I had heard maybe a year or more ago that there were a few teams of developers that had made a goal of recreating a server for the pre- "Combat Upgrade" version of Star Wars Galaxies that made so many of us quit the game (incidentally, did anyone get as far as the New Game Enhancements [NGE] version?) I just happened to ask Shikse on Saturday afternoon if I had every shown her this video I downloaded sometime late last year of a stationary camera shot of Bestine on Tatooine. So I downloaded it off of my work machine and showed it to her and we both mused over fond memories of how "the game was fun for awhile".
Afterwards, I checked to see if these guys had made any more progress since that video was cut. According to their website, didn't look like it. So I Googled around a bit and found a different group that - lo and behold - were having a Stress Test 90 minutes from then.
WTH, we both agreed, and proceeded to install SWG, get their version of the Launcher, and get patched up. This process, surprisingly, took about 40 minutes, all told (maybe my memories of patch days gone by were skewed but I remember it being a PROJECT). This, however, was not nearly as surprising as what we would find when we joined in.
We arrived about 15 minutes late for the event by the time we got everything set up, toons created, etc. They were hoping for about 500 people as I understand it and got about 600 by the time we arrived. We were supposed to split into two groups - Rebs and Imps and meet and 2 different designated spots for a little managed PvE. The bulk of the landscape was completely devoid of NPCs, lairs, and such. And player cities were not surprisingly, non-existant. But, damn, these guys were WAY farther along then I would have imagined.
Bought a ticket at the travel terminal and took a shuttle to the Science Outpost on Yavin. The waypoint to the Rebs event was quite a ways away, and what nobody told me was they had set up NPCs to dole out speeders. Actually, I found this out when I had walked about 2/3rds of the distance (about 10-15 minutes). Talk about remembering the good old days! By now, I had started re-aquainting myself with the interface. I'm happy to report that I was able to run at 1920x1200 with everything MAXXED and it was smooth as could be (screenies below)!
So we shot a couple of Krayts and Tortons - with no armor and a CDEF pistol mind you - died. Most of the other people on the server had obviously been there before and they had their full compliment of weapons and armor (some even belong to guilds omg lol).
Spent the rest of the time just tooling around Theed sampling some of the things that were there to test. Took Master Doc and Master Carbineer from a special NPC, got some armor, got a speeder. Bought some stim packs, buff packs, and wound packs from both an NPC vendor and the world auction (forget what that damn thing is called). Went to the cantina and got some Mind buffs. Then Shikse and I picked some fights with some locally spawning Spinecap Butterflies and Spiders. Fighting was a little buggy but it worked. By then it was starting to get late so we called it a night.
All in all a surprisingly fun time, and I've got to say these guys look like they might actually pull it off from a technical standpoint. Sure a lot of questions arise: how do you pay for this thing if it takes off, how long will everyone want to play a single and probably non-evolving patch, will it ever really be bug-free enough to equate to what it was.
But it was fun reliving it for the moment. Don't know if we'll ever play again, but we'll see what happens. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this little trip down amnesia lane and the screenies below.
(Click the screenshots for the full 1920x1200 versions)
