Year in Review Letter
June 26th marked the 1 year anniversary of Star Wars Galaxies. To celebrate this the team posted a Year in Review letter to take a look back at the growth of the game over the last year.
information
06/30/2004
Findar
On June 26th, Star Wars Galaxies celebrates its year anniversary. Wow. For the past 366 days (2004 is a leap-year...), hundreds of thousands of players have ventured into the virtual Star Wars universe to fight Tusken Raiders, join the Rebel Alliance or serve the Galactic Empire, and explore such signature worlds as Naboo and Tatooine. Meanwhile, we on the development team have spent what seems like every one of those 366 days reading forums for feedback, working on new systems and improvements of existing systems, upgrading and adding content, fixing bugs and addressing top issues, and prioritizing, reprioritizing, and reprioritizing again. Sometimes, it seems like the year has passed at lightspeed; other times, it's hard to imagine that only 366 days have gone by...
Typically, a "year in review" piece focuses on the highlights of the past year. Well, if you've been playing since launch, you're probably familiar with the additions and high points. Yeah, we've added a ton of new features: Player Cities, Mounts, and Vehicles by the end of 2003. And yes, new content has been rolled out as fast as humanly possible: the Nighsister Cave (August), the Warren (October), the Geonosian Bio-Lab (March), the Corellian Corvette (April), and the Death Watch Bunker (May), along with tons of smaller content pieces and the "themed" publishes like the Imperial Crackdown. And yes again, in our attempts to evolve the game, we've revisited existing content (Dantooine and Tatooine quests received complete overhauls, and Bestine was given an entire political landscape in December) and have made changes to or completely revamaped virtually every profession in the game. We've also hosted dozens of successful live events, from Jedi Hunts at the end of Beta to droid raids on cities to our current missions featuring Boba Fett. And then there are the hundreds of other things, from Wookiee armor to the "holo-emotes" to new enemies that we've tried to add at a steady clip since launch.
But most of you know all that. Instead of focusing solely on what we've done, we thought it would be better to talk about what the past year has meant to us as a development team and how it will shape our view of Star Wars Galaxies moving forward.
June 26, 2003: Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided launches. After nearly three years of hard work (and over four years of planning), we were finally able to let the public see what we'd been laboring over. It was probably the most exciting and stress-inducing day of most of our careers. The amount of people trying to play the game on Day One surprised everyone, including us. But once we were past the initial hurdles of launching a live service, we were able to start taking a look at the feedback about the actual gameplay. While much of the feedback (and press) we received was favorable, it was also very clear that we had a lot of work ahead of us to make Star Wars Galaxies more fun, more accessible, and feel like a more immersive Star Wars experience.
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