I don't exactly remember the first time I ever saw Star Wars, having watched it so many times I probably couldn't manage a guess that would be anywhere in the neighborhood. I had action figures, miniature playsets, the original and (first round) special edition releases on those terrible, bulky VHS cassettes, comics, books, the TCG cards of both the "adult" and the Young Jedi series, games for the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, XBox and PC.
Looking back at all of the Star Wars goodies I've ever owned, though, I think I have to put the video games at the top of the pyramid. While action figures let you create stories, you can only own so many. And even though the comics and books were excellent parallels and expansions of the Star Wars story, you had to follow someone else's story word for word. At least in the video games, if you so chose, you could spend fifteen minutes running around in a circle for absolutely no reason, and making no sense whatsoever, all the while creating nonsensical dialogue to yourself, but it mattered because it put YOU in the Star Wars universe, even if you had to follow someone else's main story. You got to BE the character. In later games like Knights of the Old Republic (neither of which I have had the joy of finishing (yet)), your interaction with the characters went so much deeper through different branches of dialog options. You were your own character, making your own decisions (mostly) in response to the situations you kept getting into.
When I first heard about Star Wars Galaxies, I had never before wanted to play a game so badly. But empty pockets and unreliable Internet connections held me back for the longest time. When I got settled into a job and had steady income, and after I remembered the game existed, I started planning to buy and play it. About a week before I had planned to buy it (thankfully not afterward), they released the Patch of Doom, ultimately killing the game off. I was all kinds of disheartened.
Between then and now, I've been a part of the World of Warcraft, I've piloted and lost many a ship in EVE Online, and I've shuffled through my old gaming library dozens of dozens of times over. Then I heard about Star Wars: The Old Republic. I got somewhat interested, but I was stuck so far up WoW's brown eye at the time, it rolled off of me with nothing more than a nostalgic "Aw, I wanna play that." then I forgot about it for a long time. Occasionally, I would see an article about the latest dev blog or big feature-unveiling, but I never gave it a second thought.
A few weeks ago, a friend started talking about it, and I looked up some more articles on it. We watched some gameplay footage together, some trailers here and there. I stuck with my mostly-uninterested stance. I figured that he and his fiancé wouldn't be playing around the times I would be and that for the most part, any fun-sharing connection would just be stories swapped about what happened during our separate gaming sessions. Then a few guildmates from when I played WoW stepped forth, revealing their intent to play. I took a thinktime. Even if I would only get the chance to play with people a few times a month, those times could still be fun. So I figured what the hell? I spent a couple of hours going through the web site watching gameplay footage, game feature coverage, developers' presentations about different aspects of the game. I read up on the classes, the companion characters, guild system, ships, quests and pretty much anything else I could find on the site to read. And yes, that includes all text in images written in the Aurabesh alphabet. Yeah. I can still read that, if at a slower pace than I used to be able to.
So now I have the Star Wars itch in me again. And at the very least, I'll be putting some time into the free play time offered to get you hooked. Here's hoping this game is everything Galaxies should have been and more.
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