As I’ve been playing Star Wars Galaxies over the last few days, the back of my mind has been cataloging what is still wrong with the game. I think it’s fairly obvious that the game is still deeply flawed. There’s still a lot of bad blood in the player base, and past/non-players see it as a kind of a joke. With personal positive experiences in the game now at the forefront of my mind, I see Galaxies as being in kind of a special moment right now. The game is finally stabilizing under the team, and they can start to move out of ‘fix-it’ mode. Tweaks to the combat system aside, it seems like they’re finally starting to move ahead with content in the game. A lot of onlookers (possibly even LucasArts) thinks that the game has already failed.

As a result, I’m quite optimistic. Weird, I know, but here’s the deal: what do they have to lose at this point? I think Galaxies needs a number of incremental improvements across many elements of the game both to satisfy current players and lure back curious old ones. Far from the shlock that McQuaid is offering about Vanguard, I think the view the SWG team should take at this point is one of long-term improvements. Who cares if no one comes back? Who cares if the game succeeds in the long run? Right here and now, they have a chance to work on a game that is once again filled with potential.

Here’s where I think they should direct their energies:

• Server Merges - I didn’t mention it in the last post, but one of the reasons I had so much fun this weekend is that people are playing. I saw a lot of obvious newbies playing the game with the new box on the shelves, but it seemed like every other person I talked to had re-upped their account. Curiosity about the pets, anticipation of the demolition event … people were actually quite interested. It was great to see. Just the same, higher player density would be a really really great thing. The best way to do that would to finally merge some of the damned servers. I don’t know how they’ll handle building overlaps or city overlaps, or things like that … but they have to make the hard decision and bring these communities together. People will bitch, but once they have lots of new people to trade with and hunt with they’ll see the beauty in a higher server population.
• Tie Kashyyk and Mustafar into Legacy Quest - The Legacy quest as it stands now drops off around level 40 with only three of the many planets really explored. Legacy needs to be *the* experience for SWG players. It’s got to be the hand at the throat pulling players from level to level, making sure they’re always looking over the next horizon. It needs more branches, making players aware of the other release planets. It needs to tie directly into the expansion content; let’s face it, at this point everyone has all three expansions. It needs to tie into all of the appropriate Theme Parks: Emperor’s Retreat for the Imps, the Base for the Rebs, and … maybe Nym’s for the criminal/civvies? The point is, the Legacy Quest should be the defining element in Galaxies. As it is, it’s very good at pulling players to 40. Specific mission types can get a little repetitive, but it’s still content. On Saturday I looked up from doing an odd job for Pooja Naberrie’s idiot relative and realized I was *questing*. In *Theed*. My favorite SWG city, the place I consider my home, the very first place I entered the game, and I was finally doing something questy there. It was a magical moment; even if all I was doing was whapping a foozle or two, it *worked*. Make sure the players can go all the way to 90 with that kind of story-based arc, and make sure they see as much of the game as they can on the way.
• SWG Players Website - I don’t know about the database issues here, but the EQ2 and Vanguard Players sites are tremendous. The legacy of Sanya Thomas/Weathers lives on, and players love to show off their ePeens. Give SWG players the same show-off options Vanguard offers, and then top it. Let players set up an interface between their vendors in-game and the SWG Players site. Let players log in as their characters on the site and then buy goods on a virtual market across all such linked vendors; make them leg it to wherever it is in the Galaxy to pick it up, but let them buy online. Nothing says ‘impulse buy’ like a big stack of bone or aluminum purchased during a corporate lunch break.
• Incorporate Crafters Into The Game More - Oh hey, I mentioned those crafting guys. Yeah, they’re still in the game. Still. In. The Game. While I say ‘incorporate’ here because that’s my preference, really what I want to say is: shit or get off the pot, guys. Either stop letting people make new Trader characters, or give them a focus. Specifically, merge all the Trading classes into one class: let every trader make every schematic. There are so few Traders left that this four separate types nonsense just doesn’t fly. If everyone can do everything, we’ll see a lot more people interested in trying their hand, and a lot more general-store type scenarios. People will still restrict themselves; the Tailors on my server won’t start churning out weapons. But if Traders can do a little bit of everything it makes for 1) more interesting leveling and 2) a more competitive marketplace.
