Digesting Star Wars

The Official page for the MMORPG that’s going to be bigger than Pokemon (well…), Star Wars Galaxies, has a brand new “issue” of their Developer Digest, a little page including many of the team’s forum posts during the previous week. Some flavor:

JEDI-GREG’s WIFE & NON-COMBAT OPTIONS: We very much intend to make your wife feel welcome, Jedi-Greg. Yes, we will have a wide array of non-combat ways of playing the game, and based on the other games you cite her liking, I think she’ll enjoy SWG.

ALT-TAB: we haven’t discussed it yet. It undeniably helps with cheating to prevent it, but it’s also SO convenient to allow it.

STARVING TO DEATH: Nah, we won’t have starving to death–that just feels tedious and annoying. We do intend to have cooking as a skill tree, btw, so expect food to have significant important gameplay effects, but don’t expect it to be tedious. Let’s just say that food will probably be, uh, optional but highly desirable. And gourmet food WILL actually be qualitatively different from fast food, I hope! (No promises, but that’s my goal).

Cooking was a lot of fun in EQ but hardly in demand… except for those catered wedding jobs of course. 500-1000pp per wedding… not a bad idea.

On a tangent:
I can see it now. We have EverQuest getting old, Anarchy Online out and with a following, Dark Age of Camelot leaving people feeling like they are playing EQ in medieval times but enjoying it, Ultima Worlds Online: Origin making lots of promises while Ultima Online users are dwindling and looking for something else. Then Star Wars Galaxies comes out. How many of those subscribers are going to: a) defect over to SW Galaxies knowing all their other online friends are? b) defect over to SW Galaxies knowing if there ever was a chance to “meet the one,” it would be in that game? c) defect over to SW Galaxies because it’s being made by Verant and Sony and know it’s going to be immersive, and d) defect over to SW Galaxies because it’s the only game where you can use the force, be a Jedi, find out exactly what the inside of a Jawa cave looks like, fly in an X-wing (hopefully), kill a member of the Sandpeople (who have always bothered me since A New Hope), have Chewy’s cool gun, doors that don’t creak when you open them… in other words, because it’s STAR WARS? My guess? I’ll sum it up with three words: “And then some…”

Remember how the internet took a few years to truly catch on? Star Wars Galaxies could be THE game to get the masses playing.