A Star Wars Galaxies history lesson: From launch to the NGE

by Michael Zenkeon Jun 26th 2008 4:30PM on http://massively.joystiq.com/

http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/06/26/a-star-wars-galaxies-history-lesson-from-launch-to-the-nge/

Today marks the fifth anniversary of Star Wars Galaxies’ launch. This day in 2003, thousands of people crowded the login and registration servers, all eager to carve out their own piece of the world Lucas had wrought. The reality today is very different, and despite celebrations over the new Empire Day event and recent chapter publishes, something lingers in the air – a sort of dark cloud on the SWG player’s horizon.Today and tomorrow we’re going to chart the path that has lead from there to here. We’ll reflect on the game’s early days, some of the early patches that added groundbreaking content and systems to the game, and even mull over the biggest change to hit the MMO scene, ever – the NGE. Tomorrow we’ll discuss how the game has changed since the New Game Enhancements went in, and look to the future of the title. Join us for a galactic history lesson that begins “A long time ago … ”

Launch

To say that the launch of Star Wars Galaxies was hotly anticipated would be an enormous understatement. Hype for the game ran very high in the early summer of 2003, even on the heels of a rocky Beta period. Tester writeups seemed to indicate a highly unpolished game, but for the most part their reactions weren’t visible beyond official and community forums. Sales were high as fans of the Galaxy Far, Far Away lined up to jump online. SWG launched in the days before the importance of MMO polish was fully understood, and as a result the early days of live service were marked by instability and constant patching. Most egregious, from the player perspective, was the near inaccessibility of the service on the first day of launch. While the servers themselves were prepped to receive players, the login, registration, and billing system was overwhelmed. Players who had taken the day off to play the game wasted their time hammering uselessly at unresponsive servers.

Once the server situation was stabilized, players quickly grew to appreciate the strangely quirky title. Built heavily on Raph Koster’s concept of an open world, players were given the opportunity to interact with the online environment however they chose. A skills- (rather than level-) based advancement system rewarded exploration of both the game and the environment. Unique socialization-focused classes allowed more passive players a reason for interacting with the more achievement-focused hunters. The game’s launch was rocky, and there were certainly numerous problems with the game, but the future looked bright for the new title.

Jump to Lightspeed (Publish 11)

Publish 11, the first expansion to Star Wars Galaxies, brought the launch game to a ‘feature-complete’ state. The addition of the space game, along with Mounts, Vehicles, and Player Cities in publishes 4 and 5, made Star Wars Galaxies the title LucasArts and Sony Online Entertainment had hyped up prior to the game’s initial launch. The space game was extremely well received, effectively incorporating an X-Wing/TIE Fighter style game into an MMO for the first time in the genre’s history.The simple addition of transportation to the game can’t be understated either. At launch, the only methods for moving around were either walking (it could take the better part of an hour to cross a planet) or the ubiquitous shuttle stops. With a five-minute timer between each shuttle pickup, travel was slow and irregular. You had to really want to get where you were going, and you were likely to spend time talking to people on the way. The speed of mounts and vehicles (and later the fast travel of an interplanetary ship jaunt) made the Star Wars galaxy a much smaller place.Cities were (and still are) a fan-favorite element of the game. From the earliest days Architects had been creating homes for use with the game’s unique housing system. Buildings are place-able almost anywhere on a planet outside of NPC cities, and within those houses player-made furniture is endlessly tweakable and arrangeable. The addition of the city concept allowed clusters of player homes to organize into municipalities. The larger the city, the more perks it received. Mayors were elected, a sense of community and organization developed. It was a really unique moment in MMO gaming history.

The Jedi Grinding days
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For months after the game was released, player speculation ran high on how Jedi would be introduced into the game. There was an entire Jedi Speculation forum on the official SWG boards, which regularly ran through a dozen threads a day on the subject. Each was more arcane than the last, offering some strange and lore-appropriate way for players to unlock their ‘force sensitive slots’. Prior to the game’s launch these slots were said to be filled with permadeath Jedis – a handful of deaths would be allowed for each Jedi character before their death was assured. In this way, the Jedi population would be kept low.That was not, of course, how the Jedi system was introduced to the game. Players fully understood the whys and the wherefors when the first Jedi went public with her path to glory. Devices called Holocrons were the key; in Star Wars lore, holocrons are ancient devices that allowed characters to hone their Jedi knowledge. In Star Wars Galaxies, holocrons were hints at the class unlocks you needed to complete in order to unlock your Jedi slot. Players accessing holocrons would be told – quite directly – a class. In order to ‘complete’ that holocron, you needed to master that class. Once done, accessing another holocron would inform you of another class.This method was successful for three holocrons. The fourth holocron is always silent. This silence, it would later be revealed, was hugely detrimental to the game. See, players really wanted to be Jedi. Very badly. Everyone wants to be unique, and in MMOs at the time playing a Jedi was just about the most rarefied thing going. The result: everyone wanted to be a Jedi. That fourth, silent holocron resulted in a practice called hologrinding. Because MMO layers will always find the ‘optimum’ strategy, the obvious solution to a silent holocron was to simply master every other class in the game.

