Star Wars Galaxies

… in a Galaxy Far Far Away there was a game that was beloved by a group of players for the sort of things that it allowed them to do. I was not one of those players. While I beta tested Star Wars Galaxies, I somehow missed actually playing the game when it was in its heyday. At the time it came out I was somewhere between my pre-World of Warcraft scrawl of games which were Dark Age of Camelot, Horizon: Empire if Istaria, and City of Heroes. The return to what seemed like a more Everquest experience and combat system did not seem at all interesting to me, and I was buffered by the fact that none of my active gaming group at the time were playing it either. However in the years since I feel like I missed a pivotal gaming experience.

Some years back I heard about an emulator server called SWG Legends, but at the time it was a less than retail experience and one largely that required you to know what you were doing before really being able to mess with it properly. Seeing as I never played retail I was completely unaware of how best to get in and experience the game, so as a result I bounced pretty heavily off of it. However in the several years that have passed SWG Legends has turned into what appears to be a full retail experience, even including in game events like Life Day. Recently my friend Tam went on a journey back into this game, and last night for some reason I decided to follow in his footsteps and give it a proper try.

The first challenge is getting Star Wars Galaxies up and running because it has not been online or available for purchase for quite some time. Essentially you have a few options in front of you, the option that the server operators would like you to take is to go onto ebay and purchase a set of the original discs. I did this years ago and picked up a set for $5, but the popularity of this emulator server has seemingly driven the price up to somewhere in the $50-$150 price range. The SWG Reddit has some links in the sidebar to a few options which will allow you to download the three isos directly. After acquiring and installing the original Client, you will have to grab the SWG Legends Launcher pictured above which will patch your client up to the correct version as well as allow you to patch in some upgraded assets. Your first step however should probably be going onto the SWG Legends forums and signing up for an account, because there will be some lead time before one of the volunteer admins authorizes your account which allows you to log in and play the game.

What follows is a fairly modern tutorial driven experience walking you through the first ten levels of your character while exploring a space station. The interface took some getting used to, namely the swapping in and out of mouse-look mode while hitting the alt key. I did some research looking into the combat class that was the easiest to solo, and most of the sources lead me towards a Commando, and as such Belghast Dorgastu the Mon Calamari Commando was born. I am not entirely certain how to play the game to be honest, but left click fires my primary attack and right click fires a charged bolt and with those two things I managed to limp my way to level 10 while following the quest chain and get off of the station.

The piece that was not down my alley at all however was space flight, and as such I plan on taking shuttles wherever I need to go even though the tutorial gave me a perfectly reasonable ship. The end result is more flight sim than I care to experience, so if you have long played that style of game then it might be your jam. Tamrielo grew up playing flight sims so it was absolutely his style, whereas for me anything more realistic than Star Fox is not going to be for me when it comes to space combat. Realistically you need some sort of a controller because the keyboard controls were nonsense trying to do the dog fighting quest against the black sun pirates.

I’ve now allowed myself to get mixed up with the Hutt Cartel and am aligned to the rebels which I am assuming is following a different path than had I chosen to work with the Empire. The first planet is Tatooine and Han Solo unceremoniously deposited me there. I have a speeder though which is cool and am tooling around the dunes completing objectives. All in all it is a pretty fun experience and it is very interesting to see the missing link between what SOE was doing with Everquest and the decisions they ultimately made with Everquest 2. The only bad bits are that the game is native 4:3 resolution and as a result wants to run at 1024×768. I will have to do some research to see if there are ways to mod that up to something more modern. My evening exploring Star Wars Galaxies Legends server was most definitely time well wasted.