Leave it to my luck to undergo like seven major events in rapid succession just after taking on this exercise. The next couple installments shouldn’t take quite as long to output!
----------II. The Decline and Fall of the Corellian Empire----------
Reminiscing on the good old days of Star Wars Galaxies, for me, necessarily comes with a bittersweet tinge. Certainly, there were the living circumstances that surrounded my play, but again, I believe that those experiences end up in retrospect lending more positive potency to the escapism given me by the game. Instead, I feel the ache for what could have been. The Galaxies timeline was a tale of mysterious wonder and immense promise dismantled piece by piece, an executive mandate for better fiscal performance that ended up resembling a digital, massively-multiplayer subscription funeral march. So, before we get into the gameplay nitty-gritty, I’d like to take a quick glance at the life of SWG, birth to death, and share my view on how the game started down the path to fatality. Frankly, I think there is at least one major plot point in its downfall, perhaps the most important turning point, that almost everyone else misses entirely. Once we’ve gotten that out of the way, we’ll rewind time and talk through the gameplay itself, infused with the backdrop of a game steering towards failure. That’s right, this retrospective is the bad Tarantino film of clumsy, self-aggrandizing prose.
—How Do I Videogames: Media Edition—
At launch, Galaxies boasted roughly 300,000 subscribers, a number paltry by today’s standards but impressive when compared to its contemporaries (Everquest, for reference, garnered only 10,000 launch subs). Folks there from the start proudly proclaimed themselves ‘Day 2 subscribers’, because the servers never made it online for a single second on launch day. Despite the hiccup, critical reception leaned positive.
But it didn’t lean very positive. There were plenty of middling to negative press reviews to go around. Thing is, I really don’t get most of the complaints. SWG was by no means a shining beacon of design perfection, but a great deal of criticisms were easy to debunk at a glance. GMR Magazine: “The whole game is a bit too complex for its own good – the skill system itself might put off those who have never played an MMORPG.” The skill system looks hard to understand right up until you stare at it for 15 consecutive seconds. A skill tree has 18 skill boxes, progressing from bottom to top; click a box to learn what skills are prerequisites (hint: the boxes directly under it), how much XP you need to learn the box, and what the box gives you in terms of benefits. There are tons of skills over the course of the game’s many classes, but it is the exact opposite of confusing. Plus, if you goofed up, the game let you drop skills on the fly. I wonder how many back-to-back strokes the writer had upon glancing at the Path of Exile skill tree.
Alright, rapid fire, let’s knock out a few more. PC Format: “Stormtroopers shouldn’t be easier to kill than llamas, and Rodians shouldn’t wear hotpants and start dancing in campsites.” They weren’t, and get over yourself. Game Revolution: “Star Wars Galaxies just doesn’t offer anything to the MMORPG genre and it never really feels much like Star Wars. Watch a group of brawlers running around hitting creatures with axes and sticks and you might never even guess it’s a Star Wars game at all.” Whoa, you sure beat the hell out of that strawman! Watch a group of players hitting stormtroopers with axes and sticks, or gungans, or banthas, or rebel troops, or rancors, or womp rats, and you might never even guess you had a point at all. netjak: “A guy can only sample for minerals, craft Mighty Rods of Fishing +1, and shoot the same crap for so long before they realize that it’s just freaking boring.” Hoooooooooooly shit, this mother fucker right here. We’ll talk about it more later, but Galaxies has the most robust crafting system I’ve seen in any game ever, and while I can’t claim to have played every MMO, I’m fairly confident that it is unparalleled to this day. You wanna know why you’ve never heard of netjak? I bet it’s because they smeared feces like this across an HTML editor on a regular basis. God, I hope that guy got sued for libel.
Anyways, these types of reviews were technically the minority, but neither was the critical consensus overly positive. Considering SWG was such a big name entering such a small arena, one would expect reviews to be skewed unfairly towards admiration, so in my opinion, the game got a rough deal from the news outlets. In a way, Galaxies found itself fighting an uphill battle out of the gate, at least from an outsider’s perspective. However, for the people actually playing the game, the overall mood was outrageously positive.
