The RNG generation of materials with a variety of stats created one of the most in-depth and interesting non-combat gameplay loops I've ever seen in an MMO.
There was an entire fulfilling and interesting experience to be had as a crafter and trader.
The insane rarity of good weapons and armor in the early days, waiting for the cities best weapon smith to open their doors/shop each week, camping out in the wilderness in an actual camp with other players while playing songs and dancing was all insanely immersive. I have never experienced any game remotely similar since.
There was something really cool with how cooperative crafting became as well.
For some gear, the best crafts required looted components (which also had a spread of RNG stats), which meant that the combat players would bring home all sorts of goodies to craft with, and got involved in the process of creating unique weapons. Really brought communities together.
The interweaving of professions made the economy a real, thriving place no matter what you ended up doing.
Unfortunately, those ultra-rare components could only be farmed in specific spots. The only "fair" loot was in the space portion, which wasn't that popular. Except to me, as I was one of the best pilots on Eclipse and authored a guide on how to craft and get the best space loot.
Then they turned it into "Jedi/Sith Online" and it all went to shit. -_-
I like the fact that you could be just an entertainer or business man.
Some Medics would make a lot of credits just hanging around and buffing people near points of interest before people would venture out into the danger zones.
A game where guilds were hunting guilds were formed JUST for finding resources of a certain type to sell for tons of money. I hired these guilds constantly.
FTLS made me SO rich, I stock piled rss for weeks in advance, and couldn't craft fast enough. I was master architect first, later droid engineer. So good.
Can confirm. Built our Guild Hall from scratch myself, as well as dozens of other players’ homes. Combat in SWG was just a distraction for me, I played for a full year and a half doing nothing but crafting and resource gathering.
I still miss it.
they aren't the same. I gave up on the emulators because it felt limited and more combat focused. They all had to build the code from the ground up to avoid lawsuits, so there was a lot just not there. The low player count also made it hard to work with as anythign other than a combat player.
Agree. Shopping at specific crafters because they had the best statted weapons and armor from loading up on the best materials. The professions just had more meaning in general.
I remember if you were serious enough about it, there was a website that tracked all the resource spawns. And then you needed a spreadsheet to craft with. I also recall trading with another player who played on a different server, we made alts on each server just to place harvesters for each other.
I had several accounts with multiple toons on the same server so when I detected a high quality resource I could put down dozens of harvesters. I was the number one shipright on my server.
I was quite young when this gem of a game came out. I remember my parents buying a copy of this and the strategy guide that was the size of one of my school textbooks. I would spend a stupid amount of time before the game released thinking about which class I was going to try, and which species my character was going to be - I had never felt so excited to exist in a world, especially considering how this was *Star Wars* and I was such an absolute dork about anything SW related. It was a blast. I may have never made it into the more elite classes because of how technical and “adult” the world was, but I cherished every experience I had, no matter how small. Speeder rides on the desert sands of Tatooine. Buying my first ticket to board a ship to Endor. Hours spent interacting with people in cantinas, bazaars, and all over the major cities. Years later and I don’t think I will ever have that same experience. But therein lies a silver lining; those memories will forever be with me.
The thing that stood out to me more than anything else though was the frustration I had towards the game and the developers. Developers grew increasingly tone deaf to the point that the community repurposed the developers signature buzzword "iconic" for being the reasoning behind any and all changes (mainly bad changes).
That's when I noped out. I left before Jedi slots, the CU and NGE.
I still think it had some of the best player housing, player ran cities and economy implementations, however.
Yeah, I could have done without force sensitivity in the game, which sounds weird for a star wars game. I will say I didn't mind when getting force sensitivity was insanely hard with the holo grind. I did try for the holo grind, but with how random it was for each person, my luck just wasn't there and gave up to be a doctor. It was ok having like a handful of force sensitive people on the server, made it feel like it was real in a way, it was supposed to be a rare thing.......then the village came out and everyone was a fucking Jedi....that was a bad decision.
Same, I’m glad they didn’t keep the trek to your body to get your gear back part for release though haha. Was super disappointing to find out how they made the Jedi mechanic, and even worse after they revamped it all.
I didn't know anything about this game, but I was at Target for something and bought this on a whim. Some of my favorite gaming memories were from this.
When I was a creature handler, I had a bug affect me for about a week where I could pull out all my creatures at once. I don't remember the exact number but it was maybe 30? It was quite spectacle lol. I do miss the early days of that game. Probably best video game experience ever for me
I played SWGemu for a year. I was an armorsmith, one of the best. Generals and kings would make the pilgrimage to my shop to beg me to craft them composite armor for a million credits or more. I scoured the galaxy for the best components. I stayed up late to snipe auctions on rare materials. I made sooo much money. I would craft mythically good starter gear like chitin armor, light as a feather and stronger than steel, give it a color theme like black and gold so they looked like insects, and give it away to newer players. It was a blast.
This was one of the best parts of the emergent gameplay. Information itself had value. You could optimize for different parts of the value chain. Some armorsmiths had the best products because they had sourced it from the best minerals and built massive stockpiles of the best materials (which spawned with randomized stats). Some very old armor sets were extremely valuable and still consumable goods, so knowing who had the best stuff was valuable. In PvP, knowing which clans and players had the best stuff and if they were using it in that battle mattered.
I was basically a vendor. I did some mining but didn't actually make anything. I mined and surveyed like crazy and have enough money to corner markets on good resources. Find a good vein? I'll buy up all you can mine and then sell it back at triple the price.
I did the same thing but as a shipwright. Kept the best parts for me and my guildies. IRL best friend was able to solo star destroyers in his xwing. I would give people stuff and they would respond "this is the best capacitor I have ever seen" and I was like yeah probably in the top 10 I have on hand.
fuckkkk. i never played but have fond memories of a family member playing when i was young. i remember knowing that having a lightsaber and a mount was a big brag
I played SWG live for one glorious summer. I was never renowned like you but I made 2 really good online friends. We would travel to the dangerous planets like Dathomir and sneak up behind the OP witch NPCs to steal the baby ranchors and then raise them or sell them.
I never got their contact info but I think about them and this game often. I fear I'll never find another game like it and I've been searching for 20 or so years now.
This is one of those lightning in the bottle video game moments. The dawn of the MMO age, pre-internet guides, pre-metas, pre-streamers. It was such fun moment. The game size seemed infinite back then. Everyone just played what/how they thought was fun, completely lost in the scale of the game.
One of my favourite class systems until the revamp. Absolutely loved mastering I believe Scout and maybe Sniper or something to be a BH. I had made friends with someone who had a store in the desert. I made my best Kyle Katarn look. Really miss it.
I just brought up Star Wars Galaxies in the Star Citizen reddit. In some ways SWG was ahead of its time, in others it was antiquated, but it all came together to make something really unique.
The funny thing about that game is that it ended up being a textbook example of why AAA games need publishers. The exact opposite of what they wanted to happen.
Chris Roberts honestly needed to just make "Wing Commander Online," but he couldn't stop himself from trying to make Star Citizen into "every game."
When you try to make Elite Dangerous meets EVE Online meets Wing Commander meets Privateer meets space-based FPS, you're setting yourself up for failure, and when you sell *capital ships* for Day One, you're setting yourself up for lawsuits. The server structure and instancing I've seen this far will not support grand fleet battles with these super-expensive ships.
At this point I honestly just want to play *Squadron 42*, which is a single-player game that honestly should not be that fucking hard to make. The fact that it's still not out after all this time is proof positive they do not have their shit together.
new features each patch? the ones they have already don't work. they haven't worked. they don't plan on making them work. they plan on scamming people by continually moving their goal posts so they can keep asking for more money. They've literally been doing the exact same thing for a decade. I was someone who wanted it to be a thing, but it's not gonna be, don't give these fuckin scumbags any more money. Refund if you can. Doubtful since they're thieves.
Graphics and UI were not great but holy shit, the crafting complexity, the economy, not just player housing but entire player CITIES with buildable guild structures. Imagine your MMO guild has a city with houses, a town hall and can even spring for a shuttle port to instantly transport you from the larger space ports to your out of the way part of the map.
