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?

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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).

[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.