Update 13 Star Wars Chronicles

Chronicles is live! The dev team has been working really hard on the system and it feels great to have it on our live servers. We enjoyed demoing it at SOE Fan Faire 2009 and SOE Block Party and we couldnt wait to get it in your hands. Right now, we are enjoying seeing players create quests using the tool we worked hard to give you and the quests are really amazing. When Chronicles hit public test, we received some great feedback and I think together our community and the team did a great job identifying and addressing the top issues. Many of you understand what we are trying to do with the system make generating user content a fun and rewarding game in itself. If you are challenged to make content, having fun doing it, and well rewarded, the end result will be some compelling content everyone will enjoy as well.

One concern I have heard is regarding the Chronicle rewards being no-trade shared instead of tradable. The point of the Chronicles rewards is to offer incentives for players to create new quests and complete other players quests. Doing so will earn tokens that you use to buy the new rewards. If you could buy or trade these rewards without tokens, it would defeat the goal of the system. Instead, buy and trade relics and quests and earn the tokens you need to get the rewards you want. In the near future we will be doing double-token and double-chronicle-xp events on live which will give you a chance to really rack up some tokens. We also put a nice surprise in for players who consistently complete Chronicles quests. Just hang in there; well make sure you will have fun earning those cool rewards.

We will also continue to expand Chronicles. Death Troopers and the GCW update will also have Chronicles specific content. Want to write a creepy quest line? Well well be adding Death Troopers specific relics including new destroy, location, and comm. versions. We will also be adding new relic types in the future like spawn yep, you will be able to spawn mobs with real loot, name them, and let them say a phrase like Teesquared shall be avenged! There were some other advanced Chronicles features that we know you felt were important to the system but didnt make the initial public release. Some of them were self-comm, resizable Quest Builder (this one should be on TC/TCP this weekend), and the Chronicle vendor. Going forward well keep listening to your feedback and watching the Chronicles activity. We will keep enhancing the system over time.

If you havent taken the GU13 poll yet, be sure and cast your vote. DevH & I have a small bet going on what wins the poll.

Nothing beats player generated content!

Whats that thing doing in my Chronicles comm. window and what is it saying about my pants?

Update 14 Death Troopers

Im glad to report that Star Wars Galaxies will be featured in a full page ad in the upcoming release of the Death Troopers novel. Keep your eye out for new players drawn to our game to check out this book inspired content. Make sure you scare them first and then give them a hand and an arm and a leg Also, the Death Troopers key-art we created for the Fan Faire poster was included in last months Star Wars Insider magazine. The next issue will have more detailed coverage of our games Death Trooper content.

So we have been showing a lot of the visuals, what about sounds? Our studio sound team is currently in the process of creating some eerie sounds made just for this update. This will include grunts and groans of the afflicted, some bone crushing noises, and the always pleasant gnawing on flesh sounds we all know and love. Well also be getting some ambient sounds and possibly some new music. Overall this new content is shaping up to be some of the best weve put into Galaxies yet.

Update 15 Galactic Civil War

In the beginning there was the design ... Star Wars Galaxies will have open worlds where players will be able to place harvesters, structures, and cities ... terraforming the lands and establishing themselves as property owners in the Star Wars universe and they will be happy

And then the designers decided that they too must world build in order to add more Star Wars content to the game but the players had placed objects there already and the designers were sad

For the GCW update, we needed to reserve locations on some of the planets to put some static bases. These planets also support player housing and/or harvesters. In order to make sure we didnt slap down some new GCW content inside someones city we first ran a database query to gather the locations of the player place-able objects on each planet across all the servers. This data was parsed and an image was created which overlays the planet. This allows designers to place no-build regions in locations where no player structures exist on any servers. This reserves the location for future world building needs. These new GCW no-build regions have already been pushed to the live servers. Some new stuff will be showing up in those regions when GCW goes live.

- Teesquared