Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Fear and Loathing in Mos Eisley

[24/11/05 - Edit: by way of a caveat, Brenlo and Pex on the boards have denied this explicitly.  Brenlo I trust as far as I could cough him, but Pex is a different story].

The possibility of an imminent console version of Star Wars: Galaxies seems to be firming up.

The Sony/Star Wars community forums have been, for weeks now, been the online equivalent of several hundred hungry wolverines in a 20-foot square cage.  That seems set to get even worse with the growing possibility of an announcement of a console version of SWG at some point.

This, in itself, is not a bad thing.  As Richard Bartle pointed out a while back, the MMO space is probably not ready for voice communications in a virtual world, but the shift from world to game has occurred already, so the loss of any remaining immersion is probably not really a biggie to SOE.

The evidence?  You can now pre-order the guide to the console version, on Amazon and on eCampus.  My only doubts about this surround the fact that the guide is due to be published on December 27th this year.  Surely too soon (although Amazon game-related release dates are notoriously innacurate).  But there have been reports that G4's XBox launch party last night had no less than four celebrities emerge from a preview party and, coked beyond caring for any NDAs they may have signed, stated tha the game they looked forward to most was "Star Wars Galaxies". [Edit: these reports were a bit of a red herring. I found a download and only one celebrity talked about looking forward to playing SWG]

This is not enough of a case for prosecution, even given SOE's notorious, greyscale flexibility with the truth.  Celebrities shown a game on a PC may well not spot that it wasn't running on a 360.  Books get mistitled on Amazon.  But if not, then further fear and loathing will undoubtedly result.

The point is that SOE employees, up to and including the producer, Brenlo, have been explicitly denying that a console game was in the offing throughout the NGE revamp.  Take a look at the post by Wolfmann31 on this page for a list of strong denials.

Timothy Burke suggests, in his latest post on Terra Nova, that making SWG into a Planetside-esque FPS, done properly, would not necessarily be a bad idea.  Similarly, a console implementation of such a game would be logical and useful, as well as providing a game for the new platform unlike anything else currently available in the announced lineups.  But SOE have given not one scintilla of an iota of a suggestion that they are capable of meeting the massively higher QA requirements for the console marketplace.  The first time some Stormtrooper shoots or runs through a wall to get at a console-magazine reviewer, the jig is up...  And that happened to me within seconds of starting the trial version (more of which later).