I find that now I am compelled to continue playing Star Wars Galaxies, and while I can’t nail down exactly why this is, but I think it may have something to do with the fact that this thing will completely cease to exist next week. There’s this sort of weird feeling that you get, knowing that what you’re doing will be completely inaccessible and before long that an entire game is going to go away. That said, as soon as I logged back on, I realized I had nothing to do. I had exhausted all the initial quest lines, and none of them had led me to anything else, so I started digging around in my inventory like a crazy person. To my surprise, I found an item called “Jabba’s Commlink”, which started a quest. After talking to Bib Fortuna, who was still hanging out where I got the opening quest from, I started a weird little murder mystery quest involving a super solider drug. At first, the quest just hauled me around Tatooine, to places I couldn’t fast travel of course. Flying to those kinds of places in your spaceship works well, you just have to slap it on autopilot and alt-tab out. The autopilot thinks the best way to land at your destination is to nosedive into the ground, so you always know when to tab back in by the clunk of your ship hitting the ground.

A really strange thing I noticed while I worked on this quest chain was the inability to pick up other quests as I ran along. When I play an MMO or just a plain old RPG, I just pick up every single quest that I am offered, so that I end up with a quest log full of stuff to do before I come back to the hub town. However, in Star Wars Galaxies, if you are currently “working for someone” as the NPCs put it, you cannot pick up most other quests. There are some quests you can do simultaneously, but it seems like anything that starts a chain cannot be done at the same time that you are engaged in another chain., To be honest, this feels like an attempt to artificially lengthen the amount of time it takes to level in the game, forcing you to do one line of quests at a time before moving on to the next. The idea, I suppose would be that I would remember where these quests were and come back for them later, but realistically, if I didn’t pick it up the first time I saw it, I’m probably never going to go back and get it again, which means that players lose out on huge swaths of content.

After I was done mucking around on Tatooine, the quest started taking me to different planets, which was a pretty nice change of pace, but also showed me how extremely annoying the interplanetary travel system is. Instead of paying double the amount of money to travel to a planet that involves a route through another planet, you have to buy a ticket to go to that one, then get off, run into the station and buy another ticket to go to the next planet. This was exacerbated by the fact that the quests I were doing forced me to go back and forth three or four times, and not spending a very long time on any one planet.

But then, I finally got to the payoff. And oh what a payoff it was… zombies. That’s right, we’re officially mixing in zombies with Star Wars now. Granted, no one actually calls them zombies, they’re just dead people that are being controlled by the super soldier drug. And best of all, their ranks include Mon Calamari zombies. But we’re not even at the most exciting part yet! As soon as I got to the safe zone, the quest suddenly turned from a quest that matched my level to a level 90 quest. Excellent.