Quiet Birth For Star Wars World
from the underhype? dept
Since we don't actually have a topic for "underhyped" news, this one is going in the reverse category. I noticed one or two stories this morning about the launch of the new Star Wars Galaxies online game, but was also surprised that it wasn't getting more hype. I hadn't even known it was close to launching at all. Considering the amount of hype surrounding most big online game launches and anything having to do with Star Wars, I would have expected much more. However, LucasArts and Sony have decided that they wanted to take a low-key "art house" approach to launching this game, and hope that it gets picked up by word of mouth from players who actually enjoy the game - rather than journalists who have no idea what they're talking about. They're also doing this to make sure that they don't have a launch plagued with too many glitches that can doom the whole thing. With a smaller group at launch, they're hoping they can find and fix the problems without getting a negative reaction from players. Of course, even with the small amount of press they've received so far, I'm sure the game is already swamped with people wanting to play.
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The launch has been a disaster, with numerous problems. For starters, the registration servers were totally overwhelmed by the volume of people trying to register; it was also discovered that the web-based account registration process didn't work under Internet Explorer at its default security level.
Then once everyone installed Mozilla and got their accounts registered, the game servers were unusable, bouncing up and down all afternoon. Later in the evening, all the game servers were taken offline for good to correct "database problems" that supposedly never showed up testing. The developers hope to have things back online sometime this morning.
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