Star Wars Galaxies: Senior Producers State of the Game Letter

Howdy folks... that time again :-)

Last month we saw Publish 8: Droids Rebuilt reach its fruition, with a ton of new utility droids being added to the mix. We also saw two mini-publishes. Mini 8.1 focused on Image Designer enhancements and included some radical new looks for characters as well as a secure transaction interface that will extend to numerous other areas of the game. Mini 8.2 saw the opening of the Death Watch Bunker, where there are some very tough hombres that are none too happy. There are rumors of awesome loot from this starting to trickle out into Live, including Mandalorian armor and Jetpacks!

This year's E3 allowed us to demo Jump to Lightspeed,which was an amazing experience! This was the first time we had shown it to the public and we fully realized just how much fun it already is!! There were countless occasions where we would find ourselves plinking at Hutt Fighters from the turret of a YT-1300, or chasing a TIE Fighter through an asteroid field, and have to tear ourselves away to realize that we were indeed in the middle of a demo. I assure you, this is going to completely transform SWG while tying in seamlessly with the ground game. It is simply incredible!!!

We will be doing a closed-invite Beta for JTL sometime between August and September. We really want to get a wide variety of players in the cockpit, so we are currently devising the numbers and groups for populating the beta. More on this from Bo'shek (Rich Vogel) in the near future...

Back on the ground, we are in the thick of Jedi Testing for Publish 9: Secrets of the Force. We are going to want to take an extra week or so to fully bake it in, so it may be a bit more than two weeks from our last mini-publish (the Death Watch Bunker). We will keep you apprised at the progress, but we are currently targeting June 22, 2004.

To test this massive system, we made a duplicate of the existing Test Server. We call it, originally enough, Test Center 2! We needed to create a large and robust test population, so we put together two groups and made them specific ranks.

Existing Test Center players that were active within a certain period became Padawans.
Existing Live Jedi that created characters on Test Center within a certain period became Jedi Knights.
Over the weekend there were in excess of a thousand simultaneous players on TC2! Much thanks to those of you logged in and helped us with testing. I would encourage you to continue doing so during the next couple of weeks, because we will be giving away starter packs, running some crazy tournaments and really trying to stress the system to its limits! Since Test Server 2 will be wiped at the end of the testing phase, it is really a free-for-all over there. Crazy. We may even try to set a bunch of Live Bounty Hunters loose at some time >:-)

One of the more controversial changes that is occurring with Publish 9 is that characters who unlock their slots Between Publish 9 and Publish 10 will not be able to immediately convert to a Padawan. There are a number of reasons why we feel the need to do this, but foremost is a transition period between Force Sensitive and Padawan that will not be done until Publish 10: The Jedi Trials. If you do unlock you will be notified, but not able to convert until P10. If you do not unlock but are along the way, partial credit will be given. This has been discussed in the past few Friday Features.

Looking forward, the three main systems that we are enhancing are: Jedi, Combat Balance, and the Galactic Civil War (GCW). They are turning out to be extremely extensive (and extremely cool!). Accordingly, we want to focus as many resources as we can on them. This is challenging when doing parallel development of JTL, which in some ways is a completely new game. We have made some adjustments to the Live schedule, based on our desire to fully realize each system.

Although an earlier version of this letter went out, we are still examining the schedule. We will post the full schedule as soon as we get it hammered out.

We are fully focused in making SWG the best MMOG there is out there. The game is very strong due to you, the players. The next few months have some revolutionary changes occurring, and I hope you are as psyched as I am!!

Finally, Fan Fest was absolutely amazing!!! Thanks so much to all the players  it was quite a treat for us to get to meet with you! :-)

Best,

Gary Gattis
SOE Senior Producer, Star Wars Galaxies

PS  Things can and will change