Classic Game Postmortem: 'Star Wars Galaxies'

[Music] hi welcome to the classic game post mortem for star wars galaxies i'm ralph coster and i was the original creative director on the game and i'm rich fogel and i was the executive producer on the game and we're going to take you through the story of a game that maybe was a bit unlikely to end up getting a classic game postmortem but uh here we go we're gonna start out with some of the early days the prehistory of the game and how it got launched and started so uh rich why don't you talk about that for a bit yeah so uh the original team who started on uh star wars galaxies was really working on privateer online origin systems and um we at that time origen was working on a couple of mmos and one of them we figured would be great to take the wing commander franchise and do privateer online which we started on and worked on

for about a year and a half almost two years did a great demo a great actually uh first playable of the uh of what privateer online was all about and then origen canceled it uh about that time uh richard garriott was also no longer employed and i actually had to call raph on the phone in australia to tell him what was going on because he's actually over there doing some uo uh promotions at the time and so it was a very interesting interesting tumultuous time at origin and so at that time when we canceled the the uh the game well we just started to uh look around and uh we found a landing place at barron's and the the rest is history we formed the austin studio in um for baron and um one of the great things about it is when we started working there we didn't realize they were we knew they had stores licensed we didn't know that we're already working on the game so

when we got there and went up to san diego we found out that uh they actually were working on the star wars game and had some things to show um but one of the concepts was it was actually they're working on eq two is at the same time and they wanted to share the technology and engine um and so when we looked at it we uh we started uh to review it and see where they were on the project we found that really based on our opinion there wasn't really much that we could use at that time and we felt like the engine wouldn't get us to what we really wanted to be and do in the time frame we had to do it in so next slide so we started on uh the first thing we did is kind of like get our feet wet and get a feel for star wars we love wing versus tie and so at uh we all kind of we didn't have an office space that time there were about uh 12 of us and so we started working at jl and brax who was an at that time associate producer for us

and um he he lent us their house his house and we started working on wing versus tie game um and we actually uh put it together in about six weeks the first playable uh it impres was so impressive that lucasarts decided even though we haven't started on the game officially yet that they would love to us to sign up for an expansion and that would be actually a a jtl a junk to light speed is actually came out of this prototype that we did for the star wars uh game that we started working on and we actually was able to get some of our previous technology that another group was working on that we purchased so we get a little leg up on the client but it was actually a pretty fun game that we started there at jl and brock's house next and when we went up to san diego like i said before there was a team up there working on it we decided that you know let's let's look at this and let's break the

development up so we took a good they had a really good strong art team on it and we said let's keep that strong art team on it uh because they've done a lot already and let's form the tech team from austin and we decided to do it in both locations both austin and san diego to build this game there were lots of cultural challenges for that that we had to deal with and that's something we can go into a little later one of the biggest things that they wanted us to do before we started was to make sure that was not going to cannibalize everquest so they wanted to make sure it was differentiated enough that no way anybody would probably go for everquest to playing on star wars or if they did it would be a very small group of people and so we had a great background with ultima online on a skill based system where basically everquest was a dooku mud which was level based class-based type system and we weren't going to

build that and we were actually going to use the template very similar to what actually world of warcraft used and we decided no we're actually going to do something totally different and separate ourselves immediately from everquest next slide take it from there yeah then came time to actually start making the game and the very first thing that we ran into of course was what do we do about jedi um the game was set during the classic trilogy time period in between the empire strikes back and return of the jedi and the challenge with that is that jedi in that time period are supposed to be incredibly rare they are incredibly powerful compared to everybody else but of course if you put them in a game then everybody will want to be one so we floated the idea could we make it so no players could be jedi and we were told no it was too important players needed to be jedi we asked could we change the time period to let's say after return of the jedi when

you know thanks to luke you know there's more jedi everywhere we were told no we couldn't do that then there was a question well can we make them not be powerful and the answer to that was well that's not very star wars-y so we were stuck with this impossible dilemma where you needed to create an uber class that uh was somehow incredibly rare even though players had infinite time um and that was in some ways almost the game's original sin and something that ended up leading to massive massive problems later on we played around with the idea of having jedi suffer from perma-death when they lost but that was seen as also being kind of a challenge with the audience so we settled on a system where players had to sample a random set of the features in the game and every player's set was different so hang on to that idea because it'll come back up later the game you know remember what it was like in 2003 we shipped on three cds we took up two gigabytes of space a cable connection today is thousands of times

