A long time ago in a games industry far, far away, a bunch of Sony Online Entertainment developers had the crazy idea of adding Jedi characters to an MMO without either robbing all the other classes of appeal, or nerfing the Force-wielders into oblivion.

The game in question was Star Wars Galaxies, which launched in 2003 and eventually reached the end of its official life in 2011. In a new interview, director Raph Koster has talked about the trials and pitfalls of creating overpowered Jedi playstyles for the game, including one particular road-not-taken that would have seen lightsaber adepts spending their entire lives avoiding detection. While Sony Online Entertainment did eventually come up with a way of ensuring that Jedi were powerful but rare, Koster feels it was a "monumental mistake" that fatally sabotaged the game, not helped by an overeager marketing department.

All this comes from a new interview with Noclip. Speaking as somebody who never played Star Wars Galaxies, I think it's a great story, and I've taken the liberty of transcribing and writing it up at feature length.

There was no question that Star Wars Galaxies would need to offer playable Jedi, Koster says in the video. "I saw the original movie 13 times in the theater, right, when I was eight, seven, something like that. We all played at Jedi with our Kenner action figures and all the rest. It's too powerful a fantasy not to serve it in some way. We knew, from the MMO background, that this was a massive problem."

The Story Behind Star Wars Galaxies' Notorious Jedi Problem - /noclip

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It would have been a challenge adding Jedi to the game whatever the era, but Star Wars Galaxies also had to contend with the difficulty of being set between the events of A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, at a point when "the entire galaxy is turning itself upside down to hunt down just one Jedi", as Koster explained to Noclip. "It was a contractual obligation to set it there," he said. "And that left us with a dilemma. It's something everybody wants. It's meant to be uber-powerful. There aren't supposed to be any." Nor did the developers have the option of dipping into stories about hidden Jedi communities from the expanded Star Wars universe of novels and comics.

Looking to include Jedi characters without simply allowing people to choose them in the creation screens, Sony Online Entertainment resorted to the idea of a "hidden path" of invisible unlock criteria. "We had this notion that it should be very, very hard to figure even out how to become a Jedi," Koster said. "And it shouldn't be reproducible." They swiftly dispensed with the notion of simply randomising access to the class. "It didn't feel fair to us. Because it's kind of a promise on the box, right? Like, you know, people have an expectation."

The team also threw around ideas for tempering the Jedi to preserve the class balance and ensure that other classes remained appealing. In the process, they landed on a possible approach that I, personally, would have absolutely loved to see in the game: bluntly, an MMO-wide social stealth experience akin to Obi Wan going into hiding on Tatooine.

"You basically have two choices there," Koster continued. "One is to not make them super powerful. Make Jedi be on par with Han Solo, which is not really fair or accurate to the movies, right? It just wasn't really how they're portrayed. The other choice is to make it so that, yes, they can be super powerful, but there's some other kind of trade-off."

Taking inspiration from Diablo, MUDs and the concept of an Ironman mode, Koster pitched the idea of a second character slot for Jedi characters that would be subject to permadeath, forcing the player to keep a low profile in return for their lightsaber skills and Force wizardry.

"And to push back even further against it, we would make it increasingly harder, the more powerful you got," he said. "We would start sending bounty hunters after you, then, you know, Mara Jade, and eventually Darth Vader after you. And once Darth Vader came for you, you were just going to die. It was like, you had to play the game of trying to stay hidden and not attract the attention of the Empire.

"So it was sort of an incentive to see how long can I keep my guy alive," Koster explained. "Which means not using Jedi powers too profligately, right, not using them openly and widely because it would push up your visibility meter. Think of it almost like a stealth game, right? Like you're trying to stay stealthy, that was the core idea."

The developers were worried that this would be too much punishment for many Padawans, however, particularly given the risk of losing a character to cranky mid-noughties connections. "People really didn't want permadeath," Koster said. "They're like, what happens if I get a little bit of internet lag? Which was much worse of a problem back then than it is today. You know, think how people complain about lag now. It was so much worse back then. Lag was an everyday factor, right?"

The team kept plugging at the idea, looking for ways to sweeten the package for fretful wannable space-wizards. One of their possible solutions was amusingly grisly: let players bandy around the ghosts of their slain Jedi characters as trophies.

"We kept trying to design things like, it's OK if you die, you keep your Jedi slot, but you get a blue glowie, so then you can conjure them up, even on your other character, your main one," Koster said. "You can conjure up an assortment of them, like at the end of Return of the Jedi, and for all of the Jedi you've gotten up to a certain point."

"And it's sort of like bragging rights. Check me out, I've done it eight times. You know, there's my runs. In the end, there was just too much pushback from team and public on it. And it was a bit too weird an idea." Alas for the digital charnelhouses full of grinning Anakin holograms that might have been.