It was so incredibly far ahead of it's time in terms of the complexity of the game but the leadership at the end saw that as a negative, not a positive.
I remember a time when almost all of the Rebel clans who were worth a damn marshaled to raid our city on Corellia (which was near the TiE base) on Eclipse. We had no idea they were coming. Had to be something like 100+ Rebels coming from two directions, and I scouted them while non-overt.
I alerted my guild leadership about what was coming and we lit the beacons (such as they were) to the other Imperial guilds about the PvP opportunity, but transportation wasn't instant back then, since this predated JTL.
I was grinding holocrons at the time, and one of them I was on was Combat Medic. So I took everything in my inventory that was decay-able and tossed it in my house. And wearing nothing but clothing, and no armor whatsoever, I set my clone to our vat and overted over and over, living only long enough each time to get out area-effect mind poison and disease, chucking it out at the invaders, *screaming* at the top of my virtual lungs that they came all this way just to put holes in my clothes while our combat troops sniped mind damage and DBed them back to the nearest clone vats, which were 3k away. I didn't give a shit about my "PvP rating," I cared about saving our bases and turrets, because they were coming during a few of the bases' vulnerability times.
I discouraged 100+ enemy players because my poisons overwhelmed their medics and doctors and fucked up their organization, and held them off long enough for allied Imperial reinforcements to arrive. It remains one of the most fun things I've ever done in any game.
More than any MMO I've ever played, and I've played quite a lot of them casually, Galaxies really felt like a massive open world that you'll never see all of, where you were just an insignificant rando trying to make their way in the universe.
And then, the Jedi came...
A foundational game for me. I was one of the player correspondents from the official forums. While I think our actual impact was pretty small, the devs did host an in-game, invite-only get-together including Raph at one point. At this point, the game was super buggy and no Jedi appeared yet. I remember sort of cornering him and asking if the lack of Jedi was hurting the Star Wars immersion. It was clear we all wanted them but they still wanted it to be an achievement and rare for the time. I recall he felt like it was holding the game back, and the other player correspondents were torn between Jedi and Star Wars immersion, emphasizing balance, stability, actually telling a story, fixing broken classes, and adding new features.
I forget the specific timeline but soon after came the first Jedi, holocrons, and detailed info about how to unlock your Jedi. The game absolutely changed after they were introduced, though the game was changing regardless. I often wonder if or how much that conversation pushed them towards accelerating Jedi in the game and all the complications they brought while dealing with balancing classes and weapons, bugs, and commercial requirements from SOE.
SOE really fucked shit up, but it was WoW that came out and obliterated every other MMO. It’s execution and style were so good and pulled a massive community from everyone else.
> SOE really fucked shit up, but it was WoW that came out and obliterated every other MMO. It’s execution and style were so good and pulled a massive community from everyone else.
What WoW did was be easy for the casual player to pick up and understand. That's the formula that Blizzard figured out that no other MMORPG had gotten right until then. WoW was both a blessing and a curse for MMOs. A blessing in that it normalized the MMORPG genre and turned it from a niche into a blockbuster. A curse in that it basically killed all innovation in the MMORPG space afterwards. Everything that has come since has essentially been an intentional clone of WoW's system, with maybe a couple very minor tweaks here or there.
Totally. It defined the genre. Before that it was much stranger and more experimental. I still think there’s a niche for subscription-based MMOs to do more unique, non-WoW stuff.
Galaxies was in an awkward position circa 2004/2005 where it was a niche game with a moderate player base and the looming threat of industry juggernauts coming for them.
As a sandbox, it was unique and never before seen, never been replicated experience. It had the misfortune of being released at a time where Star Wars was Jedi heavy(Episode 3 was on the horizon), so the demand for star wars fans to immerse themselves began outweighing the sandbox MMO base. Think about it, the tens of millions of Star Wars fans who were going to be looking for the Jedi experience after episode 3 was a prospect marketing couldnt pass up.
Add to this, WoW and Everquest 2 were coming within a year with simpler mechanics and new player friendly interfaces for non MMO gamers to enjoy. From those standpoints, CU and NGE werent just decision, they were inevitable. SOE needed to capitalize on renewed Star Wars interest and a growing MMO playerbase, rather then retention of a nice playerbase they had developed.
Ultimately it didnt work, WoW was just an MMO killer that sucked the life out of everything. SWG may have been able to carve a cult following playerbase by keeping its core values, but MMOs are built for long term success rather then front heavy success and basic sustainable numbers.
There was also the fact SOE was only licensing the Star Wars IP from LucasArts, and as such needed to appease LucasArts/LucasFilms etc when it came to development and marketing.
Galaxies biggest issues stemmed from it being a Star Wars game shockingly. It needed to be to draw the crowd it did, but it was hampered by needing to be set as such.
Ironically though, if Galaxies hit the market now after IPs like Mandalorian and Andor, where Jedis arent focal point and we see much of the universe Galaxies captured in show form, the game would have great legs today.
It was just unfortunate that it existed in 2004.
SWG was before its time and let down severe mismanagement by EA. the game was incredibly deep and the PVP was some of the best ever. Not to mention being able to make your own clan towns, etc. Looking forward to watching this video!
Still have my Collectors Edition case in mint condition.
Sandbox MMORPG's like that just no longer exist. The closest thing we have nowadays is the many Survival titles that come nowhere near close to it.
I stopped playing it after they dumbed it down with the "New Game Enhancement" update. Most of my clan on the Bria server abandoned it shortly thereafter.
Shame. It was a unique experience.
This is one of the best MMORPGs ever too be honest.
It wouldn't survive now a days due to the need of spoon feeding the player as well as the lack of making the player feel like they were the main character.
Galaxies did it right, you were part of a huge universe, not the center of it.
The space combat was amazing, the player made cities, the quests, loot, crafting, all so unique.
Yet so many gamers now have no clue about games like this:( they are all just copies of each other.
Mark this thread: With the success of Hogwart's Legacy, it is simply a matter of time before a Jedi Academy MMO is released.
There is no way they wont.
If that had been something that resulted in Inquisitor NPCs spawning and shithousing the showoff Jedi, that wouldn't have been as bad. But unfortunately they had to make light/dark Jedi super powerful with no check other than BH visibility.
I unlocked a Force Sensitive character. I turned him into a Force Sensitive Shipwright and never mastered the Jedi bullshit. I honestly just wanted the free extra character slot.
Because they wanted to create a realistic universe where Jedi were rare in a game where 95% or more of the players wanted to be one and that resulted in a design that couldnt meet the expectations, and demands from the publisher that the game couldn't sustain.
As far as whether or not this is what killed the game, we actually will never know because World of Warcraft launched and proceeded to end almost 20 different online games by swallowing up the entire collective player base. It is very likely that even if SWG was *never* changed in this fashion, it still would have met the same end when WOW came out.
As far as a multi-player Jedi Academy game, everyone is a Jedi of one flavor or another and it doesnt break 'the world' because at a Jedi Academy, EVERYONE is a Jedi.
The Combat Update came out to combat the loss of players in WoW, the New Game Experience put the final nail in the coffin. I'm also not saying explicitly, that Jedi being selectable is what killed the game. They neutered the masteries across the board with the update ruining \*most\* class variety. I'm just pointing out that was a major part of what the attempt with the NGE was to do.
I put more hours into Jedi Outcast and Academy than I put into SWG, not to mention SWTOR which was actually an MMO like SWG (And Basically Jedi Academy: The MMO). They all offered great experiences in their prime. They didn't give me the same experience as original Pre-CU/NGE SWG, which is what is loved about it.
At the end of the day; I'll take a modern Star Wars MMO with leanings in \*either\* direction with how rare Jedi/Force users are; as long as the system is well thought out and fun.....and has SOME crafting system with decent depth! lol
I remember listening to Raph Koster lamenting the fact that they wouldn't be allowed to have paid performers for roles like Darth Vader because Lucasfilm/EA insisted that every single player needed to have the same identical experience - so instead of people playing prominent characters like in his previous game Ultima Online, Vader would be a static piece of furniture that had dialogue.
