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

by Michael Zenke Jun 26th 2008 at 4:30PM

Filed under: Sci-fi, Events, real-world, Star Wars Galaxies

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.

History Lesson Part 2 - Jump to Lightspeed

Tags: anniversary, featured, fifth-anniversary, joystiqfeatures, lucasarts, soe, sony-online-entertainment, star-wars-galaxies, swg, swg-5th, swg-fifth-anniversary

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

Owen-Lars said on 7:17PM 6-26-2008

"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"

Sorry to detract from an otherwise great feature but this kind of stopped me in my tracks.

You're trying to say that the problem with the NGE was not the changes? Im sorry but i've never heard a more ridiculous comment regarding SWG before.

Almost all the population logged in one day with their professions deleted, ill repeat that again DELETED. These professions that players had spent upwards of 2 years getting to know and used to. Armour and weapons that cost millions of credits and countless hours to attain suddenly became average. PvP and hunting parties were presented with a totally new games to try and get used to and expected to just forget all the time and effort they had invested in getting where they were. Players logged in to find that this great character they had shaped and developed to play the end game content was suddenly beaten to death with the biggest nerf bat ever wielded. And no it wasnt extra content that required them to get better at playing or 'level up' more. It was that they had been knocked back not even able to take the stuff they had become so used to fighting.

The fact is people had much more reason to quit because of the changes than they did about the bugs. Its why as soon as the NGE hit the population just plummeted visually in game. Blame the bugs? Sure. But state that it wasnt the changes that made people quit is completely ignorant to what really happened.

You perfectly destroyed this feature when you said: "as a player of the game today....". This is just it. You are a minority, like it or not. I dont mind anyone playing any game as long as they like it, but SOE lost out because they changed the game for the worse. Bugs or no bugs people left because they didnt like the way the game went and prefered it the old way. SWG will never get away from that regardless of how much they want to change now.

A classic server would go a long way to getting numbers back up but it kind of proves my point.

Anyway, i read this blog everyday and this feature has just disappointed me. As a past correspondent and long time player i can tell you that people did quit because of the changes, long before people noticed the bugs. The bugs were just the final nail in the coffin.

Nadya Popova said on 11:07AM 6-28-2008

Please dont pee down my back and tell me its raining.

NGE is a total failure.

SWG has sure low population its only playable on a few of its servers.

My old server went from 20k to a little over 200.

All SOE has to do is format the servers, and start over with what they started with.

Build it, and they will come....................Back

Your article is false and misleading

Owen-Lars said on 7:20PM 6-26-2008

PurityKnight said on 7:22PM 6-26-2008

In all honesty... how do you mess up the Star Wars Universe? You have a ready made fan base of millions. Executives must look at WoW and want to commit suicide. SWG should have had 10 million subscribers at least.

They should do the right thing and put the nail in the coffin of SWG and just start over. It's over.

There's still a change to make a great Star Wars MMO, but SWG is never gonna be it. SCRAP IT.

Shimmer said on 7:29PM 6-26-2008

I was a long long time player of SWG. I have to agree with Owen-Lars. If the bugs were the reason why people quit SWG then they would have quit a year earlier. I played from launch until just a few months ago and bugs were rife through the game the entire time I played.

What made SWG special was the ability to create your perfect character with the profs just the way you wanted them.

The NGE came along and dumbed the game down to the point were pretty much all the classes are pretty much the same. Not only they they just deleted creature handler which was just about the most beloved class in the game.

I will agree with a comment that says that the game 'today' is much better then the day after release BUT saying the game today is better then pre-NGE is just not true. The proof is in the numbers. The game is dying - there are only two servers that have any kind of decent population with all the others being ghost towns.

I had done everything there was to do in that game - I was a VERY successful crafter, I made Jedi, I did all of the content. I played from release, through the CU through the NGE.

I probably would have still played until they destroyed the small servers with Chapter 6.

The greatness that was a UNIQUE MMO is gone, SWG is has NONE of its former glory and the proof is in the fact that they lost 90% of their players.

I agree with Owen-Lars that if they put in a "Classic" server they would draw ALOT of people back, but SoE is notorious for not admitting their mistakes so I doubt that would ever happen.

To sum up though I would have to respectfully disagree with you about the game now being better then pre-NGE.... there is nothing special or unique about it now. It is a Sci-Fi dumbed down WoW clone unfortunately.

Bissrok said on 9:39PM 6-26-2008

It wasn't the bugs that made everyone leave. 90% of the population doesn't walk away after over a year simply because of additional bugs (though the game is still MUCH buggier than it was at launch).

We left because it became really, really bad. And to say that the community is as strong as before is a little misleading. There's not hundreds of thousands of players, as there was in the past. Most cities on most servers have less than ten players in them. And there's no interdependency left in the world.

And... why am I even debating this? It's old, it's an SOE game, it's so buggy its essentially broken, nearly all of the developers left, and the Matrix Online has higher server populations. I can't imagine anyone being able to paint the game's situation in a positive light.

Kaos said on 12:15AM 6-27-2008

Obviously you didn't ask anyone that actually played the game through all of these changes and left. The NGE gutted the game. It removed all of the character interdependence and most of the professions. Those were not bugs, those were design changes that made the game un-fun.

That is why everyone left. Do your homework next time.

