So, I was thinking of getting back into SWG on one of the Emulator servers (last I played was awakening, it was pretty good, but I’m up to check out some other ones). If anyone is interested in joining with me, that would be great. I’d love to get a CNTO guild and city up and running if we had enough people joining in.
If you haven’t played Galaxies, its a Star Wars MMORPG from the early 2000’s. SWG came about when MMOs were still new to the market and hadn’t become so generic and WoW based. Out of all the MMOs I’ve played over the years, this game and Ultima Online were the two that stuck out as what games of this nature should be like as opposed to the monster that is World of Warcraft. I don’t hate WoW, but I do hate its influence on every MMO to follow in its wake due to the way it sterilized player choice and interaction and popularized the Theme-parks we see most commonly in the market today.
Unlike WoW, SWG was a true Sandbox game where you played a person living in the Star Wars Galaxy. You don’t start off as some fabled ‘Chosen One’ or some special snowflake with a destiny, no. In Galaxies you create your citizen and then build them up to their destiny, be it one of greatness or one of the mundane. You could be the greatest warrior the galaxy ever saw or just live out your time as a simple delivery person rushing from town to town with parcels to make your credits. It was a living, breathing world based on player actions and inputs rather than some set-and-repeated group of quests leading you from point A to point B…and it was very much ahead of its time.
Sadly, later iterations followed the money and started to fold in on its old values and ideals. Gameplay became more stock and WoW-like, and they even added classes to the game (including the Jedi as a starter class) which took away from the freedom to build your character your way. A few years ago, after many patches that fans hated, the game was shut down in favor of EA’s WoW-clone Star Wars the Old Republic and the cycle of the Star Wars MMO becoming just another theme-park was complete. Thankfully, fans of the game rebuilt it and host it now under Emulated servers with custom-code in a daring attempt to bring back the old game including the sand-box.
Features:
- Open character creation. You can build your character how you want. You want to be the best with a blaster, do it. You want to be a scout who hunts deadly animals, do it. You want to be an Imperial who uses a vibro-pike, do it.
- A vast, open world full of things to explore. There are a number of planets to go to, each with their own features and things to visit. From Corellia to Naboo, each world is a great size to have some fun just travelling around. The maps are around 15x15km, so comparable to DayZ and such.
- Players can change the worlds by establishing cities, building military bases for the faction they are in, and doing various things across the landscape.
- The Jedi ‘alpha class’. The game is set in the Galactic Civil War, so Jedi are super-rare. You can, if you can figure out how, become a Jedi…but it is a difficult path to walk, and the Empire has tasked Bounty Hunters (also players) with tracking down anyone who can use the Force in such a way.
- Intricate and detailed crafting systems for just about everything from blasters to houses. The economy is player driver for the most part, and each part of that economy is based on a great supply and demand leveling. Example: A crafter needs some special hide for an armor set, another player taking up the role of a hunter can get it for them and trade them the hide for a set of armor or something…or just sell it for credits.
- A complicated, but rewarding system. Gameplay is challenging to learn and get the swing of, but once you do you’ll find all the little features make it a great system.
- A focus on more than just combat: If you are inclined to avoid combat, you can have a character play the part of a Doctor healing the wounded…or an entertainer, dancing in a cantina and helping people recover their mental stats. Its a broad and open world of skills to build from.
- Tons of great mods to make the game even more fun. Graphics and gameplay mods galore and are still up and hosted for download across the web.
- And a ton more.
Just let me know if you guys are interested and we’ll look around and pick out a server and I’ll help you guys set up the game and get it looking nice. I haven’t played in a while, and I honestly put it down because of not having friends to play with, but if you guys are up for it, I’d love to get back into it a bit.