—The Twilight Void Collective—
You know the trademark of a great game? Everyone’s too busy playing it to go talk about it. I mean realistically this doesn’t happen, as society is too connected to the internet nowadays for anything in the world to go undiscussed for any length of time. Well, it very nearly happened on a daily basis for early Star Wars Galaxies. You see, the game had a central community hub – a forum on Sony Online’s spartan Web 2.0 offering Station.com. A casual glance at said forum circa 2003-2004 could leave the observer feeling like the game was dead, and indeed, conversation would seem permanently confined to a slow drip, were it not for an approximate 2-hour period starting before sunrise daily.
Many years ago, I wrote briefly about Bethesda Softworks’ underappreciated 1996 masterpiece The Elder Scrolls Chapter II: Daggerfall. The game’s position as having the largest game world pre-Minecraft evoked a natural sense of mystique and wonder, a virtually endless playground for one to imagine hidden possibilities. This wonder lent a very strange emotional side effect to Daggerfall’s (and Bethesda’s) other trademark trait of rampant bugginess. A hot play session on a hotter summer’s night could leave a middle schooler abruptly and inscrutably dumped into the obsidian void of the DOS prompt at 2 AM, staring at a fatal error message numbering easily in the four to five digits, with the same 3 MIDI notes that happened to be playing at the instant of the crash stretching into Sound Blaster infinity; the middle schooler’s reaction would always be a mixture of confusion, startlement, curiosity and unease. “What did I do? What caused that? What was I on the verge of uncovering? Did I find a ghost in the machine OH MY GOD.” In that blessed moment, shit would get very Real. This is an experience lost in translation with Gavin Clayton’s much cleaner Unity port of Daggerfall, though I still highly recommend giving it a test drive.
MMO infrastructure was still very much in its pioneer stage in the early 2000’s, and as such, SOE shut down the Galaxies game servers on a nightly basis, lest it fall victim to crippling stability issues. This daily maintenance period most regularly lasted between 1 ½ to 2 ½ hours, and while I cannot remember precisely what time the servers came down, it was somewhere in the 4:00-6:00 AM timeframe, EST - perhaps our very own @Father.Torque can remember more acutely, as I distinctly remember him present with me for that twilight deadline on more than one occasion. At any rate, darkness still lingering outside, gameplay was involuntarily severed in a way that harkened immediately back to Daggerfall, with one key difference: instead of a solitary experience, it was as if thousands of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
What followed was a nightly occurrence where players would descend upon the SWG forums like a plague of locusts, peppering just about every subforum with idle conversation, fresh insights, tales of heroic exploits, advertisements of goods… what appeared by day to be a half-abandoned husk of former greatness exploded into a veritable Night Circus of lively discussion. For many, myself included, this became a decompression ritual; as someone keen enough to schedule all afternoon classes, I would often seize the opportunity at server down to take a brisk, chilly walk around campus before dawn, returning maybe 20 minutes later to see what juicy tidbits of bedtime reading the forum had cooked up for me in the meantime. For others – also myself included, in my worse moments – this became a time for reconnaissance, gathering intel to form an agenda for the moment the servers came back up. Whatever the approach, once a day, Station.com became a veritable den of excitement, most of it overwhelmingly positive.
However, as in all communities, dissent brewed.
