of Jedi conflicted with Star Wars canon and rendered moot the efforts that veteran players had expended in unlocking their Jedi slots.

Combat Upgrade

For months, the developers promised a "combat rebalancing", which then gradually became a "combat revamping", and finally a complete "Combat Upgrade" or "CU". The CU was finally released 27 April 2005 and represented a major re-writing of the combat, armor, and weapons systems. Only certain professions could use specific weapons and armor. The combat mechanics in the game were shifted from a skill system to a combat level system for both players and game creatures. The UI icon graphics were changed from monochromatic to color. The CU resulted in a storm of controversy as players criticized the changes and their disatisfaction resulted in substantial cancellations during that time.

New Game Enhancements

Another set of major game changes called the "New Game Enhancements" or "NGE" started testing on 4 November 2005. It went live on 15 November via digital download and became available in retail as the Star Wars Galaxies: Starter Kit on 22 November. These changes included "clicky" "faster paced, more heroic Star Wars action." Professions were reduced from 34 to 9 "iconic" professions. Previously, players had to take time-consuming steps to "unlock" the Jedi profession in their subscription account. But in the NGE, any player could play the Jedi profession. The basic mechanics of the game became introduced to low level players by C-3PO, Han Solo, and Chewbacca on a space station.

Reviews were largely critical of the changes. Player outrage was well documented, even by media outlets outside the gaming industry including CBS News, New York Times, New York Post and Wired Magazine. The press speculated that subscriptions plummeted after the NGE launched. On Slashdot, John Smedley explained that they felt it necessary to revamp the game in order to reverse the deterioration they were seeing in the subscriber base.

The development team has repeatedly affirmed that this is the direction they want to take the game and they are slowly but carefully modifying the game to address player's desire. This progress includes the re-introduction of many pre-NGE features that were removed, such as creature handling, target locking, autofiring, the ability to fire special attacks from their keys, and the option to keep the camera behind the character, rather than the NGE's over-the-shoulder perspective.

Expansion refund

This Trials of Obi-Wan expansion met with controversy as, two days after the expansion was released, the development team announced the NGE. Many players objected that they would not have purchased the expansion if they had known in advance about the NGE. Sony Online Entertainment eventually offered a refund to players who had purchased the expansion prior to the NGE.

Developments to watch

Emulator server

On 26 June 2006, it was reported on Slashdot that the Star Wars Galaxies Emulator ("SWGEMU") team had successfully run their first alpha stage test of a reverse-engineered version of the server software that replicates the game mechanics of the game before the CU (specifically Publish 12.1). On 25 February 2007, the SWGEMU team announced a successful stress test involving 452 people. There is currently no official ETA on when the SWGEMU will be ready for public release. Details on the arguments over the legality of such a project can be found in the server emulator article on Misplaced Pages.

Xbox 360

A new Star Wars MMORPG may potentially launch on the Xbox 360 sometime in the future. It would be published by Lucas Arts but the developer is not yet determined. No details yet disclosed on how this future MMORPG may affect the current Star Wars Galaxies.

Trivia

• The game references and features elements from The Star Wars Holiday Special, such as Lumpy's stuffed bantha, and the customs of Life Day, when the viewer visits Kashyyyk. The red Life Day robes the Wookiees in the special wore are also available during special events in the game.
• The game also references the other two Star Wars spin-off films, in that the player may encounter the Gorax species from Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, and the base of the Sanyassan Marauders, as seen in Ewoks: The Battle for Endor.
• The game references characters from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, such as Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade from the Thrawn trilogy, and HK-47 from the Knights of the Old Republic series of games.
• All of the names of the galaxies (servers) in Star Wars Galaxies are references to starships or vehicles in the Expanded Universe.
• Star Wars Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine is a novel based in part on places and events in the game. It was authored by Voronica Whitney-Robinson and Haden Blackman, the LucasArts producer of the game.
• Includes realistic social institutions such as a dynamic player economy and other real-life social phenomena like a complicated division of labor. According to Star Wars Galaxies and the Division of Labor, the division of labor in Star Wars Galaxies around April 2005 produced in-game results similar to those in real life. Galaxies' original game design socialized players to specialize their characters by mastering one or two professions, and to join guilds, in which players relate to one another primarily in terms of their professions (I am the weaponsmith, so I make weapons for the guild) — just as in real life, people are tied to one another by organic solidarity.

References

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External links

• Official SWG website
• Template:Dmoz

• 2003 video games
• Cancelled PlayStation 2 games
• Cancelled Xbox games
• Massively multiplayer online role-playing games
• Star Wars video games
• Windows games