faster than the modems we were designing for we were looking at making maps that were large much larger than say ultima online or everquest um you know we were under a mandate to ship multiple planets uh and so we ended up shipping actually two and a half gigabytes worth of map data and those maps are to scale there what you see and as you can see that already exceeds the capacity of the cds that we shipped on so we actually had to invent a whole bunch of fractal terrain technology in order to be able to do this um what we did was we basically created a photoshop-like tool that used layers where each layer had procedural rules and these could be added on the fly and those two and a half gigabytes worth of map data ended up shrinking to about uh 30k per planet as a plain old text file it was so much memory to store these

maps that we couldn't even afford to have the maps running in full on the server we actually had to generate them as players walked around on the server which actually led to massive issues with collision uh you know you could shoot bolts through terrain that didn't exist all of that kind of thing but it did unlock really really cool procedural placement of buildings at run time while you were playing the game and the neat thing about this is this is actually way before uh this technology in 2003 um that we we developed was way advanced for its time um you know not you haven't seen this until just recently actually uh uh this technology and so we had it then and this is a great example this is kind of when we started with the terrain this is what month one and this is month four uh it is an amazing technology and it

allowed us not only to layer like in photoshop different aspects of the terrain but we also are allowed to do based on height map rivers flowing and things like that that was in the game as well so very some very very cool technology that we're allowed to do um next slide yeah so of course everything had to go through approval processes which slowed us down right a lot of extra dev work exactly and so basically i had to i had to actually hire a producer just to handle the approval processes for lucasarts and lucasfilm because not only did we had to go through lucasarts our publisher we also had to go through lucasfilm to get them approved and some things i had to go all the way up to george lucas himself to approve we were lucky to have hayden blackman who was basically a walking encyclopedia of star wars knowledge over on the lucas arts side because since he was uh i forget his title continuity coordinator

something like that on the star wars side he was really able to do a lot of approving directly um but the level of secrecy was over the top we were being sent material from the movies that had not yet come out these were hand couriered on cds encrypted with every file name garbled the file extensions were changed so you couldn't double click the file and there was a separate hand courier paper copy of what file was what so that you could find what you were looking for and this just led to really crazy development challenges like uh you probably remember um mace windu's purple lightsaber right uh samuel l jackson we had designed a lightsaber system that relied on different colored crystals and one day the message comes down nope all the lightsabers everywhere in star wars are changing to only be red and blue we said but we've we've gone and designed the system no you've got to redo it all it turned out that that was just because

george lucas was editing this battle and he wanted the two sides to be clearly different from one another so a few weeks later we were told never mind you can put it all back all the lightsaber colors can come back in it's okay again so stuff like that was uh you know an ongoing development challenge as we went to go get approvals this is you so one of the things that we uh learned a lot about this again we used a layering system is we had to recreate uh these on tatooine mos eisley and other areas and they had to be pretty much exact uh because again this was very much tied to the movie so anything that was shot in the movies we had to actually replicate for approval into the game so it was very tedious task of looking at uh we had pictures to look at for reference we had a huge library of reference material that we had to go through hayden blackmon was also our guide for that as

well because he was a sub-dramatic expert that we used not only was he our producer but he was as ralph said in subject matter expert on pretty much anything star wars it was great to have him there yeah we were pushing boundaries on a lot of things we uh put together a character customization system using morph targets um that i think was the second video game ever to ship with something like this the first was whichever elder scrolls game i remember being really upset that they beat us to market with it and we supported just incredible levels of character customization including old and young including uh really detailed uh things like beards makeup tattoos everything that people see today in character customization in terms of modern aaa games we were having to invent on the fly back then because we were literally one of the very first

games on earth to do anything quite like this and to this level of detail including things like depth of layered clothing all of that and um we ended up pushing it in directions uh pretty far right and to the reality is the character customization people look at star wars galaxies as the really the premier first one that really pushes the boundaries of that technology and and we wanted to do that because we wanted to make sure everyone felt unique in the world and they could be what they wanted to be we weren't living limiting them to cut cookie cutter type of body types and faces and heads and so that led to a lot of really cool customization in the game characters that you see running around um yeah it's it's funny because years later i actually met jk rowling and uh she was asking me so hey so in this game can i be an overweight dancing

