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The SOE-Austin design machine rolls on, with more content in the pipeline for Star Wars Galaxies. WarCry is hosting a preview of the game's goals in the coming months, with feedback from the dev team on how the first game update went. In a nutshell: not as well as they'd wanted. There was apparently a lot of miscommunication between the players and designers, that resulted in the expectation that Game Update 1's highlighted classes (the Spy and Smuggler) would get complete overhauls. That's actually very much not the point of the updates, which are only meant to polish out the world's rough parts.

The piece goes on to detail some elements we can expect to see in Game Update 2, which should be pushed live in the next week or so. That patch will offer general polishing to the Entertainer and Medic classes, along with a new raft of bug fixes. Chapter 9, the next proper content drop anticipated before the end of the month, also gets some lip service.

The official SWG site has a few tidbits on upcoming content as well. A dev diary talks about the thinking behind the newly improved buff interface, and an article called Domain of Evil offers background on the ominous Exar Kun - a baddie incoming in a Chapter 9 heroic instance.

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 developers of Star Wars Galaxies continue their good works. Just like clockwork and about two months after the release of Chapter 7, Chapter 8 is hitting live servers today. The full patch notes for the release can be found on the official site, but here are some highlights:

• The Nova Orion Station - A two-faction quest hub that will allow players to work through the dodgey politics of the Nova Orion company.
  
• Imperial Star Destroyer Heroic Encounter - The newest group high-level content for the game, the newest encounter pits groups of adventurers against some truly tough opponents.
• New ground-based collections, as well as a space-based collection system.
• Four new ships have been added: the Rebel Incom X4 Gunship, Imperial YE-4 Assault Gunship, Blacksun AEG-77 Vigo Gunship, and the Naboo N-1 Starfighter.
  

There are, of course, numerous other tweaks to the game in this update; two big areas of correction include the User Interface and Waypoints. If you're curious about the process of creating the new ships for the update, make sure and check out System Designer Thomas Eidson's dev blog from just yesterday.

And, of course, thanks to Grizz for reminding us this was happening today. For a taste of the Chapter 8 flavour, go check out his videos of the new ships in flight (with appropriate music to match).

Last week's Friday Feature on the official Star Wars Galaxies site is all about the new player housing item placement options coming in Chapter 8. In addition to moving objects in their houses back and forth, up and down, players can now slant things side to side with new pitch/roll/yaw commands. There are also new options to 'copy' placement instructions, making it easy to place a large group of items at the same height or having the same orientation.

What's especially interesting is that some of these new abilities have to be earned by completing collection quests. They don't outline details of which collections quests are involved, but a number of new space-based concepts are slated for introduction in the upcoming content update.

As of yesterday Star Wars Galaxies Chapter 8 (which was apparently really hard to work on) is now in testing on the TCPrime and TestCenter servers. We finally get a full sense of the next game update's scope from the full patch notes, available on the official SWG forums. Highlights include the new Space content, of course, including Nova Orion station, the Star Destroyer Heroic encounter, and the new Ord Mantell system.

Additional content includes new ship types, updates to the UI, house decorating, and improved waypoint options.

• Four new ships have been added: the Rebel Incom X4 Gunship, Imperial YE-4 Assault Gunship, Blacksun AEG-77 Vigo Gunship, and the Naboo N-1 Starfighter.
  
• Eight new shipwright craftable components have been added (three capacitors, three armor plating, one gunship shield, and one reactor draft schematics).
• Ships no longer have a parking location, allowing ship view and launch from any planet or terminal.
• Gyroscopes have been added to all player controller turrets. No longer will pitching/yawing your ship cause your turret to pitch/yaw as well(turret rotation clamps still apply). This should make shooting much easier!
• The secondary engine appearance of the VT-49 Decimator fixed to use the correct engine glow.

Alongside the Life Day celebration, the Star Wars Galaxies devs are hard at work on Chapter 8. It's already on Test Center, and should be seeing live production sometime this week. Producer Lorin 'DeadMeat' Jameson and Lead Developer Thomas Blair passed on a few thoughts to the folks at SWG Warcry about the work.

DeadMeat offered up a letter describing the final days of the development process, while Blair cut to the heart of the matter: the JTL-era content has gotten a bit crusty over the years.

The Jump to Lightspeed expansion, which introduced the space game, was released three years ago. Since that time, it's remained mostly untouched. Additionally, changes to the development team also posed problems. "No one here really worked on space," Blair said, "so we had to go talk to the pilots. The pilot community has been great, a big help." Of course, once the team learned what needed to be fixed and what the players would like to see, they then had to figure out how to make changes. Blair likened the update to working on a European car without any metric tools.

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.