Star Wars: Galaxies - An Empire Divided

aka: SWG
Moby ID: 9532

Description official descriptions

Explore the worlds of Star Wars in your own, special way. Become a Jedi, a Bounty Hunter, smuggler, ranger, merchant or simply live the world as a free spirit, without a care in the world.

Share the likes of Tatooine, Corellia, Naboo and six other planets with thousands of other players around the world in real time. Join the Rebel Alliance to battle Stormtroopers, become an agent of the Emperor and defeat the last remaining Jedi, or simply stay out of the conflict all together. You decide your destiny.

There are eight initial races to choose from, including humans and Wookiee, each with their own innate species bonuses. Characters can master professions, or specialize in broader areas by taking skills from multiple profession trees - there is no required "class" or path. You can also develop and decorate your own 3-D household, join a guild, or try your hand at carving out a part of the completely player-crafted market and economy.

Each lesson learned and task completed improves your skills and experience for the chance to take on larger and more complex adventures; from visiting famous landmarks from the Star Wars universe to talking face to face with the legends of the original movie trilogy.

Spellings

  • 星球大战银河篇:分裂帝国 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

347 People (305 developers, 42 thanks) · View all

Executive Producer
Senior Producer
Creative Director
Art Director
Technical Director
Associate Producers
Lead Client Engineer
Lead Server Engineer
Programmers
Additional Programming
Programming Special Thanks
Assistant Art Director
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 71% (based on 23 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.3 out of 5 (based on 30 ratings with 3 reviews)

Episode I: Like 'Second Life,' but with a purpose.

The Good
It's a sunny afternoon among the towering skyscrapers of Coronet; capital city of Corellia, and one of the galaxy's busiest meeting places. I'm an older, silver haired gentleman in utilitarian white clothes, seated at an open desk in one of the four main rooms of Coronet's expansive medical center. It's a busy shift today. It's been an unspoken agreement that Corellia is a prime location for medical treatment. A steady stream of patients from all over the galaxy is always flowing through, which in turn keeps the place staffed by up-and-coming medical specialists. There's plenty of dangers on every habitable planet in the galaxy, and as hunters or explorers get poisoned, diseased, or knocked out enough times to have their abilities greatly reduced, they have to come to people like me. I'm a doctor.

Well, a doctor-in-training, as most of the people here are. Medical centers are one of the few places you can earn the specialized medical experience needed to advance in the medical professions - field work doesn't count - so every doctor has to come through an impromptu residency at one of the major medical centers. I have just come back from the Coronet bazaar, where I was able to purchase some high-quality steel a prospector had mined and packaged off for sale. This was the last resource I needed to craft higher-quality dispersal units - an injecting component needed in all the medicines I create (some buy from other doctors, I generally make my own by hand). Better components mean more efficient medicines, which means I can cure wounds in a shorter amount of time, while using up fewer charges on these disposable meds to boot.

And so, I am tinkering away at the medical center desk, experimenting to produce the best components I can, when in walks some poor sap with a tiny sliver of health remaining. His maximum health had been severely limited by the accumulation of cloning wounds we called "black rot." Without treatment, he was effectively useless in combat - a hefty sneeze from a Bantha would probably bowl him over. It was the worst case I had seen up to that point.

"What happened?" I asked, closing my crafting kit and rising from the desk.

He looked down at the floor and shook his head back and forth. "Krayt dragons" he stated simply, taking a seat at an open medical bed. I laughed. No more needed to be said. Krayt Dragons roamed the northeastern deserts of Tatooine. The older ones were four or five times the size of a man - and about ten times as nasty. But they guarded valuable items, making them worth taking on if you could hack it. This guy must have tried taking one on solo. And then again and again after cloning.

