In my vision of the sequel to Star Wars Galaxies, vehicles would have combat roles rather than just fancy transports such as they are now. Vehicles such as the AT-AT, AT-ST and AT-RT would not be pets users control from the side lines, rather vehicles people could enter and control in battles. The combat class vehicles would no doubt be powerful when compaired to your average foot soldier and likewise much more expensive than your average transport vehicle. The larger, more powerful vehicles would also be lumbering slow vehicles that would encourage their use in combat only roles not for every day transport.
To keep combat vehicles as they are intended, for PVP combat, they would not be useable against PVE targets or some balance against PVE targets would have to be struck to keep them from being to overpowering. Also, they would have to be called from a factional base not just out in the wild from a datapad. This would prevent players from cruising around on their speeder bikes and switching into an AT-AT when they see an enemy player they choose to attack. This will also add to the flavor of planetary attacks in that when you land your forces as the attacking side you will have to establish and defend a factional base to launch attacks from. This will also give defenders goal oriented places to counterattack to expel an intruder from their planet.
More to follow.
Before you get your hopes up, no there is no Star Wars Galaxies sequel in the works, at least not that I am aware of. This is just a short list of some of the things I would like to see included if SOE and Lucasarts decided to make another go at it. The chances of that happening, given the extreme distrust from the original Star Wars Galaxies fan base is extremely unlikely. But never the less, if packed with nice features and properly managed it would probably sell anyway, Star Wars is a genre all to itself and much to intriguing for even the most hard core player to turn down taking a look.
First and foremost, the number one feature is not a game feature at all, but a management feature. The developers would have to work with the fans to produce this product. Sounds easy enough and makes financial sense to make a product people want, but the devs seem to always go another path for whatever reason.
Now, on to the real feature list. One feature that would be hot and is almost certainly something that would sell the game almost by itself is atmospheric flight. Players should be able to land and takeoff from planets in their ships and flight out into space. My idea of atmospheric flight is two fold. Spaceships should handle fairly poorly in the atmosphere, well enough to get in and out of it but not really be that manueverable otherwise. The reason for this is game balance. In my vision of the next Star Wars MMO, entire planets will be able to be captured and controlled by factions or guilds. In this way, factions or guilds who already own a planet have a bit of an edge in a battle, the advantage should go to the defender. How do they get an edge you ask? Inner atmosphere fighters. These ships would be only capable of atmospheric flight or at the very least a low orbit flight with a loss of manueverability in space. Defense of a planet would certainly start at the space level, for a faction or guild to make an attack on a planet, they would need to secure orbit before they could safely bring in their own atmospheric fighters from carrier class capital ships to begin air superiority missions. Only then would an attacker be able to successfully land troop transports on the surface for a ground attack.
In my vision, players would be able to advance through the ranks of their chosen faction and with that gain command possibilities of squads of troops, fighters or even capital ships. No one player would be able to launch a planetary attack by himself, in fact my vision takes several guilds each with its own specialty to launch a planetary attack. For example, one guild could specialize in capital ships, another in space and atmosphere fighters and yet another specialize in ground combat. Large scale battles with NPC troops, fighters and ships to increase the scale.
I’ll be posting much more later on what I think should be included in a remake. In the meantime, do you have any features you’d like to see? Tell us about them, who knows maybe George Lucas will stumble on this and realize the potential. Couldn’t hurt anyway. Until next time.
Star Wars Galaxies has really shifted gears towards instant satisfaction for their replacement player base. I say replacement because the vast majority of the original game players have vacated the game after Sony and Lucasarts overhauled the game at the fundamental level and made it a complete different game experience than people origninally bought. To add to their quest for instant gratification, they are now giving players the ability to instant travel from anywhere on any planet with the exception of Kashyyk. Players will now be able to build a free ship, called the Rattletrap, that can be called anywhere on a planet surface to take them to any space port or shuttle port on the same planet, thus cutting out travel time.
Convenient? Sure. Fun? No.
One of the greatest things about this game was the massive scope of the planets. They were huge, on foot it would take hours and hours to cross a planet from one end to another. Even with vehicles it was still a task. But that was part of the adventure. That made you feel like you were on the planet, the travel was a part of the immersion, and the new Star Wars Galaxies development team puts the finishing touches on the death stroke to this once fun game.
Blackwings
