First MMORPG videogame with hidden character classes

On 7 November 2003, four months after Star Wars Galaxies was released on PC, global messages to all players alerted the MMORPG’s community that a small handful had become “Force Sensitive”, thereby opening up a Jedi character slot. The exact process by which these early players acquired this new class was a mystery even to them: the game randomly assigned specific professions that needed to be mastered for the new powers to awaken, but all of it behind the scenes. Although the developers eventually clued players into clearer paths to Jedi prowess, the process by which it was unlocked was adjusted in subsequent updates to cut down on grinding. In a blog post on the subject, Star Wars Galaxies lead designer Raph Koster originally wanted the process of becoming a Jedi more of a personality test for people who "savored the game". The system would track certain actions such as "visit the highest location on a given planet”, “use this specific emote”, “kill this particular creature”, “learn a particular skill”, and so on. During the game's final crunch before release, the team ran out of time and resources to properly implement it, and settled on randomly assigned sets of skills that players needed to master for their powers to awaken, but still kept them secret from both players and most of the development team so that as few people as possible knew about the system.

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