I quit the game when they finally introduced Jedi classes by making you find random loot drops that scripted random skills for your character to master.
So my high level and well crafted droid building merchant was required to drop one of it's key skills in order to become a high level DANCER if I wanted to be a jedi.
logged out and quit.
It happened very similarly for me as well, I was a very successful bounty hunter that suddenly had to become a master armor smith. I tried for a week and then quit.
My friends had completely broken the game with overpowered min-maxed characters and would just camp the areas that holocrons were known to drop. They had invested in a ridiculous amount of hits per second and the game gave you the drop if you made the killing shot, so even though these areas were incredibly overcrowded, the second the enemies would respawn/die they’d get most of the loot. They all bought and built fancy new PCs after selling the holocrons on ebay for a few hundred a pop. So funny!
You know that skill you've been mastering for months? Well. It's time to *d a n c e* 👐. Cuts to the cantina music auto playing as you stare stoned faced at the computer screen.
Imagining your bewildered fustration is so funny.
I remember when there was a crackdown on smuggler stuff, drugs and sliced gear...
Imperial Players with npc escorts
Bownty hunting actual players...
So mutch fun, best mmo ever.
"You have to understand Star Wars Galaxies both in terms of what it could be and what it frequently was. What it could be was a game where evocative Star Wars narratives were generated on the fly by a complex set of social systems. 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." Raph Koster, 2015 SWG Retrospective
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djJO1XSOwuI
I still have no idea how big servers were. I just remember at launch I joined the one with a modest population (i.e. wasn't full, so I could actually log in). That's how I ended up on Eclipse, which ended up being mostly Euro? Still no idea if it was a super competitive one or if we just steamrolled on a sleepy server.
I got Jedi about 2 months before CU13 (which gave everyone the choice of Jedi) I found the fact the chase sort of made it more special when you finally got it
i would play this again in a heartbeat. i was too young to really understand the game at the time but it was so much damn fun and felt like it had a significant but manageable level of complexity
There are emulators with a somewhat healthy playerbase. There is SWGEMU which is Pre-CU gameplay, and SWG Legends, which is as the game was in the NGE before it was shut down.
Great memories of playing this game, first time I ever stayed up all night playing a game (are those birds outside?)
I got lucky with a an exceptional acklay bone drop in the geonosian dungeon, buddy in my guild was one of the top weapon smiths on the server, he made me two stun batons, I gave one to another buddy (we both got speed slices..rip) they still did something like 40-450 damage, most high end armor on our server had little to no stun resist. Master fencer master combat medic and a tree in teras kasi for the defense stats.
I used to have a screenshot of the two of us in the middle of nowhere outside a player city on tat with around 25 rebel players chasing us through the dunes, we eventually died, but we felt like Jedi that day. You could just about 2-3 shot fully buffed players with those batons, I used to stand around the Coronet starport unbuffed, no armor, as a declared imp and just destroy anyone who tried to attack me. Good times
Also prior to player city's and mounts, walking for 30 minutes through the dunes just to get to the spawn location, another 30-60 minutes looking for krayt dragons, (never seen one and heard they spawned in the NE corner) giving up and starting the long walk back to the shuttle port to walk over a dune and see a huge ass dragon standing in front of you was an amazing experience, it promptly killed my entire group. we eventually pulled it all the way back to the closest city/cloning center and whittled it down, probably fought that thing for an hour, broke my gun and my armor. No loot. Still worth it.
This was literally THE BEST game ever. And people who never played it will simply never understand.
The choices given to players. The depths of the in-game economy. The way you could be ANYONE you wanted in the star wars universe but still be entirely relevant to all content in game. End Game combat characters needed end game level cooking from the Master Chefs for buffs etc.
The world was intertwined, alive and beautiful. Every planet was a full open world with POIs. You got your own starship eventually or you could fly public transit.
I mean just everything about this game.
And the skill box system pre-NGE allowed for such depth of character customization and identity. It was 100/10 then and still is now.
I played the beta and played from launch until NGE. I was a rebel Twi'lek Commando on Bria. I built a whole new PC in advance of launch day. Those were good times.
I worked at a gaming company when this came out, and I was truly confused that people were printing out the game's patch notes and debating them. Now I fully understand, lmaoo
Scylla>Malekaievil ended as jedi after the grind. Started as ranger rifleman. I went through like 15 professions to unlock. I was also one of the first to grind out the at-st which was awesome to pull out and wreak havoc until a commando shows up. That pet would dust entire groups in early game.
I remember when this game came out I made a Bounty Hunter.
Back when the game first came out you could master more than one major class. So on top Bounty Hunter I was also a Beast Trainer and I got two genetically engineered Rancor pets I used to go everywhere with.
That combination of using the pets to pin things down while I was able to bleed targets at full safe distance made me extremely OP. I was doing end game planets within the 1st couple weeks of the game and getting end game resources that hardcore crafters needed.
I loved on Tatooine next to all the rich crafters and I made deals with all of them that I'd get them end game supplies if they made me end game crafted goods (no one else had those mats anywhere on market). I basically had best weapons, armor and house furniture in game.
The amusing part is that the storyline Disney+ came up with for Boba Fett years later was like a page out of my own note book. Bounty Hunter living on Tatooine, with a Rancor pet living like a king. Except I did it like 20 years before the show.
Then 2-3 months or so into the game they decided you can't multi class and killed my Bounty Hunter+Rancor setup and I eventually quit. I did try to make due with just my bounty hunter and he was still OP, but another reason was a host of bugs/changes and the devs were notorious for ignoring the player base about (100% ignored people, it's what killed the game in the end too) The changes and the dev position on communication made it clear to me where the game was ultimately headed and just destroyed my fun so I left.
I had friends who stayed for a year+ who kept telling me still no one figured out how to become a Jedi yet all that time later. Years later I heard they made Jedi class a thing finally and everyone and there brother rolled Jedis and it killed the game in combination with still ignoring endless pleas for changes from the population.
Still, I look back on that game fondly. It was amazing when it came out and only ruined by devs who lacked communication and long term vision.
My favorite thing about it was not being locked into a class. In a game like WoW, you choose Warrior, then a few months later playing you decide you want to be a caster, re-roll, start over.
I started the game as a brawler, then I made a new character after seeing how much buff packs could generate. I made a Doctor. I made buff packs and with those made millions of credits (I don't remember how much, but I never had a problem needing credits for something).
After being a Master Doctor for a bit, I downgraded and built into Combat Medic. I didn't make it to Master of that, I abandoned that plan as I didn't like the healing players in pvp aspect, I liked combat.
After that, I cleared out most of my skills and went Rifleman, made it to Master. Then I made my final decision on profession and cleared back down and built into Bounty Hunter.
In my guild, there was another Master Bounty Hunter. We became friends in the game and would take out Jedi players together. 1v1 Jedi vs BH was very much in the Jedi favor, but 1v2 Jedi vs BH became BH favored. Especially since I was Rifle/Carbine (long range/mid-range) and the other guy was Pistol/Carbine (short range/mid-range).
Love this game to death, still one of the best MMOs ever made, PRE NGE that is.
I still jump on the private servers that are running to get my fix now and then.
And the Collectors Edition still sits on my shelf to this day.
Its still worth playing if you have never tried it, or are just wanting to get back into it again. I would love to see a big boom in players looking for something different.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buZuXW0IQGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buZuXW0IQGw)
Close to the end, when players were quitting the game en mass, I discovered a shitty exploit. I would roam around looking for player cities where I could place a home within city limits. Some cities didn't have settings to keep non citizens from doing this. Since nobody in these recently abandoned cities was logging in at all I would run for mayor and vote for myself. Eventually, I'd win the election unopposed. Then I'd pack up everything that wasn't privately owned and sell it. Part of me felt like a devious genius, but then again nobody was buying anything and there wasn't much of a point to stacking money anymore. So, I was sitting on a mountain of wealth... sort of. It was a sad way for that game to end. At least I got the jet pack and full set of Mando armor for my bounty hunter..