We chatted a bit about his fight while I injected the medicines that were already clearing up his grievous wounds. I even managed to share a tip on how to fight them. I'd never been out Dragon hunting myself, but another hunter passing through for treatment had recommended using droids to draw the creatures' attention. I knew a droidsmith on Dantooine who offered quality droids at fair prices (I was saving up for a medical unit, myself!) and gave the now-recovered hunter datapad coordinates to her shop. He thanked me for my help, tipped me for my services, and headed out to see if he could best those damn Dragons. As he was leaving, a new patient walked in with their health being drained away by combat poisons. I dug through my inventory for my separate set of anti-toxins as he told his story of finding a secret Imperial research facility whose experiments had broken loose.

<hr />

What's most important about the above is that absolutely none of it is exaggerated or imagined. Put everything above into game terms - my character was sitting at a desk actually playing with a crafting interface for medicines, there are emotes and Krayt Dragons and damage-over-time diseases, etc - and it's a true slice of what really happened on a day-to-day basis in SWG. That it sounds like fan-fiction is part of what made the common moments of the game impressive (and why I started the review this way). Galaxies really and truly let you live out a Star Wars fantasy without an excess of imagination required.

Galaxies, as released initially, had less in common with directed, quest-based RPGs like Everquest, and more with sandbox MMOs like Eve Online. Your goals were intentionally left open; your character mostly free to pursue as you saw fit. The "world" of Star Wars was truly opened up and well-designed. Every planet was incredibly vast, had a distinct look, and every city had a recognizable layout and its own canonical landmarks. You could even sightsee effectively if you wanted to, from visiting the royal palace on Naboo, to the crashed Lucky Despot in Mos Eisley, to checking out Ewok villages in the forests of Endor.

But the world Galaxies created also extended beyond simply replicating areas from the films or novels; it truly gave you an opportunity to live in that world. You could actually become a moisture farmer with your own house on Tatooine. While it sounds goofy at first, consider it for a moment: You start with a highly customizable character generator, with "Image Designer" players who could sell you a further expanded range of hairstyles or colors. As long as the land wasn't claimed by someone else, you could scout out the perfect location for your house and drop it anywhere on the planet. You could purchase furniture built by other players to decorate the interior of your 3D building as you saw fit (or visit others' houses and take in their decorative creativity). You could purchase crafted clothing that fit the style of your character. You could buy a vehicle to get around, and customize its colors. And that moisture your harvesters are automatically farming would actually go toward helping another player create an item for yet another player to use.

There were no levels in the traditional sense, only abilities that were unlocked as you progressed up skill trees. There were also no restrictions on what you could learn in these trees and no “classes,” only a cap of skill points that allowed you to master, roughly, any two professions. What those were, were entirely up to you. A seamstress skilled in the martial art Teras Kasi? A smuggler who could track animals and live off the wild? A dancer who was also a master pikeman? Done, done, and done. Or, you could ignore the goal of mastery and spread your points around a wider selection of lower level skills.

That sense of ownership, of creating YOUR character and making YOUR place in the world is something Galaxies truly excelled at. Rather than simply running the same quest that everyone else in the game could run, and getting the same looted item that everyone else who ran the quest receives, you really had a chance to be an individual. You actually could craft (or have crafted for you) an item with stats that no one else on the server would have. Or instead of pulling the same "Farthomire's Sword of Strength +25" from a heroic, that happened to be the flavor of the month in PvP, you could have a customized weapon really restricted only by how dedicated your crafter is, and how much money you had available to spend.

If combat was more your style, there were seven complete, distinct planets for you to explore, each with their own native fauna to hunt. With the right skills, you could harvest resources from these creatures to sell - not because some NPC told you to go kill 30 blarphamets and bring back their hooves, but because you could sell the useful resources you got to crafters for in-game credits. It's a different sense when you're actually contributing to an in-game economy, and relationships were frequently forged between the crafters and the combatants this way. And though the game wasn’t quest-based, you could find random, one-shot missions in your journeys, or elaborate hidden facilities with dangers (and shinies!) inside.

You could also elect to join the Galactic Civil War as either a Rebel or Imperial soldier. The GCW was primarily based around PvP. Though you could raid a city and shoot up the Stormtroopers patrolling it, killing factional NPCs temporarily flagged you for PvP, and any PvP opponents in the area would have no qualms about coming to the defense of their helpless NPC buddies. Players could also drop factional bases to influence control of the planet, and base-busting was a frequent GCW pastime. The developers would even sometimes host factional battles, dropping in Imperial walkers and controlling iconic characters like Darth Vader as they joined the fray.

