One could make a case for Star Wars Galaxies being one of the most unique MMOs ever made. Instead of classes like Stormtroopers, players could spec into different skill trees, allowing everyone to play their own unique character. Entire in-game cities and factions came and went, the economy was completely player-driven and players lived out their own Star Wars stories. In an ironic twist of fate, however, the game's Jedi ended up dooming the MMO.
In a recent presentation at the Game Developers Conference, former Galaxies director Raph Koster and former executive producer Richard Vogel outlined some pretty significant issues that came up during development regarding even adding Jedi to Galaxies. They found themselves at odds with LucasArts, who wanted the Jedi to be a major factor in the story. However, the time period that the game was set in, the Galactic Civil War, was one wherein Jedi were incredibly rare in canon. By design, a Jedi class would also be far more powerful than most other classes, creating issues with game balance, not to mention it would draw focus away from other playable classes.
The development team was told that they couldn't change the time period, but they had to have Jedi as a playable class. Koster called the inclusion of Jedi, "the game's original sin," during the presentation and foreshadowed that Jedi would lead to many of the issues Galaxies would face down the line. The initial Jedi problem would only be made worse by LucasArts needing to approve every aspect of the game, overambition on the part of the development team and the release date being set in stone.
The initial plan, according to Koster, was that players would have to complete a random selection of activities in the game to unlock the Jedi class. To save time, the team instead went with a random selection of five different skills out of the game's 612 that they'd have to learn to become a Jedi. This last-minute decision would cause turmoil down the line, as marketing would insist that there needed to be Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies by that Christmas.
Hints were dropped to try and clue players into what they needed to do to become Jedi, but these hints quickly gave away the entire system. The amount of Jedi skyrocketed and began to overshadow any other way to play the game, such as farming, city-building and faction warfare that players loved. Because skills were what unlocked becoming a Jedi, players abandoned their old play-styles and tried to learn every skill in the game.
When the players were forced into playstyles they don't like, they stopped playing. Galaxies was bleeding players at this point and the launch of World of Warcraft around the same time did not help. Koster and Vogel would both leave development around this time and instead have an outside view on the game, including the New Game Experience combat reconstruction. The NGE is infamous, and many consider it to be one of the worst patches to any video game.
Some of the most innovative features that Galaxies had to offer were completely gone after the NGE patch launched. The worst change out of everything was that customizable skill trees were replaced with classes and Jedi were available right from the start of the game. Jedi had gone from a rare class with unknown unlock conditions to something players could just pick right from the start, and the result was disinterested players left in droves. To Sony Online Entertainment's credit, they tried to bring players back with bug fixes, events and eventually the ability for players to make their own quests.
The sheer number of players that left, however, lead to the game being shut down on December 15th, 2001. Star Wars Galaxies isn't dead, however, as devoted communities such as SWG Legends, GWGemu and Restoration II have been dedicated to keeping one of the most ambitious MMOs ever attempted alive and well with third-party servers. Despite the mishandling of Jedi bringing the game's official run to its knees, the very community that defined Galaxies heyday is now what is keeping it alive.