Star Wars Galaxies: Look who's back, back again

Holocron stopped by the boards to give us all a brief rundown of what he was doing at E3, his Matrix Reloaded review and to let us know he needs to sleep:

Yeah, that's what I'd hoped I'd do all day on Sunday. But no, I was dragged out to Walmart by my family... my aching feet...!

Anyway--E3 was, as usual, exhausting. Stand on your feet all day (in dress shoes btw... mine were killing me) and do the same demo over and over again in five minute intervals.

I only got three hours to walk the floor. I got to see about half the upcoming MMOs, and not much else. So don't ask me for my take on any of the upcoming games... the wait for HL2 was five hours...!

I did get to see the Matrix Reloaded. I thought it was terrible. To quote Snoopy, "Bleah."

I did a panel on one day, alongside Min Seo, the CTO of Nexon (a Korean online games company), and Richard Garriott, creator of Ultima. That was a lot of fun. We spent a large chunk of the time on Q&A, which was pretty interesting. The topic was "East Meets West: Online Game Design," and it was interesting to hear about the different ways in which online games are done here versus in Asia.

As far as the demo... sheesh, I could probably recite it in my sleep.

"Well, this is Star Wars Galaxies, a massively multiplayer game slated to launch in the summer. Are you familiar with the product? Good. And do you know what a massively multiplayer game is? Great, you know, a few years ago I would have had to explain that for a half hour, and everyone would get confused. Just as happy to skip it!

Well, it is a roleplaying game, so we're going to start you out with character creation. We're trying for a very high level of character customizability. It being an online game, we know how important it is for people to feel like their avatar is unique. We're launching with eight playable species, most of the familiar from the films, but a few that haven't been seen much before, such as the Bothans. Actually, the look of the Bothans hadn't been really pinned down that well in continuity before--there were conflicting depictions in comic books and on the cover of novels and so on, so this version of the Bothan ended up being the definitive one, according to Skywalker Ranch. Sort of our chance to leave our mark on the Star Wars universe.

Anyway, as you can see, a ton of options here. Not just height and weight and hair, but age wrinkles, freckles, eyeshadow, lipstick, angle of the eyes, eye color, angle of the nose... let's back out and look at an alien as well--the Mon Calamari are fun. Skywalker Ranch said that anything that you saw on tropical fish was fair game...

Once you customize your avatar to taste, you choose a profession. This is a skill-based game, not a class-based one, so you choose from one of six starting professions, branching out to over 30. There's the combat ones, brawler and marksman, and of course medic and scout and artisan, the crafters, which branches out into professions ranging from chef and tailor to droid engineer and weaponsmith. Lastly, there's even the entertainer, which develops into musician and dancer--these are actually professions in the game. There's hundreds of different skills..."

Argh... I can't go on. I'll have nightmares tonight. That's only the first 45 seconds of the spiel too. You go on to cover how you can give up skills, then you go to Mos Eisley, talk about emotes and chat, show off the avatar expressiveness... then you show the planetary map, the waypoint system, the /find command (have we told you about /find? When in a city, it actually displays a glowing path to the building yoy are looking for). Then you go into the cantina, where Han Solo and Chewie are sitting at a corner table, talk about NPCs and quests and missions, show the band playing, talk about the dancing/musician stuff...

Then it's off to Yavin IV, where there's a big battle, with dozens of ST's and an AT-ST, and a big Imperial base, and a Jedi running around with his lightsaber deflecting bolts... "How do you become a Jedi? Well, we're not telling you. No, really."

Then you do it all over again. Sometimes, a camera crew comes up, sometimes you have an extended demo and show off pets and housing as well.

Your throat goes dry real fast. I think I drank ten or so bottles of water each day.

Ever since I got back, I've been trying to catch up on emails, on the beta boards, on what got done... whew.

Anyway. I'm back now.

-Raph Koster
Creative Director

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