Players could also group together in guilds, or live in a collection of player houses grouped as official cities. These could be guild-sponsored, or simply people living together in a pretty or valuable location. Mayors ran the cities, with frequent elections determining the current mayor. Mayors granted citizenship to anyone interested in joining their city, and set options like city bonuses (e.g., boosts to crafting or healing) and taxes that went into the city’s treasury. Cities could even declare war on other cities or individuals, with players who volunteered to join the city militia able to attack the flagged players should they trespass into city territory.

And of course, you could go for Jedi. It was truly an epic journey, but with impressive rewards. Original Jedi could take on five or so fully skilled PvP opponents at once, had access to unique Force powers, and could even compete among themselves at Jedi and Sith temples through the Force Ranking System. This determined the makeup and hierarchy of an actual Jedi Council made up of other players.

The Bad
With a system this complex, of course, there were flaws. While the non-combat parts of the game were rich and inspired, the combat half was not. Leveling was not based on quests (in fact, there were hardly any in the game at all). Instead, the player was left to take repeatable hunting missions from terminals in every city; grinding out XP on spawns of critters sporting basic AI. This was truly the only effective way to level a combat character, and though true to the sandbox style, it certainly offered no sense of taking place in a Star Wars adventure - let alone any adventure at all!

Meanwhile, non-combat professions had no inherent combat skills in their trees. While you could take combat skills from other trees, they took up skill points that restricted your ability to master your main professions. If you chose to take two non-combat professions, you had to be extremely careful outside the cities. I remember a nest of wild "gurrcats" spawned outside my house. They would kill me as I went up to the door. While I could physically shoot a gun, I had no offensive or defensive skills to support it, so the aggressive cats would shred me every time. I actually had to call a combat player over to act as an exterminator for a small fee. He laughed his ass off the entire time. And while it is another neat example of the simulation trying to be made here, it’s pretty damn annoying not to be able to walk to your house. I doubt many players treating SWG as a game meant to supply fun would have appreciated the humor.

Though you could officially join either the Rebellion or the Empire, the incentives to do so were basically non-existent. Planetary control was decided by the activity and number of bases of a faction on that planet, but actually controlling a planet simply changed the alignment of the NPC guards in a city, making it more inconvenient for a member of the opposing faction to travel through… and that’s it. There were some good public battles, but hardly a sense of a war going on that was making progress for either side. Promises of expanding the GCW (which was also the only real PvP system in the game) were frequently made, but never executed.

Combat itself was standard MMO, with an autofiring basic attack supplemented with specials fired from the toolbar (or consumable inventory items, such as grenades and poisons). Over time, the combat became more and more unbalanced as the dev team tried to squash one exploit at the cost of another. The key flaw for most of the early game was the "Mind" pool. Characters had three bars - one for health, one for energy, and one for mind. Health is obvious, and actions or special attacks expended portions of either the energy or mind bar (depending on the action). Doctors and chefs could buff health and energy to a ridiculous degree, and stims could repair that damage in combat, but mind really couldn't be healed during a fight. If any of these bars dropped to 0, that player would be knocked unconscious. This fact, combined with certain weapons (rifles and some close combat) and class powers (the Swordsman's Two-Handed Head Hit) that targeted the Mind bar specifically, meant that PvP became focused exclusively on alpha strikes to the vulnerable Mind pool. This really didn't get cleared up until the first Combat Upgrade merged mind and action into one bar.

"Uber" equipment also homogenized warfare. If you didn't wear server-capped composite armor and roll in with capped Doctor buffs and as many buffing foods as your character could eat, there was no need to even show up for the battle. You'd lose. Those that did meet this requirement became titans with such absurd stats that duels would last minutes at a time, or slugged it out with creatures whose stats had been raised to provide a challenge to these new defenses.