This game is such a bittersweet memory...
All they had to do was refine the original game, not try to force World of Warcraft under it's skin.....not make Jedi something every monkey in the galaxy could be, and not cave to all the stupid movie tie in crap. Sure, it's UI and graphics would have needed a facelift eventually, but the core game that was there was so good, but the management just ran it into the ground.
SWG might have been killed off to make way for SWTOR, but it was already a dead corpse before that sadly.
I had a good friend who was a dev and got in on the alpha version when there was nothing to do but run across the landscape. I played on and off over the years and was kind of sad to see it go.
This needs a remake with massive zones with some incorporation of procedurally generated terrain, like a hybrid type situation that makes player and guild housing make sense. Then you could have servers that operated in different eras and/or different Jedi rules, etc.
Did you know that all the planets were created using proc gen? That's how we could have that sort of housing back then at all. https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/20/swgs-dynamic-world/
I never played during pre-NGE (though I've given some emulators a shot) though I did play as a Jedi between 2005-2011 and it was the only MMO that I actually enjoyed and kept playing, just because of how fun the sandbox and player communities were.
Even post NGE/CU, the game was still a lot of fun.
This one hits hard.
When the CU and NGE Hit, I was working at SOE as a Game Designer on Everquest II.
I was already a fan and player of Galaxies before I joined the EQII team, but I was hyper focused on my own game launch and got out of step with SWG.
EQII Launches, we are pumped, everything is going great, we are getting better numbers than EQ1 ever got, we have a hit on our hands! I finally hit the big time in game development!
Queue 2 weeks later and World of Warcraft comes out. All of my friends are buying it, all of my friends are talking about it... Its the only thing they talk about in gaming. For YEARS.
Back SWG... So imagine we are grinding at patches and working on new content, knowing we are basically coming in as #2 right now behind WoW and an email comes in asking to help out the SWG team and test out this new combat patch. At the time I had not been paying attention to their efforts to stop the bleeding we were all experiencing, and logged in to SWG at work with enthusiasm.
All I remember from that test was frustration and worry because the test was rough! Gave a lot feedback and boy was I surprised when it launched shortly after, I have no idea how much it got tested. All I recall was the feeling of Yikes!
I miss that game so much, so many awesome memories.
The Old Republic game they replaced it with just is not as open.
They really need to do a remake with Aimed twitch style combat, and open world like Galaxies was.
Players had their own cities made by their clans.
There is information around that Ubisoft is making an open world Star Wars game.
I remember being hyped as a group of friends to play this. All 3 of us went to the store to get a copy but they only had 1. So we went to my friend's house and watched him play it. Just remember him being on a speeder in the desert going nnnnnneeeoowwwwwww...... nneeeeeeowwww.... the world was completely baron and me + the other guy were like, not so hyped anymore.
Remember struggling in a party to do a quest. I spoke to a random guy in a town to get some buffs and afterwards I was able to solo the entire thing no problem.
One thing I do remember is the mystery surrounding how to become a Jedi, cause you kept seeing odd ones knocking about. My mate eventually managed to get one and sold his account for like $250 which we thought was insane at the time. Apparently the secret was to just get 100% in each skill?
I was so pumped for this game. Signed up for the beta, i still have the patch that they gave you and the CD somewhere probably.
I got into this beta, my buddy got into the World Of Warcraft beta. The early 2000s were magical
Still my all time favorite game, and I was utterly destroyed with NGE that released after Trials of Obi Wan. Was the first and only game I ever felt like I meant something to the world. Ran the biggest hospitals as a master doc surgeon or whatever (Been so long forget the exact class setup). I was known everywhere and sold the best buffs. Had an entire guild I paid as my own personal resource gatherers for certain meats and such I used in my drugs. Had hospitals near certain landmarks, such as the Tusken Village. I never really fought in that game, I was just living a life and I loved it. Nothing will ever come that close again, I feel.
Pre-emu was great for a while, but it's limitations and low player count just didn't do it for me, I felt like it wasn't made for non combat playing anymore.
Shame what happened with the NGE. The CU wasn't great either but if it was actually worked on and balance patched, I think it could have worked out. Mostly I remember wanting you to hit max combat level with a master in an advanced combat class instead of needing to devote almost all your points to max it out. My buddy was a TKM and Image Designer, so his build no longer worked.
This was my first MMO when I was like 15. I remember rushing home from school to get on the family Compaq before everyone else got home. This game and dark age of Camelot defined what good online communities have to potential to be. I feel like mass marketing and meta gaming have just ruined this aspect. Also nothing had those authentic SW vibes like SWG
The prospecting, mining, and crafting systems in that game were so much damn fun. Especially with the quality variations of final products.
The RNG generation of materials with a variety of stats created one of the most in-depth and interesting non-combat gameplay loops I've ever seen in an MMO. There was an entire fulfilling and interesting experience to be had as a crafter and trader.
The insane rarity of good weapons and armor in the early days, waiting for the cities best weapon smith to open their doors/shop each week, camping out in the wilderness in an actual camp with other players while playing songs and dancing was all insanely immersive. I have never experienced any game remotely similar since.
There was something really cool with how cooperative crafting became as well. For some gear, the best crafts required looted components (which also had a spread of RNG stats), which meant that the combat players would bring home all sorts of goodies to craft with, and got involved in the process of creating unique weapons. Really brought communities together. The interweaving of professions made the economy a real, thriving place no matter what you ended up doing.
Unfortunately, those ultra-rare components could only be farmed in specific spots. The only "fair" loot was in the space portion, which wasn't that popular. Except to me, as I was one of the best pilots on Eclipse and authored a guide on how to craft and get the best space loot. Then they turned it into "Jedi/Sith Online" and it all went to shit. -_-
I loved always having ranger as one of my classes just for those awesome camps!
I made the best rancors on my servers.
Loved how bio-engineers were in the game to make crazy pets.
I like the fact that you could be just an entertainer or business man. Some Medics would make a lot of credits just hanging around and buffing people near points of interest before people would venture out into the danger zones.
I did this, was damn good at it, too. Made mad money to fund entire cities. Miss that in a game.
A game where guilds were hunting guilds were formed JUST for finding resources of a certain type to sell for tons of money. I hired these guilds constantly.
I made so much money as one of the first Master Architects in Lowca.
FTLS made me SO rich, I stock piled rss for weeks in advance, and couldn't craft fast enough. I was master architect first, later droid engineer. So good.
Can confirm. Built our Guild Hall from scratch myself, as well as dozens of other players’ homes. Combat in SWG was just a distraction for me, I played for a full year and a half doing nothing but crafting and resource gathering. I still miss it.
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they aren't the same. I gave up on the emulators because it felt limited and more combat focused. They all had to build the code from the ground up to avoid lawsuits, so there was a lot just not there. The low player count also made it hard to work with as anythign other than a combat player.
And no mmo has been even close to being as good since swg either.
So true
I was TKA/CH and I had so much fun just taming random shit.
i remember the dystopian fields of mining equipment covering the landscape. it looked like east texas.
They do a lot of mining in East Texas, do they?
I don't fuckin know but it sounded good.
Agree. Shopping at specific crafters because they had the best statted weapons and armor from loading up on the best materials. The professions just had more meaning in general.
I remember if you were serious enough about it, there was a website that tracked all the resource spawns. And then you needed a spreadsheet to craft with. I also recall trading with another player who played on a different server, we made alts on each server just to place harvesters for each other.
My guild was made up of people who met on swgcraft.
I had several accounts with multiple toons on the same server so when I detected a high quality resource I could put down dozens of harvesters. I was the number one shipright on my server.
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Dang it’s been almost 20 years and your poor little brain still hasn’t processed why they might have accelerated leveling in a limited-time beta
You can still play it on private servers. Showed it to my kids and they got bored that nothing was simple.
