The impact would subsequently be known as the ‘hologrind’, a social crisis of such scope the game never recovered. Master that profession and use another holocron and it’d tell you the next one, and so on.
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. 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.Īlmost no Jedi emerged from the system in the early months. Jedi would be powerful but hunted by the Empire, and if they died, they’d die forever. To simulate that, every character was assigned an invisible set of criteria involving multiple profession masteries that ultimately unlocked a Jedi character slot. The game was set at a time when the Jedi were dead or gone, but when new Force sensitives might nonetheless be born.
The idea was, originally, quite a good one. 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. SOE should have learned from this that balance was uniquely important to Galaxies. 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. 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. What it could be was a game where evocative Star Wars narratives were generated on the fly by a complex set of social systems. You have to understand Star Wars Galaxies both in terms of what it could be and what it frequently was. Doctors, realising their clientele were in a hurry, relocated to areas outside of starports on hub worlds. Roleplayers inclined to play the game ‘as intended’ struggled in the new ecosystem, which was defined by space karate. 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. A niche combat discipline, Teräs Käsi, was discovered to be much more powerful than any other way to play. When it did not work, in those early days, it was because of balance problems. 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). 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. Players came up with get-rich-quick schemes for themselves or took up jobs to pay the bills on their way to something else. When it worked, this created a wonderful sense of place. Similarly, you might choose to buff your stat pools with food created by a chef or go to a cantina, where player musicians and dancers could offer buffs to experience gain. These would require the attention of a player medic, often found in medical centres where they received a bonus for their work. Light injuries would heal over time, but more serious wounds would not. Interdependency between players was encouraged. Instead of classes, Star Wars Galaxies gave each character a budget of skill points to spend on professions that could be freely mixed and matched in whole or in part. If an aspiring Han Solo wanted a drink, then they should be able to buy one from a player who-for whatever reason-aspired to be that bartender from the Mos Eisley cantina. If the player wanted to be an adventurer, the logic went, then they should be an adventurer in an ecosystem that also included craftsmen, doctors, dancers, pilots and farmers. In the view of Koster and his team, an MMOG was a persistent world driven by systems that emphasised player participation at every level. Galaxies’ creative director, Raph Koster, had been a lead designer on Ultima Online.
In its final form, Star Wars Galaxies was a mess of contradictory creative urges whose design and technological foundations had been stripped out from under it-but it was an ambitious mess, the type of game that players often ask for but rarely get. The game’s scope could belong to an unlikely sounding Kickstarter pitch, so perhaps it’s little wonder that Sony Online Entertainment shuttered its Star Wars MMOG in December 2011.