Spotlight: SWG Emulation

Periodically I will be highlighting a community-made game or project I find interesting and that I think you will also. For the first Spotlight I have chosen a project that thousands of MMO players around the world have wished for yet few seem to know about: the Star Wars Galaxies Emulation project. Or projects, rather, as of right now there are three which show a great deal of promise.

Throughout its life Star Wars Galaxies has been no stranger to controversy: first, with the difficulties balancing the Jedi class and the path to obtain a Jedi character and later with Sony Online Entertainment's horrendously miscalculated NGE and, to a lesser extent, the Combat Upgrade of 2005.

The Combat Upgrade, which changed character progression in the game from skill-based to combat-based progression, followed by the NGE which (among other things) reduced the playable classes from 34 to nine, very nearly killed the game and resulted in a mass exodus of most of the player base. To this day SWG does not enjoy the same subscriber numbers it did from 2003-2005 (although subscriber numbers and demographics have been subject to debate from the beginning as well).

Though SWG has nowhere near the player base it once it enjoyed, the game is by no means dead. However, the extremely far-reaching bad word-of-mouth has made SWG (and by extension SOE) synonymous in the MMO world with failure. There is, however, a rather numerous group of players throughout the world who remember the glory days of Star Wars Galaxies and are working hard to create an environment where they can relive those pre-Combat Upgrade memories.

Three predominant groups have sprung up over the past two+ years who are attempting to reverse-engineer SOE's pre-CU servers. By reverse engineering the servers from scratch and using official (i.e. bought from SOE) SWG clients they hope to side-step the obvious legal hurdles encountered by those who maintain private servers for existing games.

SWGEmu - The only community of the three who maintains a public testing server that anyone can join. While the game is still not entirely playable, you can see that they have been making huge strides. In my opinion this is the community to watch for the future and offers the most for those of us who would like to contribute but aren't coders. Their focus on creating an open source emulator and the dedication to keeping the community informed sets this group at the forefront.

SWG:ANH - Another strong group working to create a server emulator, SWG:A New Hope does not currently operate a public test server. They keep the community informed largely through screenshots and videos. A much more tight-lipped group that is developing their emulator as closed-source, they still have a lot of promise for those who just want to play. And with the addition of the core members of the SWG Pre-CU development team, that promise just got a lot brighter.

SWG Pre-CU - The future of this project is currently unknown as their core development team recently left for SWG:ANH. In the coming weeks we should learn more about whether this project will die or be picked up by a new dev team.

Whatever is in store for these projects, one thing is certain: SWG vets and noobs who long to play the game as it was first designed will be getting the chance in the not-too-distant future.