Into this soup you have a player base largely composed of EverQuest-style power-gamers who (partly because of the action-oriented nature of the Star Wars license) joined Galaxies expecting to kill a lot of stuff and become powerful heroes. Could these wildly different game designs and player expectations live together in the same world?

Living in the Star Wars Universe

Central to the Star Wars: Galaxies design philosophy was the idea of "player-generated content." Players would be able to enter the game and select a profession, gradually carving out a niche in the world, interacting with other players, forming social circles, and exploring the world while creating their own stories. Like Ultima Online, Star Wars: Galaxies was meant as a role-player's paradise.

A quick examination of the game's basic systems drives this point home. One of the universal points of praise that the game received at launch was the intricacy of the game's crafting and economic systems. The game's economy really does work and is vulnerable to many of the same monetary and inflationary issues that the real world grapples with. Player interdependency is fostered by the fact that the best items, from clothes to droids to weaponry, must be acquired from player-crafters within the game's world. Players don't have "levels" as such. Rather, they have skill trees that must be improved by constant repetition and practice.

As a result, gamers looking for that kind of experience found that Star Wars: Galaxies had quite a bit to offer. Many players enjoyed building up their tailoring or architectural skills, building shops, stocking inventory, and advertising their wares. Others put on fashion shows, fireworks displays, threw in-game "Life Day" parties, or (after vehicles were put in) ran Boonta Eve races on Tatooine. The unfortunate side effect of this, though, was that combat classes didn't have much to do when the game was released. Killing monsters didn't offer much more than slight skill point rewards that took a tremendously long time to increase your power. The majority of the game's theme parks and quest-oriented areas were broken on release, and those that did work didn't offer much in the way of compelling content.

In a way, this was by design. Reward-based quests, ever-increasing loot, and competitive content that put players on rails ran counter to the role-playing philosophy of the game. They are, in fact, characteristic of "power-gamer"-style MMOs such as EverQuest that the design team had been so eager to get away from. In fact, a quick perusal of many of the early complaints about the game shows them to be mostly of the, "This isn't like EverQuest" variety.

Unfortunately, the game's player base was as sharply divided as the Empire and the Rebellion. Many players expected a lot of combat and quests to make their character more and more powerful. They began to complain, and they were paying customers ... who wanted to be Jedi. •

Episode II: Enter the Jedi ... Who Bring Problems to a Head.