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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."
I don't understand the relevance of creating and selling a MMOG (Multi-Massive Online Game).
I mean. It requires a lot of resources in creation, development, manteinance, and it also requires a lot of marketing in order to reach a vast audience. It is strenuous on resources, and with human nature of the players, a MMOG experience may be even worse than Real Life.
Ok, I am biased against MMOGs, I only played freeware ones and I find hard to collect the necessary time to play one anyway (I still prefer usenetting). But this "let's do a MMOG" craze looks to me like the other crazes that there were back in the days, only worse.
Example: after playstation came out, every single industry tried to put a 3d videocard for pcs (and now only NVidia, who played well, and ATI, who was relatively out of the high-end 3d business until late, are the top of the market).
Another Example: In 1996, how many IPSs were proliferating trying to replicate the success of Compuserve, AOL and Prodigy?
Third Example: Wizards of the coast came out with Magic the Gathering in 1992/1993, then everyone and their dog published their own C/TCG. (When WoTC grabbed the patent on C/TCGs the market was sweeped by WoTC fees, leaving WoTC with a monopoly).
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?
+ + + + ;_;
I thank the AC who stole my first meaningful first post
"I am slashbot, hear me roar!"
The reason raph is considered the worse thing to happen to UO is that it was not until he left and the stuff he had done was no longer in the pipline did game sales and population take off.
The same thing can be said about SWG, now that he has less contact alot of stuff is being proposed that is against what raph originally planned and is getting wide support and design.
BTW raph was put in charge of all SOE games and based on current messages in now messing with EQ2, he has delayed it to make changes he wants.
This bears less a resemblance to "an independent post mortem" and more of one to the rants on the SWG boards. It's stated with less venom but for example he refers to the "viciously boring" character advancement method. As opposed to????
Yes it can be absolutely boring but generally only if you are a power gamer, someone who demands instant advancement with as little work as possible. No, I would NOT enjoy spending an hour grinding out couplers and grips: so I don't!
This is basically an attack on Koster and as such it is not worth deep analysis.
NEXT!
The problem with Star Wars games is that everyone wants to be a Jedi. Period. Sure, you'll get the odd weirdo who wants to be Watto's sex slave, or the guy who thinks Corellian starship mechanics is the place for him, but by and large, everyone wants to be a Jedi. That's why every Star Wars game lets you
Back on various Pern-themed MUSHed, based upon the Anne McCaffrey's Dragonrider books, you had a very similar situation: everyone wanted to be a dragonrider (and, even more pointedly, the higher level gold/bronze dragonriders). Folks who could not obtain a gold dragon in one of the MUSHes would start their own MUSH (generically called the "gold-of-their-own" MUSHes since the person starting the new MUSH always gave him/herself a gold dragon). Guess what? It isn't all that fun when everyone wants to play the same type of character.
Imagine playing a Star Trek game: folks would most likely want to be a Captain or a bridge officer, NOT Ensign Red Shirt or Dumbass Diplomat. In vampire games, you'd want to be a vampire (or, these days, a vampire slayer, I guess).
The problem is that it is NO fun being a Captain, or a Jedi, or a Vampire if EVERYONE else is a Captain, Jedi or Vampire. That, invariably, is why MMORPGs based upon the concept that one type of person is better than everyone else is destined to fail, unless care is given to balancing all the different career paths.
Movies tend to focus on extraordinary individuals, and Star Wars, Matrix, Star Trek, etc, all have that "bias." Creating games based on those extraordinary people works perfectly fine in single-player experiences (where everyone CAN be the Captain), but suffers greatly when spread across hundreds or thousands of people.
I think that's why more generic MMORPGs like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot tend to be more interesting: while there are some balance issues, there's not a clearly superior "endstate" class, like Jedi or Captain or Vampire. There's no pre-conceived notions of how to do things, and no reference material (like movies) to inform the experience.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
I'm another one that left SWG. I did that yesterday. I gave away 500k credits, a medium sized house, and a lot of resources to a friend. He said he'll probably go another month and quit too.
It's not for lack of interest in MMORPGs... I've played Everquest since near the beginning.
I have to say, I'm quite disappointed in how SWG turned out. I can tell that the SWG team must not have had anything to do with the EQ team, or they wouldn't have made the mistakes they did.
