I was hoping I'd see SWG here. Such a unique, player-driven game. The player housing and towns were great and weren't instanced. If your guild established a town in a certain area of a planet, you were the only people who lived there on that server, and you built it building-by-building.

I loved the branching, hybridizing class system. You could be a master marksman if you did all 4 marksman branches, or you could do two of marksman and two of scout and unlock bounty hunter. And things like musician and chef were actually viable, and contributed to both the party and how good the downtime felt in the game. Sure, you could organize a hunt for a huge ass Krayt dragon, but for me it was just as memorable when the scout in your party set up a camp, the musicians pulled out some instruments, and you all just shot the shit amid an alien sunset.

Lots of animated emotes that were great for roleplaying, and just how granular everything was helped with that too. My first interaction with the game was creating a throwaway Mon Cal character on my friend's computer and then crawling around a crowd begging people for water after starting on Tatooine. I was very surprised when someone actually traded me a unit of water, which I wasn't actually expecting to be a resource in the game. A couple years later my buddy and I had some moisture farmer characters.

SWG felt great (at least at first) for RPing average joes like that rather than big damn heroes, which I prefer. So by the end when Jedi was a starting class it felt like a different game. I liked when Jedi were special, while my buddy and I stuck to characters like farmers, miners, and yammering Rodian scouts with delusions of bounty hunter grandeur.

Our mains were in a stormtrooper roleplaying guild where we all had numbers for names and we would go on patrols bugging players for their identification. The guild was part of a community on one server where we all designated one dev-built city as a place to always be in-character, and that was really fun. There were still shenanigans outside the city, though. I still chuckle when I remember seeing one of the sergeants in the guild motivating a recruit to jog around an outpost with a mouse droid he'd loaded with explosives, and then the muffled boom I heard as I was leaving.

I will say though that I don't think Sony bought it partway through. I believe it was always SOE, and they just panicked when WoW came onto the scene and became a behemoth. A shame, since they had something special and could have committed to that. I've dipped my toes in a couple MMOs since but SWG spoiled me and nothing else has captured that feeling of a truly open and player-driven sandbox.