Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) was Lucas Arts’ first attempt at a Star Wars MMORPG and as such lends some of its aspects to serve as a potential template for Bioware’s new MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic (TOR).

The issue is that SWG was not without its flaws, in fact, many aspects of the game were broken through the entire duration of my playing it. As SWG was first to the party, I believe that TOR could greatly benefit from borrowing some of the aspects that made SWG great, and discarding the ones that lead to its eventual downfall.

What Aspects of SWG should return in TOR?
1. Diversity of Classes: SWG’s leveling system gave the players an opportunity to take different paths by mixing and matching classes, you could be a dancer/smuggler/creature handler if you wanted, you were not locked down to a single class that you picked when you created your character.

2. Player Cities: One of my favorite parts of SWG was the ability for players to band together around a politician and build a city on one of the game’s many planets. Not only did this make the players independent of the major cities, but they also created opportunities for merchants to pedal their wares, and served as pseudo-strongholds for guilds. Not to mention the hostile takeover of other player cities made for great times.

3. Creature Handlers: Star Wars is a franchise that takes place in a galaxy completely different from our own with all sorts of fantastic and extraordinary creatures. SWG allowed you to harness the abilities of these unique monsters for combat, and also, from time to time, you could strap a saddle on an animal and ride around from place to place. Now sure these creature mounts were not nearly as effective as speeder bikes were in this game, but there is a certain amount of respect I have for a man who marches into Mos Espa riding a bantha.

4. The Importance of the Player: One thing that SWG had that I havn’t seen in the other MMOs that I have played is an absolute importance of the player in the game’s community. It was necessary to have player weapon-smiths and armor-smiths because most items found in the main world were far inferior to the items created by a skilled craftsman. Also, most weapons of the same model were different because of the type of materials used so for example, you could have purchased an E-11 carbine from a newbie weapon-smith that used bad resources, or you could buy that same E-11 carbine from a skilled weapon-smith who uses only the finest resources around and the difference between the two end results would be enormous. The importance of the player made the game feel like a living, breathing society rather than your average MMO. I understand that Bioware is trying to make TOR a very epic and heroic game, which would most likely exclude most of the crafting classes, but I still think that TOR would benefit greatly from a thriving in-game economy.

5. Space Combat: SWG moved from just marching across the barren deserts of Tatooine or venturing through the dense jungles of Dathomir to space with their Jump to Lightspeed expansion pack. It added a whole new dimension of gameplay and guild interaction. Although the star fighting PVP never really became as huge as it should have, the solo and group missions were quite fun and they had a very solid combat and flight system, along with the addition to being able to get out and walk around large ships such as the SoroSuub Personal Luxury Yacht 3000, better known as Lando Calrissian’s “Lady Luck” (It was awarded to players who were with the game for several months prior to the release of the expansion).

Check out the second part of this article at the link below:

Star Wars Galaxies:  What Aspects Should NOT be Included in TOR?