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Star Wars Galaxies - Fact-Checking, Fan Style

Posted by simoniker on from the bantha-droppings dept.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to this interesting LA Times article regarding Star Wars Galaxies. As well as plenty of background information, the piece talks about how detail-orientated beta testers of the forthcoming Sony-published PC MMORPG are, and includes this choice quotation: "..a German fan was outraged that the cockpit dimensions of an X-wing star fighter varied from those in the movies. Blackman looked into it and found that the game's version was indeed off -- by 6 centimeters."

1 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why not an Alternate Universe? by Babbster · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It would be even more absurd to be able to kill Darth Vader only to have him "respawn" a week later.

    The biggest problem with making the game world completely malleable by the players is best described in two parts:

    1. Players who aren't online when a galaxy-shattering event occurs (like killing Darth Vader or Princess Leia being turned to the dark side or whatever) miss out. As in my first sentence, it seems like it would be no more fun or involving if those characters reverted (back to life or back to good in my examples) after a specified time, effectively resetting the game.

    2. If the game changes too significantly (and doesn't reset) then it destroys what the developers have created. To use the example of Everquest, if Freeport were permitted to be destroyed by dark elvish players then everything the developers put in Freeport (including quests, NPCs, dock, etc.) is lost content that would need to be replaced. The developer would essentially have to build a new game multiple times just to keep up with "Players Gone Wild."

    In an MMORPG like this, you either accept the internal logic or you don't. If you don't, it's probably just not the right game for you. For a bigger influence on events in the Star Wars universe, you might want to watch for Knights of The Republic - single-player RPG - coming later this year for Xbox (and I believe for PC as well, though that version will come a bit later).