It also meant that getting into PvP became a barrier for new players strapped for cash (there was a reason so many players had crafter alts). And since crafting any item took a fair amount of time and resources, crafters generally ignored the low-level items they could in favor of making and selling the best equipment for the lucrative end-game PvP market. Without quests to kit out up-and-coming players with standardized loot, many players had to slog through their development with shitty starter weapons until they could afford something the crafters could charge enough for to make it worth crafting.

Item decay was another controversial part of the crafting system. As items were used, or a player died with items on them, the item would decay. When its decay value reached 0, it could no longer be used. This was to force players to keep injecting money into the player economy, but really just incited frustration. Crafters charged a premium for their time and efforts (the price rising significantly as inflation took over), and players became irritated at dropping a million credits on weapons or armor they were then afraid to actually USE in combat. Likewise, forcing combat players to visit non-combat players between battles (doctors to heal wounds, dancers to heal "combat fatigue") became equally annoying. A combat character literally had to STOP PLAYING if they were wounded, and wait for a doctor to log on and heal them. There was no alternate way to remove the wounds. Rather than promoting interaction between the combatants and non-combatants, decay and wounds really just bred animosity.

Finally, the Jedi. Jedi were just as cool as everyone wanted them to be, but the grind to get there was wildly punishing. The idea was to ensure that only the most dedicated players got Star Wars’ best reward, but the practice fell short. Galaxies was one of the few MMOs that allowed players to write their own UI macros (and did not punish players for using them). These ran from macros that could automate most steps of crafting, to ones that could entirely automate combat. Players wanted Jedi. They didn’t want to deal with the arduous grind. Hence, the proliferation of “hologrinding,” or simply letting a macro level your character while you did something else (Doctors were notorious for this too, further infuriating players who came to med centers expecting treatment). And from a business sense, it didn’t make much sense to rope off your best content, to the extreme that most subscribers would never hold a glowbat (lightsaber). Most people rightfully aren’t going to pay a monthly fee for three to six months to do busy work.

I think Raph Koster legitimately believed that many players would be perfectly okay with never being elite themselves; would understand that their rarity gave the Jedi value, and not feel that they were entitled to everything in the game simply because they paid the monthly fee. And this is just one of many examples of Raph’s adorable, apparent naivety regarding the mentality of the Internet Generation.

The Bottom Line
Galaxies tried things that hadn’t been done before, and in some cases, have yet to be done again. And a lot of what it did worked. Some of it didn’t, but could probably have been fixed within the existing system. Unfortunately, it may all have been a bit too quirky for a mainstream title. It certainly found a niche, but one that wasn’t pulling in as much money as LucasArts/SoE felt they could make with the powerful Star Wars brand.

Maybe they were correct that Star Wars was too big a name to waste on a sandbox world/trading simulation. I just know that I had a hell of a lot of fun healing real players as a doctor providing a valuable service (healing NPCs all day, such as in Theme Hospital, would have just been goofy). I looked for a long time after SWG changed tactics around the release of the Galaxies Starter Kit, but I have never felt so much a part of a virtual world since.

Windows · by BurningStickMan (17916) · 2010

Flawed but getting better

The Good
The first thing you'll like about this game is the excellent design of the planets. There's really nothing like being able to wander around the Star Wars universe being able to do whatever you like. The graphics are some of the best I've ever seen too, which helps (along with a powerful computer) with the immersion.

The Bad
As of "publish 5" (as the last big update to this ever-changing game is called) the game is based around largely unrewarding and repetitive tasks. The worst crime of all being that these tasks require absolutely no player skill at all, just lots of time (make that LOTS of time). There are also qualms about the lack of a "Star Warsy" atmosphere and the lack of things to see, do and interact with.

The Bottom Line
The main problem has been the fact that this game has unexpectedly attracted a player base of "achievers", which basically means that the average player is more interested in improving their stats and achieving goals than living out a fantasy "role-playing" existence. As a result, the game's path has taken a turn during its development, not necessarily for the worse, but certainly somewhere the developers were not quite ready for.

