Massively^™

The ongoing quest for more content in the galaxy Far, Far Away continues, with producer Lorin 'DeadMeat' Jameson dropping a production letter / state of the game address into the official Star Wars Galaxies forums. Jameson is enthusiastic about the upcoming release of Chapter 9, which entered public testing this past Friday. He invites players to fully test the patch, giving special notice to the much anticipated Exan Kun instance (which will feature some really fantastic rewards), the storyteller blueprint system (screenshots of the system at work are available) and a brand new ITV collection quest.

The next two Game Updates are already in the planning phases, with Bounty Hunters/Jedi scheduled for some tweaking in Update 3, and Commandos/Officers due for Update 4 (finally!).

He also teases the playerbase with hints about what we can expect in Chapter 10. According to Jameson the headliner for next chapter will be the fan-favorite Meatlumps gang. This content will be, amazingly, not for the high level. Instead, level 45-65 characters will feel the love, and face down the dangerous Meatlump gang on their home turf. The next content drop will also see dramatic improvements in the Looking For Group and player search interfaces - tweaks designed to make finding other players less of a challenge on low-population servers. All great news for the average SWG player, and another follow-through with the team's promise to keep the players happy.

The newest content update for Sony Online's Star Wars Galaxies is expected soon, and Chapter 9 promises a world of new and enjoyable content for the players in the Galaxy Far, Far Away. Last week the official SWG site offered up a preview of one of the Chapter's additions: PvP collections. Collections are a great feature, added to the game back in Chapter 7. They allow players to show off their in-game accomplishments in a very deliberate fashion, and these PvP rewards follow much the same lines.

Collections will be opened up for all kinds of PvP activities, including killing factional NPCs, slaying players on the opposing side, and downing officers of varying rank in the Rebel or Imperial forces. PvP collections not only net players swanky additions to their inventory, but have the possibility of earning the PvPer factional rewards above and beyond what they'd normally get. A rare base infiltration collection, for example, could earn a player 2500 faction points for spending/saving as they participate in the Galactic Civil War. We were promised a number of new collections in the upcoming patch, and it will be very interesting to see what other kinds of rewards will be made available post-Chapter 9.

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.