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Star Wars Galaxies: Story of the Week: Ding-Dong, Vader's Dead
BillMurphy
Former Managing EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 4,565
Every week we here at MMORPG.com take a look at the news and come up with the biggest scoop. This week, it was kind of a no-brainer as the world learned that SOE's Star Wars Galaxies is shutting down for good on December 15th, 2011.
Believe me; I understand the sadness of a game closing down even if I was never a big Galaxies player. You’re reading the words of a man who bought the Limited Edition of Auto Assault, reveled in Asheron’s Call 2, and was in the front seat for the opening of Tabula Rasa. But Star Wars Galaxies was more than all those games combined. For a time it was the universe of Star Wars brought to life. In a time when MMOs were just beginning to grow and flourish, SWG offered an entire planetary system to live in and shape with players’ actions. While many were off slaying dragons in Everquest, others were in SWG desperately seeking their path to become a Jedi while running a small business back on their home planet.
Read the rest of The Story of the Week: Ding-Dong, Vader's Dead.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
Comments
Not being a SWG player, my first thought ( after the mild regret I feel when ANY MMO closes), was that TOR must be coming out end of Dec then. Not such an unlikely thought considering the somewhat random date. Why not close on Dec 31? Why the 15th?
Smedley can sit there and play the PR game all he wants. He's a damned liar. And I refuse to believe a word he says. But, for the rest of the article....Bill, you hit this one on the head for the most part. For this veteran of the Pre-NGE SWG, this is a very bittersweet moment. I will never forget the good times before the real cataclysm.
Star Wars Galaxies....Rest in peace.
*places a black rose at the coffin*
Lets be honest...SoE lived on what they did in the early years of SWG. They showed they didn't care about their fan base when they made the silly nge changes. They didn't listen to the gamers about their game, they just did what they thought was best...total fail. I think that Sony made this game drag out far past its should have been death.
Incognito
www.incognito-gaming.us
"You're either with us or against us"
Well a lot of the comments yesterday about Lucas Arts not wanting to renew the license was dead on I knew it had to be this, as there was no way Smedley was about to give up this game. His comments were as long as there were enough players to play the game they would never shut down.
However I have to say swg died for me a long time ago. I lived the the CU, and the NGE, but after 3 months of fighting Smedley and company, I decided it was best to leave the game. All the lies about we deleted the code, and there was no way to go back. Don't get me wrong I don't hate SOE, I still play EQ2 on a daily basis. I just hate what Smedley did to SWG.
I feel for the current player base, you have to hand it to them, they were die hards, those are the ones who its a sad day.
I had a free 45 days due to the soe hacking problem, so I logged in this morning. I have taken my screen shots. It is time to lay swg to rest. The way I see it SOE needs to just let folks play for free until the shut the server down. It is the least they can for a game that some of us poured our lives into.
Could just be the day their contracts with whatever third party resources they have expires. COuld just be arbitrary.
All I feel when seeing this is sadness. Even though I've never played the game.
I remember a loooong time ago getting a beta invite and declining to use it...I just didn't think it would be handled well. Early SWG proved me wrong...then NGE came, and proved me right. It never quite recovered.
Here's to you SW:G. You were a great game even if I never knew ye.
I've always been a little sad that I never got around to trying this game, just to understand the story of its rise and fall a little better.
Yeah, SWG died for me when the Jedi class was instituted. I kept playing for a while, at first planning on re-speccing for bounty hunter so I could hunt down Jedi, but they did away with putting bounties on the Jedi and perma death pretty quick. I have seen a lot of people complain that they didn't listen to the player base, but IMO they did listen, just to the wrong players. They listened to those fools that just had to be allowed to play Jedi, even though the Jedi order was just a fond memory at that point in the SW chronology. If they would've allowed players to have force powers, lightsabers, etc., I could have prolly lived with that, just not Jedi class/abilities.
They started with some truly great ideas. I thought the class/skill hybrid progression system was excellent, they just needed to expand it with subsequent expansions to allow players to continue to advance "vertically" through their professions instead of "horizontally" to other professions once they hit the skill cap. The system was a bitch to balance I'm sure (I heard of a rifleman/pikeman combo that was so indestructable that SOE initially banned the player because they thought he had hacked the game), but overall a good system that worked. The player run economy was second to none at the time, as it forced the fighters and merchants to be fairly interdependent. It was also the first game I played where the crafters harvested materials from the game world instead of buying them from NPC vendors (Horizons may actually have been the first game I played to feature this, can't remember), which was a huge advancement in MMO's IMO.
Overall, the game had tons of unrealized potential, and it is sad to see it go. RIP
Pre-CU SWG was my favorite time in the 10 years I've been playing MMORPG's. The community was second to none, the game was somewhat on the complex side and had a lot of things to do, and as a huge Star Wars fan it was the first time you could live out some of your fantasies in a world of other people doing the same.