wookie so it kind of became a signature of of the game right but people knew that it had that level of personal expression in it one of the nice things about a swig was it had a dynamic poi system in the game uh what that allowed us to do is if you had a group of people walking around on tatooine for instance you could have a dynamic system like a spacecraft crash in front of you someone run out and give you something then suddenly stormtroopers come over the horizon after you and shoot you for what you have and you give it to an npc to get a reward once once you uh you know you tell them she tells you to give it to this npc in this town this was an amazing system and it was also based on the level you were the level of your group for your party not only dynamic dynamic system did that but it also allowed events to be done in the game where we had real-time people be able to run events in real time on all

our servers anytime anywhere within our structure so that was pretty cool yeah it also of course introduced all kinds of challenges around changing the collision and the nav mesh on the fly and all the rest so it definitely gave us some headaches headaches was one of the big things right because throughout all of this we were really consciously trying to create sort of a next generation mmo something that broke the template of just levels and classes so we tried doing too many new things we had crafting on equal footing with combat we had hairdressing in the game you know 612 individual skill boxes we even modeled ptsd if you got hurt a whole bunch while you were out in combat you had to come back and hang out in a bar and listen to musicians and and watch dancers and that kind of thing uh and people definitely made fun of us for that right like it was it introduced a level of

both tedium and also kind of social contact that was sort of different from other games right um so we were really pushing boundaries all over the place uh in a bunch of different directions a great example of that was actually with the economy which to this day is one of the main things that people talk about with star wars galaxies we didn't set the price of any goods in the game players set all of the prices they harvested materials from the environment and these materials actually appeared and disappeared and generated with different stats all the time which you caused huge database problems because not only were those stats different but then anything you made from them also came out with different stats and it had four digits of precision so a few years later there were literally billions of resource items billions of types of materials in the database and enormous database bloat and performance problems

and many of those there was one unit left of that resource in the entire galaxy everything was supposed to break everything uh was crafted by players this meant that when the game started they had to bootstrap up the economy from nothing and it was really a very complex system uh if you go hang out on reddit today and threads start about hey what's the greatest crafting system of all time a lot of players mention galaxies because of this level of depth but boy did it cause problems with the database it really did so we've gone and built all of this technology but can we actually ship the game right the answer was no no we couldn't so the timeline that you see here is we started in 2000 and you can see how we we went to e3 in 2001 and showed off

a demo of the game at e3 which won many awards including almost uh game best of show um we lost it by one um i think it was what's that i think we got pc best of show we did get pc game of thrones right and then uh we got the online uh game of show as well um but we made a lot of promises here uh when we shut it off uh we also showed off the the crate dragon as you came around the corner the first time you ever seen it in the star wars game and we could see how our tools were progressing and where we are when we opened up the game we literally had people running around and just texting with text bubbles when we first opened up we didn't have much anything working now i think was very fortunate that we decided when we originally did this game we only had we knew we didn't have a lot of time to build this game a very short time frame so we knew to

have we need to we knew that we had to do procedural type a systematic type of uh game design and not have everything handcrafted so we didn't want to get into a handcrafted treadmill when we released the game so doing that means that we had a huge open world sandbox game luckily but we didn't have much content i'd call it in the game to really hold the players for a very very long time because our tools our content tool pipeline as you can see in the two dots at the end came very close to each other before we launched we had no choice the launch was set we were not going to move that date they only gave us another month that was it we asked for six uh that wasn't going to happen we actually even had to bring up you know 60 people to help us uh to try to get the content done but it was very much a hopeless case we knew when we launched this game that we would

be running behind and having to really play catch-up in terms of getting the content out and fixing the bugs in the game yeah so this meant there we are running off on the end um we've gotten an extra month we have no real quests i think there's one question in the entire game there is no quest system so we just had to randomly generate missions from mission terminals and not even from npcs because we couldn't afford the right dialogue for npcs so it was just mission terminals and worst of all we ran out of time to implement all of that tracking for becoming a jedi and we had to change the system instead of a ransom random subset of all the activities in the game every player had an invisible list of five skills out of the 612 that they needed to learn and that was how they were going to unlock jedi that was a very fateful decision made at the end of a you know 14 or 16 hour long crunch day um that proved to have really

