Star Wars Galaxies Rogue Server Roundup – December 2021

While Life Day dominated the headlines of many SWG rogue servers throughout this customarily update-lite month of the year, one major story managed to ignite the community. The launch of SWGEmu‘s Finalizer server came out of nowhere this month to cap off what has been a banner year for the game.

SWGEmu (Pre-CU vanilla emulator)

A few years back SWGEmu‘s Basilisk was by far the most populated server for those looking to get their Galaxies fix following the game’s official shutdown. The lure of new content and rulesets has seen players migrate to other servers which use the SWGEmu code, while the release of the Galaxies source code – including the Jump to Lightspeed expansion – has drawn players towards those servers. Basilisk’s population and reputation has been in a downward spiral for a while now with nine years of history built on top of unfinished code having taken a drastic toll on the game’s economy.

It seemed as though the SWGEmu team would ride it out until its 1.0 milestone was reached (something that we still don’t have a timeframe for), but early this month the team dropped a poll on its community asking whether they would play a fresh server launching with the game’s most recent updates. From there, things progressed at a head-spinningly rapid rate. More than 1000 players took the poll with a strong majority declaring that they would play on a new server. A day after the results were posted another post detailed the specifics of the new server, and within a week of that post, the new server was launched. Something tells me the SWGEmu team was prepared for what the results of the poll were going to be.

Going forward the team plan to treat Finalizer as a testbed for changes to the original Publish 14.1 code that they are aiming to replicate for their own 1.0 launch. They’re also planning on hosting more events such as the Jabba’s Eve Classic which took place on New Year’s Eve.

The new server has certainly gotten off to a good start with concurrent player numbers consistently rising just above 1000. Counted amongst them are SWG streamers Napyet and Mobyus1 who have both been uploading a host of Finalizer-related content to their YouTube channels including Let’s Play’s, guides and analysis.

Elsewhere, most servers snuck in a few fixes and the like with their Life Day patches, but mostly this month was about looking forward to 2022, with several servers teasing upcoming content.

Sunrunner II (SWGEmu-based server)

Server admin Takh polled players on how they would like the server to progress. Ultimately it was decided that priority would be placed on merging the server’s code with the latest SWGEmu release following an expedited release of Mandalore. A “new game system” was teased as coming later in the year before the team would return to further flesh out content on Mandalore.

SWG Expanded (Custom content for SWG Source servers)

We got a look at what SWG Expanded have planned for the whole year in their ambitious and varied roadmap:

ProjectSWG (Custom NGE emulator)

While ProjectSWG announced that they would be concentrating on developing their CU emulator in 2022.

SWG: Legends (Custom NGE rogue server)

Issue #12 of the Community Transmission didn’t offer much in terms of what we can expect from the server in the coming year, but it did reaffirm that Bespin apartments should be available to purchase in the not too distant future.

December also saw the return of the Remembering Carrie Fisher event which was watched over by 160 players, as well as the 10 Years Later: A Galaxy Remembered event which saw 242 players attending.