We know you have been waiting and wondering about our plans for Star Wars Galaxies in 2007, and we are excited to be able to share some initial details with you today. First off, we’d like to thank all of you for your enthusiasm for the game and your excitement about all the new features we’ve been able to implement recently. We also appreciate the constructive feedback you’ve given us over the past year, and we encourage you to continue to share your thoughts and feelings about the features we’ll be adding in 2007.
LucasArts and Sony Online Entertainment have been working closely over the past few months to analyze what went right, and wrong, in 2006 and where we wanted to take the game in 2007. Like last year, we will continue to release content and features via our Chapter Adventures every eight weeks or so. As always, they will be delivered to you as part of your subscription to the game. These Chapters have allowed us to introduce new content on a consistent basis, while still giving us the flexibility to implement some of the feedback you gave us in the community summits and on the forums. Speaking of the community summits, we’re pleased to say that we’ll be starting them up again this year, albeit in a slightly different form that will accommodate more participants. In addition, we will continue to be active on the forums, responding to your questions and providing important information about the game.
Today we are publishing our plans for Chapter 6, which centers on the new Beast Master expertise tree that will be available to all players. We are excited about this feature, as it addresses a major community request while also delivering a more balanced gameplay experience and opening up the very fun and rewarding activity of crafting and raising pets to all professions. We invite you to read the Chapter 6 outline and give us your feedback and comments as we finalize the specifications.
In the weeks ahead we will be publishing more information about the plans we have for upcoming Chapters and our other initiatives. We have strived to focus our long term planning on a few key systems and content additions which will form the core of our upcoming Chapters, while leaving plenty of room for the community to help drive what comes next. We know that some of the things we already have planned will be very exciting for our players, but at the same time we want to be nimble in reacting to community input as it comes in. Every new Chapter we released in 2006 has inspired even more creative ideas from our players and we have no doubt that this will continue in 2007 and beyond.
We also would like to take this opportunity to mention some recent changes in our development team. As you know, SWG has been live for almost four years now, with many of our team members working on the game since the start of development more than seven years ago. Two developers that have been on the game since the beginning, Grant McDaniel, a producer at Sony Online, and Julio Torres, a producer at LucasArts, have moved on to other projects. Because of their stellar work on SWG, both guys have been given amazing opportunities within our respective companies. Grant has transitioned over to SOE’s massively multiplayer game based in the DC comic franchise. Julio is now a producer on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for LucasArts. These transitions have been complete for several weeks now, with seasoned, enthusiastic developers taking over the positions, and we wanted to officially share that news with you today. We view these changes as very exciting, both for Grant and Julio, and also for the SWG team, as we’re able to bring in fresh perspectives on the game’s development.
For the rest of the day, we will be stationed on the official forums to address any questions you might have. We’ll do our best to answer specifics, but please understand that many of the details of the new content and features are still being ironed out and will be communicated in future updates. However, we’ll be glad to discuss the motivation behind our thinking, along with our high-level goals for the year.
Sincerely,
The Star Wars Galaxies Development Team Production Leads:
Brian Lowe, Senior Producer at LucasArts Jake Neri, Producer at LucasArts Lorin Jameson, Producer at SOE
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