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The Mystery Of Star Wars Galaxies
Tim Burke writes "I've got a piece up on my website that acts as a form of independent postmortem for Star Wars Galaxies, discussing my initial impressions and lasting conclusions on the PC MMORPG." Burke argues cogently enough that SWG lead designer Raph Koster comments that it's a "good essay" over at GameGirl Advance, despite direct criticism of his team as having a "prevailing assumption... that players make content, not designers", and the suggestion that Koster is "muleheaded" about "the importance of creating a sense of achievement in a persistent world entirely through barriers of time and repetition."
Its the "Me too!" attitude. Someone sees a burgeoning market, hops onboard hoping to ride the original products coatails to success. Sadly, its how industry mostly works these days. Witness feature 'borrowing' in Operating systems, 'innovations' in new cars and 'reality' television. Nobody wants to be the person with their neck on the line creating something new and innovative. Everybody wants to invest in a known quantity. Let someone else prove the market and we'll profit from it. MMOG's are just another example of this, as you have said. They were not the first and they will certainly not be the last.
Ok, this process of everyone investing their asses in the product may incentivate innovation, but how many wrong investments were made? And now, what MMOG should I play first without having time sinkholes, idiotic admins (problem that is seen also by the linked article - see the highly censored SWG forums), and ton of bugs et al? At least AOL delivered you the packet you wished to retrieve on the internet (yeah, ok, along with SPAM, but this is the problem of the internet in the whole, not of AOL), and 3D cards delivered you pixels arranged to resemble 3d solids on the screen... but after SWG and the other batch of would-be-evercrack, how can we say that these services are delivering FUN?
MMORPGs are currently in the stage that 3D games were during the first few years of the PlayStation. They're definitely going to become a normal part of mainstream gaming in the future, but no one knows exactly how to make them yet. Somewhere, someone is cooking up a Final Fantasy VII or a Metal Gear Solid of an MMORPG , but no one really knows who has it, so they're just taking their best ideas and throwing them into the market to try and see what sticks. Eventually the gameplay will evolve into the sort of naturally refined gameplay that you expect from new 3D action games, first person shooters, 2D side scrollers, and the various other genres of games, but that's going to take awhile.
And personally, I'm going to do exactly what I did with the PlayStation: not sink a single dollar into the damn thing until someone delivers the REAL goods. Eventually, it will happen. Until then, you're paying for the beta test of the hottest MMORPG of late 2006.