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Star Wars Galaxies - No Crushbone Factor?
Tark writes "Over at Warcry.com, there's a new column from Warthog discussing his post-launch impressions of the PC MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, a month after official release date." This opinion piece is from the writer whose entertaining review we featured just after game launch, and it's interesting to see how his opinions have changed over time - he still says SWG lacks the "Crushbone Factor", referencing a particular area of Everquest which "..had quests... unique monsters... cool, level appropriate loot drops... [and] personality."
As much as I want to like SWG, it's becoming very very hard to. The game is simply boring. PvP which should be the driving factor is boring, and in some cases broken. Missions are all the same. If you change planets you just change which creatures you fight, but the battles are all the same. Dungeons and quests? What dungeons and quests. Not only were the dungeons and quests so few and far between to be almost non existant half of them were broken up until this weekend. SOE says sorry if you did these quests and got nothing, they are fixed now, but those of you that did them once can't do them over again to get the reward you should have gotten the first time around.
While this all adds up to a bad experience I think the most telling factor is this. The most commonly heard question I've been seeing in game and on message boards is. When does World of Warcraft come out?
Why doesn't everyone just play MUDs? IMO They we're so much better. I curse our new graphical overlords!!! On the other hand, maybe with time they will become as good as MUDs. mud.arcadia.org 4000 (ahh, the memories.)
Who needs SWG when I've got KOTOR? It's a lot more fun, has great voice acting and story, and won't cost me $10+/month.
In a product designed to amuse me, I shouldnt have to go looking for fun.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
One of your criticisms (as I took it) of the game sounds like a real strength to me. I had always envisioned EVERYONE trying to be Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, or Boba Fett. If everyone tried to be, I would think the game would be horribly boring.
If >50% of the people lead virtual lives that are NOT heroic, that means that BEING heroic actually puts you in the minority. That is, most certainly, how it should be.
Progress? What progress?
You spend an hour or two a day in game so you can make a new coffee table. I spend an hour or two a day in game fighting the same old garbage so I can have enough money to purchase your coffee table. Eventually I'm going to get tired of the boring and repetativeness of this portion of the game. I'll leave and when you've mastered building that armoire there won't be anyone around to buy it. There isn't enough content to keep the people that don't want to be crafters entertained. Without this portion of the player base the economy will collapse.
Now don't get me wrong, to a certain extent I like the fact that there is dependance on other players for the game to work. I don't like playing at 2am and coming into town to find there are no entertainers in the cantinas and no medics in the medical center. I don't like the fact that I can't find an upgraded weapon because MOBs don't drop them and the stuff on the bazaar is junk. The weaons crafters and armor crafters that were providing these services are quiting because they are tired of "being weapons whores" etc. There is no easy way to find out where players are building thier houses and setting up thier vendors so you spend hours running around aimlessly outside of cities looking for these vendors. You find one or hear of one and check the vendors there. Only to find out that there is either no stock or the weapons are equal to or below the quality of your current weapon (more of a problem for melees than ranged, and then mostly a problem for pikeman in the melee category).
Now, this isn't the case on all the servers. I'm hearing about how there are tons of crafters on Starsider and you can find plenty of what you need. There are so many damn servers though there doesn't seem to be any consistancy.
Now lets talk missions. Missions on the starter planets are designed to match your skills. However, they are way too easy, too time consuming, and the reward is rarely worth the effort. You spend 80% of your time running from the city to the mission area and back again. Now, the missions on some of the smaller planets or moons are much more difficult. In some cases impossible without huge groups. This is better, except that once you do get a big group together they become just as easy as the standard missions and the rewards are just as poor.
I don't want this game to be like Everquest, heck I didn't like Everquest so I really don't want it to be like Everquest. There just isn't much there for anyone to do right now. There are people that are having fun, but the people I play with on a regular basis are already losing interest. The game is just over a month old, and in my opinion that is a very very bad sign.
While I agree with most of what you're saying, I had to laugh when you got the part about how, before SWG's release when they pulled vehicles you show a screenshot of WoW, before its release with players on horses. You have no idea whether those horses will still be there when WoW launches, nor do you have any idea how much WoW might change for the worse. The game's not even in beta yet.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
SOE could complain about the costs of content if they weren't gouging month to month subscribers for $15. As far as I know this is the highest priced subscription so far. Of course I could be wrong. It is the most expensive I've played.
His "main beef" is that it's missing the "crushbone factor". This isn't "I want Crushbone in space with Jedi", this is "I want a story, a big dungeon, and interesting items with side quests to back it up".
He spent quite a while explaining the Crushbone Factor. Perhaps if he named it "The Content Factor" you would have less to complain about. Perhaps you would have spared us your mini-rant about how much you hate Everquest, and your insults to mmorpg players.
I'm sorry, this is definitely news to me. SWG was made as a world, not a game. Of course, it all makes sense now! It's not a game in anyway! That's why it's not marketed a replacement for this world, Eart- oh, whoops.
It's obvious that you like the SWG. Please, write up a rebuttal designed take apart Warthog's main argument, the lack of content. Don't segway off and bitch about Everquest. When your rebuttal is written, post it... I'd like to read another article that shows SWG in a more positive light.
Seems to me that people who buy an SOE game should pretty much know by now what they're getting themselves into.
Consider this: There are lots of complaints about bugs. Lots of complaints about servers being unavailable. Lots of complaints about cheating, poor gameplay, boring quests, etc, etc... But regardless of what specifically people are complaining about, the pervasive theme running through 90% of complaints is that SOE simply don't care about their customers.
I'm seeing cause, I'm seeing effect.
Just because people are willing to give something away for free doesn't mean it's not expensive. Quite a few people that read Slashdot make quite good money working on software during the day then give away their programming ability to quality Open Source projects at night. Just because I can go download GCC for free doesn't mean programmers shouldn't be paid well for their expertise.
I should have also stated that quality content is expensive. Sturgeon's law and all that. Especially since I have the audacity to expect to be able to make a living running a game, people aren't going to be falling over themselves to give me content for free in most cases. (I know this isn't strictly true, but I can't rely on people's generosity forever in a commercial game.)
So, while there is a lot of quality content out there in text MUDs (I provided a little bit to some MUDs when I was in college), you can't rely on that in the commercial world. Content is expensive in this situation.
I run a commercial graphical game, so I have some experience with this issue. (Meridian 59, the URL is just under my username.)
My experiences,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog