Relive the end of Star Wars Galaxies

Sure, Star Wars: The Old Republic may be "officially" online today, but let's not be too quick to forget what came before it. Relive the final moments of Star Wars Galaxies.

21

Sure, Star Wars: The Old Republic may have "officially" launched today, but let's not be too quick to forget what came before it. A few days ago, Sony Online Entertainment officially closed Star Wars Galaxies, and it appears many decided to come together for a final farewell. The Galaxies were lit up with fireworks, as members chatted in the game's closing moments.

A YouTube user managed to capture the last ten minutes, including the abrupt (and tear-jerking) "Disconnect" screen that ended the long-running MMO.

Video uploader Kuokka77 noted that "SWG was the first ever mmorpg for me. There can be only one first ever. Therefore i have some unique memories from this game that no other game can't possibly provide - ever. The first few weeks especially were something magical."

Andrew Yoon was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    December 20, 2011 5:15 PM

    Andrew Yoon posted a new article, Relive the end of Star Wars Galaxies.

    Sure, Star Wars: The Old Republic may be "officially" online today, but let's not be too quick to forget what came before it. Relive the final moments of Star Wars Galaxies.

    • reply
      December 20, 2011 5:57 PM

      Video uploader Kuokka77 noted that "SWG was the first ever mmorpg for me. There can be only one first ever. Therefore i have some unique memories from this game that no other game can't possibly provide - ever. The first few weeks especially were something magical."

      I guess if you didn't know any better, then they might have seemed that way. It only took me two weeks to figure out SWG wasn't worth the time.

      • reply
        December 20, 2011 6:05 PM

        I feel the same way about EQ, it was a trash game but it was my first mmorpg and I'll always remember stepping out of the woods with my half elf and seeing people running around and fighting skeletons, it was epic

        • reply
          December 20, 2011 6:16 PM

          EQ was much more popular that SWG ever was. I think that is because it was a much better game, not just because of some fluke. Most people these days don't like the penalties that were associated with EQ and find games like WoW much easier to invest their time in.

          • reply
            December 20, 2011 6:20 PM

            i think you're confused, this isn't a comparison test, this is one person's feelings about a specific game

          • reply
            December 21, 2011 6:03 AM

            I don't know why but I remember when I learned that Kithicor Forest was safe during the day but suicide at night, I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I can remember sitting outside the forest entrance with a fire levelling my crafting and waiting for sunrise, telling lowbies "don't go in there until the sun comes up."

            The world and the things that inhabited it were their own entites in EQ, seperate from the player and uncaring. You were just another thing to be eaten by bigger scarier things if you werent careful. To this day no other game has ever captured that feeling for me, hell at some point I realized most MMOs don't even have a night time any more, makes me sad in a weird way. I never made much of myself in EQ, level 40 before I quit I think, but by God I earned that level 40 with blood sweat and tears, nothing was given to you. You want mana do you? Well then you can stare at this god damn book for 15 minutes!

        • reply
          December 21, 2011 1:42 AM

          How dare you speak ill of EQ, common internet forum trash!

          • reply
            December 21, 2011 4:12 AM

            No kidding, EQ was amazing, from the music to the massive raids. The flaws only added to its charm. Time to go back to solo'n guards! /casts Engulfing Darkness

        • reply
          December 21, 2011 7:52 AM

          D-Port, my first MMO was Everquest as well (I don't count the month and a half I stumbled around UO).

          My first guy was a dwarf. Walking out into Butcherblock Mountains for the first time is something I will never ever forget.

          • reply
            December 21, 2011 8:03 AM

            EQ was my first MMO, too. Rolling a wood elf as my first character and then falling off the edge of a platform in Kelethin is my first memory.

        • Zek legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
          reply
          December 21, 2011 8:05 AM

          EQ was an amazing game for its time. Its only real flaw was the incredibly unforgiving design decisions they made, but that also gave it a lot of its character.

        • reply
          December 21, 2011 8:31 AM

          aw man I loved EQ. I'll never forget the first time walking out of the barbarian starting grounds; to see nothing but snow and mountains and people running around fighting spiders and white wolves. I remember you had to swim out of the city, ridiculous.

          My other favorite thing was once I was up near level 17 and made my way to blackburrow, man that place was absolutely brutal. Getting farther down into the dungeon was downright brutal because you could get killed so fast; the "trains" of mobs was literally the best thing ever. Nothing quite like sitting on a hill watching 30 gnolls just rape everyone in the dungeon as they ran to the entrance and back hahaha. The worst was when you realized you hadn't gotten back quite far enough, and you had to fucking haul ass to the exit, which had 30 gnolls standing there, and you would get hit for like 300-400 damage instantly and pray you survived until you loaded out of the zone haha.

          • reply
            December 21, 2011 8:32 AM

            BB TRAIN TO ZONE!!

            • reply
              December 21, 2011 10:54 AM

              Haha... yes... those were the days. It might have been a design flaw in a way... but holy shit.. it scared the crap out of me and running for the zone was quite a rush.

        • reply
          December 21, 2011 8:36 AM

          I must've been about 11 or 12 when I started playing EQ around launch. Walking around Halas and into the Everfrost mountains had way more of an emotional effect on me than Skyrim did, although that is unequivocally the better game.

          There was something frontiers-y about it, it was an incredibly exciting time in gaming.

        • reply
          December 21, 2011 8:53 AM

          I played The Realm for a few years before EQ came out, but I had the same experience with EQ. Lots of epic moments in that game. I had a level 20 High Elf Wizard and I started over because I jumped down the well to the bottom level of Befallen (I think it was?). There weren't many people higher than me on the server at the time, so there was basically no way for me to get my stuff. I started over as a Troll Shaman and loved that shit. Playing an evil race in that game was so much fun. There were so many little things that made it worthwhile, like passing other trolls in the Freeport Sewers as we made our way to and from the boat, getting stuck in doorways in Solusek A... this is the problem with this game, thinking about these things makes me want to play it again, but I *know* it is bad and I won't have the same experience.

          • Zek legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
            reply
            December 21, 2011 9:30 AM

            Oh yeah, I really miss having evil outcast races in MMOs. There are a dozen accessibility problems with a feature like that which makes it a taboo for modern game design, but in EQ they never gave a single thought to anything like that and just focused on building a fantasy world. By doing that I think they reached a level of immersion that you simply can't do with a game that's really fun.

        • reply
          December 21, 2011 10:51 AM

          Except EQ was AWESOME! You have to give it credit.. it was the first fully 3d MMO of it's kind. It did so many things for the first time. It truly was amazing when it first came out. The EQ Beta... was probably some of the most fun I've ever had gaming (that and my time in the early days of Ultima Online!)

      • reply
        December 20, 2011 6:15 PM

        If only it was possible for people to have differing OPINIONS.

      • reply
        December 20, 2011 6:18 PM

        For me it was EQ2. It just seemed the world was so big and I had no idea of the limitations that exist in these types of games yet, there was so much to discover.

        • reply
          December 20, 2011 6:25 PM

          exactly, that feeling never comes back

          • reply
            December 21, 2011 6:17 AM

            Familiarity breeds contempt. You get the measure of games and lose that sense of wonder. But be careful that it's not you that it limited. I replayed Oblivion a couple months ago, and the game is much, much deeper than I believed it to be the first time around. My preconceptions of the game kept me from seeing just how deep, addition to being broad, the experience could be.

            But my brother and I were just talking about this issue the other day. We'll never again play Ultima IV on a snowy day in our parent's big back room, on one of those endless winter breaks. It's all gone.

            But that's OK. Skyrim brought back a LOT of the magic for me. Games can still blow me away, as it turns out.

        • reply
          December 21, 2011 6:47 AM

          Same here.. I remember my first proper grouping experience in Death Fist Citadel where someone actually offered constructive advice and showed me that strategy actually made a difference, how simply tanking in one spot made an encounter piss easy.. or the first time me and a friend duo'd through Fallen Gate carefully pulling mobs so we didn't get an entire room of heroics etc. Even after hitting 80 (when the cap was 80) relatively quickly, I still knew nothing and had missed probably 3/4 of the other content available when leveling but I loved every minute of it.. and since then i've probably taken between 8-12 character to lvl and aa cap. I continued to play for a few years to the point where I knew the mechanics inside out.. I still love the world of EQ2 but incredibly disappointed with the change of leadership and the last 2 xpacs.

          I'd pay big money for another game like EQ2 (with a similar amount of content which is pretty much impossible) but without Sony in charge. Hell, make it a single-player or 2-6 player LAN co-op only game and I'd still play it.

          Sadly, the most fun I've had in EQ2 in the last 1 1/2 years has been playing various different classes soloing or boxing epic content.. found no fun in the heroic content in the last few xpacs.

        • reply
          December 21, 2011 7:07 AM

          Bring your FSRs' to me!

          • reply
            December 21, 2011 9:15 AM

            Have no idea what this means but its familiar to me.

      • reply
        December 21, 2011 7:11 AM

        I feel that way about DAoC, but the game was awesome and i have a lot of nostalgia from it

      • reply
        December 21, 2011 7:15 AM

        I think that feeling happens to most people. Ultima Online was my first and it was amazing. Every other MMORPG after that was boring. I tried them all - Everquest, Asheron's Call, World of Warcraft, etc, and I felt they were not worth the time after a few weeks.

        I'll never be able to re-create the magic that happened in Ultima Online and I feel that it ruined MMORPGs for me.

      • reply
        December 21, 2011 7:57 AM

        SWG was actually the first modern MMO I ever played and I could tell after a few months how garbage it was and I dropped it. I don't know how anyone could have felt that game was magical.

        • Zek legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
          reply
          December 21, 2011 9:32 AM

          It did do some stuff that was really cool. But it was a better cantina simulator than it was an RPG.

    • reply
      December 20, 2011 7:16 PM

      SWG was the first and last MMO I will ever play. They're horribly addicting. They're designed to be. I'm surprised the government doesn't regulate them.

      • reply
        December 21, 2011 6:29 AM

        i'm terribly sorry that was your only MMO experience.

    • reply
      December 21, 2011 7:41 AM

      At the last second, someone should have posted "Live long, and prosper"

    • reply
      December 21, 2011 9:38 AM

      DAoC 4 lyfe!!!

Hello, Meet Lola