Games of the decade: Star Wars Galaxies

We are nearing the end of a decade. This always spurs a ton of top ten lists, and why should this blog be any different? So i will be doing a couple of posts about the games that meant a lot to me this decade. It wont necessarily be good games, but it will be games that somehow affected me. So without further ado, here goes.

Star Wars Galaxies was the first MMO that really caught a hold of me. Before Galaxies i had played both Ultima Online and Anarchy Online. Both had been fun, but i had played them on a very casual basis. I didn’t quite understand how people could get addicted to MMO’s. Then Galaxies came and changed me.

I still believe that Star Wars Galaxies was one of the few MMO’s that got 80% of its gameplay right. It had a lot of faults, but the innovation in player generated content was amazing. You could build your own cities anywhere you wanted, you could craft nearly anything, you could even have elections in your player created cities to decide who was to be the mayor. All of this resulted in some of the best roleplaying i have ever done in a MMO. The game also tried to innovate on the player classes. You could play a lot of different things, from the classic combat types like Bounty Hunter, to a class that only let you change the looks of others (a hairdresser type of person). You could however NOT play a Jedi. A few people where randomly selected and could open up Jedi accounts, but you didn’t see Jedi’s running around everywhere. Of course, that changed.

For some reason SOE decided that they wanted to give player the option of becoming jedis. As such they implemented a Holocron system, where you could specific objects, known as Holocrons, that would tell you how to become a Jedi. The Holocron would tell you one of the 3 classes you needed to master to open up a Jedi character. After that you would have to grind and grind and grind and grind….and then grind some more, to become force sensitive at which point you would then get hunted by pretty much everything that moved in the game. Jedi life was tough, and only the toughest and most dedicated (insane) players could manage it. And THIS was what made the game so addicting to me. I actually did manage to become a Jedi. It gave me a character with awesome powers, but also ruined my social and school life for about 6 months.

However i wasn’t totally without a social life, because this game became the first game where i joined a guild. At first i joined one, after a while i set up my own and managed about 50 players in it. This opened my eyes to the hell that is guild management. But i did learn that MMO’s are very much based around this social aspect. Being part of a guild increases the experience ten-fold, and ever since i have joined guilds in any MMO i have played (pretty much them all….).

After 8 months of play, i decided to leave the game behind. It was taking way to much of my time. But the game still stands as one of the games that i have been the most immersed in, and one of the games that have been responsible for most harm on me as well (and here i assume that you also think that having no social life is not so healthy…).

After i left the game was, in my humble opinion, totally destroyed. The game was redesigned, implementing a class system that looked like the one seen in the just released World of Warcraft. Now EVERYONE could play Jedi’s, so they where everywhere. A lot of the game design innovation was removed, and left was just an empty husk of what the game had once been. Perhaps the reason why i still think of this game so fondly is because i did leave before the redesign.

Star Wars Galaxies stands as a reminder of what MMO’s can do. What they can do with design, what they can do with a franchise, and what they can do to the social life of players.

That is why i think of this game as one of the greatest of this decade – even though many would disagree.