Star Wars Galaxies

The ten species that were available to players included: Human, Twi'lek, Zabrak, Wookiee, Trandoshan, Rodian, Mon Calamari, Bothan, Sullustan and Ithorian.

Players could hire Entertainers to change their appearance in-game, with even more options than those available at creation. Many visual aspects of a character were changeable after character creation except species and gender.

Star Wars Galaxies was set between the events of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. The game launched with 10 planets: Tatooine, Naboo, Corellia, Talus, Rori, Dantooine, Lok, Yavin 4, the Forest Moon of Endor, and Dathomir. Later paid expansions added the planets of Kashyyyk and Mustafar. There were 12 space zones, added primarily during the release of the Jump to Lightspeed expansion.

Nine space zones were associated with one or more of the playable planets, and three, Kessel, Ord Mantell, and Deep Space, were solely used for space gameplay and player-versus-player combat, with no land equivalent. The planet Hoth was added in November 2008, but could only be explored during an instance depicting the events of the Battle of Echo Base from The Empire Strikes Back.

The game was announced in 2000, when LucasArts Entertainment began a partnership with EverQuest creators Verant Interactive and Sony Online Entertainment to create a massively multiplayer Star Wars online role-playing game. The announcement included an expected release date of 2001 and that the game would take place during the original trilogy era. According to Raph Koster, director of the game during its early development, Star Wars Galaxies had a budget of $10-$12 million.

On May 17, 2001, the first expansion's development was announced, which would include gameplay in outer space. In the same press release, the release date of the base game was delayed to the second half of 2002. Rich Vogel, director of development at Sony Online Entertainment Austin, said that delaying the space expansion's release until after the base game's would give players time to establish their characters and understand ground gameplay. A new official website was also released on the same day.

In the United States, Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided had sold 370,000 copies ($16.1 million) by August 2006. It was the country's 43rd best-selling computer game between January 2000 and August 2006. Combined sales of all Star Wars Galaxies-related games released between January 2000 and August 2006 had reached 720,000 units in the United States.

Reviews for the initial launch of the game were mostly positive. The game was praised for its graphics, use of the movie soundtracks, massive world size, character customization, creative creature ecology, complex skill system, player economy interdependencies, and its sandbox approach. Reviewers criticized the overwhelming complexity of the game, combat imbalances of the professions, bugginess, and lack of quest content.

In 2004, the SWGEmu project was founded with the intention of re-creating the Pre-Combat Upgrade version of Galaxies from scratch through emulation. 1. 0). 0 due to the complexities of implementing the system.

SWGEmu is an open source project distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License. The server code base, known as Core3, has been open source since before 2010, allowing for volunteers to easily contribute to its development. In 2019, SWGEmu also open sourced its engine, known as Engine3. Because SWGEmu is open source, any members are able to easily launch their own server for their own community.