Star Wars Galaxies Totally Explained

Everything about Star Wars Galaxies totally explained

Star Wars Galaxies (abbv. SWG) is a Star Wars themed MMORPG for Microsoft Windows developed by Sony Online Entertainment and published by LucasArts.

History

On 16 March, 2000, LucasArts Entertainment announced a partnership with Verant Interactive Inc. and Sony Online Entertainment to create the first massively multiplayer Star Wars online role-playing game. The then unnamed game would be developed by Verant with online play supported by SOE. This was the same team responsible for creating and supporting the popular EverQuest multiplayer online game. LucasArts would be responsible for all distribution of the Star Wars online game. The announcement included an expected release date some time in 2001 and that the game would take place during the original trilogy era.
LucasArts officially announced the brand name of the game to be Star Wars Galaxies on 29 November 2000. The announcement claimed the first round of testing for Star Wars Galaxies was expected to start in late 2001 which would push back the official release date to an unknown time. The game's official information site was launched on 30 November 2000 in conjunction with SOE and featured frequently asked questions about the game and message boards fielded by members of the development team.
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Combat Upgrade

SWG developers promised a "Combat Upgrade" or "CU," which was released 27 April 2005, and represented a major re-writing of the combat, armor, and weapons systems, wherein only certain professions could use specific weapons and armor. The combat mechanics in the game were shifted from a skill system to a combat level system for both players and game creatures. The UI icon graphics were changed from monochromatic to color. This alteration resulted in controversy caused by players who criticized the changes, and cancellations during that time. However, subscriber numbers gradually grew back for the next seven months, hitting a peak around October 2005.

New Game Enhancements

Another set of game changes dubbed the "New Game Enhancements" (NGE) was announced on 3 November 2005 and started testing the next day. It went live on November 15 via digital download, and became available in retail as the Star Wars Galaxies: Starter Kit on November 22. Changes included the reduction of the 34 original professions to nine "iconic" ones. The NGE changes also included a massive overhaul to the gameplay, deemphasizing the importance of tradeskills and replacing the CU combat system with a faster first-person shooter style game. Jedi powers and status, once obtainable only after extremely long hours of play, became available to characters as starting class. On Slashdot, John Smedley explained that they felt it necessary to revamp the game to the NGE in order to reverse the deterioration they were seeing in the subscriber base.
   The development team affirmed this is their desired direction for the game, and they're slowly modifying parameters to address players' desires. This progress includes the re-introduction of some pre-NGE features that were removed, such as creature handling, target locking, auto-firing, the ability to fire special attacks from their keys,
   Since then, the development team has given each profession a set of "Expertise trees" to bring back some complexity and differentiation to characters.
   After the announcement that SOE had acquired the MMORPG, Smedley addressed that game's players, many of whom had come from Star Wars Galaxies, about the perceived threat of major changes to the game:

Expansion refund

The Trials of Obi-Wan expansion met with controversy as, two days after the expansion was released, the development team announced the NGE. Many players objected that they wouldn't have purchased the expansion if they'd known in advance about the NGE. Sony Online Entertainment eventually offered a refund to players who had purchased the expansion prior to the NGE. Some subscribers threatened a class-action lawsuit, but eventually gave up once they learned it had no legal basis since SOE was going to offer refunds.

Subscriber numbers

Veteran designer, Raph Koster, helmed the development and initial launch of the game. Many industry professionals expected that the subscription numbers would exceed the one million mark, a feat accomplished only thus far in Asia by MMORPGs such as Lineage and more recently by World of Warcraft. Based on NPD figures as of February 2004, SWG sold more than 400,000 boxed copies at retail for a total initial revenue of over $18 million. Sony Online Entertainment confirmed in March 2004 that there were well over 200,000 monthly subscribers making it the second largest MMORPG in North America. The company later reported in 2004 that they'd 250,000 subscribers. In August 2005, Sony Online Entertainment reported that they'd now sold 1,000,000 boxed copies of the game. Media sources reported that the subscriber numbers have fallen substantially since the release of the CU and the NGE. In early 2006 after the NGE, allegedly "hacked" numbers purported to show that only 10,363 subscribers were playing on a particular Friday night. The President of Sony Online Entertainment, John Smedley, denied that subscriptions had fallen this low: "Have the numbers in Star Wars Galaxies gone down? I'll tell you that the concurrent numbers have gone down. Are they as low as what was shown there? Absolutely not."
As of the second quarter of 2006, according to charts at MMOGchart.com, there were estimated to be between 110,000 and 175,000 subscribers. A more recent update from MMOGdata.com which uses the previous data from MMOGchart.com, estimates that the game has about 49,000 subscribers as of April 2007. However, both MMOGchart.com and MMOGdata.com rated the subscriber number estimates at a "C" confidence level which mean they're "merely industry 'best guesses' or are otherwise questionable" due to SOE not releasing SWG subscriber numbers.
In October 2007, Primotechnology.com reported that; "It’s estimated that the game now has fewer than 100,000 subscribers and less than 20,000 active players.

Emulation efforts

The aforementioned controversial updates to the game prompted a few small groups of players to develop a server emulator which would allow for play in an older version of the game. Some players are seeking to revive the "Pre-CU" or Pre-Combat Upgrade version of Star Wars Galaxies. Three groups - SWG:ANH (Star Wars Galaxies: A New Hope), SWGEmu (Star Wars Galaxies Emulator), and SWG Pre-cu (Star Wars Galaxies Pre-Cu) - are currently attempting to reverse engineer this earlier version of the game. None of these emulator projects are completed. Although all three are running test servers. The SWGEmu project is currently running a public test server, and has also returned to being a partially open source project. SWG ANH has shown its progress through videos, screen shots etc and hosts a private test center where members chosen from each community can test the features. SWG Pre-CU has divided their test centers into two distinct servers hosting separate applications. Several exiled SWG players have formed communities in advance of the release of an emulator.

Novelization

is a novel based in part on places and events in the game. It was authored by Voronica Whitney-Robinson and Haden Blackman, the LucasArts producer of the game.

Further Information

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