SWG kinda models the life of Darth Vader if you think about it. At first it's a very promising new MMO with lots of potential, then it quickly begins to fall to the crapside. Now that its dead (soon to be) the people that were burned by it can finally have some restitution, but those who knew it in better times will always have fond memories it. Just a thought, hehe.
And thats wrong?
I mean, obviously they were wrong in what they thought, but doing what they THOUGHT was best, what else should they do? what they thought was worst?
www.90and9.net
www.prophecymma.com
Seconded
Wrong wording here. They did what they thought was best and when public told them they are wrong there never had the brains to admit it. Sony fails.
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
I have a theory. The greatest Sci Fi movie of all time was ruined when its creator Gorge Lucas decided to tweak it a decade later followed by years of continuing nerfing it Star Wars basically became Star Soup. lol anyways Sony follow the Jedi Sith known as Lucas close and it cost them BIG when the went to the dark side early we all know the story. Im surprised it lasted this long.
My Point is I sure as heck hope that Bio don't go down the dark side after they release TOR.
One thing I never understood, if NGE was such an unpopular change, why didn't the developers just reverse it? Was it a pride thing or a technical one?
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
exactly the nge wasn't a sole sony decision. fanbois neeed to be a bit more level headed it was lucas arts and their liscenincing of the ip they said look we want to make money chnage thegame or we pull the ip and you end up in a financial rut....
so say we all
Lets face it Lucas loves money. He said no to smed and thats that. But what king george never realized by axing the license is that he wont get the the left overs now. Sure we don't know how many still play, nor do we know how many will go TOR, but the truth is this bearded man will start to flex his power over his IP if BW can't keep at least 400k subs and if it slips lower?
Th irony of this is Blizzards Titan will be to TOR what Wow was to old SWG. .
yep hate to say it as a fan of Star Wars and loved SWG so much, SWG has died twice (nov 15, 2005 NGE crap) and now DEC 15, 2011
The game was bleeding subs at X rate and they could see the writing on the wall. Wow and EQ2 were coming out, they wanted to try to find a way (they did poorly) of hopefully saving the game. They failed to improve subs for a game whose declining subs had already doomed.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
true enough, though the NGE really did accelerate the pace exponentially.. but the game had been in decline since they introduced Jedi into it.. a mistake the game never really recovered from.
Should of died so long ago soe and la have only themselves to blame, said it at the time and I still stand by the fact soe shall never get another penny from me after ignoring all thier customers.
Because on the 16th Dec BioWare will release SWTOR..... ???
No competition.
still the best mmo out there ............. sad to see it go
But at that point it was recoverable, with a lot less effort than was used to create the nge
-----
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
Unfotunate to see a great sandbox close even if it heavily went themepark in the end. I enjoyed it 4 or so years ago, but it served its purpose, and hopefully it is something companies can learn from in the future.
Reread what I wrote.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
The game I loved was gone long before. Indeed, I have to say that SWG made me addicted to MMOs and, also, cured me of the addiction.
I became addicted to SWG because the experience was so good, and so pure, it was a whole lot better than my 'real life' at that point. It made me feel like the things I did there were important, be they crafting, entertaining, Rebel/Imperial stuff, roleplay, or going on an excursion to Dathomir. I wasn't alone.
SWG game me the belief that what we were doing was important; that we had a responsibility to make the game work. That's the great thing about sandbox, but also the reason why nobody wants to touch it. The game needs people to fulfill the vision, and it relies on everybody playing in the spirit of the game. When people make the game conform to their version of fun, rather than conform themselves to the game's needs, the sandbox dies.
There were problems with SWG from the get-go. But I had a feeling they'd all be fixed in time. I believed in things like the rulebook, the interface, the 'physics' of how major systems worked like crafting and combat. Times were hard in there, but we loved the vision so much that we decided to stick with it.
Then the NGE hit. It made me painfully aware that if the publishers didn't even have any faith in the game hundreds of thousands of people loved, why should I? Everything got changed, somehow or another, so the only thing I got away from my sessions is some sort of vague familiarity with what I once knew, but something that was gone forever. Even my characters, things with personas and backstories I crafted with care, weren't all that interesting to me anymore.
It cured me of my MMO addiction real quick and, moreover, innoculated me from any severe case of MMO addiction since then. It made me realize that nothing, NOTHING in this genre is so good that it deserves your unqualified devotion to it...for it can all be taken away for reasons wholly unrelated to your devotion.
SWG taught me that the things we do in virtual space are the most fragile things we can possibly experience. These are not castles made of stone, but sand, that blow over because of a little wind.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE