November 15th isnt just F2P day but the day that changed SWG forever

As you know, I was a huge Star Wars Galaxies fan. I played the game very early on up until the servers shut down. On November 15th, 2005, Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts with Producer Julio Torres launched the most significant change to the title: the New Game Enhancements (NGE). Many fans of the game quit shortly after the release of this change to the combat system.

For many, it was a players first real taste of deception as not a word was uttered from SOE about the huge changes and their impact as the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion was launched together with the Starter kit and NGE. Taking 34 classes down to just 9.

Happy Birthday NGE/SWG!

Will people ever forget this game and let it die?


It failed, the whole the reason they brought the NGE is because they were losing money in the first place thats why they redesigned it.

Considering the game lasted eight years and only closed because LA would not renew the license with SOE, SWG wasn't a failure. Yes, the game had problems and many of them. But it was not a failure.

To answer your question, NO! I will never forget Galaxies. I had a blast in my time there, all of it during the NGE. I do wish people would stop bringing up Novemeber 15, 2005, however. We all know that is when the NGE went live. It has no bearing on STOR so stop posting about it.

The confirmed max of subs is 350,000 for SWG.


90% of MMOs out Today have twice that and up.

The only reason it lasted 8 years was because it was licensed to run. If it was LA's or SOE's 100% owned development team on it they most likely would have pulled the plug.

And yes, SWG failed. They projected nearly 1 million players at launch and barely got 1/3 of that. So I'd say they set their own expectations on how good their game was.

There have only been like WoW, Aion, Rift and SWTOR were the only P2P MMOs that had over 350K subs at one time. Not even close to 90%.

An eight year run does not make a failed game.I bet if TOR wasn't being made SWG would still be around. Call a failure all you want. The fact it lasted eight years says otherwise. Failed MMOs don't last half that long.

Here Here I 2nd that. If it was free to play it make more money then swtor any day because they had some much stuff they could have put on the swg store that people would have payed real money for, I know I would have.

Considering that SOE has never in the past 9 years released sub numbers for any of its games, I doubt your characterization of "confirmed."
Nevertheless, the game was "bleeding subscriptions" (words from Jeff Rubenfield's blog here http://rubenfield.com/?p=86) up until that day for many of the same complaints posters have made about SWTOR.
For the most part, it never recovered, not because of the quality of game that existed on December 16, 2011, but because you cannot radically change a game 2 years into its life and not upset a large portion of your fans irrevocably. Well, we will see how the re-launch of Final Fantasy XIV does I suppose.
For all the efforts that the flightless bird has achieved, it is still the same flawed game that existed on April 26th, 2005 and was "bleeding" subscribers. When the novelty fades, and the rose colored glasses get cleaned, people will realize the imbalances, the lack of a meaningful GCW, and the absence of compelling end game content that existed in 2005 still exist in their flightless bird in development for the past seven years. They will realize that with all their freedom to play in their sandbox, they are still missing important RP tools like Storyteller and Chronicle Master, major industry innovations that happened late in the game's life cycle but most nostalgics never wanted to try because they were too angry for something that happened years prior.
Those nostalgics will once again realize that it is still hard to compete when there is an alpha class so dramatically more powerful that pvp and pve become trivialized and boring. Unless of course, it was their love of said alpha class (and their resentment of its effective nerfing) that motivated them to create and play the game-which shall-not-be-named in the first place. Much like the flightless bird it is nicknamed after, it will still be lacking atmospheric flight and (better) balance in spaceflight simulated combat, and end-game space content beyond the (horribly bugged, in 2005's version) RE game and dogfights with interceptors around 0,0,0 in deep space.
Will the most innovative, detailed, and creative social, crafting, and housing system in an MMO to date be enough to blind them from those gameplay realities? I doubt anyone can honestly expect a game that is now nearly 12 years old from the infancy of its development can challenge any current MMO title, let alone SWTOR, but I will let them have their fun.
Meanwhile, I still await a true sandbox Star Wars MMO with compelling ground, space, social, crafting, and pvp experiences.

SWG was licensed to run. So they milked its players by staying P2P and introducing the TCG which ALL these collectors wanted those items. The means that they had a contract to run that game with LA so it HAD to stay up. And SWG didn't fail? If it was a good game and lived up to what everyone thought it was going to be then SWTOR never would have been a though.
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