bad repercussions later we had planned to have things like player granted missions and we were cutting whole skill trees at this point because we were just really desperate for time we knew we were running out of it um and this entire time of course we had been talking with the community about what we were making and so one of the things that i had a lot of experience on in meridian 59 and then went to uo and worked with raf on uos how to build community and how to talk to community and how important that was in an online game so i took a lot of lessons i learned there and i see i saw the way this was happening so i got the community involved in this game right away and so about six months after launch we formed a special jedi council of key players that we felt like in the community invited them over to our offices we paid for everything and to come in and be our council and help us

guide us to what net what the players really want to do and this concept was never done before in an online game and so this council and how we interact with the community was really uh very important to us because we realized that we had a very rapid fan base we wanted to make sure that we we knew the way the game was launched we knew it was buggy we were going to do everything we can to fix it to help we built basically help with engagement and their the jedi council's job was to help us to figure out how to triage what to do next to get this game into the shape that we want to and the players want want it to be so on that you know we also had a situation where we were uh threatened by the 501st because you couldn't play a stormtrooper in the game they threatened to go boycott our offices and i always had and i and i wish they had because that would have been great news but i was i was terrified oh god we're going to get

harassed now because and there was a reason we couldn't do that because it all had to do with the movies and we couldn't talk about it at all we were told not to talk about it at all so uh at that time no one knew storm troopers for clones no one and so that was a a really really important secret that george lucas wants to make sure kept within his group and so that is the reason why you cannot play a stormtrooper in the game yeah we we eventually calmed them down by saying well you can get stormtrooper armor and wear it and you can take the side of the stormtroopers you just can't really be one yeah but we can't tell you why [Laughter] oh well um an effect of all of this was that there was a lot of hype a lot of people got really really excited that community was so big and so active it translated directly into day one sales but you know the coverage people are

tipping galaxies and sims online which was the other upcoming big mmo to be the two big mmos sims online even landed on the cover of time magazine or something right and so there was an enormous level of hype and in the office we are freaking out because we know our timeline is so short right a release date hasn't been announced yet and we know that we're we're about to hit a wall and the one thing about that is you know when you when you log when you launch a game for the first time or talk about it from a marketing campaign not for launching the game for a marketing campaign when you really release for the first time i think one of the biggest lessons i learned is we release way too early i think that if you ever you know one of the lessons i learned for all the online games i have is only talk about it when there's a point of action to occur like signing up for a beta or whatever and it should be very close to when you're about to go into beta test and that should be it because if you wait so long

people in their minds get set up to what their perception of what the game is and it's very hard to change reality uh because perception is reality and so what that led to is we knew we were heading headfirst into a very bad situation which when we launched the game uh we asked for it you know like i said six months to a year i didn't think that we would get a year but i think maybe we could get six months but we got one month which really kind of like put us in a very big bind for for releasing this game because you only get one launch if anything is you got to get out of this you only get one opening night and what that happens if you don't make it on the d1 the first day and it becomes a very bad experience for the player what'll happen is you have a curve and that curve goes like this and if you launch poorly that curve will go like this you'll never get that really big accelerant of that upward trending curve ever ever ever again you

only get one opening night now most people think in today's world if you see mmos or online games launched they uh two years later they come back and say oh they actually are pretty good but they'll never reach that high point of the initial launch ever that i've seen so it's hard for a team that worked and crunched so hard we did that game in two years and nine months that was with no technology at all we had to basically build everything from scratch that was an amazing amount of work in that very short period of time and we all it's very discouraging for the team to see it launched the way it did and we paid for it because this is probably the only classic game post mortem you'll see that won coaster of the year the initial reception was not good i'm not sure there's much more to say about that no yes and life went on right i mean we have to run the game absolutely and the one thing i want to

say is we had some technology that we were using that were very very new uh to the way the database is stored and also uh with the company running everquest they never had that day one surge that this game had and so what happened was is their login service melted on the amount of transactions per second that was happening and they could not scale fast enough and it took several days for that instability to get cleared up and on top of that we had a new way of storing data as ra as raf said because our objects the way they are the database we bought was for a very high-end company that did very much uh enterprise level software had never seen the transactions per second that was coming in with our game they never seen that and so they started melting and we had to figure out that for about i'd say two weeks of instability really did cost us a huge amount of players uh going into this game because the player experience just wasn't where it needed to be

