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Sandarie, Community Manager
May the 4th be With You!
An Empire in Flames is set a post-Endor timeline offering a new and unique Star Wars Galaxies experience! With under 2 weeks to go until Launch Day, we wanted to give you some highlights of what to expect from Empire in Flames.
The developers created their vision of an environment friendly to Roleplayers, PvE players, and PvPers. With the hope to one day include the Pilot community. EiF will include:
The designers dreamed of a real Galactic Civil War, one which wasn’t exclusively in the imaginations of the players.
A New Profession System
Empire in Flames offers a new approach to the professions system – one combining the best from NGE and pre-CU.
Professions cost no skill points (though they require XP to level). However, a player can only have ONE profession at a time. Professions include:
Abilities acquired from professions can be used with any weapon, or even unarmed. Professions offer enhancement, access to specialized skills like slicing, vendors, creature harvesting, and more.
Skills, on the other hand, require skillpoints and can be freely mix-and-matched. They do require XP to level; however all skills can be learned from their novice box up. Prerequisites are not required.
Skillpoints have been adjusted to allow a player to pickup approximately 2 1/2 trees, with some exceptions. (Image Designer, Dancer, and Musician together reach 250 points, for example.)
A New Approach to Housing
Empire in Flames offers additional housing options not available on other SWGEmu servers. Player cities take a central role; player houses are required to be built inside city limits. No more crust of housing on the edge of the no-build zone around NPC starports. No more endless sea of houses on Tatooine. Instead, players have more reason than ever to cooperate – “home” is now a community.
New Races
New races started with the developers of Empire in Flames; some of which have been shared with other servers. However the team has some saved exclusively for EiF and the server launch!
Crafting Revamp
One of the most controversial changes we’re adopting is a crafting revamp for weaponsmith and armorsmith. Instead of the old crafting system, we’re moving to a “core”-based system. The base of every weapon is a core, whether it’s a pistol, carbine, rifle, or melee weapon. The core determines critical stats like HAM cost, damage, and speed. Additions like stocks, scopes, and customized barrels are done at the weapon-level to modify those core stats. In essence, any weapon or armor can be made good. Empire in Flames is more than powerhammers and T-21s and composite armor.
A New Setting – with a look to the future
The decision to move post-Endor is partly driven by roleplay, but also by a desire to implement a proper Galactic Civil War. While the immediate ramifications of the time shift are largely cosmetic, it means new themeparks are coming – after all, Jabba the Hutt, Darth Vader, the Emperor, and Xizor are all dead.
How will you position yourself to rise to power?
A Roadmap Forward
Post-launch, the next three major patches are planned: Galactic Civil War, Schisms of the Force, and Underworld. The first brings a proper Galactic Civil War to the galaxy; the second the implements the Jedi profession; the third reveals black markets, smuggled goods, player bounty hunting, and Crime Lords.
Along the way, other content is planned – new themeparks for the New Republic and the Empire, a three-faction questline over the fate of Jabba’s criminal empire, and a series of post-Endor based heroic encounters.
Join Us!
An Empire in Flames launches in less than two weeks!. Plan to be there! A launch party will be held along with other fun activities. Like… SWG is back, only better!
May the 4th be with you! May you be with us on May the 4th, as well!
Join us on Discord to reconnect with old friend and meet new ones.
“To be a Ranger meant knowing how to move in any environment. To blend in with the forest or grassland, to sail, to swim, to dive, to pilot. To be masters of our surroundings. We were good spies, good warriors, very adept at intrusion and escape.” – Tyria Sarkin
In the live Star Wars Galaxies games, the Ranger was an underappreciated class. Too much of their thunder was stolen by the basic Scout profession, and the most of the rest was taken away by game changes.
Empire in Flames aims to make the Ranger a valuable addition once more.
Rangers are the outdoorsmen of Empire in Flames. Of the various professions available (more to be unveiled soon!), Rangers have the highest terrain negotiation, allowing them to climb hills quickly and cross rugged terrain in quick order.
