Star Wars Galaxies 2: Immersion

The ultimate goal of any MMORPG is to totally immerse you in the game world.  That’s what keeps you coming back, in the game world you can be whoever you want to be.  You are a jedi knight constantly at odds with the Empire or a rich and powerful merchant.  The original SWG didn’t pull this off, not enough anyway.  They have some of my favorite features of a space based MMORPG out there but have some short comings too.

Many of the things that would help completely immerse you in the game and let you forget the real world for awhile are also some of the things that would cripple some aspects of game play.  For example, one thing that always ripped me out of the game world was the fact that everyone could carry things that just wouldn’t fit in your pockets.  Say, for example, oh I don’t know, a swoop bike or an X-Wing fighter.  That kind of just flip anything out of your magic pocket game play always threw me for a loop.  I know it’s just a game, but wouldn’t it feel more like Star Wars if you were cruising around a player city on Tatooine and there were player ships landing and taking off?  Or player vehicles parked out in front of the cantina?

These are the sorts of things I would make sure not to miss if I were building an MMOG.  The little things like actually having to go to a hangar and climb aboard your ship to leave the planet make the game more experience feel more real.  Let’s say you’ve got a nice land vehicle, let’s say it’s a skiff.  You shouldn’t be able to just pack that into your backpack and whip it out on some other planet.  No!  You should need a starship with enough room to park it in a cargo bay and take it with you. 

Fighter class starships bigger than a TIE fighter should be able to carry a small land transport so people don’t go back to walking wherever they go but only be able to use their larger transports on whatever planet they bought it on.  This would add an element also to player housing, which in my mind is a great idea done wrong in SWG, but we’ll get to that in another post.  Players would be able to add on garages or hangars to their house to store their bigger equipment when they are away.  If a player owned a starship that was to big to fit in their hangar, well they’d have to rent a docking bay at a local starport or keep it docked to a spacestation in orbit and use a shuttle to get back and forth to the planet. 

The whole point is, vehicles and ships should be visible where ever they are left.  Of course, there would have to be some semblance of rules on where you could park otherwise the planets and space would look like a virtual junk yard.  But that would be fairly easy to overcome with rules of nature.  Ships or vehicles left outdoors for extended periods of time would begin to erode and decay, costing the player to invest in expensive repairs if they choose to leave their ship or vehicles sitting out in the open or just floating in orbit.  You steal another idea from a game called Planetside, vehicle jacking.  Players wouldn’t want to leave their ships out for long for fear it may be stolen.  If you were rich enough, you may be able to afford some NPC guards to protect while you were out running missions but most players would probably prefer to land in a spaceport and ride out on their swoop to keep repairs down and take those NPC’s along to protect them instead of their equipment.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on features you’d like to see in a remake of Star Wars Galaxies.  It will probably never happen but who knows.  Let’s let these game developers know what’s important to the gamers, speak up and let your voice be heard!

Users That Liked This Page Also Liked:

MMORPG Cookie Cutters

Star Wars Galaxies 2: The NPC Element

MMORPG Feature Innovation

Star Wars Galaxies 2: A Remake

MMORPG Persistent Worlds Aren’t Persistent

MMORPG End Game: To Raid or Not to Raid

They Set Us Up the Bomb