and yet what ended up happening was what people today call sort of a golden age of uh star wars galaxies everybody talks about this pre-cu period um you know early on we actually had a pretty robust analytics system and uh we actually have some numbers here to share about what life was like during this time period we were able to measure things like uh gdp growth in the game and and where income was coming from and so on and even though the combat was terrible the game balance was awful and there was no content in the game we found that the sandbox elements of the game were surprisingly popular and were working really really well really high numbers of people were participating in all of these peaceful ways to play and of these probably one of the biggest and most forward-looking

was player housing yeah so player housing was an amazing triumph we learned a lot from uo if anything that taught us about player housing was it was what you owe what to do and what not to do in player housing um there were situations that people took player housing so serious and uh we weren't going to screw this up in star wars galaxies um that i wasn't going to have happened i you know the housing was so screwed up that i actually found a letter on my doorstep that was not posted and said how would you like your house broken into that was the first time i realized how how fans could be it really scared me and i said no i'm not going to have that happen here again so we put a lot of effort into our housing system and because we're a fractal terrain based uh we actually can level out and place buildings on the terrain very effectively and efficiently and officially so much that sometimes it hid entrance to the dungeon

there are checks that we're not put on specific places there were bugs actually that occurred that we needed to fix but most of all the housing really worked well and it created cities within uh galaxies on planets and so it was a very very cool and the customization which i like to talk about which is our next slide was something that has never been done before there's nothing out there like that in my opinion on player housing that was out added the custom this is players customization that we showed you here they could customize this place craft many items and put it in the house and so it what this allowed is not only players to do that but guilds to express themselves so guilds have their own guild halls that they develop themselves and because we had different types of housing available and different types of blueprints so to speak they could pick the ones they liked and big halls and things like that so guilds actually built their own places and that was very very cool and compelling and engaging in

our game so the housing really really took off and it's something that's remembered a lot in star wars galaxies yeah and it wasn't just house by house because guilds and players got together to found cities and we actually created a politician skill tree that allowed the elected mayor of a town to set laws taxation for their town decide who the police force was so they could eject people or kill people who were misbehaving you know we had a whole bunch of individual servers there's an average of 125 player cities per server so that means every planet had about a dozen player cities we had only built three or four per planet and they went on and built a dozen more on every planet and these had theaters and they had museums and they had malls and they had all kinds of stuff and this is one of those things that uh outside of the political structures

in eve online maybe um you know it's hard to think of other examples of this kind of empowerment being given to players it really was a signature element and there are still countless websites out there for player-run cities and galaxies even though the game has been shut down for a long time and the cool thing about is because the fractal terrain and other things that we're allowed to do again we we had this way before no man scott had this yeah this is in 2003 that this came out so you can imagine how far ahead we were and this and we streamed terrain in real time both server and client as the players went around so that was just unheard of too um one of the neatest things i think that we had in our game is the pet system the pet system was really really cool you started out with a baby pet a baby bantha for so to speak and they were baby banters all around and you could and you could train it

and basically it would learn if you were hostile to it it would be a mean santa if you were nice to it and kind to it and it would be a kind event but it actually learned from your behaviors of what type of personality it would come up with and you could teach your tricks and so one of the big things about the pet system was very very cool you walk into cities you see people all around with pets and it became a problem that we actually had to nerf because the pets became very powerful over time and again if you're abusive to it it would also be very tough very aggressive animal so we actually had to nerf it a little bit so it didn't dominate the combat component of star wars galaxies but the neat thing about it is it allowed players it did allow players to do um arenas little battles between the animals and embed on them and things like that there was so many different uh aspects of the pet system that people used in white and you see them in their houses people walking around the streets

with them it was very very cool part of our game in fact very unusual aspects of it that made it i think one of the best pet systems uh in a game yeah another thing that we ended up pushing on you know player versus player free-for-all player killing had just about i mean it cut uo's user base in half it was devastatingly bad and the consensus on the in the market was that safe worlds was the way to go but of course we had to model a galactic civil war between the empire and the rebels so we knew that pvp was going to have to be really important so we came up with this temporary enemy flagging system that let you join aside but as a covert sympathizer so you could turn your flag on temporarily and duck back out and you know the stats at the time showed that only one to three percent of people would turn on a flag permanently in games like everquest