The developers have since acknowledged all of the above short-comings and have vowed to fix them in the upcoming weeks and months. This is definitely the best thing about SWG; its ability to continue to grow and get better as time goes on. At the time of writing (Jan 31st 2004) it is definitely worth a look-see, and in the upcoming months, more so.

Windows · by Johnny "ThunderPeel2001" Walker (476) · 2004

A very sad, sad game...

The Good
This game doesn't really have any good qualities that would distinguish it from other games. After the "combat update" the game plays like a bad clone of Everquest.

The Bad
Ever since the combat "upgrade" the game has been turned from a unique, slightly unfinished gaming experience to a bug-ridden, clone-ripoff of better MMORPG's.

Gone is the skill based combat of the Star Wars Galaxies of old, now we have a "combat level". Having a higher combat level than someone else gives you gigantic damage bonuses, getting higher as the gap between the combat levels widen. Your armor, weapons and other equipment are now mostly just for show. You don't need that high powered rifle and heavy armor. All you need is the higher level.

The variety of skills and professions you can choose are completely out of balance. Before, you could choose to focus only on combat, only on crafting\entertaining or a mix of the two. Now, without combat skills, you can literally be killed instantly. The reason is that you don't get a higher combat level for being a Master Dancer or Weaponsmith. You can literally be walking along (with a combat level of 1) and then get killed in one shot by some thug or wild animal.

Even combat is skewed. Melee such as swordsman and martial arts are now just target practice for ranged professions, because they can move while shooting as quickly as a melee guy can move. This turns into just "shoot and run while he tries to run after you and get in range to hit you".

Even among the ranged professions, the combat is skewed. The 3 main ranged professions, carbines, rifles and pistols play almost identical. The only real difference seems to be the name and what weapons you can use.

It's not so bad for artisans now though. They can just as easily give up crafting and go to combat because artisans simply are nearly worthless. With equipment all being nerfed to about the same level, there's no point in making higher end weapons. Will you pay 80 percent more for a 1 percent damage bonus to a weapon?

The combat "upgrade" has also made a vast array of formerly expensive armor, weapons and resources almost worthless. The new certification system now makes it so that most players can't even use their armor or weapons, where before you could wear what you want and generally use the weapon you wanted. What mattered was your skill, not your combat level.

The game has also completely changed your health. Before, you had three health bars, mind, body and action. Having any of these three depleted would kill or knock you out. Now, action and mind are just costs for doing attacks. Only your body can actually take damage. This removes alot of the strategy from the game, and alot of the point from the ranged professions, who before specialized in either body, action or mind shots.

The game has also made combat boring and slow. You can't line up more than two attacks in advance, so every 5 seconds, you are clicking on the "attack" button again. No evaluation of the enemy or quick tactical analysis. No time for that. Keep clicking the same thing over and over.

The game is also significantly harder. Even expert players will find it difficult to kill multiple enemies, even those with a much lower combat level. Player combat level is capped at 80. NPC's however can be level 120 and beyond, making large portions of higher end content impossible to progress through, even with the 8 player group, the highest amount of players that can group together.

The combat upgrade not only failed to fix old bugs and balance the professions such as squad leader that needed to be balanced, but it brought a whole new host of bugs and imbalances to add on. Everything from the lair spawn bug (One minute, you are fighting two level 5 kreetles from a lair, the next minute, 2 level 30 kreetles spawn) to the decay bug, which destroyed several of my own items.

The Bottom Line
This game really just isn't fun, plain and simple. It's just a ripoff of other games with Star Wars skins slapped on. The game has been pretty much destroyed.

Windows · by James Kirk (150) · 2005

Discussion

Subject By Date
Strange that it's over. BurningStickMan (17916) Dec 16, 2011

Trivia

Controversy

Not all events are planned in the world of Star Wars: Galaxies. On August 19th, 2004, a large group of gamers gathered on Intrepid to protest against Sony Online Entertainment. Just recently, a new credits duping bug was being exploited and these cheaters were running around the planet, tipping people with money. SOE fixed the bug, but announced to ban everyone involved. That mass ban did not only include the cheaters, but also many high-profile players who had accidentally received 'dirty' money while lending services.

