I’m going to harp on Galaxies again. Just so you have a fresh reason to think me an ass haberdasher, the reason I want to harp on Galaxies is because I’ve been playing it again. I blame Foton. I read back through his Grumpy Architect series again, and it made me pine for the good old days.

In any case, my experiences going through some of the game content in Galaxies dovetail nicely with my thoughts on Everquest’s newest expansion, and Darniaq’s designing for the past post.

As I walk through the almost lifeless planets in Galaxies, I’m struck by the folly of misjudging your audience as badly as SWG has. (On a side note: why haven’t they done server mergers yet? SOE, get on it, stat. I want people to group with.) While the changes of the NGE and CU certainly have contributed heavily to the sad state the game is in, I think there were more fundamental problems with the game from the get-go.

By way of example: Last night I was waiting for my wife to finish her shift at Barnes and Noble, and I picked up some of the Clone Wars trade paperbacks from the comics section to while away the time. Besides enjoying the quality of the art and writing, they made me compare my own experiences within the Star Wars Universe (primarily, making shirts and sucking at PvP) with what filled the pages. The marked differences between what I mentally associate with Star Wars, and what I associate with Galaxies, are quite telling.

The most serious flaw, I think, is the almost complete absence of physicality from Galaxies. The grace of the Jedi in the more recent trilogy is the standard to live up to, and the game has always fallen very flat. Combat animations are run awkwardly together, the general lack of death animation sequences is just embarrassing … it makes you wonder if the people  working on the graphical presentation had actually stopped to watch the world they were emulating. To be sure, Galaxies is still attractive even lo these years later, but it’s not a world you inhabit, it’s just a world you move through.

Even moments they managed to accurately capture can be dashed by inadequate technology. The the feel of riding a swoop at breakneck speed across a desert during the setting of twin suns is made much less special because of the popping and stuttering of the world around you.

No, of course they couldn’t have just made “Jedi Outcast the MMOG”. Another successful 3D character based PC game may, just may, have been a good place to take some hints from, though.