MMORPG games take place on huge open terrains where the character is free to explore every inch of the digital world.  In World of Warcraft, the game takes place on a single planet, or through a portal to another dimension.  Star Wars, however, consists of an enormous galaxy with many star systems, each one containing a large number of planets.  In the MMORPG nature, many of these planets will be active and explorable.There will certainly be a type of mass transit (i.e. public star ships) to transport people from planet to planet, but once they arrive, how do they get around?

The issue of traveling the vast worlds of MMORPGs has been solved in the past by allowing players to, aside from using the provided mass transit services, purchase mounts.  In World of Warcraft, at level 40 (now level 30) you can purchase a mount that will increase your movement speed by 60% which you can later augment with trinkets.  At level 60, you can buy (for a large sum of money) an “epic mount” which, aside from looking cooler, increases your movement speed by 100%.  This system works fine for WoW because of the relatively small size of its world.  For a Star Wars game, you would need a more reliable form of individual travel.

In Star Wars Galaxies, a player could do one of many things for traveling the vast wastelands of Tatooine.  You could have a player make you a landspeeder, or a speeder bike (the latter being faster than the former) or you could go the route of having a creature handler domesticate and put a saddle on an animal for you.  Later on in the life of the game, the developers added multi-passenger vehicles that some people would use as taxi cabs.  These speeders and animal mounts did not have any level requirement.  Everything had its purpose, speeders for traveling from point A to point B and animal mounts for exploring the world.  Plus it was always fun to dress like a Tusken Raider, ride a Bantha and ambush people as they were leaving cities.

Who knows what route Bioware will take in solving the issue of planetary travel?  As a fan of Star Wars Galaxies, I would like to see the system that they implemented to return in this new Star Wars adventure.  Whatever the case, I am confident that Bioware will combine the Star Wars universe’s wide arrangement of creatures and vehicles and turn them into a fantastic way to trek across their colorfull worlds.

P.S. BIOWARE PLEASE LET US HAVE NEXU MOUNTS!