Heartless has a rant up calling for the death of Star Wars Galaxies. As someone who has called for an SOE title to be put into sunset himself, I’m not going to question his choice of topic. An announcement on the forums a few days ago spurred me to put down what I thought of the game, and H’s comments made me think it might be a good idea to put them out here. So here, then, is a cathartic little piece looking at some of my experiences in Star Wars Galaxies, what I think of the game’s place in MMOGs as a whole, and why I find myself agreeing with a heartless call for its destruction. If you just want the part where I bitch about how angry I am about the game now, feel free to skip to the paragraph right before the quote.

I set foot in Theed within minutes of the servers going live. I came home from work early for the chance to be among the first to see the galaxy a long time ago go retail. I’d played MMOGs before, but SWG was my first game launch. I was pumped by the design elements I’d been following for the past two-odd years, and I was excited by the impressions I’d read from SWG beta testers about what it was actually like to play. It didn’t sound perfect, but it was Star Wars, man! My first character was actually eaten by the up-and-down servers that first day. I managed to do little more than harvest a few units of ore before the Starsider server went down. It didn’t come back up until after dinnertime, and I found that my 15 minute investment in the Mon Calamari Amak had been wiped away. I shrugged, and recreated the character.

Amak’s time in SWG has been extremely varied. During the time of the game’s original design he was primarily a crafter. He made Master Tailor and joined a PA. Most of those folks were the typical Bounty Hunter / scavenger types, and they appreciated the addition of a dedicated crafter to their ranks. With their help he rose through some of the ranks of Pistoleer and made a tidy profit selling to other PAs. At one point I was providing uniforms for half a dozen Imperial player associations. Amak had a nice house, a good stack of cash at a time when that still mattered, and plenty of resources coming in to produce goods. After a while though, the PA I was in broke apart and I decided to take some time off. This was a few months before the JTL launch, and it seemed like a good time to look into other games.

SOE has always been generous with free account days for SWG; Each new expansion has resulted in a couple of freebie days. I hopped back in during the JTL free time, and found a very different game than the one I’d left. MUDflation had hit the game, and my ‘tidy pile’ was next to worthless. Resources had changed, most of the PAs that I’d worked with were gone. Those that weren’t were run by different avatars and had no interest in contracting with a solo Tailor. The thought of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter action was tempting, but I just wasn’t interested enough to buy the expansion.

By the time the CU hit, I’d been away long enough for the changes to pique my interest. I reupped my account and played for about two months, becoming re-associated with a PA for the first time since the early days of SWG. The focus of the CU made it obvious where SOE considered their focus should be, and my interest in Tailoring had waned since Amak’s creation. I decided to respec into a combat monster, and I chose a Rifleman/Creature Handler build that did quite a number on the local Nabooian wildlife. He was a good build for PvP as well. Frustratingly, Master Tailor translated very poorly to a combat class. My Pistoleer ranks were helpful, though, and I managed to be semi-effective when compared to the maxed out characters who had been doing combat since the game launched. That PA broke up, though, when the guild leader fled the game disgusted with the combat changes.

I took the hint, and left as well. WoW was out, and the break from playing after the long Beta period had renewed my enthusiasm for the game. SWG, which among most of the folks that I talked to was already a joke, became a laughing-stock. Many of the more unique elements of the game were ironed out by the CU, and while my interest in the game remained I just didn’t care enough to go back to playing.

Which brings us to the here and now. The concept of the NGE was so interesting I actually sat through the annoyance of making a character on the Test server to feel it out. The twitch combat was (until DDO’s launch) unique among Westerm MMOGs, and the extremely complicated gameplay of SWG’s original vision probably did need some streamlining.

With the main servers moved to the new systems as well, I ran Amak 3.0 through several different classes to figure out the way I wanted to play. Jedi-action Amak was just too weird, and while Smuggler had an appeal that class needed some help. I decided to try something straightforward: Soldier. My interest primarily lay in trying out the new questing elements of the game anyway, and hitting hard seemed the best way to do that. I found that I could even put back on Amak’s old armor, a great set of Composite that I’d had made for him waaaaay back in the day. It cost me almost three million credits for the helmet alone. I sold off the remainder of Amak’s crafting supplies for operating capital, and went off to find my fortune in the big wide world.

I had a blast. The NGE version of combat was engaging and understandable. While some of the legacy quests were a bore (and at CL 40 pretty easy), it was great hunting around to find new elements of the game to explore. I went through a good chunk of the Rage of the Wookies content, fought my way up the Imperial Pilot ranks, and explored a little bit of Mustafar. I even took the chance and re-associated myself with a PA. The folks in the Imp PA I joined welcomed me in, and I spent a very fun evening a few days before Christmas dancing and enjoying the company of fellow Starsider players. I even did the tourist thing, finishing up the Jabba and Nym theme parks to go with my Imperial badge.

Then I left the game. I took my time leaving this time, closing up my house and making sure it was paid up for a good long time. I had plenty of reasons to stay on with Galaxies; I went back to World of Warcraft with regret. Just the same, I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to SWG. This time, it wasn’t boredom or a new shiny that drew me away. I left because of a fundamental frustration with the actions of Sony Online Entertainment and the designers working on the game. I left because it’s just not SWG any more.

I have a big problem here; I greatly respect some of the people working for SOE. There is still a lot of love in my heart for Raph’s original design of the game, and Jeff Freeman is an obviously talented man. I understand that making hard choices that affect thousands of players is a delicate balancing act, and that it’s hard to get things right the first time. I know that people are human, and perfection is a goal that is often set but rarely met.