—Thirsting for a Worse Thing—
When I discussed examples of negative reception earlier, I intentionally left out one fairly common complaint – a poorly thought-out opinion that festered like a dirty wound until it rotted the game from the inside. Father.Torque finds himself once again name-dropped here for very nearly touching on it over a decade ago on Selectbutton.net Podcast episode 9: Galaxies vs. WoW. In the podcast, he explains that Penny Arcade’s Gabriel eviscerated SWG upon the lifting of the review embargo, but I find that to be a slightly uncharitable characterization of tone. Before PA (and Gabe in particular) became known for stunningly tonedeaf hot takes, one might check their website for decent opinions on games and stumble upon posts like the aforementioned, in which Gabe comes to the conclusion that the way LucasArts/SOE constructed this particular MMO was just ‘not for him’. He wanted to be a hero figure like in the movies (something that WAS accurately mentioned in the podcast), and he wanted to jump right IN to being that hero figure. This is a naïve expectation from an MMO that, if embraced in the design process, inevitably results in overly-sterilized massively singleplayer fiascos like Star Wars: The Old Republic. However, Gabe wasn’t particularly rough in the analysis, settling on a rather muted wish that Galaxies was something that it wasn’t. Still, there was truth in intent spoken between the lines.
“Maybe some day a developer will combine all the best stuff from games like X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter and Jedi Knight into one game that doesn’t involve the poking of [womp] rats with sticks.” This sentence by Mike Krahulik is the Rosetta Stone in understanding what slowly poisoned Galaxies. A few things of note: the combat, while imperfect, was so very much more than hitting womp rats with sticks; even if it wasn’t, the game itself was so much more than just combat (as I will detail in my next few installments); and even if that wasn’t the case, for Gabe’s sake, the best parts of X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter WERE later added to the game and then improved upon. None of this ended up mattering to him in the long run, as Gabe never ended up being enticed back to the game even after the space expansion, and that’s because at its heart, we all know what people like Gabe mean when they say they want to be a hero in the Star Wars universe. It isn’t about smuggling goods nor being a bounty hunter as he says elsewhere in his opinion piece, as there’s nothing even remotely heroic about the act of smuggling in this context, and you could effectively be a bounty hunter even at release. It’s all about that sweet, sweet jedi nectar.
Maybe you didn’t look at that beautifully gigantic, gigantically beautiful SWG user’s manual I uploaded. I can’t blame you, no matter how much I love it. I’ve skimmed it numerous times cover to cover since then, and while I haven’t meticulously read it like a prize novel, I’m fairly confident in stating that the prospect of playing as a jedi is mentioned approximately zero times over the manual’s 170 pages. In a way, this makes perfect sense – the game takes place during the events of the original movie trilogy timeline, when jedi were ostensibly nonexistent. Still, somewhere in the game’s advertisement, whether it was in some developer interview or during one of the installation slideshow’s screens or a one-sentence blurb on the back of the box, there was a mention along the lines of “who knows – maybe you could find yourself unlocking the secrets of the Force…” That’s all it took.
And in a vacuum, that’s brilliant! Imaginations burned white-hot across the game’s fanbase about whether or not there even was such a mention, and if there was, if it wasn’t just some developer yanking people’s chains. Among the background static of the daily early morning forum scrum, rumors flew wild and free. Someone had a badge in their profile (an early analogue to achievements), the Mark of Intellect, that nobody had ever seen before. They said they got it on Tatooine, and the scavenger hunters immediately blitzkrieged the desert planet. Someone found a wandering hermit who pointed towards a Mark of Altruism badge. Almost nobody else could seem to find that one. Someone found out, god knows how, that there were two more Mark badges that literally nobody had, and they were all part of a meta-badge, the Mark of the Hero. This MUST be part of unlocking jedi! Someone was out in the deep boondocks of Dantooine and saw a wandering Dark Jedi Master, and engaged him in combat only to have their dicks kicked RIGHT IN. Someone in the lush wilds of Endor stumbled upon a stories-tall entity called a Gorax that seemed to hit even harder. Several people found strong enemies on Dathomir called Nightsisters, the strongest of whom seemed to be able to use the Force. Theories suggested you had to create a lightsaber somehow. I even distinctly remember one individual swearing up and down that they talked to an NPC that flew them to Hoth, a planet which straight up didn’t exist in the game files.
