It’s been such a good year for Star Wars gaming, and it has made my life much, much more interesting.
I should start from scratch.
Back in 2022, after watching the first season of Andor, I realized that I had the need to enjoy more Star Wars content. Alas, there were no new shows or movies coming up. I could (and of course I do) watch all existing 7 movies (Original, Prequels and Rogue One; and not Disney’s fan fiction), all of The Clone Wars episodes and some of the books (which frankly speaking I am very much lacking behind).
But wanted a different medium…
The search for a different medium started a rabbit hole which brought me back to gaming.
First, I found the most bestest MMORPG ever, Star Wars: The Old Republic. SWTOR for short. But oh no, it works only on Windows? Fear not! I installed Linux on a MacBook Pro 2015 and thanks to Steam’s Proton I was able to install and run the game.
The obsession of playing that game with better graphics, and everywhere, made me get a Steam Deck OLED, which is probably one of the best investments in my life.
And I ended up building a gaming PC (before the AI RAM crisis) in order to play more games.
I got invested into SWTOR so much that I deeply participated in the Mac beta Launcher and created, joined and befriended guilds.
This year, not so long ago, another Star Wars game has been launched: Star Wars Zero Company, or ZCOM for short. Yes, it’s basically an X-Com style game with a breath of Star Wars in it. I have not finished the campaign yet, but planning to do that by end of this year.
Last month also saw the launch of Star Wars Galactic Racer, a racing game with awesome Star Wars stories, a multiplayer (alas not split-screen) and some of the best (and optimized) graphics I’ve ever seen in a racing game.
But we’re not done yet! This year Broadsword announced that they are planning the release of the next expansion, and sometime this (or next) week, they are releasing a test client for DirectX 12.
And don’t get me started on the awesome community! It was just 6 months ago when we had the Battlefront II resurgence, with tens of thousands of players joining in!
In short, as a gamer and as a life-long Star Wars fan, it’s been an amazing year and I’m looking forward to 2027 to see what the community and the gaming industry is going to surprise us with.
The only thing I’m sad about is still the game development economics: I cannot believe that even when a successful game is released with large number of players, people get fired. Every publisher and studio is expecting their game to be as massive as WoW, to make as much money as Destiny, or to be as complex as… oh shit I ran out of games that I care about. But having 1 million copies sold is an amazing number, yet, somehow, the economics don’t work.
Anyways, I need to finish my work so I can play some SWTOR this weekend.
That’s all folks…
(Written on a BlackBerry Classic)