For Sony and LucasArts, the idea has been to make the game more Star Wars-like, tying it more explicitly to the films.
"We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base," said Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director at LucasArts.
"There was [were] lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves," she said.
MacIntyre said Galaxies had lost "significantly more" than the 3 percent to 5 percent of players who typically leave any online game every month. She said she expected the game to return to its previous subscriber levels in six months, a process she hoped would be accelerated by the introduction of a new television infomercial hawking Galaxies later this month.
"We knew we were taking a significant risk with our existing player base, but we felt so strongly that we needed to make these changes for the sake of the game's long-term future that we all held hands, LucasArts and Sony, and went forward," she said.
It may, however, be a rocky path, because the revamped game is receiving mostly horrible reviews from players.
On Gamespot.com, a leading game Web site, about half of the more than 600 players evaluating the game have rated it "abysmal." Some 14 percent have called it "terrible," and 6 percent have described it as merely "bad." The game is described as "perfect" by about 12 percent and "other" by 18 percent.
"We just feel violated," said Carolyn Hocke, 46, a marketing Web technician for Ministry Medical Group in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Hocke said she once had as many as 10 separate Galaxies accounts but has canceled all but one in the last two weeks.
"For them to just come along and destroy our community has prompted a lot of death-in-the-family-type grieving," she said.
"They went through the astonishment and denial, then they went to the anger part of it, and now they are going through the sad and helpless part of grieving. I work in the health-care industry, and it's very similar," she said.
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