While I’ve been mostly preoccupied with the explosion of games over the past month or two, I have been dropping into Star Wars Galaxies every once in a while, since I am apparently way into self-flagellation, and with the end approaching, I figured I’d stop being lazy and write something up. I finally just gave up on any illusion that I was still “playing” the game to see the quest content or anything of that nature, and just started wandering around this weird little world, which I find far more entertaining.

I wandered back to Galaxies around Halloween time, which coincides with the in-game festival of the ‘Galactic Moon Festival’, which is of course just a silly Halloween event. Just like any other MMO with holiday events, select cities and towns in the world are decorated, and a few short-term events are activated.

However, instead of making the holiday event at least somewhat fun, SOE manages to make an extremely arduous talk out of what is supposed to be a fun little distraction from the day to day doldrums of RPing in Mos Eisley… or whatever it is you do in this game. To even participate in the event, you have to go up to the event organizer, who just happens to be a Twi’lek vampire (because why not), and get a trick-or-treat kit from him. This kit allows you to, as the name suggests, trick-or-treat. While grabbing the kit, I also asked him for a costume, which resulted in me being turned into a Droideka, complete with a rolling animation instead of walking.

To engage in the trick-or-treating activity, you have to walk up to any random NPC in the game and manually type into your chat window “Trick or Treat” while targeting them. Apparently, the idea of making this interaction a simple dialogue prompt never occurred to the designers. From there, they can refuse to give you a treat, in which case you can use your kit to “trick” them, which creates a hologram of something “scary”. If at any point in this process, you succeed, you are given a single coin. You can also completely fail this process, and not get anything from the NPC you are trying to get a reward from. Once you succeed though, you get a single coin, of which you have to have 50 or more to buy anything. A truly entertaining holiday.

I hear there’s a Christmas event going on right now, I’ll try and get over there to take a look at that soon… and maybe get my thoughts on it up before the game ends… maybe.