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."

Comments

MMOG = failure? (this is a question).

[ihatesco]

Maybe OT, but this topic has been inspired by the original article:
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 ;_;

Re:MMOG = failure? (this is a question).

[Mategan]

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.

Re:MMOG = failure? (this is a question).

[will_die]

Not really sure what the purpose of the message was, that you don't enjoy MMORPGs(to each thier own) or the financial reasons for developing a MMORPG. I will answer the financial one.
Simple answer why everyone and thier mother is developing a MMORPG is simple money, money,money.
With your average game with a $50+ price range the makes of the game will only see around $15 after all is said and done. So over the time it takes for the game to be developed for an average game you will see a time value of money in the 12-15% considering the amount you could of made from putting the money in the bank and just getting interest it is still worth it.
Now for your average MMORPG, you still have that $15 from the package, but you are collecting an additional amount each month, and for alot of people even years. Even with higher costs the quess is that the average MMORPGs has around 19% return on money with the bigger ones in the 30%+ range. Throw in yearly expansion packs and it is really nice money.
One of the smaller developers said they need around 50K players to break even with paying themselves a small amount,running the game and paying investors. It was guessed they had around 70K subscribers so that would be a nice chunk of change.

Re:MMOG = failure? (this is a question).

[DarkZero]

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.

Common Problem with Licensed Games

[vjmurphy]

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.

Economy

[Dachannien]

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.