I could write a long list of things to SOE about why I think the game failed, but I think it'll just fall onto deaf ears. It's time to move on to something that's more fun.
If another company decides to look at the MMORPG area, take a cue from Everquest. A system that rewards players little by little, adding to the characters power over a long period of time works well.
Add a ton of content, and I mean a ton. Don't rely on your players for this, because that's not what players will pay to play. It's like going to the movies, only to find that once you get there, you're responsible for entertaining everyone else.
Rewards should be items, not just money. Money should be hard to get. Too much money will ruin the economy.
I'll have to agree with the article author that there are fundamental problems with the economy in SWG (or, at least, there were - I cancelled my account about a month after the game went live).
The most glaring issue is that there is no real advancement through manufactured goods in terms of the scale of the economy. A top-end weapon costs roughly the same order of magnitude as a newbie weapon in terms of the cost of materials required to construct the weapon. Because of this (and the players' evident unwillingness to charge the exorbitant prices they should for top-end crafted items), the best crafted weapons cost about the same order of magnitude as the bottom-end crafted weapons.
Because of this, there is very little room for more than a few people in the sellers' market. Get a factory fired up, and one person can produce a significant portion of all the goods their local customers need, and can use their spare time to produce special-request items on the side. Thus, new entries into the market must either undercut the market or go completely without sales while they skill up to Master in order to be competitive.
The crafting professions should have been designed so that top-end items were multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than bottom-end items, in terms of material costs to produce. The same % markup would result in a significantly larger inflow for those who specialized in top-end items, thus decreasing the impetus to bottom-feed (make items available at lower levels in the skill tree). This would open up those lower-level markets to relatively unskilled crafters, and would permit them to sell their items rather than simply using the "practice" mode on every attempt.
Additionally, crafting should have been designed so that lower levels of skill permitted the production of widgets necessary in the production of higher-level items. This is true already, in some cases, that you need a few of some crafted item in order to make another crafted item. But in order to prevent high-skilled players from simply cranking those bits out themselves, the quantities needed should have been in the dozens or even hundreds - enough to ensure that there would be a market for those items from lower-skilled players (if for no other reason than to save the high-skilled player a lot of time and trouble).
There are various other flaws with the game in terms of design and the expectation that players would do more than they are doing now. However, there are far more achievers in these games than designers would care to think (almost everyone has a bit of Achiever in them), and not coming to that realization was the design team's fundamental mistake.
Do you know what I want to see in a MMOG? I want to see an expiry date. I want to know that the game is going to have a beginning and a middle and an end. Every great game and every great work of fiction ends at some point. There should be a story arc that changes the world over time so that I have a reason to log in every day and see what's changed. I should be able to get involved in these changing events. There should be high-level, DM-run NPCs on both sides that give meaning and order to the lives of their respective players. An Emperor DM telling the Imperials to attack X. A Mothma DM ushering the Rebels to secret base Y.
There should be epic battles that are announced in advance. Players log in and fight for their side. The results of those battles should affect which side controls which world. Eventually, there is a final month-long epic campaign to take over Base X and at the end victory parties for all and then the server gets reset. It would be like a television series.
There should be no RPG-like persistent experience-points and levelling system. This creates a barrier of entry to the wide casual market, which is your ultimate goal, financially. A linear advancement system that does not reset just means that late entrants will always be behind and people who only have a few hours a week will always be behind. (I've never understood this. It seems to me that your ideal customer in MMOG plays a few hours a week but pays the full monthly subscription. They don't put a heavy load on your servers but you get tha same income. MMOGs should be encouraging these people to play.)
Instead of experience points and levels, players should accrue items and bonuses more like they do in action or adventure games (mind you the game doesn't have to be an action game, I'm just saying that the special advantages should be easy come, easy go). Players who are dedicated will still do better in general casual players due to skill but the casual people won't be so far behind. Even the lowly slave can get a lucky shot with the gun.
In other words, you either need a linear advancement system that resets easily (like Quake) or you need a non-linear system. Ie, every plus has a minus in another direction so you're always hovering around zero.
Right now, persistent seems to mostly mean "unending". It feels like 1984 "We are at war with the East because we have always been at war with the East." Constant, unending conflict with no real ability to make a mark on the world.
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects