PorkyThePaladin
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2013
- Messages
- 5,167
Star Wars: Galaxies was a sandbox MMORPG that came out in 2003 from Sony to a lot of hype. One of its distinguishing characteristics was that the lead designer was Raph Koster of Ultima Online fame, and in many ways, SWG was the intended successor to UO. It had great ambitions in terms of creating a complex, dynamic world driven by players with deep social interactions. While its initial launch was very buggy and the game certainly had its share of problems, it nevertheless attracted a hardcore following among people looking for a serious sandbox MMO.
Shortly after SWG came out, the MMO genre was rocked by the arrival of World of Warcraft, and much like many other publishers, Sony tried to cash in on WoW's financial success by changing SWG to make it more similar to Blizzard's behemoth. Two infamous releases called the Combat Update (CU) and New Game Enhancements (NGE) destroyed much of what was unique and complex about SWG and turned it into an inferior WoW wannabe. This led to most of the players leaving in disgust, and the game eventually being shut down in 2011.
As some of you might be aware, a small group of dedicated fans started a community project called SWG Emu all the way back in 2004, to try to preserve what made SWG special. Their goal was to give players an opportunity to play pre-CU SWG, the way the game was originally meant to be played by its designers. To get around Sony's changes, they set out to recreate the entire server architecture from scratch. This was an extremely ambitious goal that would take such a small group many years, and understandably, when people tried SWG Emu over the years, their experiences were often negative, with a lot of stuff either missing or broken.
However, it has now been well over a decade, and their efforts have not been in vain. If you look at their development list these days, they have been able to implement much of the original functionality, although they are still some ways away from version 1.0:
http://www.swgemu.com/forums/showthread.php?t=75
They are currently running 2 servers, a test server and a play server called Basilisk, which has a rather healthy population of 1200-1300 players on most times. There are also about 8 other servers run by other people with different rules but using SWG Emu's server code.
So if you are looking for a good sandbox MMO to play, and are saddened by the state of things in that sub-genre, this might be the best thing out there at the moment.
Website: http://www.swgemu.com/forums/content.php
Some recent articles about this:
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/15335/star-wars-galaxies-swgemu-project/
http://kotaku.com/star-wars-galaxies-is-dead-but-these-people-are-keepin-1786587786
Shortly after SWG came out, the MMO genre was rocked by the arrival of World of Warcraft, and much like many other publishers, Sony tried to cash in on WoW's financial success by changing SWG to make it more similar to Blizzard's behemoth. Two infamous releases called the Combat Update (CU) and New Game Enhancements (NGE) destroyed much of what was unique and complex about SWG and turned it into an inferior WoW wannabe. This led to most of the players leaving in disgust, and the game eventually being shut down in 2011.
As some of you might be aware, a small group of dedicated fans started a community project called SWG Emu all the way back in 2004, to try to preserve what made SWG special. Their goal was to give players an opportunity to play pre-CU SWG, the way the game was originally meant to be played by its designers. To get around Sony's changes, they set out to recreate the entire server architecture from scratch. This was an extremely ambitious goal that would take such a small group many years, and understandably, when people tried SWG Emu over the years, their experiences were often negative, with a lot of stuff either missing or broken.
However, it has now been well over a decade, and their efforts have not been in vain. If you look at their development list these days, they have been able to implement much of the original functionality, although they are still some ways away from version 1.0:
http://www.swgemu.com/forums/showthread.php?t=75
They are currently running 2 servers, a test server and a play server called Basilisk, which has a rather healthy population of 1200-1300 players on most times. There are also about 8 other servers run by other people with different rules but using SWG Emu's server code.
So if you are looking for a good sandbox MMO to play, and are saddened by the state of things in that sub-genre, this might be the best thing out there at the moment.
Website: http://www.swgemu.com/forums/content.php
Some recent articles about this:
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/15335/star-wars-galaxies-swgemu-project/
http://kotaku.com/star-wars-galaxies-is-dead-but-these-people-are-keepin-1786587786