Was it resilient to the, uh, many, many well-documented problems that the genre pushes players/itself into?
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[1] There's a lot of ideas in this space that sound interesting on paper to nerds bikeshedding, but often fall flat in actual implementation. I'm curious as to what were the ones that worked.
SWG set out to be something like Dwarf Fortress in terms of depth to the worlds physics; for example, gunsmiths could tinker on all parts of a gun and maybe get a lucky roll to unlock +N more damage or -N recoil. Same with land vehicles and bioengineered animals, droids. Parameters to noodle all the way down. Some under user control, others random to foster sense of a chaotic physical world.
As the in game object economy was entirely propped up by crafters this fostered economic PVP.
Lucasarts of 2000-2003, when the game was developed, did not understand MMO, and 3D games take much longer than 2D adventure games and shoved it out the door 2 years too early.
It also suffered from 90s OOP heavy software development patterns. Devs had difficulty managing it and updating over the years.
Ultimately it failed at being a Star Wars game. PVE was just "kill a nest of bugs" and failed to leverage storylines and characters. Players with nothing else to do ended up ruling the economy or whatever. Could have made them compete against Star Wars power brokers, IMO. Jabba sabotaged your factory, or something. Once a player was kitted out they had nothing to do.
Some have spent the last 10+ years implementing a server emulator, various tools and mods. An emulator built around the original release is here: https://github.com/swgemu
I tinker on a modded private server now and then. Initially added in random world events, to generate things to go do and replacing odd design decisions like mission terminals with NPC models to talk to in that seedy back alley, to foster more in world RP vibe.
When WOW launched SWG was redesigned to play more like that. Typical MBA "copy paste what they are doing" project management.
It truly was ahead of its time, I don't think any one game has come close to implementing such a rewarding group of systems and economy in an MMORPG, except maybe EVE but that is a very different game and admittedly I did not find EVE fun.
The most exciting systems to me had very little to do with combat, but especially as it pertains to this article, also couldn't be as rewarding without it. It was all the player run economies, homsteads, towns and cities, player shops, craftsman and markets. The fact that materials mined had quality which impacted item stats, on and on.
To get good gear, you had to know a guy who made it, they had to know a guy who'd mined good quality minerals, and that person may have found the minerals through another player who had prospected it.
It made sense to be part of a player city, so you could put your house in a known market area for people to visit.
It all mattered because people needed the equipment to go do the quests, and so it was a really symbiotic set of systems that made crafting and economy matter.
The fact that player towns just emerged was really cool.
It was such a shame the space expansion was so ... flat. Neither space nor ground had a storyline to follow, but space wasn't an open world, and had no real element of choice in skill paths.