sure enough less than one percent of our players actually went to full-time pvp but over a quarter of them ended up participating in the galactic civil war as long as it wasn't a permanent commitment now this may not seem shocking today right but back then the market couldn't sustain a title like rust or dayz or you know games that were sandboxy but free for all pvp on their own that gameplay had to be integrated into something larger and uh galaxies opened the door along with games like daoc to show how you could have that kind of realm versus realm combat and we definitely lifted a bunch from daoc in order to do that of course um and that pvp in combination with the proctor and terrain and the ability to build buildings meant that there could be entire bases spawning on the map being destroyed the ability to put down turrets in them and have really large-scale battles and faction warfare

so it really did unlock this thing where at any moment you might be in a city and suddenly have a huge battle that wrapped around you and if you weren't interested it couldn't hurt you but it definitely made the environment feel more exciting one of the cool things about that uh is and i will tell you is watching the faction battles i mean again all the tools in this the sandbox really worked well that was the cool part of the game i will tell you and actually where all the players migrated to as we're trying to build our content they started building content basically and actually entertaining themselves very very quickly and probably the biggest way they did that was of course with the stuff that people made the most fun of us for yes um like having dancing in the game at all but it turned out that dancing and musicianship and beauty pageants and making music videos

and filming little soap operas and bear in mind this was before youtube existed right um there was just an enormous amount of player creativity that got unlocked by this even though everybody was also simultaneously saying that's not very star wars yeah and they had things like hot pants all sorts of music videos that they did that were were extremely popular by the way uh not only with our fans but out outside of our fan base actually the emphasis on crafting in the game also unlocked all of this social play you know the player economy had bootstrapped up from nothing because there wasn't real loot but players during this time period bootstrapped it up to the point where one third of all players were running a shop where there are bakeries and weaponsmiths and architects and whatever so we hadn't put any npc shopkeepers in the game at all and there were 15 000 of

them per server uh probably more than we would have put in by hand had we been doing it so the community during this time period was amazing and yet we were still going to hit a wall yeah so i mean basically if if you see this it's you know we promised a star wars experience but we delivered a sandbox and i think that when you think of star wars you're talking about the fantasy of being a jedi or being uh on the other side darker light and so um that we did not provide a very good uh game experience for player experience for and that really did hurt us um i think later on they made a lot of fixes and a lot of changes towards that but initially not filling out that fantasy was really something that hurt us and i think raf could talk about that right now yeah um

go ahead it was it was super clear that in the first few months this year is basically a graph of how many players are quitting in the first month second month third month and so on across a variety of games and the blue line is galaxies and you can see that the early months it actually held better but players started turning out at increasing rates the longer they had played the game because there simply wasn't enough to do other than participate in the sandbox community when i'm saying here content is king i always talk about heartbeat heartbeat is the amount of content you're able to deliver after live a lot of games even games today have made that valuable mistake of being able to being on a content treadmill that is too difficult to tap into and get content out to the players in a timely manner and when you do that guess what happens people leave the game over time

what is interesting to say is if we were to have that extra year that extra six months we would have had a different situation in our game and i think we'd have time to clean up the bugs and get the content the way we wanted to get the content but you see that didn't happen we had to play catch-up and that was really really difficult for us to do but one of the neat things about the survey is that 80 will return if we fixed it that was huge that's a huge positive note about what we did so you know people look back at this game i think they remember the sandbox elements of the game versus the fantasy elements of the game that they were filmed what happened was people filled their fantas their fantasy of star wars and living in the star wars universe themselves so they became what they wanted to be in the star wars universe versus us dictating it to it now that's pretty cool and i think that's probably why people really hold this game to where it is today in their minds because they were actually living their own fantasies versus us creating one for them

yeah in fact our tagline for a while was the greatest story ever told in the star wars universe yours right remember that i still like that tagline yes we desperately tried adding content but we don't even have the tools infrastructure to do it right like all of our work had gone into that system underpinning stuff right it had not gone into making quest tools so it's just like pulling teeth to get simple things like a dungeon added to the game and you know this is still in the first six months of launch that we're hitting these issues and we get told by marketing you know what to do a new marketing push we need jedi in the game we want jedi by christmas and the decision is made to drop hints but if you remember players just needed to learn an arbitrary five skills out of the 612 a random set for each of them as soon as we stopped dropping hints a few players said oh

