So here’s the thing about Star Wars Galaxies: The people who tell you NGE stunk are right. When it launched in 2005, it was abysmal, and SOE deserves every bit of anger hurled its way for upending a functioning sandbox, wrecking systems without care, and deleting whole classes from the game overnight and without much warning.
But – you knew there was a but, right? – by 2011 when the game sunsetted, it was good you guys. It took a few years, but SOE eventually righted the ship and buffed it out with content – so much content that I personally feel a bit let down playing pre-NGE emulators. Just a week ago on our podcast, I even said that I sure do wish I could just take the content from NGE and marry it to the freeform skill system of vanilla. That would be perfect.
All of this is preamble to say that some mad lads have actually done it, and they’re the crew behind Sunrunner 2, a SWG rogue server I’ve had my eye on for a while. It officially launched this week, and it’s a bit of a hodgepodge of content you’ll find in other public emus, like extra planets, races, buildings, vehicles, decor, and wearables, but also a few that are more rare, like player city roads. Of course, the key point of interest for me is that it runs with a version of the original skill tree, meaning you won’t be locked into NGE’s irritating class system.
“It’s certainly not as finished as I’d like, but it represents 2 years of work by nearly two dozen people… and a full-time passion project for me,” the lead dev wrote on Reddit. “It’s our belief that in it’s current state, we have a version of Galaxies that will inspire, challenge, and reward players for quite some time… and we are still developing. We currently have five more planets in the pipeline, in varying stages of completion, and plans to continue to fill our base planets with more and more content. It’s a huge galaxy that’s going to keep growing, in both depth and breadth.”
If that’s your cup of blue milk, you can check out more info on the emu’s official site. But of course, it’s just one of many, many emulators and rogue servers floating around the internet, seemingly without legal interference from Daybreak or Disney. This past spring, MOP’s Hyperspace Beacon explored several emus, while I tried out SWG Legends last summer for Working As Intended and somehow forgot to leave.