This had two results. The first was afk grinding, absolutely everywhere in game. Combat professions, Medics, dancers, musicians, even artisans would be standing around in specific locals running game-supported macros to advance their xp. With that much content to take on, it was sickening for players to actually spend time playing. Most sane gamers would have quickly lost their taste for the game. The second result was an absolute destruction of the game’s economy. A careful web built entirely on player-made goods since the game’s launch came crashing down as macro-grinding jedi-seekers flooded the market with goods they neither understood or cared about. In the quest to master the artisan professions a player might make hundreds or thousands of an item, and then turn around to sell it for a fraction of the previous cost.

The strangest thing about the Jedi system is that it’s clear the designers initially thought it would be a good idea. Just a day before Monika T’Sarn unlocked her FS slot, Producer Haden Blackman’s comments in an interview on IGN make it clear he’s looking forward to a galaxy full of Jedi. To this day AFK grinding is such an intrinsic part of the game it’s not even considered a TOS violation anymore.

The CU (Publish 15)

Because Star Wars Galaxies was so unpolished when it launched, many elements – even major game elements – were partially implemented or poorly tested. The BioEngineer class, for example, was added just a week or two before the title hit store shelves. As a result the cloning expert in the game was a barely functional mess. The main combat system was fully implemented but, despite the lengthy Beta test, was also highly idiosyncratic. In an effort to answer player concerns and streamline the game’s playability, the designers undertook a massive overhaul of the combat system. Where, previously, every character was allowed to use every item (more or less) there would now be restrictions on who could use what. There would be clearly marked bonuses and penalties for using certain times of armor and weapons, and how weapons and combat worked would be clarified as well.It was easily one of the largest changeovers attempted in a post-launch MMO, and the hope was that clarified combat would attract new players. The current players were vocally opposed to a number of elements in the CU, with entertainers and crafters the most vehement. Those classes – once able to sally forth into combat alongside their big-game hunting friends – would now be restricted to pea-shooters and cardboard robes. The catch – the thing that few people recall these years later – is that the Combat Update worked. Afterward players found engaging in combat a far more rewarding experience, and (the rumour goes) subscriptions actually rose back to at-launch levels. Perhaps even beyond.

The NGE (Publish 25)

Just ten short patches away, and that rise in subscriptions would come to a crashing halt. As fundamental a shift as the CU was, it was nothing in comparison to the changes implemented with the “New Game Experience”, or NGE. The NGE will go down in history as the largest change ever to hit a post-launch MMO. Almost every system in the game – from combat to crafting, all the way through to classes – was fundamentally shaken by this patch. The NGE took what had been a skill-building character advancement system and transformed it into a level-based system with very specific classes. One of these classes was even the Jedi, meaning that players could create force-using characters from the very start. No more holo-grinding.Along with the loss of holo-grinding, the playerbase’s sense of what the game was shifted. Many players at the time of the NGE had been there since launch, happily chatting and socializing in cantinas or going on hunting trips with their friends. Now they found their characters in a strange new world, populated by classes and systems they didn’t understand. The sense of outrage, in-game and out, in the forums and online, was palpable. Emotions ran hot, with “betrayal” the running theme for most individuals that experienced the changes firsthand.It’s not clear how large a drop in subscriptions resulted from the NGE, but it was large. First in drips and drabs, and then in increasing waves of departures as a cascade failure hit the social fabric of the game. Ironically, the real problem was almost certainly not the changes themselves. As a player of the game today can tell you, the title is almost certainly better off for the firestorm of change that the NGE introduced. Players began to leave not because of the changes themselves but because of the enormous pile of bugs and inconsistencies they introduced.

For a period of time it was incredibly challenging to actually play the game. Combat, still being ironed out from the CU ten publishes previous, was in shambles. Crafters, artisans, were beside themselves as their once broad-based ability to craft was narrowed down to a much smaller selection. Entertainers were even affected, as the inability for an entertainer to participate in combat – or indeed, do anything aside from entertaining – meant there were suddenly very few of their number. Above all the wailing could be heard the cries of the Creature Handlers, the combat soldiers who had long been accompanied by their fearsome beasts. The entire concept of creature pets was removed in the NGE, and with it went both the Creature Handler and BioEngineer trades.

When the /quit storm began, it began with the most vocal and committed members of the community. In other words, the key influencers. Their departure drastically lowered the quality of life for player association members, city dwellers, etc. Seconds-in-command, deputy mayors, and guild officers were the next to go as leadership unraveled. With their social ties cut, other players just drifted away from the game, some trailing bitter words of rebuke the whole way.

Since the days of the NGE Sony Online Entertainment has as much as admitted its mistake. They took the wrong tack on the subject, made a bad call. But yet, the game is still running. Star Wars Galaxies still lives, and the community that rebuilt among the ashes of the old is going strong. Join us tomorrow for a look at the post-NGE days, and hopes for the future of this unique title.