After last year’s Bespin expansion release, the team over at SWG: Legends finally revealed their next major content drop this month. Players had been expecting the release of either Felucia or the second part of the Jedi Themepark to be this year’s banner release, and while we know that both of those are still in active development, what was announced instead came as a very welcome surprise.
SWG: Legends (Custom NGE rogue server)
That’s right, ranching and farming are brand new systems being added to the SWG: Legends server. The concept of having some kind of player gardening profession or subsystem had been thrown around several times throughout the live game’s development, but it was always one of those things which were pushed aside to make way for something a little flashier.
Well, that’s the great thing about these fan-operated servers. Without the necessity of having to demonstrate a drive to bring in a constant stream of fresh players, the developers can focus on adding stuff to the game which keeps the existing playerbase wanting to keep logging in.
New spaces and opportunities for decorating are always welcomed by the SWG community, but the systems coming in the ranching and farming update won’t be purely superficial. Although details are pretty sparse at the moment, the trailer revealed that player gardens will tie into returning and revamped creature taming and spice crafting systems (Smugglers rejoice!), as well as offering new ways of gathering and managing crafting resources.
There’s no firm release date for all this but it doesn’t seem there will be a long wait before it goes live, with “the first half of 2022” being the expected release window according to the team’s quarterly Community Transmission which was released this month.
That Transmission also gave us an insight into more exciting stuff coming to the server throughout the year, with details on the Star Viper update (last teased back in September 2021) being further fleshed out with a planned May release. This appears to be a very space-centric content drop with ties to the Shadows of the Empire multimedia project from back in the mid-nineties (which makes sense seeing how those stories took place directly after the events that took place on Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back). New wearables and decorations were also teased as rewards, so it certainly seems that the team at Legends has something in store for every kind of player in the next month or two.
An Empire in Flames (SWGEmu-based server)
The Empire in Flames server had some teasing of their own to do this month as the team showed off some early look gifs at their visual overhaul for jetpacks. SWG‘s jetpacks have always been pretty underwhelming (especially considering how much effort they take to obtain), and thanks to The Mandalorian they’re more popular than ever amongst Star Wars fans. It will be interesting then to see how these changes look and feel once they’re ready to hit the server.
Right now however, players can jump in to check out the long-awaited Great Fashion Disaster update. Anybody who has ever played a crafting profession in Star Wars Galaxies will be fully aware of just how random and limited the game’s original colour palettes were. That isn’t the case on Empire in Flames anymore though as “All wearables (and recolorable furniture) have been moved to a unified color palette”.
It’s another major step forward for the server as they continue to offer the most diverse character customization around. Now’s a great time to jump in as they’ve got a whole host of events planned through the first week of May in celebration of their fifth anniversary.
SWG Restoration III (Custom CU rogue server)
The team at Restoration III gave a glimpse into how the server will play out when its 1.0 patch hits later this year by explaining both how its Jedi system will work, and what canon the server will be adhering to in its story content.
How playable Jedi should be handled has been one of the major bones of contention since the game was in its earliest days of development. It changed numerous times throughout SWG‘s lifetime, and rogue servers have followed in this tradition by each offering their own unique ways of unlocking the Force-wielding alpha class.
Restoration III is aiming to evoke a cinematic sensibility, with players having to endure a lengthy six-part series of events to unlock the profession. The key element in all of this is what they’re calling The Inciting Incident, a randomised event that will challenge players in some personal fashion in the ultimate discovery of their latent Force powers. It sounds genuinely exciting and not too unlike what Raph Koster had wanted to do way back when he was designing the original Jedi unlock system.
A second, much shorter developer diary entry explained that the server would be adding content that occurs according to the events in the pre-Disney takeover Legends continuity.
SWG: Prophecy (Custom NGE rogue server)
If you’ve been wanting to check out the custom content that SWG Expanded has been creating for anybody to use on their servers then head on over to the Prophecy server, which has just implemented the Isolation of the Sands questline in their 5.0 update.
SWG: Beyond (Custom NGE rogue server)
Congratulations to the Beyond server, which has been live for three years as of April. Alongside their anniversary event, players can check out a host of changes to the server’s crafting system.
[…] players finally got to check out the Ranching and Farming update, having waited an entire, er, two weeks since it was announced. Yep, this was a spectacularly quick turnaround from reveal to […]