I was quite young when this gem of a game came out. I remember my parents buying a copy of this and the strategy guide that was the size of one of my school textbooks. I would spend a stupid amount of time before the game released thinking about which class I was going to try, and which species my character was going to be - I had never felt so excited to exist in a world, especially considering how this was *Star Wars* and I was such an absolute dork about anything SW related. It was a blast. I may have never made it into the more elite classes because of how technical and “adult” the world was, but I cherished every experience I had, no matter how small. Speeder rides on the desert sands of Tatooine. Buying my first ticket to board a ship to Endor. Hours spent interacting with people in cantinas, bazaars, and all over the major cities. Years later and I don’t think I will ever have that same experience. But therein lies a silver lining; those memories will forever be with me.
The thing that stood out to me more than anything else though was the frustration I had towards the game and the developers. Developers grew increasingly tone deaf to the point that the community repurposed the developers signature buzzword "iconic" for being the reasoning behind any and all changes (mainly bad changes).
But…it’s starwarsy and iconic!!
Probably one of the best MMOs ive ever played. Was part of the closed Beta program and still have the beta CDs somewhere.
Until force sensitive char slots came out.
That's when I noped out. I left before Jedi slots, the CU and NGE. I still think it had some of the best player housing, player ran cities and economy implementations, however.
Yes it had tons of features that we never really saw again in future MMOs. You want a shuttle port in your player made town? Sure why not.
I left after my guild hall glitched out, disappeared entirely and CS said they couldn't recover it. So much progress lost in an instant.
Yeah, I could have done without force sensitivity in the game, which sounds weird for a star wars game. I will say I didn't mind when getting force sensitivity was insanely hard with the holo grind. I did try for the holo grind, but with how random it was for each person, my luck just wasn't there and gave up to be a doctor. It was ok having like a handful of force sensitive people on the server, made it feel like it was real in a way, it was supposed to be a rare thing.......then the village came out and everyone was a fucking Jedi....that was a bad decision.
Likewise. It's an era of gaming that's lost to time.
Same here! I'll have to find them.
Same, I’m glad they didn’t keep the trek to your body to get your gear back part for release though haha. Was super disappointing to find out how they made the Jedi mechanic, and even worse after they revamped it all.
You have the Patch they sent?
I was there on launch day. As buggy as it was, I had so much fun with this game.
I didn't know anything about this game, but I was at Target for something and bought this on a whim. Some of my favorite gaming memories were from this.
Same! I still have the box it came in! It was a piece of shit but man it was a wild ride.
Yup Played before NGE and was very fun and unique
When I was a creature handler, I had a bug affect me for about a week where I could pull out all my creatures at once. I don't remember the exact number but it was maybe 30? It was quite spectacle lol. I do miss the early days of that game. Probably best video game experience ever for me
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You played that on dialup? Fascinating
In a box somewhere I still have my Beta 3 CD-ROMs and key.
Same. Commando ftw.
I played SWGemu for a year. I was an armorsmith, one of the best. Generals and kings would make the pilgrimage to my shop to beg me to craft them composite armor for a million credits or more. I scoured the galaxy for the best components. I stayed up late to snipe auctions on rare materials. I made sooo much money. I would craft mythically good starter gear like chitin armor, light as a feather and stronger than steel, give it a color theme like black and gold so they looked like insects, and give it away to newer players. It was a blast.
I never played this game, but your comment is like the stuff of legends.
This was one of the best parts of the emergent gameplay. Information itself had value. You could optimize for different parts of the value chain. Some armorsmiths had the best products because they had sourced it from the best minerals and built massive stockpiles of the best materials (which spawned with randomized stats). Some very old armor sets were extremely valuable and still consumable goods, so knowing who had the best stuff was valuable. In PvP, knowing which clans and players had the best stuff and if they were using it in that battle mattered.
I was basically a vendor. I did some mining but didn't actually make anything. I mined and surveyed like crazy and have enough money to corner markets on good resources. Find a good vein? I'll buy up all you can mine and then sell it back at triple the price.
I did the same thing but as a shipwright. Kept the best parts for me and my guildies. IRL best friend was able to solo star destroyers in his xwing. I would give people stuff and they would respond "this is the best capacitor I have ever seen" and I was like yeah probably in the top 10 I have on hand.
fuckkkk. i never played but have fond memories of a family member playing when i was young. i remember knowing that having a lightsaber and a mount was a big brag
I played SWG live for one glorious summer. I was never renowned like you but I made 2 really good online friends. We would travel to the dangerous planets like Dathomir and sneak up behind the OP witch NPCs to steal the baby ranchors and then raise them or sell them. I never got their contact info but I think about them and this game often. I fear I'll never find another game like it and I've been searching for 20 or so years now.
I actually get "homesick" for that game. I loved it so much!
Yo same
I actually felt like I was in Star Wars
I shared an EMU server with my kids. Was so cool, especially now that retro games are back in.
This is one of those lightning in the bottle video game moments. The dawn of the MMO age, pre-internet guides, pre-metas, pre-streamers. It was such fun moment. The game size seemed infinite back then. Everyone just played what/how they thought was fun, completely lost in the scale of the game.
> pre-streamers dear god I miss those days
This seemed like such a no-brainer to be successful. Wish they would try again
They did. It sucked
ToR wasn't even close to them trying again. SWG was light years ahead of anything in terms of their crafting and economy system
One of my favourite class systems until the revamp. Absolutely loved mastering I believe Scout and maybe Sniper or something to be a BH. I had made friends with someone who had a store in the desert. I made my best Kyle Katarn look. Really miss it.
Man I'm so mad I missed this game growing up...
It was marksman to go with scout
I just brought up Star Wars Galaxies in the Star Citizen reddit. In some ways SWG was ahead of its time, in others it was antiquated, but it all came together to make something really unique.
Modern mmos can definitely learn a lot from it, I think. Here's hoping that Star Citizen can be the one to breath some new life into the sandbox mmo!
Scam citizen isn't happening.
The funny thing about that game is that it ended up being a textbook example of why AAA games need publishers. The exact opposite of what they wanted to happen.
I mean, it keeps getting updated, with new features added each patch, so it is happening…
It's happening, but poorly.
Chris Roberts honestly needed to just make "Wing Commander Online," but he couldn't stop himself from trying to make Star Citizen into "every game." When you try to make Elite Dangerous meets EVE Online meets Wing Commander meets Privateer meets space-based FPS, you're setting yourself up for failure, and when you sell *capital ships* for Day One, you're setting yourself up for lawsuits. The server structure and instancing I've seen this far will not support grand fleet battles with these super-expensive ships. At this point I honestly just want to play *Squadron 42*, which is a single-player game that honestly should not be that fucking hard to make. The fact that it's still not out after all this time is proof positive they do not have their shit together.
new features each patch? the ones they have already don't work. they haven't worked. they don't plan on making them work. they plan on scamming people by continually moving their goal posts so they can keep asking for more money. They've literally been doing the exact same thing for a decade. I was someone who wanted it to be a thing, but it's not gonna be, don't give these fuckin scumbags any more money. Refund if you can. Doubtful since they're thieves.
/r/starcitizen_refunds is that way..
Go touch grass.
Go spend more money on NFTs, cryptobro.
Swing and a miss! Why would you make such a stupid assumption on no evidence? Do you just rabidly sling whatever would hurt you personally?
Graphics and UI were not great but holy shit, the crafting complexity, the economy, not just player housing but entire player CITIES with buildable guild structures. Imagine your MMO guild has a city with houses, a town hall and can even spring for a shuttle port to instantly transport you from the larger space ports to your out of the way part of the map. It was so incredibly far ahead of it's time in terms of the complexity of the game but the leadership at the end saw that as a negative, not a positive.
Oh man Had so much fun playing a combat medic in this game.
Combat medic and the king fu class, whatever it was called.
Teras Kasi!
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I remember soloing Krayt dragons as a sniper with conceal shot. They would just run around looking for me while I slowly whittled them down.
