![]() ![]() But in the end, the small population of remaining players watched the world go dark from the beaches of Port Royale. In its final months, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean Online offered players double gold, double XP, and unlocked all the game’s content for all its players. Most titles, though, take a simpler route: passing out free high-level gear or experience boosts to offer players a sense of closure, however insufficient. The last moments of Star Wars Galaxies and The Matrix Online stand out among MMO apocalypses as a conscious attempt to script a proper “end” to their universes, whether celebratory or catastrophic. Shutting down.” The machines win after all. Someone asks “Is it over?” A pop window answers: “Failed to reconnect to the margin server. After, the only sound is an irregular beep, like an old modem. The contortions are horrific the screams are worse. Someone in the server-wide chat yells, “I’m smoking weed and crying” someone replies, “Please don’t cry.” Seconds later, a bolt of ochre lightning tears through the crowd, killing everyone. In one Youtube video, perhaps two dozen players obliviously wait for the end. ![]() In both cases, survivors were cut down by an unexplained electrical phenomenon (a glitch in the matrix, so to speak). A bloodbath ensued anyone whose character died found that death, suddenly, was permanent. On PvE servers, SOE flooded common areas with high-level monsters that slaughtered every player in sight on PvP servers, players discovered that their weapons had been augmented to kill other players with a single shot. But unlike Galaxies, it wasn’t so much a celebration as a genocide fitting of an apocalypse. Like they would later do for Galaxies, SOE organized a final event for The Matrix Online. Sega’s ill-fated MMO The Matrix Online ran from 2005 to July 2009, when it was brought down with little warning by none other than SOE, which had purchased the property from Sega some years before. The death-knell came in 2011, when SOE announced, to no one’s surprise, that Galaxies would be shut down for good in December of that year (not coincidentally, the same month that BioWare launched its dreary Star Wars MMO, The Old Republic). Players revolted, and, by 2006 barely 10,000 people could be found in Galaxies on any given Friday. Alas, in 2005, in response to a lack of new players, Sony Online Entertainment redesigned the game to emphasize combat, trading the game’s supreme sense of inhabitation and belonging for a sense of power (the lure of the dark side indeed!). That might seem hopelessly jejune in 2015, but Galaxies was a tremendous success for several years. Instead of saving the Star Wars universe for the umpteenth time, the player was asked merely to live in that universe, getting by doing anything from bounty hunting to stripping in dusty cantinas on the Outer Rim. Though video games routinely spoil the player with fantasies of singular greatness (in Elder Scrolls Online, every player is, improbably, “the one”), Galaxies initially set its sights lower. Star Wars Galaxies launched in 2003 to critical and commercial acclaim. ![]()
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