Eventually, Sony Online Entertainment discarded the permadeadable Jedi concept in order to concentrate on the earlier, "hidden path" approach to unlocking a Jedi. The initial plan was a kind of secret "personality test", with players completing hundreds of activities, "ranging from everything like dancing a jig, to climbing the top of a tall mountain, to crafting a sandwich", as Koster recalled. The idea being that Jedi training would only be available to players who'd proven their commitment by delving into every aspect of the experience.

"If you were somebody who only did combat, you probably wouldn't hit all of these activities," Koster said. "Only extremely well-rounded players would hit all of the different categories. So we created these multiple categories, and then we gave every individual their own randomised little list that was balanced across the categories. That was the design. So it would be a well-rounded individual, but they would not know what their checklist was. It was invisible." These checklists were to be kept hidden even from many of the developers, to avoid leaks.

It's a cool idea, I think, albeit not as thrilling as the abandoned Jedi Incognito X Force Banquo approach. It proved a nightmare to implement, however, as the game neared launch. "[We] found that we didn't have the time and the database capability to track all of those different actions," Koster said. "Because it required setting up hundreds of little hooks, right, to detect each of the actions, and we are incredibly crunched for time. The team is a year from finishing and two months from launching. And, you know, that whole game was built in less than three years."

The game's producer and lead server programmer came up with a solution to lighten the load: rather than individual activities, the Jedi path would hinge on unlockable skills. It made sense, on paper, because Star Wars Galaxies was a game that allowed players to dabble with every skill, and the developers already had a system for tracking this.

"It was towards the end of a long day," Koster said. "I was exhausted. They were exhausted. We were all working 12 to 14 hour days, including weekends, for nine continuous months at that point. And I signed off on it. And it was a monumental mistake."

One problem with tethering the system to skills was that it created a much simpler list of unlock criteria that proved "very easy to reverse engineer... from a very small amount of hints", Koster said. Even then, the system was obscure enough that players struggled to figure out the clues, though this was partly because they weren't, in fact, trying to dabble in ever last skill available, but committing to their roles within the Star Wars universe.

In yet another show of the art and business of game development gouging each other's eyes out, this led to friction with the marketing teams, who inevitably wanted to upsell the game as a Jedi power fantasy. "[The] system is in, and we start getting asked by marketing, 'When will we see the first Jedi? Because we wanna goose sales by Christmas,'" Koster recalled. "And we started looking, and players in the game were playing the way they liked. They went and learned the skills that fit their particular playstyle, and they would go off and they'd play that way.

"Very few players were of the inclination to go try everything and learn everything, right?" he continued. "Because that's just not how people are. Like, you know, I have a musical hobby, but that means I don't rebuild car engines, right? I like what I like, and I specialise in what I like. I might have diverse likes, but, you know, it's unusual for a person to be chasing everything, right? And so we ran the numbers and found that at the rate that we were going, the first person to unlock Jedi might take a decade to do it."

With sales teams breathing down their necks, the developers decided to offer more concrete hints about how to become a Jedi by way of in-game objects, nudging players towards certain skills on their hidden checklists. Players quickly deduced that all of the hints were about skills, and inevitably concluded that the surest way to achieve Force mastery was to learn every skill.

People "mostly hated" this, Koster said, because it forced them to abandon their specialisms. "All the players who enjoyed raising pets suddenly found themselves having to kill them and cook them. And all the players who enjoyed cooking and hanging out and playing cozy gameplay in a nice safe space found themselves having to run out and fight giant monsters. And all the people who enjoyed fighting giant monsters found themselves condemned to go dance in a cantina."

It was chaos, and according to Koster, it had a pronounced effect on the game's commercial fortunes. "The lure of being a Jedi was so powerful that everybody wanted it. But the quality of your day-to-day experience plummeted. And as a result, we started to see that the audience that had been growing stopped growing. And it wasn't because of less people joining the game. It was because they were lasting less time because they were being told by the game's systems to play the game in ways they didn't like."

Videogames, eh? What a rollercoaster. The pedants among you might object that (as I have just discovered) Koster has told a version of this story back in 2015, but I would counter that it is statistically likely some of my readers weren't able to spell, back then. Besides, I really want to try that Jedi 'social stealth' game - if we keep belabouring the theme, perhaps the new overlords at Disney will take note. No, Respawn's Jedi Survivor games don't count as Kenobi the Hermit equivalents - they're functionally action-adventures.

There's plenty more in the full Noclip interview, including what the experience of running MMOs has taught Koster about human beings at large. If you'd rather hear more about Star Wars Galaxies, it's far from 'dead': the MMO still exists on private servers, and has received plenty of fan updates. In 2015, Steven Messner interviewed a bunch of the people responsible about how they pulled that off.