The chase was fun when it was a community charting The Unknown, a following of trails that had no promise of leading towards a goal that had no promise of existing. Naturally, a small gathering of players had a problem with the way things were progressing. You see, they were playing a Star Wars game, and Star Wars means jedi, and they were the most dedicated Star Wars mans, and therefore they should be jedi, and the developers owed them this. By my recollection, these were always the same handful of forum warriors bleating that they completed X task that seemed tangentially related to larger Star Wars Universe jedi lore and it didn’t seem to make any difference which was such bullshit. If you asked almost any player that was interested in the hunt for force sensitivity, the answer was almost invariably that the hunt was fun and having a jedi would be cool but not expected. Of course, since these people weren’t upset, they had no reason to post rapid-fire about it. And relatively early in internet social history as it was, SOE forum moderators had seemingly no experience with a raucous vocal minority. They just saw a large concentration of complaints.
—Holocron Holidays—
At this point, events are best corroborated by nerdSlayer’s excellent entry of his Death of a Game series on the subject. Word of forum discontent climbed the corporate ladder to the decision makers. The holiday season is approaching, and the players want jedi? Then give them jedi! We have shareholders to impress, and this game isn’t going to put itself into Christmas stockings! And so it was, that a misinformed community services team and Capitalism conspired to begin constructing a gallows for their own product. Word was given to the development team to give in-game hints towards the system to unlock jedi. And boy, did that system suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. At character creation, from the game’s 32 different launch professions, a pool of 4 or 5 were randomly chosen (I remember 5 at the time, but I may have been mistaken in the moment, and others have claimed 4 since). If you mastered those 4 or 5 professions, Ta Da, you’ve unlocked a jedi! That was it. That was all! What a letdown. The hints that were provided to lead players to this discovery were jedi and sith holocrons dropped at a very low rate by certain humanoid NPC enemies. Whether the holocron was jedi or sith, they did the same thing: if used by a player, they would shatter and then give the player a popup listing one of the professions that they needed to master. If the holocron was silent and didn’t list a profession, that was the indicator that you only had one profession left until you unlocked jedi, and you would have to start guessing from there.
Overnight, gameplay no longer revolved around living in and exploring the Star Wars universe, and instead revolved around mindlessly grinding enemies for holocron drops followed by mindlessly grinding through professions that held no interest whatsoever to the player grinding them. In the most obvious turn of events of 2003 including the war in Iraq, gameplay suffered immensely, and people burned out. Even for those not interested in jedi whatsoever, this just resulted in a more hollow experience through their being surrounded by players suddenly much less interested in living in the moment. And, naturally, jedi started showing up. Only a select few, at first. But I’m sure you can guess what happened next.
—Onward and Downward—
The impending avalanche of glowstick-wielding ravegoers presented issues of gameplay and balance to be addressed by the developers. We’ll speak more later about how jedi functioned, but for now, suffice it to say that they had to make jedi even easier to obtain in order to try and salvage fun value out of the game, but jedi had to become weaker in order to prevent the obsolescence of other combat professions. Instead of fixing anything substantial, this upset existing jedi who were about to be nerfed, took the wind out of the sails of people who were still trying to grind for their own jedi, and opened the floodgates for people who had previously not wanted a jedi due to the forbidding grind.
Players drizzled away from the game. With most of the development efforts seemingly centered around how to handle jedi, unrelated new content was sparse. Casual players originally drawn to the community-centric nature of the game found a playerbase largely excised from the game’s original lustre, and left for untold greener pastures. MMO lovers began to search for new homes, many of them finding one in the April 2004 North American release of Lineage II. The Jump to Lightspeed expansion for SWG was released in October 2004, introducing space flight and ship combat elements to the game that in my opinion were quite excellent but also largely divorced from the now crucially hamstrung ground game. Of course, a month later, World of Warcraft came along and basically beat Galaxies into effective obscurity.