While all characters can skin out animal kills and acquire meat, hide, or bone, the ranger is far more effective. Years of experience in the outdoors allow him to recover far more valuable organic material from a kill than a character without his skill.
Rangers are masters of camouflage, allowing them to sneak up on unsuspecting wildlife or bypass hostile creatures without confrontation. Many early Rebels trained as rangers for the stealth skills necessary to launch surprise attacks on Imperial outposts.
Experienced rangers also know how to read the signs of an environment. The best rangers understand not only how to track their prey, but figure out what else – and who else – is around them. Bounty hunters seeking targets on the run may employ Rangers to help them track their target even in the wildest jungle or forest.
Rangers may go days or weeks without seeing civilization – in part because they bring civilization with them. Rangers can build camps from even primitive materials, but with advanced techniques and components they can build a home-away-from-home. While a camp is useful for a ranger, it’s far more important for a ranger’s allies – often adventurers who are unaccustomed to the harsh outdoors.
Rangers rely on a wide variety of skills in the field to keep them independent from the city. They often pick up first aid medical training, and specialize in long-range weapons – often taking their prey with precisely aimed medium- to long-distance shots.
Star Wars Galaxies launched with a profession system that is best described as “revolutionary.”
32 classes allowed for an incredibly complex number of character builds, covering all types of combat, support, and crafting. To this day, that freedom for character building still draws players back to the Star Wars Galaxies emulator.
Ultimately, the devs found the 32 class system to be really unwieldy – balance problems plagued the original system, and were partly addressed by the Combat Upgrade. Less than a year later, the development team replaced the entire system with the nine-profession New Game Experience – a move that drove off massive parts of the playerbase which were alienated after losing the incredible customization that had made SWG so much fun in the first place.
The emulator has exposed some further problems with the original 32-class system – namely, that only a handful of builds work for high-end content. Some classes are virtually unable to compete at the high end (like pistoleer and Teras Kasi Artist), which makes that complex character building largely superfluous.
An Empire in Flames is taking a combination approach to allow for more freedom in character builds – more useful builds.
The EiF system begins with the original launch SWG system, and flavors with the Combat Upgrade’s specials system, and tops off with the New Game Experience’s professions.
SKILLS AND PROFESSIONS
An Empire in Flames allows customization in new ways. Under the pre-CU and NGE versions of Star Wars Galaxies, smugglers used pistols and only pistols in combat. (The NGE also had a separate melee line later in development.) It’s based on the Han Solo archetype – he carried his trusty DL-44 throughout the original trilogy, after all.
Under An Empire in Flames, however, smugglers have a unique set of specials that can be used with all ranged weapons, not just pistols, similar to the Combat Upgrade’s far more flexible system. For the purpose of an example, the smuggler in question is also a Rifleman. Those smuggler specials still work even though the smuggler is using a T-21 instead of a DL-44.
In this case, smuggler is the profession; rifleman is a skill.
What does this mean in practical terms for a player?
Skills can be trained in any mix-and-match combination, and use skill points up to the 250 point cap. They are weapons skills and proficiencies, crafting skills, entertainment skills. Professions require no skill points, but a player can only have one profession at a time. They provide supplementary skills and open up new content options.
NEW CONTENT
Star Wars Galaxies, in its varied forms, provided a small amount of profession-specific content. Most notable (and long-lived) was the bounty hunter’s unique mission system, allowing players to hunt marks across the galaxy in every version of the game. Late NGE gave smugglers what were derided as “pizza delivery missions” – smuggler-specific content that included both ground and space. Jedi had the other end of bounty hunter missions and the Force Ranking System.
Other profession-specific content was more subtle. Galaxies crafters (and later, NGE traders) were unique in their ability to have a fulfilling game experience in running a shop and producing goods. Creature Handlers (and later Beast Masters) spent endless hours searching for rare creatures and training up pets.
By differentiating between professions and skills, the Empire in Flames team can focus on providing more unique content and experiences for each profession.
WHICH ARE SKILLS AND WHICH ARE PROFESSIONS?
Stay tuned to find out. We will be featuring both professions and skills in the upcoming weeks.