it's a skill it's a skill it's a skill and then they decided they knew the whole system and set out to learn every single skill in the game one after the other which meant the creature handlers started killing monsters the people who liked cooking started making spaceships the people who liked you know building houses went on adventures and died to create dragons everybody started playing the ways they didn't like because the idea of becoming a jedi was so powerful and the result was that our churn rate went up more and we started losing players even faster one of the things that we did is a lot of us came from wing commander so we knew about space flight we knew how to do space flight one of the uh aspirational games that we were doing even with privateer line with sun dog and mule was the two taglines that we used as gains of aspirational here sundog gave us a presence of what it's like working on

multiple functions on a ship so when we did the millennium falcon experience in jtl it was that you could be a pilot you could be a gunner or you could be an engineer and that's pretty damn cool um and allows people to have multiple roles on a ship be and be able to switch them off and so that what i call millennium falcon experience was a cornerstone of jtl but it was a very cool game because you can fly uh star wars ships into combat and have fun doing it uh jtl was a great expansion in a sense that it allowed us and i'd say 80 percent of the user base got it but it was one unfortunate thing the unfortunate thing was it launched right when wow launched yeah so wow brought the whole industry down not just us every online game out there went down as soon as wyo went out wow was like a huge succubus of players

went over there and drove into wow and it drove all our numbers down but it didn't help jtl jtl got us a very small bump uh yeah and it was it was such a good expansion and and yet it really suffered from this now galaxies of course this is a graph of daily active users you can see where wow hits the game it actually hit all mmos galaxies suffered less than the level in class based other mmos that were out there at the time because the gameplay the sandbox gameplay wasn't on offer in well but it really was just a devastating devastating blow and when combined with the increased churn ever since the jedi holocrons um it left the live team in a really challenging position and you know trying to stop the bleeding and at this point you know i had already moved off the team i've been promoted up to uh chief creative officer at sony online so i got to watch a lot of this from a distance as the live team was

working on let's try a combat upgrade oh no that didn't do enough let's try modifying the grouping rules let's adjust the pvp all in all none of it was really moving the needle as you saw from the graph and so this fateful decision is made to try a really big revamp that was known as the nge at that particular time i decided uh i did not want to participate because i knew that you you have a core loops in the game you built from scratch and does and the players love and enjoy and if you change that core loop and make it more like wow you will lose a large audience over time and i said you can't do that in a game like this has already been out you already have the inner and outer loops already working in the game changing that would be devastating to your base and you'll never ever get it back and so i said yep i think that if you want to guys do that that's not where i want to head and so at that time i did

leave um soe and uh and actually joined bioware uh and formed bioware austin studio ironically he ended up making another star wars mmo yeah i want to try it again with my second shot yeah so uh you know i also didn't think this was a good idea unfortunately we were right it has gone down in history as the most infamous video game patch ever made um it's made the new york times all of that skill based stuff was removed in favor of classes the rpg combat came out in favor of action rpg with clicky stuff um you couldn't mix and match different skills from different skill trees anymore peaceful professions now became helpless in combat because there were combat levels jedi was a starter class and maybe the worst blow of all to a lot of people their pets the pet system got turned off for a while and all the pets were locked away in their datapad ui and

you could see fluffy locked in there and tap on them but you couldn't get them out anymore and players literally held funerals across the game for their pets it was just a disastrously bad reaction and it wasn't just the new york times it made the washington post it made the christian science monitor and one of the weirdest things was suddenly seeing people say no wait this was something different and unique we liked it after all and that was a bit of a you know i mean we were wrestling with bad reviews and and churn and all the rest and yet we get reactions like this so that was a eye-opening and shocking and really just depressing and distressing to the team this was a very very tough time period um yeah go ahead and if you look at the graph coming up yeah it was

painful i'm not sure there's much to say uh it was brutal um we we had projected out what the normal rate of cancellation was in the space of one month we lost 25 of the active user base and it continued to bleed over time as well oh yeah it got worse over time players just complained in droves a refund had to be issued for the last expansion you know there was a marketing push we tried to get magazines to write nice things about the game they said oh it's worth a second look right well that very same magazine galaxies became the only game to win coaster of the year twice i uh not exactly what you want on your resume right so uh yeah and it oh of course the irony is that little review says no more do-overs but that isn't what