That day, supporters of some innocent victims came together to protest against the measures taken and they demanded justice. Sony interfered in-game, as it was apparently disrupting the gameplay, and they threatened to shut down the server if the demonstrations would continue. The players did not give in and in the end they all got booted into space, to random planets. Afterwards, the message boards were flooded with complaints about this subtle example of customer service.

Crafting

Star Wars: Galaxies - An Empire Divided featured a very complex crafting system based on a replication of real-world mechanics. Each crafting profession specialized in a specific area (clothing, cooking, weapons, armor, etc) and learned new schematics as they progressed through that character's skill trees. Anything in the game could be crafted, including weapons, clothes, tools, traps, medicines, temporary buff foods, houses, furniture, vehicles, pets, even dice for games. Even a simple item like tea needed leaves to brew, water to boil, and a glass made from ground gemstones to put the tea in.

Players first needed resources. A resource table for each planet was updated weekly, essentially mapping out where the highest concentration of specific, randomized resources would appear at what locations "underneath" a planet. A surveyor could use a portable tool to see the percentage concentration of a resource in a specific area. Automated harvesters could be planted at open locations in the game world to generate that resource as long as they were supplied with maintenance money and a power resource (or until the next resource shift). Resources could then be used by the crafter, or split and sold on the market.

Organic resources came from creatures spawned around the game worlds, who could either be killed and harvested (for hide, meat, or bone) or milked (for milk or eggs). These were considered scouting abilities, so players with those skills could sell the items to edibles crafters.

Weekly resources had randomly-generated stats in areas such as conductivity, malleability, and flavor (for organic items). Different schematics relied on different stats, causing resources to be excellent for building one item, but useless for another. A high quality in the stat specified by the schematic improved the quality of the final item. Some of the highest quality resource spawns could be mined, and the output then stored for years to come, giving value to weapons with server-capped stats made from such rare ores.

At the last crafting stage, crafters could add experimentation points to various weapons stats, allowing them to customize a weapon to client specifications (such as a weapon that hits harder, at the cost of firing slower). Craftable "crafting stations" and "crafting suits" with special skill attachments could boost the character's experimentation points, allowing veteran, established crafters to create better items than their counterparts with the same basic skills.

Advanced schematics also required components (such as pistol barrels or injector mechanisms); crafted using the same techniques and resources as entire basic items. The quality of these components affected the quality of the final product, and a crafter could easily make some money simply selling excellent-quality components to other crafters, who would then make the actual items. Some customization could also occur at this stage, such as armor "layers" that specialized the resistance stats of the final armor piece.

Crafters could purchase automated factory structures that lived in the gameworld, just like player housing. The crafter would create a blueprint using the above methods, then fill the factory with enough of the specific resources and let it mass produce the items for sale. Crafters could then sell these items on the planetary bazaar (a typical MMO "auction house"), or through the use of their own customized NPC vendors inside player housing decorated and advertised on the world map as a store.

Jedi

On November 08, 2003, Monika T'Sarn of the PA Combine on the Intrepid Server was the first to unlock her Force Sensitive slot, which made her the first confirmed Jedi Initiate in all of Star Wars Galaxies. There were more than 300.000 accounts at that time. Jedi Initiate is a rare class that only very few will experience.

Hours after the first Jedi appeared in the game, bounties were placed on her head. This is dangerous, because if a Jedi character is killed three times, their account is erased forever.

Freeman Memorial

After game designer Jeff Freeman took his own life in September 2008, the game was updated to include The Freeman Memorial, a statue accompanied by the words:

"The Freeman, gone but not forgotten. Thank you for your works of wonder. You will be missed."

Jedi: Mechanics

The original grind to Jedi was fairly extreme in scope, and meant to limit the number of players who would achieve the coveted class:

Originally, every new character had three professions tagged at random upon creation. The player had to completely master all three professions to unlock their Force Sensitive character. Players were initially given no clues. Later, "holocrons" could be looted that told the player the first and second needed profession, but not the third! Players would have to spend time equivalent to grinding multiple characters (losing the previous mastered profession to reclaim those skill points!) until they stumbled across the third profession.