Events from here are mostly only known secondhand to me, as I had stopped playing by this time, but nerdSlayer does a good job of recounting them in his video. As an attempted remedy to the sorry state of the ground combat game post-jedi, and spurred on by World of Warcraft’s monumental entry into the MMO sphere, Sony overhauled the combat in its entirety, introducing a numerical level system that more readily resembled traditional RPG tropes. The ‘Combat Upgrade’ (CU) level system had more bearing on player power than profession choice and gear did, bleeding away much of the agency once granted by player choice and scaring away a sizable portion of the already dwindling playerbase. By this point, with the jedi situation handled for better or worse, two more expansions were introduced to middling success: Rage of the Wookies and Trials of Obi-Wan. The most controversial business move, however, and thus the one most often pointed to in the game’s downfall, was the decision to simplify and speed up gameplay to imitate World of Warcraft even more. The collection of changes, dubbed the New Game Enhancements (NGE), was announced one single day after the release of the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion in November 2005, and was rushed to live servers within two weeks. It pared down the game’s professions (which at this point numbered 34) down to just nine, and you were forced into choosing a single profession per character and sticking with it. The combat was changed to more resemble WoW by speeding it up and taking a more action-based approach. Ironically, everyone who wanted to play something like WoW had already left for WoW, so the remaining playerbase was understandably outraged and shrunk even further. It was at this point that SWG could be neatly codified into its own trilogy of eras: Pre-CU, CU, and NGE.
By New Year’s 2006, Galaxies had functionally become the MMO Ship of Theseus; so many parts had been removed and replaced with unrecognizable game mechanics, so many aspects of the original design philosophy forsaken in the name of chasing subscriber numbers, so many original gung-ho players long since gone and replaced by meager Star Wars diehards, that calling it Star Wars: Galaxies was technically correct at best. The way nerdSlayer tells it, plenty of polish, new content, bug fixes and other improvements were introduced in the years to come, but were essentially performed for an empty auditorium to the sound of one hand clapping. The game was mercifully put down behind the SOE shed on December 15, 2011; even for a game that I loved so much, to describe the occasion with composition emotionally appropriate for its momentousness would be to merely state that it was an event that happened.
—Ghosts of Greatness—
In my estimation, most of the events along the Galaxies timeline were more or less inconsequential in causing its eventual death. I lay the blame a very small amount at the piece of shit implementation they went with for unlocking jedi, and most of the rest on the decision to make that unlock system a known variable to appease forum whiners and corporate suits. I stand by this assessment facing a myriad of differing opinions from others more active in the post-SWG ‘community’: many blame the game’s transition to the Combat Upgrade, many others point to the hideous WoWification of the NGE, and some such as nerdSlayer look more analytically towards a general mishandling of player expectations and lack of transparency. One video, How Jedi Killed Star Wars Galaxies, sort of hits the right ballpark for slightly different reasons. The game would very likely have succumbed in the long term to the MMO death of old age that 99% of them seem to, but there was so much to love in the early days of the game that I firmly believe its original vision stood a chance of gracefully transitioning into a long-term installment in the MMO sphere.
Others have believed this as well, so much so that they’ve recreated the server code for the game from the ground up in the form of emulator servers. The most conceptually impressive of these incarnations involves the pre-CU community, whose efforts could not include any captured data from server interactions with the client. Since the game had fundamentally changed from its early days, those seeking in hindsight to recreate the first era of Galaxies had to do so from scratch without any available analysis of traffic caught across the wire, the painstaking process instead involving a marriage of the data found on early client disks to a wealth of information of all types collected and archived off the internet (a prime example of such archival is Biophilia’s SWG PreCU Scrapbook). Surprisingly, the more active SWG community is the NGE emulator community, centered around recreating the late-stage maligned version of Galaxies. While I have in the last year actually developed a newfound respect for the latter era of the game, both emulator communities miss the mark on what made the game great, and recreating that magic may be a dimension of nostalgia that is impossible altogether. We’ll be talking in-depth about that in the closing sections of this project, but next, I’d like to dive us all into the glory that is Pre-CU Star Wars: Galaxies.