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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.)
Hardly the same thing.
C3PO says, "Your reward has been placed in your backpack."
You look in your backpack... there isn't anything there. You check your faction standing. It hasn't budged. You check your bank account. No new deposits.
You tell C3PO, "You lying rust bucket screw you rebels I'm going to tell the Emporer where your secret rebel base is!"
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.
"Shortly after posting this article, I realized something that had somehow gotten past me about the last update by SOE, just two days ago. SOE in their wisdom decided that they needed to slow down the respawn rate of some static spawns, because people were "camping" them. Camping is, apparently, a bad thing. (Does it matter that most players want lots of spawn points to camp? One must wonder...).
I went to one of the very few locations with some content today (the Tusken Fortress), and hunted for a while. The tuskens located there spawn much, much more slowly now. There is less to hunt, basically. It was frustrating.
That's right, folks. SOE took a game with little content and, by reducing the spawn rate of static spawns, actually reduced the amount of content, hunting, and other things to do.
Pure genius."
oh god... I was in Beta 3... (actually, I was BANNED from beta 3 near the end because I was a little miffed when medics got the shaft, and suggested that if marksmen had to go through the same crap to shoot as medics were forced to in order to heal, people would tell SoE to shove the game up their ass... or perhaps it was Holocrons (Raph Kosters) post about "how they had decided to drop vehicles at launch in order to focus on 'content'" and my subsequent posting of a WoW screenshot showing players on horses... who can say?)
Regardless, the games "content" has been 0 since the day I got the beta, and it seems like it hasnt gotten any better. Sad really, THIS is that SW MMORPG we get. There wont be another one 6 months from now (like, AC and EQ are both fantasy MMORPGs, so there IS "choice")...
oh well, WoW will be out in a year or so...
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
The problem is that content is expensive. The hand-crafted feel of EQ's zones (and the game I work on, Meridian 59) take a long time to create. It takes specialized people with a good eye to create those cool level, to write up the quests, to create the cool items that drop off the monsters.
SWG had to go toward randomly-generated content in the world because they simply could not generate all the needed content by hand. Especially with more modern players expecting a wealth of new content at launch and on a regular basis. New games have to compete with EQ's content, which has been added to over the years.
In the end, content is expensive. Generating some of the content randomly helps create more content that doesn't feel repetitive, but it loses a bit of soul in the process.
My view on things,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
Dead? Hardly. Warthog's main beef is that it isn't everquest. And he's an idiot. Many, many of us do not want everquest. We do not want ph4t l3wt drops off mobs. We don't want to camp Crushbone for weeks till we can ding so we can go camp crocs in Oasis until we ding again. Everquest was designed as a game, SWG was designed as a world. I'm sick and tired of seeing all the little pellet chasers that Everquest brought to the genre trying to turn every game into the next everquest. The fact I can log in, play at my leisure and log out whenever I feel like it and not feel guilty about "only putting 6 hours in today" is great. I can play one or two hours a day and still make progress with some of my online friends. SWG was made for people who have outside lives and are more socially adapt than a paperclip. I like it that way...Don't turn it into another Everquest pandering to the catasses who play 70 hours a week.
You want Everquest? Go play Everquest and stop trying to turn every other game into a Everquest clone.
In a product designed to amuse me, I shouldnt have to go looking for fun.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Notice the titles. The link is the same because the current article is always at that link. The title of the previous article was "Warrior, Brawler, Hairdresser". The current article is titled "Beware the Dancing Kung Fu Lizardman!". If you scroll to the bottom of the current editorial you will see a link to the previous article which is now archived at the following url http://swg.warcry.com/scripts/columns/view_columns .phtml?site=13&id=579
You should also notice from the slashdot summary of the previous article that it mentions the previous title. If you actually read the linked article today you would see that the titles are differant.
It is NOT a dupe.
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.
the "Crushbone Factor", referencing a particular area of Everquest
Great. We refer to part of Everquest to measure how good a game is?
That's like complimenting a game by saying it has the "root canal" factor.
-- Mojo Tooth : exploring our world as only an idiot can.
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.
This is not the game you're looking for.
---
Heavily armed, easily bored and off my medication.
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.
I had this problem once back in beta. Toggling my "Chase Cam" fixed it. I think it's the numericpad decimal point key which toggles this.
The problem with being in-range to attack as a brawler is quite valid. Range for attacking purposes is calculated to the center of the beast you are attacking. Some of these beasts are HUGE, and you can be literally standing beneath them visually and still get "out of range".
I also heard from one player that the beasts attack from the space where their head is located, but since they can only receive damage at their 3D object center, it gets kind of difficult to battle in any sensibible way.
