How Star Wars: Galaxies could have changed the world

Star Wars: Galaxies

This article was supplied to Techradar for PC Gaming Week by Edge magazine. Follow Edge on Twitter here. Click here for Edge subscription offers.

The game's scope could belong to an unlikely sounding Kickstarter pitch, so perhaps it's little wonder that Sony Online Entertainment shuttered its Star Wars MMOG in December 2011. In its final form, Star Wars Galaxies was a mess of contradictory creative urges whose design and technological foundations had been stripped out from under it – but it was an ambitious mess, the type of game that players often ask for but rarely get.

Galaxies' creative director, Raph Koster, had been a lead designer on Ultima Online. In the view of Koster and his team, an MMOG was a persistent world driven by systems that emphasised player participation at every level. If the player wanted to be an adventurer, the logic went, then they should be an adventurer in an ecosystem that also included craftsmen, doctors, dancers, pilots and farmers. If an aspiring Han Solo wanted a drink, then they should be able to buy one from a player who – for whatever reason – aspired to be that bartender from the Mos Eisley cantina.

A new hope...

It was a less strange fit for the Star Wars licence than you might think. The game's development overlapped with the early part of the prequel trilogy, and its developers had chosen to set the game in the period between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars Galaxies was, then, far more influenced by the work done in Star Wars' expanded universe through the '80s and '90s than it was by the new films being produced by Lucasfilm.

It has a place in a line of Star Wars work that begins with the original trilogy and extends through novels by authors such as Timothy Zahn and Michael Stackpole, the Dark Horse comics, and simulator-style games such as X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter. The expanded universe treated Star Wars as a world with depth upon which the original films had only touched. It was an ideal fit for the type of MMOG that Koster and the Galaxies team set out to make.

When the game launched in 2003, creating a character meant entering a complex simulation. Your choice of race, for example, determined which languages your character could speak. The majority spoke Basic (see also: English) plus one other language specific to them, while Wookiees could speak only Shyriiwook (see also: Chewbacca).

Each language constituted two different skills – listening and speaking – and players could teach these skills to one another. Language spread like a virus: wookiees picked up an understanding of Basic from humans, who might in turn learn to speak Twi'lek or Huttese. Roleplay, community and play merged in a single system – a good metaphor for Star Wars Galaxies' broader ambitions.

Star Wars Galaxies

Classless society

Instead of classes, Star Wars Galaxies gave each character a budget of skill points to spend on professions that could be freely mixed and matched in whole or in part. Interdependency between players was encouraged. Light injuries would heal over time, but more serious wounds would not. These would require the attention of a player medic, often found in medical centres where they received a bonus for their work. Similarly, you might choose to buff your stat pools with food created by a chef or go to a cantina, where player musicians and dancers could offer buffs to experience gain.

When it worked, this created a wonderful sense of place. Players came up with get-rich-quick schemes for themselves or took up jobs to pay the bills on their way to something else. You might start a mining company just to save enough money for an expensive off-world shuttle, and once on that other world you might decide to settle down and never come back.

If you were looking for a new blaster, you would scan listings for advertisements from players, journey to their shops in player-built cities, and buy what you wanted from customised NPCs in buildings that had been decorated through an elaborate object manipulation system (with the help of player architects and interior designers, naturally).

When it did not work, in those early days, it was because of balance problems. A niche combat discipline, Teräs Käsi, was discovered to be much more powerful than any other way to play. It was a form of Star Wars kung fu invented for a fighting game on the original PlayStation and, through developer oversight, it came to define early Star Wars Galaxies. Roleplayers inclined to play the game 'as intended' struggled in the new ecosystem, which was defined by space karate.

Doctors, realising their clientele were in a hurry, relocated to areas outside of starports on hub worlds. You have to understand Star Wars Galaxies both in terms of what it could be and what it frequently was. What it could be was a game where evocative Star Wars narratives were generated on the fly by a complex set of social systems. What it frequently was was a game where players in identical armour holding knuckle dusters queued for buffs from a man in a coat in the rain.

Latest in Gaming
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
With discounts of up to 95%, these are the biggest deals I've managed to find in the Steam Spring Sale
WWE 2K25
I've spent days in the ring with WWE 2K25, and it's like a five-star match ruined by the Million Dollar Man
Asus ROG Ally using Steam
I think Asus could be the perfect partner for an Xbox handheld – but I have questions
NYT Connections homescreen on a phone, on a purple background
NYT Connections hints and answers for Saturday, March 15 (game #643)
Rainbow Six Siege X promotional art.
The Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege X 6v6 mode might finally pull me away from Black Ops 6
Atelier Yumia
I was already sold on Atelier Yumia as an RPG, but I wasn’t expecting it to have my favorite crafting system in all of gaming
Latest in News
Super Mario Odyssey
ChatGPT is the ultimate gaming tool - here's 4 ways you can use AI to help with your next playthrough
Ray-Ban smart glasses with the Cpperni logo, an LED array, and a MacBook Air with M4 next to ecah other.
ICYMI: the week's 7 biggest tech stories from Twitter's massive outage to iRobot's impressive new Roombas
Brad Pitt looks over his right shoulder with 'F1' written behind him
Apple Original Films will take you behind-the-scenes of a racing cockpit in this new thrilling F1 movie trailer
AI writer
Coding AI tells developer to write it himself
Reacher looking down at another character from the Prime Video TV series Reacher
Reacher season 3 becomes Prime Video’s biggest returning show thanks to Hollywood’s biggest heavyweight
Finger Presses Orange Button Domain Name Registration on Black Keyboard Background. Closeup View
I visited the world’s first registered .com domain – and you won’t believe what it’s offering today