The highly anticipated Star Wars Galaxies started appearing in retail stores today, but many players trying to log in to the game for the first time have run into error messages during the initial registration process. LucasArts has explained to us that Sony Online, the game's developer, had planned for the first-day rush of players by installing more servers than the company has had for any previous product launch. However, not so many players were expected to have the game so early in the day, as soon as the servers went live. The heavy traffic, combined with hardware failures, has overloaded the registration servers.
A LucasArts representative said that "all hands are on deck" at Sony Online trying to smooth out the game's launch. The developers estimate that new hardware will be installed today that will resolve the registration problems. According to a new update on the official forums, "There is more work to do on the subscription servers, but weve doubled our numbers of people online and playing in the last hour." Once players are able to register, the game is said to be running fine. At last count, there are more than 1,400 players in the game.