The worst problem with these unannounced 6-8 hour "emergency maintenance" sessions is that some people can't get to their harvesters during their gaming window that day, which can result in some seriously nasty losses, which the CSRs are very unlikely to rectify.
But harvesters are a very very sore point all their own in this game. Harvesters are horribly implemented and have irrational costs considering their hit-and-miss usefulness.
I wonder how much the Franchise Approval process is slowing them down. This could be a significant liability if it is not streamlined.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
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.
To become a Jedi, you have to unlock a Jedi character slot, through a process that no one knows about, and is supposed to take months. There will only be 1-5 Jedi per server, apparently, which is intended to keep them rare, which I certainly understand.
To my knowledge, no players have unlocked Jedi slots yet, although there are a few Dark Jedi NPCs running around, as well as whole clans of force-sensitive witches on Dathomir.
you have to have a rebel backpack (your regular inventory doesn't count) and 1500 faction points before you get your reward. or so i've heard. I've also heard that they've taken out that message if you can't get the reward or there is no reward to give.
If you can't get the reward you shouldn't be able to do the quest. Also the first missions are simply run here run back missions so there is no reason to limit who can do them and who can't. The message has been changed so that you don't see "Your reward has been placed in your backpack." when the only reward would be faction points and credits. The problem is that you didn't even get the faction points or credits.
first you guys bitch about how its not out yet and to "release it already"
This is completly out of context. I would never bitch about releasing it already. I jumped all over the funcom people for the state of Anarchy Online. I'm constantly griping about companies releasing games or other software that isn't finished and expecting people to live with it, and I'm always griping about people not telling these companies to go to hell. I cancelled my AO account when they started billing because the game still wasn't done. I just got billed the first time for Star Wars, and that is the primary reason I'm upset about the lack of content. They are telling me that the game is done, and that I need to be paying to play it. I don't think there is enough content and if at the end of the month it is the same way they can not count on my $15.
then you complain about its level of completeness when it is finally released. when does the madness end?
I agree there are people that fall into this category, but I would much rather wait an extra six months or a year to play a game if that means it will be done when it comes out. Since SWG is obviously lacking and it was sold to me as a finished product I have every right to be upset and bitch about it.
No Stars
No Wars
No Wars in the Stars
No Galaxies
No Star Wars Galaxies
WTF?
I think Star wars, I think of Cruising around in my Millenium Falcon shooting Tie Fighters.
I think of flying low on Hoth taking out AT-AT's.
I think of Lightsabers, blasters, and Stormtroopers in White Armor blasting everywhere.
When I heard that you couldn't fly anything, and how the PvP system was implemented, I was like, you're kidding right?
I want barfights, I want to jump in my spaceship and fly around.
I want my fellow rebels to all hop in THEIR spaceships and try to take out a few Battlecruisers or something.
I want to be able to attack a planet.
SWG seems more like an experiment in MMORPG addictiveness rather than entertainment.
I'm glad I listened to everybody and passed on this game.
You know I think half of the problem is that people are comparing SWG to the wrong game.
While in looks and interface wise, EQ and SWG are very similar and either could pass for a clone of the other, fundimentally they are different games. I think it would be more accurate to compare post-launch SWG with early Ultima Online. If you look at the Dev team you can see why, I'd be willing to wager that half of the original UO dev team was recruited for SWG and that has an influence.
Anyway, Ultima Online had NONE of the "Crush Bone" factor due to the fact that UO NEVER was about loot. If you went out and killed a bunch of monsters, you didn't go out to get uber Sword of XXXXX, you went out to get gold to buy player made armor and weapons. UO was made interested by a vastly superior PvP system that to this day, in my humble opion, has never been equalled or bettered; a VERY immersive world; Player Markets; a very tight and involving society and (upon later discovery, and un-intended system of...)rares.
What I believe has happened to SWG is that Raphael Koster has tried to make a 3d sw-based version of UO, and people are expecting EQ. These two are apples and oranges and your expectations will taint your experience within the game. Not saying that SWG isn't lacking because make no mistake, it is greatly lacking, but people have their expectations the wrong way around. I don't think that SoE had those big mobs you need 34523453 people to take down in mind when they designed the game.
The quest/unique mobs is NOT a required feature of an MMO. And a game that can be designed to be fun WITHOUT camping will succeed alot better than one that does. The reason being, these camps cause alot of competition, grief playing and headaches that the majority of gamers really don't want to deal with. However, UO did have static minor mobs for players to hunt. And they had them in abundance. Not only that, but dungeons were made 10x more interesting, not by mobs, but by players. Player killing added something to dungeon hunting that a super hard monster never will.