Star Wars Galaxies Retrospective

GamesRadar has published an interesting retrospective piece on Star Wars Galaxies that documents the ambitions and the troubled history of Sony Online Entertainment’s MMORPG. Here’s an excerpt that, in my humble opinion, explains really well how the game was supposed to be played and how it actually ended up being played:

When it worked, this created a wonderful sense of place. Players came up with get-rich-quick schemes for themselves or took up jobs to pay the bills on their way to something else. You might start a mining company just to save enough money for an expensive off-world shuttle, and once on that other world you might decide to settle down and never come back. If you were looking for a new blaster, you would scan listings for advertisements from players, journey to their shops in player-built cities, and buy what you wanted from customised NPCs in buildings that had been decorated through an elaborate object manipulation system (with the help of player architects and interior designers, naturally).

When it did not work, in those early days, it was because of balance problems. A niche combat discipline, Teräs Käsi, was discovered to be much more powerful than any other way to play. It was a form of Star Wars kung fu invented for a fighting game on the original PlayStation and, through developer oversight, it came to define early Star Wars Galaxies. Roleplayers inclined to play the game ‘˜as intended’ struggled in the new ecosystem, which was defined by space karate. Doctors, realising their clientele were in a hurry, relocated to areas outside of starports on hub worlds. You have to understand Star Wars Galaxies both in terms of what it could be and what it frequently was. What it could be was a game where evocative Star Wars narratives were generated on the fly by a complex set of social systems. What it frequently was was a game where players in identical armour holding knuckle dusters queued for buffs from a man in a coat in the rain.

SOE should have learned from this that balance was uniquely important to Galaxies. It did not. Under pressure from both players and LucasArts to give Jedi a more prominent place in the game, the studio began to take the lid off the game’s elusive Force Sensitive system. The idea was, originally, quite a good one. The game was set at a time when the Jedi were dead or gone, but when new Force sensitives might nonetheless be born. To simulate that, every character was assigned an invisible set of criteria involving multiple profession masteries that ultimately unlocked a Jedi character slot. Jedi would be powerful but hunted by the Empire, and if they died, they’d die forever. On paper, this was a challenging, exciting system, one designed to create extraordinary experiences both for the player that becomes a Jedi and the ones who witness or hunt them.

Almost no Jedi emerged from the system in the early months. To accelerate the process, SOE added a rare item to the game called a holocron, which, once used, would tell you a profession you needed to master to earn your Jedi. Master that profession and use another holocron and it’d tell you the next one, and so on. The impact would subsequently be known as the ‘˜hologrind’, a social crisis of such scope the game never recovered. SOE had breached one of the core tenets of Star Wars Galaxies’ original design by placing a singular goal on top of a system defined by lateral interdependencies. The result was chaos. The only items of any worth in the economy became gear for fast levelling and holocrons themselves. Shops were abandoned as armoursmiths rerolled as dancers, dancers rerolled as biotechnicians, biotechnicians rerolled as smugglers. A small underground of hologrind objectors clung on, making money from the chaos in service economies and wondering when the game would become about something other than unlocking Jedi.