Star Wars Galaxies

First off, im not trying to hate on SWG at all, past and present form.  I simple just want to know what made star wars galaxies such a great came back in the day before the CU and NGE.  I played the trial for 2 weeks a couple of months after it was released but i didn't get a good feel for the game.  So please, explain to me what the old SWG was like.

- Lots, and I mean LOTS, of players. Enough that we had servers rivalling each other.
- 32 professions and the freedom to mix and match.
- A skilling system where doing specific things granted specific xp. And the social aspect of teaching people skills.
- A player-driven and player-run economy. Everything would break down and replaced, crafters and crafting mattered.
- No Instant Travel. We waited at shuttleports. And in that time we meet a lot of people, made friends.
- Bustling capital and player cities. And then the massive PVPs of one guild attacking another's city.

Though these are just but a few of the things that seperates NGE from Pre-CU, there are a whole lot more that I'm sure other people will post up :)

Well here is my summation of it. A lot  more classes to play ( broken though they may of been ) A more populated game with not that much content. The NGE to me is the exact opposite. Less more simplified classes to play. A lot more content  with less people playing.  So I guess for me the best part of pre NGE was the people that you met along the way.

FREEDOM.

You had choice.  You didn't have a class, a level, a restriction.  You could do whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted.

You NEEDED to socialize with other players.  Doctors had lines 100 people long waiting for buffs.  Entertainers had danced and played music for hundreds of people...

Pre-CU SWG offered something that no game today offers, FREEDOM.

Originally posted by Thunderous

FREEDOM.

You had choice.  You didn't have a class, a level, a restriction.  You could do whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted.

You NEEDED to socialize with other players.  Doctors had lines 100 people long waiting for buffs.  Entertainers had danced and played music for hundreds of people...

Pre-CU SWG offered something that no game today offers, FREEDOM.

.....looking back at it through rose colored glasses.

Pre-cu and pre-nge SWG was one of those situations where you just don't know how great you have it until it's gone.  As others before me have posted, SWG had freedom; where you could socialize, solo grind mobs, group with some friends and tackle harder areas, build a player city, discover lots of in-depth crafting professions, and otherwise play the game to your own style, whether that be solo or with a group. 

What SWG failed at was creating content.  In the era of wow, it's hard to compare SWG with the content offered in today's MMO landscape, and the lack of content (read - more dungeons and new mobs to kill) was what made people move from SWG to WOW.  If SWG could have only created more content, the game would still be thriving today.  This is not to say that the dev team didn't try; but I would argue that they simply bit off more then then could chew when it came to creating content in such a gigantic world.

In the end, people still dream about the SWG that could have been rather then the SWG that was, despite the fact that the SWG that was is still better then the vast majority of games on the market today.  We simply didn't know it at the time.  Now we've lost what made SWG into such a unique and spectacular sandbox game.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  SWG was way ahead of its time.  The future of MMOs is an expansion of what SWG was.  I hope that makes some sense.  :)

Originally posted by zaxxon23

Pre-cu and pre-nge SWG was one of those situations where you just don't know how great you have it until it's gone.  As others before me have posted, SWG had freedom; where you could socialize, solo grind mobs, group with some friends and tackle harder areas, build a player city, discover lots of in-depth crafting professions, and otherwise play the game to your own style, whether that be solo or with a group. 

What SWG failed at was creating content.  In the era of wow, it's hard to compare SWG with the content offered in today's MMO landscape, and the lack of content (read - more dungeons and new mobs to kill) was what made people move from SWG to WOW.  If SWG could have only created more content, the game would still be thriving today.  This is not to say that the dev team didn't try; but I would argue that they simply bit off more then then could chew when it came to creating content in such a gigantic world.

In the end, people still dream about the SWG that could have been rather then the SWG that was, despite the fact that the SWG that was is still better then the vast majority of games on the market today.  We simply didn't know it at the time.  Now we've lost what made SWG into such a unique and spectacular sandbox game.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  SWG was way ahead of its time.  The future of MMOs is an expansion of what SWG was.  I hope that makes some sense.  :)

"where you could socialize, solo grind mobs, group with some friends and tackle harder areas, build a player city, discover lots of in-depth crafting professions, and otherwise play the game to your own style, whether that be solo or with a group."

IMHO, yes there is a fundamental mechanical difference in the SWG of today vs the SWG of yesterday but what most old timers seem to miss is that intangable "something" that was mainly created by the community itself. Most of the base features are still there.

Nothing prevents anyone from socializing today any more then the merciless Bol grind did before NGE. You are still able to solo and you are still able to group. These basic elements have not changed. Crafting is still far above any other MMO and the amount of features like housing, space, player cities and gameworld size are still without equal. IMHO what effected the cranky vets of today the most is the removal of the profession system. When you really look at the "classes" of today, they are more or less "profession packages" of pre-NGE. (of which many of those 32 professions where never up to par, working or fleshed out) IF SWG added a few more "classes" to fill those missing gaps from the old profession system you would basically be back to square one as you still have the basic freedom to change classes unlike most other MMOs.

SWG of any era is still far more then most MMO's of today. What SWG is mainly the victim of is unfocused development from the start and very bad management desicions.

The smart thing would have been to do what you said from the start, work with what they had but they didn't and thats not going to change.

Originally posted by TheHavok

First off, im not trying to hate on SWG at all, past and present form.  I simple just want to know what made star wars galaxies such a great came back in the day before the CU and NGE.  I played the trial for 2 weeks a couple of months after it was released but i didn't get a good feel for the game.  So please, explain to me what the old SWG was like.

I'll sum this up easily, 32 professions and use to be skill based.

1) Large maps of diverse locations/planets.
2) Multiple 'vectors' for socialization: "grouping", entertaining, crafting, travel (with Jump to Lightspeed), player city 'politics', and so on.

These two things I think made the most of the positive aspects of online games, but the rest were either broken or unbalanced. Other than that, there wasn't really anything magical about the game, other than the two particular features I reference.

-- Brede