Windows

Star Wars: Galaxies - An Empire Divided

Servers were turned off at the top of the hour (around 10 min ago). This is the third shuttered MMO I've seen, but luckily I wasn't too invested in Matrix Online.

Anyway, SWG was a sometimes-amazing game that just couldn't keep up with the times and didn't match changing tastes. Pouring a 40 out for you, homie. Thanks for a great year and a half. ... you can keep the rest of the time after that though.

Need to finish my review series for it too :P

I had a cousin who was pretty invested in this. Haven't talked to him in awhile, but I figure he was able to transition to Old Republic easily. He seemed like the sort that was only in it for the Jedi.

I, of course, am the kind of Star Wars fan who think the Jedi are the weakest and least interesting part of Star Wars, but it seems like there aren't many others like me out there.

"You have my bow..."

Oh, pardon me, wrong franchise :D

When I was enlightening Unicorn Lynx to the pure greatness of "Dark Forces" I should be mentioning this as major advantage: Star Wars game, yet no Jedi around! Woo-hoo!

This is the only MMORPG I ever played for more than a free trial week. This was years ago, before they decided to send out a patch that changed the core mechanics. I stopped shortly before that.

The game was rather imbalanced, but a lot of fun to play. And the fact that every item you owned was at some point created by another player created a superb sense of community. When you entered a shop to buy a new piece of armor you knew that everything you saw in that particular shop was hand-crafted by the owner. And if you didn't see what you liked you stepped back on your speederbike and sped off to the next village and see what they had there.

Also have lots of fond memories of raising baby banthas, rancors and various other cool animals from Star Wars lore.

Becoming a Jedi or Sith were very difficult and shrouded in mystery when I was playing. I only saw one two or three times and only once I caught two of them in battle. But there rarely were more than 2 or 3 players on a server that were Jedi/Sith anyway. Later they changed it and made it very easy for everyone to become one, but as I said, by that time I had already stopped playing. I agree with Lain, that I didn't miss being a Jedi, and to me it feels the game went in completely the wrong direction after they changed the mechanics.

I think the worst part wasn't that there weren't people very interested in SWG, it's that it was felt that there weren't enough people interested.

There was an article a long time ago (on Gamasutra maybe?) analyzing the change, and how SWG was basically caught on the edge of the end of the freeform sandbox style and the proving success of the power-gamer MMO (EverQuest). Inevitable, I suppose, as gaming tries to shift from geeky intellectual sims built by and for geeky intellectuals, to mainstream blockbuster numbers.

So pretty sure we'll never see anything like this again. Garriott's talking about Ultima Online 2 - which I presume would be a similar sandbox style - but at this point, I'm surprised anyone trusts him with more than their lunch money.

It does sound like SWG would have greatly benefited from a FTP platform. That way you'd have the free players supporting the in-game economy while the dedicated players are spending real money creating economic empires.

It would be curious to see how that would work if it was released today. Obviously unthinkable then, and both parties were apparently unwilling to convert to F2P. They did consider it.

This all came about because the licensing contract with LucasArts runs out at the end of this year. SOE apparently figured it wasn't profitable enough to renew (fair enough, I'm sure the fee for Star Wars is enormous), and saw a good time to cut their losses.