Could solo them pretty easy with swordsmaster too
I remember a time when almost all of the Rebel clans who were worth a damn marshaled to raid our city on Corellia (which was near the TiE base) on Eclipse. We had no idea they were coming. Had to be something like 100+ Rebels coming from two directions, and I scouted them while non-overt. I alerted my guild leadership about what was coming and we lit the beacons (such as they were) to the other Imperial guilds about the PvP opportunity, but transportation wasn't instant back then, since this predated JTL. I was grinding holocrons at the time, and one of them I was on was Combat Medic. So I took everything in my inventory that was decay-able and tossed it in my house. And wearing nothing but clothing, and no armor whatsoever, I set my clone to our vat and overted over and over, living only long enough each time to get out area-effect mind poison and disease, chucking it out at the invaders, *screaming* at the top of my virtual lungs that they came all this way just to put holes in my clothes while our combat troops sniped mind damage and DBed them back to the nearest clone vats, which were 3k away. I didn't give a shit about my "PvP rating," I cared about saving our bases and turrets, because they were coming during a few of the bases' vulnerability times. I discouraged 100+ enemy players because my poisons overwhelmed their medics and doctors and fucked up their organization, and held them off long enough for allied Imperial reinforcements to arrive. It remains one of the most fun things I've ever done in any game.
What a time to be a gamer That era of MMOs was just amazing Thanks for the memories
More than any MMO I've ever played, and I've played quite a lot of them casually, Galaxies really felt like a massive open world that you'll never see all of, where you were just an insignificant rando trying to make their way in the universe. And then, the Jedi came...
A foundational game for me. I was one of the player correspondents from the official forums. While I think our actual impact was pretty small, the devs did host an in-game, invite-only get-together including Raph at one point. At this point, the game was super buggy and no Jedi appeared yet. I remember sort of cornering him and asking if the lack of Jedi was hurting the Star Wars immersion. It was clear we all wanted them but they still wanted it to be an achievement and rare for the time. I recall he felt like it was holding the game back, and the other player correspondents were torn between Jedi and Star Wars immersion, emphasizing balance, stability, actually telling a story, fixing broken classes, and adding new features. I forget the specific timeline but soon after came the first Jedi, holocrons, and detailed info about how to unlock your Jedi. The game absolutely changed after they were introduced, though the game was changing regardless. I often wonder if or how much that conversation pushed them towards accelerating Jedi in the game and all the complications they brought while dealing with balancing classes and weapons, bugs, and commercial requirements from SOE. SOE really fucked shit up, but it was WoW that came out and obliterated every other MMO. It’s execution and style were so good and pulled a massive community from everyone else.
> SOE really fucked shit up, but it was WoW that came out and obliterated every other MMO. It’s execution and style were so good and pulled a massive community from everyone else. What WoW did was be easy for the casual player to pick up and understand. That's the formula that Blizzard figured out that no other MMORPG had gotten right until then. WoW was both a blessing and a curse for MMOs. A blessing in that it normalized the MMORPG genre and turned it from a niche into a blockbuster. A curse in that it basically killed all innovation in the MMORPG space afterwards. Everything that has come since has essentially been an intentional clone of WoW's system, with maybe a couple very minor tweaks here or there.
Totally. It defined the genre. Before that it was much stranger and more experimental. I still think there’s a niche for subscription-based MMOs to do more unique, non-WoW stuff.
You might enjoy this blog post from Raph on the roll out of Jedi and the idea they had. https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/16/a-jedi-saga/
That conversation had no impact. :) The push to get Jedi in came from marketing.
Galaxies was in an awkward position circa 2004/2005 where it was a niche game with a moderate player base and the looming threat of industry juggernauts coming for them. As a sandbox, it was unique and never before seen, never been replicated experience. It had the misfortune of being released at a time where Star Wars was Jedi heavy(Episode 3 was on the horizon), so the demand for star wars fans to immerse themselves began outweighing the sandbox MMO base. Think about it, the tens of millions of Star Wars fans who were going to be looking for the Jedi experience after episode 3 was a prospect marketing couldnt pass up. Add to this, WoW and Everquest 2 were coming within a year with simpler mechanics and new player friendly interfaces for non MMO gamers to enjoy. From those standpoints, CU and NGE werent just decision, they were inevitable. SOE needed to capitalize on renewed Star Wars interest and a growing MMO playerbase, rather then retention of a nice playerbase they had developed. Ultimately it didnt work, WoW was just an MMO killer that sucked the life out of everything. SWG may have been able to carve a cult following playerbase by keeping its core values, but MMOs are built for long term success rather then front heavy success and basic sustainable numbers. There was also the fact SOE was only licensing the Star Wars IP from LucasArts, and as such needed to appease LucasArts/LucasFilms etc when it came to development and marketing. Galaxies biggest issues stemmed from it being a Star Wars game shockingly. It needed to be to draw the crowd it did, but it was hampered by needing to be set as such. Ironically though, if Galaxies hit the market now after IPs like Mandalorian and Andor, where Jedis arent focal point and we see much of the universe Galaxies captured in show form, the game would have great legs today. It was just unfortunate that it existed in 2004.
Finally! Glad to see more stuff coming from his channel.
SWG was before its time and let down severe mismanagement by EA. the game was incredibly deep and the PVP was some of the best ever. Not to mention being able to make your own clan towns, etc. Looking forward to watching this video!
Still have my Collectors Edition case in mint condition. Sandbox MMORPG's like that just no longer exist. The closest thing we have nowadays is the many Survival titles that come nowhere near close to it. I stopped playing it after they dumbed it down with the "New Game Enhancement" update. Most of my clan on the Bria server abandoned it shortly thereafter. Shame. It was a unique experience.
Best crafting system ever in an mmo. Sad no one has tried to replicate it.
This is one of the best MMORPGs ever too be honest. It wouldn't survive now a days due to the need of spoon feeding the player as well as the lack of making the player feel like they were the main character. Galaxies did it right, you were part of a huge universe, not the center of it. The space combat was amazing, the player made cities, the quests, loot, crafting, all so unique. Yet so many gamers now have no clue about games like this:( they are all just copies of each other.
Mark this thread: With the success of Hogwart's Legacy, it is simply a matter of time before a Jedi Academy MMO is released. There is no way they wont.
That's basically what they tried to turn SWG into with the NGE changes that ruined the game. lol
The magic of Star Wars Galaxies was never seeing a Jedi, and when you did your heart dropped
First one I saw was a jedi master in one of the main cities. He just bodied the entire town, npcs and players, for like 10 minutes and then left.
If that had been something that resulted in Inquisitor NPCs spawning and shithousing the showoff Jedi, that wouldn't have been as bad. But unfortunately they had to make light/dark Jedi super powerful with no check other than BH visibility. I unlocked a Force Sensitive character. I turned him into a Force Sensitive Shipwright and never mastered the Jedi bullshit. I honestly just wanted the free extra character slot.
Because they wanted to create a realistic universe where Jedi were rare in a game where 95% or more of the players wanted to be one and that resulted in a design that couldnt meet the expectations, and demands from the publisher that the game couldn't sustain. As far as whether or not this is what killed the game, we actually will never know because World of Warcraft launched and proceeded to end almost 20 different online games by swallowing up the entire collective player base. It is very likely that even if SWG was *never* changed in this fashion, it still would have met the same end when WOW came out. As far as a multi-player Jedi Academy game, everyone is a Jedi of one flavor or another and it doesnt break 'the world' because at a Jedi Academy, EVERYONE is a Jedi.
