Star Wars Galaxies: State of the Game
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 1101
Before getting into the full details of Chapter 7, I want to talk a bit about last summer, and all the activity around SWG. At the end of May we released Chapter 6 which introduced the Beast Master system to the game. This system allowed all players to grow and train pets, or "beasts," that they could use in a variety of ways, including combat. This is really the most robust pet system in an MMO today and we have still yet to see any server uncover all of the possible beast mutations. On the heels of that, the dev team had a major bug bash which was pretty much about the size of a Chapter in terms of fixes, content additions, and tweaks, all of which our players and senators had been asking us to fix for sometime. We are always trying to improve SWG and this was a true example of that dedication.
One of the other cool events we ran was the home pack up event. SWG is one of the first MMOs to allow players to create and decorate homes. Not only that, but they can build their homes nearly anywhere they want. We had a number of key locations on many servers with homes that were no longer populated, so we ran an event that allowed current players to flag those homes for destruction. Once flagged, an Imperial bomber flew in and destroyed the homes in real time. The players were then allowed to claim this newly freed up land for themselves. We really rallied the player base around this event and we saw a number of former players come back to participate and to save their homes. While perhaps this sounds simple, the home pack up was a huge development challenge, but the results were really beneficial for SWG players.
Uh... no. Ultima Online let you create and customize houses, keeps, and even castles 10 years ago.