happened there was a do-over because there was a new era after that over the next six years the live team on galaxy started to be composed of people who were players of galaxies who loved the sandbox qualities who loved what made it different and unique the things that made it not like wow and over the next six years they did this amazing job of putting all that sandbox stuff back in and we can only call out a couple of things that they did during that time period um partly because neither of us were there but we really want to give them props for the amazing job they did in basically turning the game around and bringing it back to life they did some amazing things um they again the event system on there really helped because they ran a lot of events we had real time we had a people that we played as

volunteers to run the events and they developed tools and added to the sandbox tool set uh where people or players can actually do and create as you see quests a quest system and we when they put that in the live team put that in there were three main quests were created by players in one month it was an amazing experience for the players yeah but despite all of their heroic efforts december 15th 2011 the game was nonetheless shut down the team was so devoted and dedicated that they launched atmospheric flight the ability to take off with your x-wing from the ground and fly over the planets and from there go out into orbit and into space kind of the star citizen dream today and they launched that even though the game was going to get shut down that month because they just were that committed to delivering on the promise of what star wars galaxies could be

and so they held this crazy giant party and people from all over the industry logged in many of the game sites ran all day live streams of the final days with all kinds of really weird stuff happening like giant ewok battles in the middle of mass eisley and whatever um as players just really cut loose and were given access to do whatever they wanted on the last final days and so it was a big farewell but it wasn't the end because there was an afterlife the fans also worked on keeping it alive they started building emulators and today there are dozens of star wars galaxies emulators running these projects have been running on a volunteer basis for years now and fans are not just keeping it alive they're extending it bespin just launched in star wars galaxies emulators this month and to this day across these fan run

servers there's still thousands of active users if galaxies were a title today running on steam it would have enough active users to be in the top hundred online games on steam even now which is just a testament to the passion and dedication of that community and you know we know that like i said it had a very ridiculous short debt period two years and nine months it had one of the worst launches ever i'd have to say a terrible churn and almost no content and i will say it had the infamous patch of all time that's the nge but still people think of this game even today as an unbelievable masterpiece in their minds so it's interesting makes us i'm left with these weird feelings because it was so painful

and so demoralizing and it's like its reputation has improved over time right because now people look back and say look at the ambition look at the things that were tried it turns out people do want to you know be uncle owen and um peru that used to be the knock against it and today with the popularity of animal crossing and stardoo valley and you know all of these ways to play that are are just living in an alternate world right somehow the game that went from two coasters of the year variety names it you know number 10 best star wars game of all time and there's this massive cognitive dissonance right because the memory of the things that it did right it turns out that those ideas were really really right they really were going to be the thing that extended the game marketplace and a lot of those things wouldn't come to full fruition until mobile gaming and casual gaming

really blossomed right today people look back at the crafting system and say that's the one to emulate they look back and they say lots of players want to live peaceful lives you know it used to be that you had to mine everything by hand the idea that you could put down a mine and check back in later that was the basis of games like farmville and all of the facebook games right um some of these features that of that we put into galaxies that were the oddball things have turned out to have been incredibly important to the development of online games i mean there's lots of things you think about minecraft where that came from and all the systems in minecraft you know uo influenced and i i probably believe star wars galaxies maybe have influenced that as well um in roblox today it's it's an amazing amount of stuff that we did back in 2003 we got laughed at like dancing and

musicians music position skill in the game and things like that but actually people have fond memories because like i said before they created their own stories and lived in the start with living in the star wars universe and that was what made it special to them yeah and so one of my favorite stories there is a um a musician named porter robinson and uh i'd urge all of you watching you know we avoided putting the music in here because we don't want a youtube takedown or anything but go search for the song goodbye to a world porter is a really really famous grammy-nominated uh electronic musician and his album worlds is considered a landmark in moving edm in a more ambient peaceful direction and it turns out that this landmark album was inspired by his time as a player in star wars galaxies and other mmos that shut down

and today you know whenever i hear that particular piece of music where this robot voice is singing i'll say goodbye soon even though it's the end of the world you know don't blame yourself it's not your fault but you know in the end this is about giving life to a world that is your own and that's really what galaxies was about in the end and so even though we can't play the song kind of like for you to all kind of play out this presentation go find that song and listen to the end as the voice kind of dies off making weird modem noises um because that's the right way to play off star wars galaxies in the end as it heads off into its afterlife um it really was a world for players a world of their own thank you thank you for joining us we appreciate it [Music]