What was your experience with Star Wars Galaxies?

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Played it extremely early, like at launch. It was my first 3D MMO, so I loved it even though I never accomplished anything. I mostly just walked around Tatooine marveling that I was in Star Wars, interacting with the world and making friends. I did some combat but I never got good at it. It was a very user unfriendly game and honestly the gameplay itself wasn't very good. The fun was almost entirely in exploring the galaxy. Still, it was a really unique game that's hard to forget because of it.

I didn't think the CU nor the NGE were that big of a deal. They didn't kill the game. They were an attempt at resuscitating a dead game. SWG was dead with or without them. Yes it made a lot of people mad, but at that point catering to their player base meant listening to an audience far too small to sustain the product. They did what they had to do, and it didn't work. I'm not sure anything would have worked at that point.

WoW coming out barely a year after launch was an unavoidable catastrophe for SWG, as it was for every early 3D MMO. For those who weren't around to experience the MMOPocalypse that was WoW, it's hard to overstate the damage that game did to the diversity of the genre. Not only did it kill everything, but everything that came after was just WoW But Not for years. It still pretty much is.
 
Tried it out after the "New Game Experience" completely changed it. I found it rather bland and I wished I could have tried out the original version but I know from experience that older MMOs are clunky messes. Half of the people I know who did play it earlier complained about Jedi or later design decisions even before NGE. I think they just put the nail in the coffin with it.
 
I believe I bought it in the fall of 2003. And I was in love with the game. Very unfriendly game for players but man what you could do in this game was fun. We had player built cities. Some players setup shops to sell their goods.

The guilds were pretty cool. I remember our attempt to have our entire guild raid a imperial outpost to only have our systems lag in the middle that ended up failing what we tried to achieve.

Remember when you could get a bunch of people to have a shoot out to cause people’s clients to freeze up due to how much silliness was going on in that area? Yep.

To this day, I have yet to find an MMO to scratch the itch. And I know about the private servers. But it’s a game I don’t want to revisit and will just let sleeping dogs lie.

However, Jedi should have never been introduced and essentially killed the game.
 
Loved the community, crafting, and skill tree system. Gameplay/combat was kinda shit otherwise (and definitely don't hold up) but it had its moments.
Gorton Colu said:
Jedi ruined the game.
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GeorgeFloydFentanylStash said:
However, Jedi should have never been introduced and essentially killed the game.
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These are statements of objective fact.

The NGE was effectively a different game. Imagine your favorite game got an "update" that removed everything that was good about it and either did not fix any of the problems or made them worse... shit that is almost every game sequel and remake these days.
 
I only ever heard about SWG through a couple of those hour-long retrospectives.

It caught my attention because of the social side, since I don't find MMO combat engaging, and I kinda lament completely missing out on it.

I wish there were more MMOs that had interesting social shit to do, like running merchant stalls and pubs and things like that. Things that aren't just being a generic dungeon-diver and bossgrinder.

But it seems like basically all MMOs that have existed post-Everquest and post-WoW are all the same thing: nolife grinding for the biggest numbers, and then waiting for raids to release so you can google a guide on day one and grind it for gear that gives bigger numbers.
 
Blue Miaplacidus said:
You have never played EvE then? Still the best MMO and there will never be anything like it again, nothing will ever compare to the golden age of EVE. It is just impossible now.
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Eve did really interest me, but the sheer complexity of it meant there was never enough time to start learning how to play it (also things like EV:Nova and Endless Sky were good simpler singleplayer substitutes). I have the same issue with Path of Exile 1: I really enjoyed that when all the "expansion acts" dropped, but since then it's become bloated bullshit I just  cannot be fucked with anymore. Dust514 also caught my interest, but NZ's latency with the rest of the world makes fast paced FPS outside of LAN parties barely plausible, let alone fun.
 
Lurkerish Kandor said:
but the sheer complexity of it meant there was never enough time to start learning how to play i
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common misconception. It is very simple to play. It appears complex, but it is not. I was also hesitant to play as I heard it was complex and "spreadsheets in space". It is not, it can be if you want to make it complex but the core and most interesting gameplay is very simple and the most fun I have ever had gaming to date.
 
I never played the original (besides a 14-day freetrial in 2010 or something), but like everyone else I'd heard a lot of raving about the lost paradise that the pre-NGE supposedly was. So I downloaded the SWGEmu and gave it a shot sometime in 2017.