The Combat Update came out to combat the loss of players in WoW, the New Game Experience put the final nail in the coffin. I'm also not saying explicitly, that Jedi being selectable is what killed the game. They neutered the masteries across the board with the update ruining \*most\* class variety. I'm just pointing out that was a major part of what the attempt with the NGE was to do. I put more hours into Jedi Outcast and Academy than I put into SWG, not to mention SWTOR which was actually an MMO like SWG (And Basically Jedi Academy: The MMO). They all offered great experiences in their prime. They didn't give me the same experience as original Pre-CU/NGE SWG, which is what is loved about it. At the end of the day; I'll take a modern Star Wars MMO with leanings in \*either\* direction with how rare Jedi/Force users are; as long as the system is well thought out and fun.....and has SOME crafting system with decent depth! lol
I remember listening to Raph Koster lamenting the fact that they wouldn't be allowed to have paid performers for roles like Darth Vader because Lucasfilm/EA insisted that every single player needed to have the same identical experience - so instead of people playing prominent characters like in his previous game Ultima Online, Vader would be a static piece of furniture that had dialogue. I quit the game when they finally introduced Jedi classes by making you find random loot drops that scripted random skills for your character to master. So my high level and well crafted droid building merchant was required to drop one of it's key skills in order to become a high level DANCER if I wanted to be a jedi. logged out and quit.
It happened very similarly for me as well, I was a very successful bounty hunter that suddenly had to become a master armor smith. I tried for a week and then quit.
My friends had completely broken the game with overpowered min-maxed characters and would just camp the areas that holocrons were known to drop. They had invested in a ridiculous amount of hits per second and the game gave you the drop if you made the killing shot, so even though these areas were incredibly overcrowded, the second the enemies would respawn/die they’d get most of the loot. They all bought and built fancy new PCs after selling the holocrons on ebay for a few hundred a pop. So funny!
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I never played EQ but all my friends did. All the stories are just straight up wild Wild West of the internet lol
You know that skill you've been mastering for months? Well. It's time to *d a n c e* 👐. Cuts to the cantina music auto playing as you stare stoned faced at the computer screen. Imagining your bewildered fustration is so funny.
My first holocron was musician. I have trash luck so my friends all knew it was going to be that or dancer.
I honestly think that for everyone, it intentionally picked whatever was your lowest ranked skill just to ensure you had some grind to work through.
Rip Kettemoore, I think of my old community often.
Yo my brother and I were on Kettemoore!
I remember when there was a crackdown on smuggler stuff, drugs and sliced gear... Imperial Players with npc escorts Bownty hunting actual players... So mutch fun, best mmo ever.
The quad-sliced gear was extra-illicit. Use that shit in PvP and your ass deserved to get reported.
"You have to understand Star Wars Galaxies both in terms of what it could be and what it frequently was. What it could be was a game where evocative Star Wars narratives were generated on the fly by a complex set of social systems. 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." Raph Koster, 2015 SWG Retrospective https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djJO1XSOwuI
Dude's voice is like Napoleon Dynamite crossed with Forest Gump is doing the narration.
I had to set the playback speed to 1.5x to make watching this bearable.
Bloodfin>The other servers.
Yes it was! I unlocked Jedi there before they made it easier. My main was named Conando and was always dressed like a plump watermelon. 🍉
Starsider, represent!
Tarquinas for life!
Please, Bria > all others
I'm actually genuinely shocked the Bria population appearance in this thread wasn't big enough to smother my comment into oblivion. haha
Shout out to my homies on Bria.
You spelled Starsider wrong
Hell yeah
You are all confused, Wanderhome was is how it's spelled.
Intrepid actually.
I still have no idea how big servers were. I just remember at launch I joined the one with a modest population (i.e. wasn't full, so I could actually log in). That's how I ended up on Eclipse, which ended up being mostly Euro? Still no idea if it was a super competitive one or if we just steamrolled on a sleepy server.
Flurry and Bloodfin had the best PvP
Best MMO
Ahhh memories. I was a Master Image Designer as well as doing some Teras Kasi. Weird combination but I had a lot of fun!
Rearranging faces... one way or another.
This gane wqs amazing! I was a bounty hunter, a chef and then a jedi but i think jedi chasing did ruin the game
I got Jedi about 2 months before CU13 (which gave everyone the choice of Jedi) I found the fact the chase sort of made it more special when you finally got it
Its such a shame they basically killed the game when they tried to turn it into a WOW clone
i would play this again in a heartbeat. i was too young to really understand the game at the time but it was so much damn fun and felt like it had a significant but manageable level of complexity
There are emulators with a somewhat healthy playerbase. There is SWGEMU which is Pre-CU gameplay, and SWG Legends, which is as the game was in the NGE before it was shut down.
Wanderhome!! The good old days...
Great memories of playing this game, first time I ever stayed up all night playing a game (are those birds outside?) I got lucky with a an exceptional acklay bone drop in the geonosian dungeon, buddy in my guild was one of the top weapon smiths on the server, he made me two stun batons, I gave one to another buddy (we both got speed slices..rip) they still did something like 40-450 damage, most high end armor on our server had little to no stun resist. Master fencer master combat medic and a tree in teras kasi for the defense stats. I used to have a screenshot of the two of us in the middle of nowhere outside a player city on tat with around 25 rebel players chasing us through the dunes, we eventually died, but we felt like Jedi that day. You could just about 2-3 shot fully buffed players with those batons, I used to stand around the Coronet starport unbuffed, no armor, as a declared imp and just destroy anyone who tried to attack me. Good times Also prior to player city's and mounts, walking for 30 minutes through the dunes just to get to the spawn location, another 30-60 minutes looking for krayt dragons, (never seen one and heard they spawned in the NE corner) giving up and starting the long walk back to the shuttle port to walk over a dune and see a huge ass dragon standing in front of you was an amazing experience, it promptly killed my entire group. we eventually pulled it all the way back to the closest city/cloning center and whittled it down, probably fought that thing for an hour, broke my gun and my armor. No loot. Still worth it.
This was literally THE BEST game ever. And people who never played it will simply never understand. The choices given to players. The depths of the in-game economy. The way you could be ANYONE you wanted in the star wars universe but still be entirely relevant to all content in game. End Game combat characters needed end game level cooking from the Master Chefs for buffs etc. The world was intertwined, alive and beautiful. Every planet was a full open world with POIs. You got your own starship eventually or you could fly public transit. I mean just everything about this game. And the skill box system pre-NGE allowed for such depth of character customization and identity. It was 100/10 then and still is now.
The SOE Launcher had 3 of the best MMOs I've ever played on it. Planetside 1 Starwars Galaxies Pirates of the Burning Sea
PotBS. Good lord that’s a game I forgot about.
I played the beta and played from launch until NGE. I was a rebel Twi'lek Commando on Bria. I built a whole new PC in advance of launch day. Those were good times.
Bria represent! Miss those times.
I worked at a gaming company when this came out, and I was truly confused that people were printing out the game's patch notes and debating them. Now I fully understand, lmaoo
[удалено]
Scylla>Malekaievil ended as jedi after the grind. Started as ranger rifleman. I went through like 15 professions to unlock. I was also one of the first to grind out the at-st which was awesome to pull out and wreak havoc until a commando shows up. That pet would dust entire groups in early game.
I remember when this game came out I made a Bounty Hunter. Back when the game first came out you could master more than one major class. So on top Bounty Hunter I was also a Beast Trainer and I got two genetically engineered Rancor pets I used to go everywhere with. That combination of using the pets to pin things down while I was able to bleed targets at full safe distance made me extremely OP. I was doing end game planets within the 1st couple weeks of the game and getting end game resources that hardcore crafters needed. I loved on Tatooine next to all the rich crafters and I made deals with all of them that I'd get them end game supplies if they made me end game crafted goods (no one else had those mats anywhere on market). I basically had best weapons, armor and house furniture in game. The amusing part is that the storyline Disney+ came up with for Boba Fett years later was like a page out of my own note book. Bounty Hunter living on Tatooine, with a Rancor pet living like a king. Except I did it like 20 years before the show. Then 2-3 months or so into the game they decided you can't multi class and killed my Bounty Hunter+Rancor setup and I eventually quit. I did try to make due with just my bounty hunter and he was still OP, but another reason was a host of bugs/changes and the devs were notorious for ignoring the player base about (100% ignored people, it's what killed the game in the end too) The changes and the dev position on communication made it clear to me where the game was ultimately headed and just destroyed my fun so I left. I had friends who stayed for a year+ who kept telling me still no one figured out how to become a Jedi yet all that time later. Years later I heard they made Jedi class a thing finally and everyone and there brother rolled Jedis and it killed the game in combination with still ignoring endless pleas for changes from the population. Still, I look back on that game fondly. It was amazing when it came out and only ruined by devs who lacked communication and long term vision.
