Gary Gattis's Letter to the Community

Hello, my name is Gary Gattis. I am the Senior Producer on Star Wars Galaxies. I would like to take some time to talk about where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.

When SWG launched in July there were three major systems missing that we felt needed to be in the game. These are Mounts, Vehicles, and Player Cities. August was spent supporting the initial growth of the game and tweaking the various systems. September we designed Mounts and Player Cities, and worked on a ton of Live issues (as well as creating a few) with a large publish in early October. October was spent on Live issues and developing Mounts and Player Cities. This month we opened two clusters in Europe, are releasing Mounts and Player Cities, and are developing Vehicles. In December we will release Vehicles and various other Live enhancements.

Our priorities up to this point have been:

1) Live support.

2) Mounts, Player Cities, and Vehicles.

We been focusing on critical issues and as many Live enhancements as we can, while balancing the necessity of finishing the systems we promised the players and felt were needed for the game. There are a lot of other big things on the horizon, but we are shifting our full priority to Live by fixing things that are broken and improving the overall game as much as possible.

We worked with LucasArts and our correspondents, and combed the forums to come up with some general guidance for the game as it stands:

• All professions should be interesting and enjoyable.
• The game should not end when you finish building your character.
• Players should feel like they are participating in and observing the Galactic Civil War.
• Combat should be tactically interesting.
• Key Star Wars locations should be richly populated with plot.
• Dynamically created locations should emphasize intrigue and adventure.
• Star Wars characters should be developed and detailed in the game.
• There should be more moment-to-moment interdependence (group tactics, etc).
• Adventuring should be as profitable and engaging as taking missions.
• You should be able to play fruitfully in a short play session.

We have learned a lot during the first 4 months of this game's life. We are examining our publish process and are moving towards a more efficient methodology. We want to increase our server up-time and stability. We are going through vast database optimization efforts. We have been developing tools that will help us create content much more rapidly. Test Center is going to be getting a lot more attention and utilized to its fullest extent. We are enacting a Test Center character copy for those that want to try out the new systems (and help us break them) before they come live.

There is a lot on our plate, and we are regularly going to provide you with as much information as we can about what is going on. Our priorities and tasks feed in from a variety of sources, and there are very many items on the design priority list. We will not be able to get to all of them with the next few pushes, but we want to take on a number of things that will make the game better, immediately. These include:

• Professions Augmentations
       Droid Engineer
       Smuggler
       Merchant
       Chef
• Creature balance pass
• Combat pass
• General Loot pass
• MOB AI revamp
• Loot pass on themeparks
• Jedi Bounty Missions
• Junk Dealer revamp
• Dynamic POI's
• Expanded Theaters

I wanted to let you know that we do hear you, and we love this game as much as you do. We hope the coming months are going to be a total blast! If you are currently away from the game, you may not know that there will be mounts running around, players creating their own cities, and vehicles blasting across the terrain very soon. There are even rumors of a few Jedi walking around...

Thanks, and may The Force be with you...

- Gary Gattis
Sr. Producer, Sony Online Entertainment
Star Wars Galaxies

Post Release Archives
Gary Gattis's Letter to the Community
A Welcome Letter from the Executive Producer

Pre Release Archives