That’s what makes it so bloody hard to express my frustration and overwhelming disappointment with the consistently player-fucking choices that Sony has chosen to make.

From the Publish 28 changes:

– New clothing items with a wider variety of character attribute bonuses will drop as loot with random stats appropriate to the level (based on the level of the creature or NPC).
– These clothing loot drops will have randomized colors.
– These clothing loot drops will drop instead of the types of clothing with character attribute bonuses that dropped previously.

You may recall a few paragraphs up where I mentioned that Amak was once a Tailor? Randomized clothing loot drops with attribute bonuses (that Tailor’s can’t craft) + no decay on items (meaning no need for new equipment) marks a final nose-thumbing at the few bastards tenacious enough to stay on as a crafter in the new SWG order. The whole reason I bought the damn game back in 2003 was because it was not just EQ in space. You could play the game without falling into the ridiculous mold of ‘hunter of tiny creatures’. You could make a profit without running meaningless errands for nameless citizenry. If you had signature clothing products, you could walk through a crowded plaza and see your impact on the world around you.

I’m a big proponent of the G in the MMORPG genre, but just this once SOE had something special on its hands. When it launched, Star Wars Galaxies was a world rich with possibility and promise. Easily the most customizable character creation tool offered at the time, combined with an infinitely re-combinable set of professions, meant that players could participate in the Star Wars story the way they wanted. There wasn’t much in the way of content to offer, but things looked promising. Badges were a wonderful way of showing off to other player. The ‘Theme Parks’ were great ways of interacting with the Star Wars canon characters on your own time. The DeadEye storyline events that took place soon after launch were mediocre in and of themselves, but the willingness to give it a go impressed the playerbase.

The bleed-out of the playerbase that followed these heady days led to drastic overhauls like the CU and NGE. The lowering subscription numbers resulted from what appeared to be a complete lack of ‘getting it’ on the part of the developers. As an example, the raw potential of the gameworld meant precisely dick once the first Jedi slot was unlocked. The method for unlocking a Jedi slot, built-in since the game’s launch, lead to meaningless churn as players ground their way through the professions. The commodities markets fluctuated rapidly as players ground through the artisan profs. When people are willing to sell high-end crafted items for a fraction of their normal cost, how can actual crafters hope to make a living?

Possibly the most egregious offense (from the point of view of LucasArts, I’m sure) was the squandering of the Star Wars license on the title. I’ve seen recent editorials say ‘People didn’t want to be moisture farmers.’ People were actually more than happy to be moisture farmers; They just wanted to have other kinds of fun too. They wanted the chance to go out and have grand space adventures once in a while. They wanted things to be ‘Star Warsy’. They wanted to see the Empire fight the Rebellion, they wanted to dogfight in space … they didn’t want to farm moisture all the time. The mindless monotony of those randomly generated missions was all that there was to do for months, and months. Once content began to trickle into the gameworld, it was in the form of dungeons. Dungeons innnnnn spppaaaaaccccee! As I said, I didn’t buy the game to play EQ in space. Even dungeons literally in space, like the Corvette dungeon, were just not the kind of content that the game’s surroundings deserved.

It’s been a long three years, and I’ve been disappointed at almost every turn by the decisions made in the growth of the game. Quality elements that should have been in the game from the very first (such as an instructive and intuitive new player experience) were added far too late to make a difference. Space Combat should never have been allowed to be pushed back to an expansion. The Wookies expansion was released at a time when player resentment over game imbalance was high; Focusing on making the game you already have fun before releasing an expansion should always be the priority. The Trials of Obi-Wan expansion was a movie tie-in that came out six months after the movie was released, making it useless for the Lucas marketing machine or the good name of the game. And, of course, the NGE went into effect just after the Trials expansion was released, infuriating players who had no idea the money they’d sunk into the game was actually being invested in a very different animal.

Any way you slice it, Star Wars Galaxies has been a colossal waste of opportunity. Three years into its retail life, a MMOG based on one of the most popular movie franchises in the history of cinema should be shouting from the rooftops about the number of people who play it. SOE remains silent as the grave on the number of subscribers playing. Three years into its retail life, the sheer potential of the profession system as it existed at launch should have shamed later releases into adopting similar designs. Class/Level advancement is still the standard. Three years into its retail life, canon and player created cities should be bursting with activity as avatars go about their business. With a few exceptions, the cities of SWG feel like monuments to a lost civilization.

I’ll own up to having an occasionally bitter time of it in-game. I’m not a designer, and can’t claim to know all the particulars of the live team’s decision-making process. I wasn’t there through thick and thin; I left and rejoined the game several times over the last few years. Just the same, I was there at the beginning. My time in the Galaxy far, far away has come to an end. You know what they say, you never forget your first date. That first day pulling minerals out of the ground in the little wooded area outside Theed’s plaza will always stay with me. I’ve walked many worlds since Naboo, but my opinions of all of these places are forever colored by the green hills and graceful architecture of Amidala’s homeworld.

I’m leaving the game reluctantly, and with a great deal of frustration. I’ve wanted this game to be the MMOG I played. I’ve wanted that since it was launched, and it’s never maintained my interest longer than four months at a stretch. I’ll never be as excited for a game launch as I was for Star Wars Galaxies again.

Three years later, excitement has turned to ashes in my mouth. I just can’t stay invested in a game that has fundamentally failed me at every turn.

For better or worse, catharsis accomplished.