Slipping up through the peach-orange atmosphere of Correllia, we jump out to the space zone beyond. We head up in a YT-2400 freighter, a Millennium Falcon-style multiplayer vessel that can hold a whole group of players and be decorated like any other building. With twenty minutes left on the clock, we decide to see the game out somewhere quieter. Back on the ground, the bombardment is causing everybody's frame-rates to plummet. A few old friends and I head up in our fighters to face it, successfully whittling the monster vessel down to 50% shields before one of our X-Wings gets caught in the cross-fire and explodes dramatically. A to-scale Star Destroyer squats over the metropolitan skyline as players scrap (and dance, and put on hats, and spam each other) in the streets below. The defeated Empire lashes out in Coronet, the capital of Han Solo's homeworld Corellia. Unless Sony open the game up to the community, all of these are gone forever, beyond the reach of archeology. Pod-racers created from hundreds of tiny parts a custom starport built from the ground up. What is being lost is not just the accumulated experience and credits of thousands of players, but the cities and sculptures that the advanced object manipulation system allowed players to create. The death of a player-driven MMO like SWG is different to that of a more prescriptive game. Players break off to scrap with the increasingly ridiculous monsters thrown at them by the developers: a super-sized reptilian Krayt dragon, and a massive spear-toting Ewok known as the Megawok. A fifty-foot-tall Jedi stands in the corner, motionless, unexplained.
There's dancing, and crowds of veterans giving away their rarest, most valuable gear to whoever wants to play with it. Ceaseless fireworks fill the sky with lag-inducing particle effects and players run about in garish costumes, or their underwear, or both. Player ships jostle for space in the skies above Mos Eisley as the end approaches.
It's rough around the edges - the engine struggles to load in scenery fast enough, and the narrow draw distance ensconces everything in fog - but it works, and it provides the slightest glimpse at what could have been achieved if SWG's development had more focus and fewer dramatic U-turns. This includes the long-awaited addition of atmospheric flight, where players can take their ships from a planet's surface all the way to orbit with only a single loading screen when they reach the upper atmosphere. In the last few months, the SWG dev team have thrown everything at the wall.
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