• Trader Questing - I retooled a Jedi character I was playing on the same server as Amak into a Weaponsmith, and got two surprises. One was good: as far as I can tell, leveling crafters is pretty much a flat exercise. That is to say, there’s not much of a curve to your leveling. I was grinding on personal harvesters, and I didn’t notice a significant increase in time required to gain one level over the next. She was level 1 on Saturday and hit level 28 earlier today. I think that’s great; don’t make Traders endlessly grind like back in the day. Recognize that they’re special and let them just get up there as fast as possible. The other surprise was bad: there still aren’t really crafter quests. The intro quests with the guy out back of the Mos Eisley cantina were so appealing that I was hoping they’d keep going. No such luck. Look, the Traders don’t get to do the Legacy series: that means they need one of their own. Give them something to do besides pure grinding. If you take my suggestion to make Traders a pure, non-split class then Traders quests could be endlessly variable. Ten whole levels of crafting and questing could consist of outfitting a dinner party with uniforms, food, and drink. Another series of quests could involve a hapless trader becoming involved with weapons smugglers. Hell, hook some of the Trader Legacy quests into the regular Legacy line, and you have real players interacting via the world’s backstory!
• New, Regular Content - I know this is a very general, high level, wholly unpopular request, but it’s really necessary: give players more stuff to do. Even beyond the Legacy quests, there has to be more to do. With games like WoW and EQ2 patching in new content every single month, it’s crazy not to see a more active storyline in the galaxy far, far away. Having been out for so long now, elements of SWG lend themselves very well to new content. I’m not talking about dungeons, either. Dungeons are great and all, but I’m talking about new quest lines. The Azure Cabal being added in Chapter 6 sounds great; more elements like that sprinkled through the game at 5-level blocks sounds like a brilliant idea. My requests: cultural background quests for a bunch of the races (most people don’t even know Ithorians have more than one mouth), anti-faction quests that let you get close to the big NPCs (Imps incapping Han Solo, Rebs fighting off Mara Jade), and more non-faction quests would be all appreciated. A long, long time ago there was talk of a third criminal faction; that’d be a great bit of content to roll out.
• Planning For KOTOR - Everything here so far are just incremental changes; honing in on what works and taking it to the next level. If the rumours are true, though, and BioWare has begun work on a Knights of the Old Republic Massively Multiplayer Online Game … the SWG devs need to do more than just batten down the hatches. I’ll be honest: a KOTOR MMOG sounds like seventh heaven. I’d probably never see the inside of Galaxies again (and most other fantasy MMOGs would get pretty short shrift). My hope is that the designers are aware of this possibility and are coming up with ideas to make sure that SWG can respond to another fish in the IP pool. My suggestion: relaunch the game. The original subtitle was “An Empire Divided”. How about, for the relaunch: “New Republic Ascendent”? I think the obvious thing to do is, if KOTOR goes back in time SWG should go forwards. With KOTOR just in the rumour stages there is plenty of time to work on this, but you’d need that much time. I say, do what the players have wanted all along and start advancing the storyline. Move SWG through the time of Empire, into Jedi, and beyond. The EU elements we know about from the X-Wing series of books would make for amazing quest content. Rebs helping ready for the assault on Coruscant. Imps work to try to keep the feuding warlords from ruing the Empire. That would be powerful stuff. And at the end of the move: a completely new balance of power. The ‘Rebel’ faction is now the ‘New Republic’ Faction, with the rebs on top and the Imps just the scruffy taggers-on. PvP would have whole new levels of meaning, there are thousands of storytelling possibilities … it would be amazing. I don’t even think you need to go as far as the Yuuzhan Vong … just bring SWG up to the first Thrawn Trilogy era and you’ll have players leaping out of their seats. Whatever the response to KOTOR is, there has to be some kind of actual response. The worst thing SWG could do in the face of a new Star Wars MMOG would be nothing; doing nothing guarantees that SWG won’t see 10 years.

I know that was a lot of blathering, but I feel pretty strongly about this. I’ll throw it open to you, as well: What do you think SWG needs to get the blood pumping again? Just don’t say ‘a classic server’ or ’server rollbacks’, because it ain’t going to happen. Launch-era SWG is gone forever … and I think we’re better off for it. What would you do if you were a SWG dev?