My impression was it's pretty awesome in the ways people say it was -- there's a crazy depth of mechanics, and it really seems like you can do almost anything. While it's definitely grindy, I had enough fun just exploring the worlds and killing stuff along the way that I made it to Master Scout in not too long. I'm also an autist who just enjoys watching a number go up, so that's part of it too. The social aspects of it (like the codependency of the playerbase -- almost anything you do requires you to interact with another player to buy, sell, heal, improve skills, start a town, decorate your house, get a haircut, tinker with your stats, and so on; and every item crafted by a player is unique, etc. etc.) are really cool and definitely the best part, though unfortunately hampered by the low player-base on the emulator servers, even worse now since everything's fractured into a hundred private servers with 50 players each.

The main problem with it is that it's a 22 year old game and the "meta" got figured out a year in. The combat, while deep in theory, has the glaring imbalance that the classes which focus on dealing "mind" damage just completely smoke everyone else. The economy, while dynamic and player-driven in theory, gets dominated by a few power-users who mostly just do everything AFK. There is one set of gear that is just the best so everyone wears it and looks the same. Same for pretty much every piece of gear or consumable. You have to go to a player doctor AND a player entertainer for buffs once an hour or two (more if you die), because they so ridiculously overshadow your normal stats that it's just pointless to go without.

I played again when the SWGEmu developers started a new "blank slate" server a few years ago, and that was really fun for 2 weeks, before the power-users who've been playing for decades maxxed everything out again and it was just the same. I could imagine it was awesome back in the day when the mechanics were still mysterious, but it's a "solved game" now. Still, it's fun to dick around with other players. I remember there were some really funny roleplayers who would go around with whacky shenanigans.

They're planning to do another new blank slate server in the next couple of years (supposedly), and I'll probably hop back on for that. I think if there were a server that a large enough section of the playerbase could agree upon, and that fixed some things, shook things up to break up the meta, and occasionally added new content, it could actually be fun long-term. But that's a definite pipe-dream for a 22-year-old game.
 
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I got the 14 day trial disc, my parents wouldn't pay for a subscription so I spent the 14 days trying everything. For most of the time I was a bounty hunter and smuggler, at some point I tried to become an Imperial pilot but I don't think I was successful. I never left Tatooine. I tried to replay it during COVID at some point but I just couldn't get into it again as it just didn't feel the same, probably due to the player count.
 
Playing just some dude in SWG really scratched the itch I had for wanting an MMO to make my own little life in. I'd spend hours just wandering around settlements chatting with people. I still talk to some of the people I met in ye olde TeamSpeak servers from SWG. It had a charm and it filled a niche. Then WoW came out and it made the player a hero. In SWG you were some dude. Your influence on the galaxy was limited to your immediate area and if you wanted to expand that you legitimately needed to be able to schmooze and deal and backstab in a boardroom sense to be able to be influential. Other MMOs, including SWTOR (except Imp Agent), never had that "you're a faceless cog amongst billions in a violent galaxy" feel. Imp Agent only managed that in SWTOR because the writer, Alexander Freed, understood that his job wasn't to make Mary Sues, but to make something that leaves a mark and can be built upon which is a fancy way of saying a foundation. The Agent left a mark, and built this entire underbelly of the Imperial factions that no one had every really explored. Most Empire stuff, GCW or TOR era, was all about the superweapons and MacGuffins (looking at you, Karypshan). The Imp Agent storyline was excellent summed up right at the start of it: you're the Sith's garbage man. You clean up the mess, they take the glory and preen, the galaxy keeps turning.

Rambling a bit here, happy memories have resurfaced. Even though I know it's free, I don't *want* to play SWG again. Adding playable Force users killed the experience for me because now everyone and their dog wanted to be the Jedi or the Sith. It ruined the feeling of being a little man in a big galaxy. I'd much rather keep my happy memories exactly where they are, tinted rose with nostalgia, then try to dredge them up to the present and lose the magic.

This conversation has made me feel old.
 
ADN_VIII said:
Then WoW came out and it made the player a hero. In SWG you were some dude.
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That's what I loved about old MMOs. From Everquest to Ragnarok to SWG, the game never forced you to take up the mantle of Most Important Person Ever. And to be fair, neither did WoW for a while. I definitely don't remember being important in vanilla, and I'm pretty sure you weren't in TBC either.
 
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