Screaming Penguin

As a follow up to Andy's great E3 coverage (WTG guy, and thanks for the details on WC3!), I wanna talk about what has caught my fancy lately -- Star Wars Galaxies. SWG is brought to you by a collab team from Lucas Arts and Verant/Sony Online. I can't think of a better matching of companies for this project. Verant are the people who brought us EverQuest ( or EverCrack ), the fantasy MMRPG (Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game ) that currently has approaching 400K subscribers, including myself and many of my friends. You know who LucasArts is unless you've been holed up with the Unibomber for the last 20 years. SWG will represent a pretty radical change to the MMRPGs out there now. Harking back to my MUD/MUSH days, if EverQuest and Asheron's call are Hack'n'Slash MUD, SWG will be more of a MUSH -- centered around player built society and environments and less combat focused. Set in the StarWars "universe" between ESB and RotJ, it will provide users with alot of ability to change the world, build cities and more. Several exciting features are on deck, including:

• Continous "world", there are not "zones" or hard barriers in the world. It is a smooth movement across the whole playing world.
• Players have the ability to construct structures in the world, building stores, staffing them with automated merchant NPCs, and making money. Build houses, bases, fortifications with automated weapons and more.
• No fixed character "classes", just amalgomating skills at different levels, so each character can be much more unique.
• Graphics, eye candy, and graphics.
• An add on to follow soon after initial release will add space combat and transit within player control.

In short, this is gonna rock.