Kunra said on 12:31AM 6-27-2008

Are you frikkin kidding me?? Bugs????

I left because MY game was Taken from me you moron!!

Bug?? I couldnt give a dam about bugs! My game was Replaced with a bastardized versoin of another game.

Bugs??? Are you really being paid enough to weather this storm?

Massively, just shut down now and forgo the inevitable.

Kylrathin said on 1:03AM 6-27-2008

Star Wars Galaxies, pre-CU, was not a game. It was a simulation, and one with the potential to be everything that every Star Wars fan who grew up on the original trilogy could have possibly wanted. Everything done within the simulation was a mini-game, but brilliantly architected. It all fit together; everything and everyone complemented each other. Now? It's just a game, and a poor one at that. It may be better than what came out on November 15th, 2005, but that isn't hard to do.

Saying that the bugs made everyone quit SWG is like saying seasickness made everyone want to get off the Titanic. SOE and LA destroyed every character's accomplishment since the day they started playing. The only ones who left due to bugs and/or inconsistencies were some of the players who started playing during the CU.

vastar said on 1:21AM 6-27-2008

UnSub said on 10:53PM 6-27-2008

I'm sure a lot of ex-SWG players will come in and say how it was the NGE was the total fault of everything and drove the population away. However, if you look at what one of the people who put the NGE in place says (http://rubenfield.com/?p=86), the reason it was done was because SWG was already losing 10k subs a month. NGE didn't come in because SWG was successful - if SWG had been as good as those most involved in it remember, it would have attracted enough players in that such a change wouldn't have been contemplated.

NGE did make SWG a better MMO as a (proposed) game experience. But the implementation was awful - 2 weeks notice on untested content - and it drove away those players who liked the old game. All the bugs the NGE introduced then stopped any players actually enjoying the experience, so few new players came on board.

SWG should have been hugely successful. The fact that it flopped to 200k players or less prior to NGE tells me the original game was horribly flawed. But it took something like the NGE to show that you can't radically change what content / systems you launch a MMO with. You are what you are at launch.

Owen-Lars said on 12:23PM 6-29-2008

If the NGE made SWG a better game then surely the subscriber numbers would reflect that?

The fact is less people play it post NGE, and if their game was better it wouldnt matter if the vets left of not, they would still have more numbers.

The problem is instead of adding new content and fixing existing issues they spent all their time removing the successful components. If only that time was spent making the original game better they wouldnt of been loosing the numbers they had post-cu.

Please dont try to tell me that the NGE made SWG better because as well as being highly subjective, its clearly not based on any reasonable facts. The NGE caused the vets to leave, it also didnt appeal to new customers either. Least the old SWG had a subscriber base, the NGE'd SWG has scraps. Clearly the old game was a more fun and overall 'better' game, as it actually had more than 10 people who played it.

UnSub said on 1:22AM 7-06-2008

The horrible implementation of the NGE - short notice, buggy - saw new players deterred from trying out SWG. SWG's reputation also took a huge hit as a result, so not only did old players leave, but new players were deterred from playing by the howls of protest and shoddy implementation. As indicated by Rubenfield, NGE came in pretty quickly (2 - 3 months of solid crunch are his words) after it was determined that this was the direction to go in. It wasn't years taken off developing other SWG features, it was a quarter of a year. SWG was in a hole before NGE; it just turns out that you can indeed fall further if you try hard enough.

Here's my question for you: if SWG was such a good game prior to NGE, why did it had a declining sub base and fall so far short of expectations? SW is a property where even poor quality tie-ins are often massively successful - why not SWG?

RK-31 said on 7:32AM 6-27-2008

So how much did they pay you? Or maybe you got the 1 player per hour "badge" for free eh?
Cuz I did not leave my post because of bugs, no sir, I left because they stole everything I had been worked for and enjoyed in the galaxy.

And guess what, so did over 100 of my fellow troopers. Our whole Detachment left the galaxy, because they stole everything, not because we couldnt fire our guns cuz of a code error.

Solitare-sp said on 10:08AM 6-27-2008

The point is not 'what' changes were made...but that such wholescales changes were made to a system which people had spent two years playing. It would be like WoW removing the horde and alliance and just having one faction......

SWG was visionary and ahead of it's time in some ways...in fact there still isn't a game with the social and community side of it, which is an absolutely crying shame.

I still remember to this day creating a nooby medic and sitting in Mos Eisley healing people and getting tips. Just letting the players do whatever....I also then created a fencer/smuggler combo which let me tailor my character to a completly unique way.....

Darksryder said on 11:00AM 6-27-2008

You have got to be joking about people quitting due to bugs caused by the NGE right?

I think you will find that 200k subscribers actually quit due to the NGE itself, the loss of all the proffessions and the horrible fps type combat alone was the main reason for most people quitting.

The dishonest way $OE went about it also did not help their cause as you can see over 2 years later and people have not forgotten and from what I hear the game is a dead buggy mess still.

$OE you reap what you sow!

Woody said on 3:28PM 6-27-2008

Is that you Smedley???

What a piece of revisionist history.

omnomnom said on 3:50PM 6-27-2008

Just thought I'd point out that according to Dan Rubenfield subscriptions during the CU were falling-at the rate of 10k a month-not rising, as per your article.

http://rubenfield.com/?p=86