Wednesday, July 13, 2011

One Day Later...

The longest twenty-four hours since the last Christmas Eve where I believed in Santa Claus slowly melted away. I checked out of work early so I could be a part of the greatest epic story ever told: mine.

Unfortunately, things weren't going smoothly for Star Wars Galaxies. The servers were inaccessible due to problems with the registration and logins. A precursor to what was to come, or just a speed bump on the way to throttling it up to high gear?

The trick of it was all in the browser being used. Most people had Internet Explorer installed, and configured as their default. The launchpad application which transitioned players from login to the servers themselves was utilizing the default browser within it's framework. It seemed that IE was having problems - for whatever reason. So the trick was to open up the internal HTML page from Netscape instead of through the launchpad (and subsequently IE).

Cyra and I made it through just fine after that. Maybe it was pure luck (the server load relaxed just long enough to allow us safe passage) or the Netscape trick really did the job.

Our journey had begun.

Just to jog your memory - or to educate anyone who's just happening to read this post in lieu of the others that came before it - most of my SWG screencaps from the early days were lost due to a hardware crash. Fortunately I have some of Cyra's picks to help with my narrative.

The image above shows Cyra looking out from the starting location; the tutorial area. It was a pretty standard affair, the tutorial. A droid would show you how to move about, loot and shoot, and generally get from the space station to a starting location.

You were able to choose where to go, which distributed the population nicely and gave a slight sense of "national" pride based on where you first arrived. Otherwise, the tutorial did nothing to prepare a player for the complexities to come.

Both Cyra and I selected Mos Espa as are starting location; as previously agreed. I should note that we were able to get our desired names: Cyra Sedaris and Vincer Kaden. Our beta friend Ooyna came to be known as Shakkara. We had completed the tutorial and were ready for the big time.

I'd like to say I simply "lost" the pictures of our first adventures in the live game, but there wasn't really any time to think about the old Print Screen button. Mos Espa was under attack!

Hundreds of Squills had descended upon the city. We dashed out into the streets and fought bravely to defend the...

Lying! Completely lying! There was one squill. It attacked every player it saw and laid waste to each and every one. We'd clone and run back at it like moths to the flame. Within minutes, the five free cloning sessions given to each toon were bled into the hot sands of Mos Espa, courtesy of one rogue Squill.

It only FELT like hundreds of them. But it was just one. One stinking Squill.

I've heard stories since then of others with the same experience. One of my soon-to-be guildmates was one such storyteller. Neither of us ever forgave the Squill or it's kind for the rest of our days in SWG. One day, we each became powerful enough to do something about it.

But this Launch Day was the Day of the Squill. For the time being, we would bow to our green-skinned, lanky master.

No comments: