Massively^™

Just as they did after Chapter 7, the folks behind the scenes making Star Wars Galaxies have offered up a look at how they think the game is going. Lorin 'Deadmeat' Jameson, the game's producer, reflects on their successes with Chapter 8. The title's space content has been significantly expanded, and he implores ground-based gamers to look to the skies in the wake of the most recent update.

He also looks forward, to the coming year of Galaxies updates. The team has wanted for some time to be more responsive to player interests. The long wait between Chapter publishes means that pressing issues fester on the forums before being addressed by new code. Jameson outlines their response to this problem: splitting the development cycle in two. Going forward, there will be two tracks on which updates will be pushed out. One, called simply 'Updates', will address game balance issues recognized by players and QA as needing some attention. He singles out the Smuggler and Spy classes as being the first to receive this track's attention.

The other track is going to be called 'Content'. This is the track that 'new stuff' will appear in, and we should expect to see something out of this group roughly every eight weeks. The first of these content updates will be a heroic encounter with the deadly, legendary Sith known as Exar Kun. Further content work will focus on more collections, storyteller additions, quests, and new gameplay features.

I continue to be impressed with the work the SWG team is putting out. Am I the only one? I know that some folks are still bitter about the whole NGE thing but c'mon: an instanced Star Destroyer mission? That's just cool.

The Chapter 7 update to Star Wars Galaxies went live at the beginning of the month, and has already been patched once. Now the second iteration of the Chapter content is going out to live servers - with presents!

Patch 7.2 is aimed primarily at further tweaking the content recently added to the game. Fix highlights include:

• Correcting problems with the Tusken Raiders Heroic encounter.
• Adding/improving functionality on Storyteller jukeboxes.
• Fixes allowing some previously un-completable quests to be finished (including expanding the definition of 'Veermok' for the 'Veermok Killer' quest, thankfully).
• And I quote, "Removed the Emperor's underpants." Anyone want to explain that, or is this some sort of practical joke? I wouldn't want to tick off a Sith Lord, but that's just me.

They've also added 54 month veteran rewards to the game. Yes, the game's been out that long. Yes, that makes you old. Players who have accounts that 'venerable' now have some attractive new options to choose between:

• A city-placeable flag, which can be changed between one of a dozen different designs.
• A podracer statue, appropriate for all your housing decoration needs.
• A permanent storyteller token, which will allow to spawn a boss level Super Battle Droid, Rebel Commando Vindicator, or Stormtrooper - perfect for those epic events.

With Chapter 7 just released, and already patched, the developers and producers of Star Wars Galaxies are looking forward to Chapter 8 and beyond. To give us a sort of snapshot of what the game looks like right now, Producer Jake Neri and Lead Designer Thomas Blair passed along a State of the Game letter to the folks at WarCry. They recap the last half-year or so of content updates (like the Chapter 6 Beast Mastery system and the big bug fix that followed), and go into a good bit of detail on what was just released in Chapter 7.

We just released our latest piece of content, Chapter 7: A Collection of Heroes and we're feeling very good about the release. We haven't delivered a piece of content this big since the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion pack, and it was no simple task pulling the Chapter together. The Chapter is focused around two new major systems, the Collections System and the Heroic Encounter System, which presented a great challenge, but the team definitely succeeded in pulling it off. Now that the players are engaged in the content we're hearing good things about the release and it's always nice to get that positive feedback.

At the letter's conclusion the two men tease the core concept behind Chapter 8: space.

Early in the year we polled players to see what they wanted in the game, and space-based content came in very high. Without giving too much detail right now, our broad goal is to provide content to SWG's space game, which really hasn't been touched much over the past two years. The Chapter gives us an opportunity to link the Collections and Heroic Systems to space content. We are already working on a new heroic encounter for Chapter 8, as well as additions to Aurilia to reflect the new heroic story.

Chapter Update #7 just hit the live servers at the beginning of the month, but already the Star Wars Galaxies live team is working to improve the just-released content.

Patch 7.1 highlights include:

• Adjusted the creature difficulty class weighting for hydrolyses extraction. Players should see consistently higher results from Boss and Elite level creatures over normal.
• Added "Start Listening to Jukebox" and "Stop Listening to Jukebox" as radial options on a jukebox. This will allow players to listen to the jukebox music if they missed the automated start. This usually happens in cases when they are not part of the jukebox owner's story at the time it started.
• Storyteller Imperial officers and stormtrooper squad leaders should now use their ranged attack.
• Heroic Tuskens will now update the Tusken Terrorizer collection.
• Fixed a case that would cause the second player in a group to launch their own instance rather than join the first player.
• Lord Vartonis's health has been reduced to the intended level.

The official site is also featuring a pair of informational pages this week. One is a new comprehensive list of the Player Cities across the galaxies. It lists their planets and locations, as well as their size for players who want to explore. They also have up a preview of Chapter 8: three brand new ships slated for inclusion in the space-focused game update.