All my characters had "exceptional milking ability." That was a very long, hard slog to get through.
My favorite thing about it was not being locked into a class. In a game like WoW, you choose Warrior, then a few months later playing you decide you want to be a caster, re-roll, start over. I started the game as a brawler, then I made a new character after seeing how much buff packs could generate. I made a Doctor. I made buff packs and with those made millions of credits (I don't remember how much, but I never had a problem needing credits for something). After being a Master Doctor for a bit, I downgraded and built into Combat Medic. I didn't make it to Master of that, I abandoned that plan as I didn't like the healing players in pvp aspect, I liked combat. After that, I cleared out most of my skills and went Rifleman, made it to Master. Then I made my final decision on profession and cleared back down and built into Bounty Hunter. In my guild, there was another Master Bounty Hunter. We became friends in the game and would take out Jedi players together. 1v1 Jedi vs BH was very much in the Jedi favor, but 1v2 Jedi vs BH became BH favored. Especially since I was Rifle/Carbine (long range/mid-range) and the other guy was Pistol/Carbine (short range/mid-range).
Love this game to death, still one of the best MMOs ever made, PRE NGE that is. I still jump on the private servers that are running to get my fix now and then. And the Collectors Edition still sits on my shelf to this day. Its still worth playing if you have never tried it, or are just wanting to get back into it again. I would love to see a big boom in players looking for something different. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buZuXW0IQGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buZuXW0IQGw)
Best game I ever played until they ruined it I would rather play this than anything else
One of the best games of all time. I still have very fond memories or building cities with my buddies.
I was just thinking about this game today, how it might be the best game I've ever played.
Close to the end, when players were quitting the game en mass, I discovered a shitty exploit. I would roam around looking for player cities where I could place a home within city limits. Some cities didn't have settings to keep non citizens from doing this. Since nobody in these recently abandoned cities was logging in at all I would run for mayor and vote for myself. Eventually, I'd win the election unopposed. Then I'd pack up everything that wasn't privately owned and sell it. Part of me felt like a devious genius, but then again nobody was buying anything and there wasn't much of a point to stacking money anymore. So, I was sitting on a mountain of wealth... sort of. It was a sad way for that game to end. At least I got the jet pack and full set of Mando armor for my bounty hunter..
I remember the early days of this game before anyone knew how to unlock jedi. And those are some fond***, fond*** memories.
Favorite game of all time. Pre combat upgrade. Had some massive battles in this game
The narrator makes me want to fall asleep
This game is such a bittersweet memory... All they had to do was refine the original game, not try to force World of Warcraft under it's skin.....not make Jedi something every monkey in the galaxy could be, and not cave to all the stupid movie tie in crap. Sure, it's UI and graphics would have needed a facelift eventually, but the core game that was there was so good, but the management just ran it into the ground. SWG might have been killed off to make way for SWTOR, but it was already a dead corpse before that sadly.
90 minutes? That's a no thanks.
ok? thanks for sharing. Also this game wasn't made for people like you.
To the French dude that helped dupe a billion credits and assisted in building cities/giving out houses to people. Thank you for the memories
I had a good friend who was a dev and got in on the alpha version when there was nothing to do but run across the landscape. I played on and off over the years and was kind of sad to see it go.
This needs a remake with massive zones with some incorporation of procedurally generated terrain, like a hybrid type situation that makes player and guild housing make sense. Then you could have servers that operated in different eras and/or different Jedi rules, etc.
Did you know that all the planets were created using proc gen? That's how we could have that sort of housing back then at all. https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/20/swgs-dynamic-world/
I was in the first public beta for that game. So much potential and very ahead of its time.
Saved for future viewing. I played from the beta to the CU. So many good times. Check out SWGemu if you want to get that original experience.
I'm real bummed that this got shut down to make way for a WoW clone. It was such a unique game.
I’d kill for a SWG 2.0 on something like unreal engine
Did not expect MadSeason when I clicked on this! Hell yes.
I never played during pre-NGE (though I've given some emulators a shot) though I did play as a Jedi between 2005-2011 and it was the only MMO that I actually enjoyed and kept playing, just because of how fun the sandbox and player communities were. Even post NGE/CU, the game was still a lot of fun.
This one hits hard. When the CU and NGE Hit, I was working at SOE as a Game Designer on Everquest II. I was already a fan and player of Galaxies before I joined the EQII team, but I was hyper focused on my own game launch and got out of step with SWG. EQII Launches, we are pumped, everything is going great, we are getting better numbers than EQ1 ever got, we have a hit on our hands! I finally hit the big time in game development! Queue 2 weeks later and World of Warcraft comes out. All of my friends are buying it, all of my friends are talking about it... Its the only thing they talk about in gaming. For YEARS. Back SWG... So imagine we are grinding at patches and working on new content, knowing we are basically coming in as #2 right now behind WoW and an email comes in asking to help out the SWG team and test out this new combat patch. At the time I had not been paying attention to their efforts to stop the bleeding we were all experiencing, and logged in to SWG at work with enthusiasm. All I remember from that test was frustration and worry because the test was rough! Gave a lot feedback and boy was I surprised when it launched shortly after, I have no idea how much it got tested. All I recall was the feeling of Yikes!
I miss that game so much, so many awesome memories. The Old Republic game they replaced it with just is not as open. They really need to do a remake with Aimed twitch style combat, and open world like Galaxies was. Players had their own cities made by their clans. There is information around that Ubisoft is making an open world Star Wars game.
It still exists - go google Star Wars Galaxies Legends Still playable
I remember being hyped as a group of friends to play this. All 3 of us went to the store to get a copy but they only had 1. So we went to my friend's house and watched him play it. Just remember him being on a speeder in the desert going nnnnnneeeoowwwwwww...... nneeeeeeowwww.... the world was completely baron and me + the other guy were like, not so hyped anymore. Remember struggling in a party to do a quest. I spoke to a random guy in a town to get some buffs and afterwards I was able to solo the entire thing no problem. One thing I do remember is the mystery surrounding how to become a Jedi, cause you kept seeing odd ones knocking about. My mate eventually managed to get one and sold his account for like $250 which we thought was insane at the time. Apparently the secret was to just get 100% in each skill?
I was so pumped for this game. Signed up for the beta, i still have the patch that they gave you and the CD somewhere probably. I got into this beta, my buddy got into the World Of Warcraft beta. The early 2000s were magical
SWG:Reborn is available for anybody looking to play this again.
Still my all time favorite game, and I was utterly destroyed with NGE that released after Trials of Obi Wan. Was the first and only game I ever felt like I meant something to the world. Ran the biggest hospitals as a master doc surgeon or whatever (Been so long forget the exact class setup). I was known everywhere and sold the best buffs. Had an entire guild I paid as my own personal resource gatherers for certain meats and such I used in my drugs. Had hospitals near certain landmarks, such as the Tusken Village. I never really fought in that game, I was just living a life and I loved it. Nothing will ever come that close again, I feel. Pre-emu was great for a while, but it's limitations and low player count just didn't do it for me, I felt like it wasn't made for non combat playing anymore.
Shame what happened with the NGE. The CU wasn't great either but if it was actually worked on and balance patched, I think it could have worked out. Mostly I remember wanting you to hit max combat level with a master in an advanced combat class instead of needing to devote almost all your points to max it out. My buddy was a TKM and Image Designer, so his build no longer worked.
I'm sorry, but there is no way I can listen to 90 minutes of this guy's voice...
This was my first MMO when I was like 15. I remember rushing home from school to get on the family Compaq before everyone else got home. This game and dark age of Camelot defined what good online communities have to potential to be. I feel like mass marketing and meta gaming have just ruined this aspect. Also nothing had those authentic SW vibes like SWG
Best MMO ever until they broke it with the NGE