Later, Force Sensitivity was unlocked through completing specific quests (like the Hero of Tatooine) and visiting specific locations (like Ben Kenobi's hut on Tatooine). Players that met these invisible requirements were visited by an NPC named the "Old Man," who would direct them to village of Aurillia on Dathomir (a 10-15 minute real-time drive each way, past some of the most dangerous creatures in the game).

At Aurillia, the player had to take a series of repeatable quests to receive Force Sensitive training. However, the player could only take a quest once every three weeks (!). Meanwhile, the player had to attain XP points through the regular game content, and trade this XP in to an Aurillian NPC for "Force Sensitive XP" at a significantly reduced exchange rate of 3 or 4:1 (!!). Only Force Sensitive XP could be spent on Force skill trees.

This continued as the player progressed up to Padawan and Jedi Knight. All the while, other players who had taken the Bounty Hunter profession acquired bounties placed on new Force Sensitives by the system. Using a series of tracking droids that could pinpoint a Jedi player's location on any planet, Bounty Hunters attacked without warning (Bounty Hunters always had the first shot) and engaged the budding Jedi in a forced PvP duel. If the Jedi was killed, the Hunter got his pay and the Jedi lost a percentage of their gained Force Sensitive XP, setting them back for days (!!!).

This led to many players looking for ways to game the system ("hologrinding" with macros, hiding on the Rryatt Trail where Bounty Hunters' droids wouldn't work, etc), and more than a few broken Padawan hearts.

Novels

A Star Wars: Galaxies series of novels has been released.

References

Various things from the Star Wars movies can be found in the game such as R2-D2 and C3PO's Escape Pod, the charred remains of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's home on Tatooine, the Massassi Temple and Pieces of the Death Star on Yavin IV and the Theed Palace and the Gungan Sacred Place on Naboo among others. Also, there are places like Lok, Rori and Dathomir and characters like Grand Admiral Thrawn and The Spacetroopers that come from "Expanded Universe" the Star Wars saga outside the films.

Shutdown

In October 2005, distributor Electronic Arts Japan announced it is seizing support for the game. Japanese gamers need to transfer their account to European and North American servers if they want to continue playing. On December 15, 2011 (shortly before the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic) the game was shut down for good.

Smugglers

Though not explicitly a crafting class, Smugglers had some underworld abilities that could help out others... for a price. Specifically, Smugglers could "slice" weapons and armor to boost various stats - making sliced weapons quite valuable for an extra edge in PvP.

The downside was that sliced items were illegal. Players were randomly subjected to searches by factional NPCs guarding cities. If contraband was discovered, or the player tried to flee, they would temporarily be marked as an enemy and bring down the wrath of that faction.

Smugglers could also craft "spice" such as Booster Blue, Neutron Pixie, and good ol' Muon Gold. These offered big boosts to stats as an initial rush, followed later by a crashing debuff. These illegal drugs of the Star Wars universe were removed by the time of the New Game Enhancement gameplay revisions (Nov 15th, 2005), perhaps because being offered fantasy stimulants like "Thruster Head" and "Pyrepenol" wasn't "family friendly."

Timeline

The timeline of the game takes place somewhere between Star Wars and Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back.

Veteran reward program

In February 2005, a veteran reward program was launched. Players are rewarded on their three month, six month and twelve month anniversaries with a choice of rare in-game items or collectibles.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 2004 (Issue #236) – Coaster of the Year
  • GameSpy
    • 2003 – The Jury's Still Out Award (PC)
    • 2005 – Green Banana Award (PC)

Information also contributed by BurningStickMan, MegaMegaMan; WildKard and Zack Green

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Kartanym.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Apogee IV, Shoddyan, Sciere, Patrick Bregger, Jo ST, Deleted.

Game added June 30, 2003. Last modified March 7, 2024.