I didn't come to Star Wars Galaxies on my own. Back in the early 2000s (it came out 2003), my house was still running on AOL dial-up. Needless to say, online gaming lay beyond my grasp. My friend Tom would tell me the funniest and coolest stories about the game. I could only glimpse the burgeoning world of online gaming through the peephole of text-based MUDs like Turning Point.
I graduated high school in 2005, at the age of 17. As a gift, my parents bought me a Dell Inspiron 6t000 (I think, I forget the exact number). Tom and I would be moving into the UNF dorms in the fall, finally with access to high speed internet (I'd be lying if I said higher education was at the top of my priority list).
Star Wars Galaxies goes something like this. You pick your character's race, sex and physical details, you play a brief tutorial, and then the game drops you off in Mos Eisley. You can continue on some basic tutorial-esque quests, or you can strike off on your own and do whatever you want. If I'm not describing the levelling system, it's because I can't keep the different systems straight. You see, they changed the way levelling worked at least 3 times. There was the original game, then there was the combat update, and later the NGE (new game experience). I played the game predominantly during the CU and NGE days, so I'm unfamiliar with the way the game was originally.
I started playing SWG while still on dial-up, at home. It took about 4 days for my laptop to download all of the updates for the game on my connection, which was quite the nightmare. That was only the beginning of my problems, however. As I mentioned earlier, the game drops you off in Mos Eisley, which is a pretty busy place. Unfortunately, my connection simply couldn't handle going to the busier cities. A lot of the cities on Tatooine were just impossible for me to visit. Right before my friend Tom left to go to Japan on vacation, he dropped my newbie Wookiee ass on Rori, a moon of Naboo (a planet which almost nobody bothered going to). Still, I had problems with connection. I wandered off into the wild with a stick to learn the basics.
The combat system of SWG wasn't exactly inspired. Basic attacks, power attacks, special attacks, items. You've played one MMO, you've mostly played them all, I find. I think pre-NGE I was a rifleman/doctor combo, which was fairly useful. The NGE got a lot of hate from people (mostly from Jedi who were upset that now everyone in the game was allowed to be a Jedi). I didn't mind the NGE because I mostly did stuff alone, occasionally with Tom and/or Mike. Being a Jedi let you fight a lot of people all on your own, which made it so I could do the more difficult stuff without having to get together some massive party of people.
For whatever reason, I was never big on the PVP aspect. I could fight pretty well against monsters, but I just didn't have the patience to figure out how the different classes interacted with one another to really stand a chance against other players.
Where SWG really stood out was in its space combat system. Space had only been added to the game in an expansion pack called Jump to Lightspeed, which come to think was a pretty radical addition to the game. Space wasn't just some afterthought - space combat in SWG was almost a completely new and different game tacked on to the original. You could choose between fighting for the Empire, Rebels, or neutral smuggler-types. Space let you choose what ship you wanted to fly, what kinds of weapons, engines, boosters, shields and missiles it had too. Probably coolest of all, you could bring multiple people on board certain POB (Person on Board) type ships. POBs didn't function so well in combat, but the concept was cool. You could even decorate the inside of your ship, the Star Wars equivalent of "Pimp My Ride", I suppose.
(Cockpit view like a boss)
Space combat in SWG wasn't perfect. Probably the most frustrating thing was having to go back down to the planet just to get your missions, which added hours and hours to the whole schebang. The actual space missions themselves were pretty dull - escort this ship here, protect these ships there. Once you jumped through all the hoops, you graduated to the real space experience. SWG required that to fully graduate into the big boy world of space, you had to take down a Star Destroyer (if you were rebel, if you were Imperial you had to fight a rebel blockade runner).
At this point in the game, you could engage other players in the PVP zone, known as Deep Space. Fighting it out in space was probably the most fun I ever had in Star Wars Galaxies. Some people were impossibly good, with ridiculously overpowered gear that made them impossible to shoot down. Those players were also part of the shipwright class (which I never chose).
So, why hasn't there been any attempt at all to try something like this on the console? Perfectly doable. Certainly the game doesn't have to be Star Wars. Come to think, are there any space combat games for the 360? I can't think of one. Seems like a big gap, doesn't it? Come to think, remember that short space sequence in Halo Reach?
Halo tried branching out with Halo Wars. Makes one wonder what might be possible, doesn't it?
K
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