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Star Wars Galaxies To Revamp Jedi System
JasdonLe writes "In a move that significantly changes the game's goals, I just saw on the official Star Wars Galaxies site that plans are in the works to 'revamp' the entire Jedi system, including removing Jedi permadeath." The plan is to "rebuild the Jedi system to be quest-oriented; and to include the familiar elements of Force Sensitivity, Jedi-oriented quests, as well as many other elements the developers and the community feel should make up the process of becoming a Jedi." SWG Stratics also has word that the holocrons, previously needed to be come a Jedi in the PC MMORPG, "won't be in the new system", but may still have value as rare in-game items.
maybe now the path to becoming a Jedi will be based on skill, and not mastering random professions told to you by a magic cube...
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
When various MMORPGs came out, I would complain about the initial outlay, considering you have to pay a monthly fee. I would usually get modded 'troll' or 'flamebait' or, at best, someone would argue that it was to pay for development. Now, how much development was actually done by Sony and LucasArts prior to release of the game? Since release, there's been several very large patches, major revamps to several professions, and now a total revamp of the Jedi system. So, again, why would I pay $50 up front?
Hope this new system gives folks what they want.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I've noticed that when anything major is patched in MMORPGs, it's to make it easier and more newbie-friendly. Seeing how many people were whining about how convoluted and arbitrary the process of becoming a Jedi was, it's most likely that it will be much easier post-patch. Then you'll get tons of Jedi running around until it's nothing special. Sad, but that's how it will be.
So exactly how long do you think it should have taken Yoda to become a Jedi? =)
True story.
just the utter lack of skill required to do so. All it is is a repetitive level grind which makes no sense in the context of a Star Wars universe, and is completely at odds with the what most people consider fun.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
They're Jedis, people! Lightsaber welding, Force power using, elite people. I know everyone wants to be the ultra badass in any game, but it comes to a point where sometimes you just can't have it without some work. The developers are just doing this because players couldn't figure out the secret.
As someone who's been playing SWG for less than a month, I'm very torn about this revelation. I'm still rather early along in any skill progressions, and haven't gotten anywhere near aquiring even a single holocron, so I was nowhere near being a Jedi. But because the game is still pretty new to me, I've been enjoying it a lot. Even without the prospect of becoming a Jedi any time in the near future, I've enjoyed running Rebel missions and exploring the Star Wars galaxy (excuse the pun).
But I can see the grind of leveling getting old and the feeling that some gamers might have, of their 'right' to become Jedi in a Star Wars game. And as a gamer, I can relate. Part of the fun of almost every Star Wars game has been the excitement of being a Jedi. But as a Star Wars fan, I have to agree with other posts: the universe of the origonal trilogy was almost entirely devoid of Jedi. The Empire was hunting them down and killing them, one by one.
And even outside the origonal trilogy, even at the HEIGHT of the Jedi Order, we're talking a couple thousand Jedi, tops. Even with tens of thousands. Even (and this is just silly) MILLIONS of Jedi. In a galaxy populated by billions and billions of sentient beings, that's less than one percent of the population.
So I don't think it's unreasonable that it's hard as fuck to become a Jedi, and it's kind of a bitch to be one once you've achieved it. That's consistant with the rules the origonal trilogy laid out.
I know some people may say, "Yes, but it's just a videogame." But it's a videogame set in a specific universe with specific rules that it has to follow to be able to truely claim it's in the Star Wars universe. And if it doesn't follow those, then I don't know why I would want to bother playing it. There are a number of other MMORPGs out there, and have their own cool sets of rules and characters and stories, without having to conform to an already existing background universe. But SWG has chosen to constrain itself within specific boundaries, and I expect it to do so.
I guess I'll have to wait and see. I've been having a good time, but have also been annoyed with certain things. For example, the Rebel mission terminals are sitting out in the open. Even though certain systems may be doing a better job than others resisting the Empire, I think it's fair to assume a Rebel standing in the middle of a public square yelling "COME WORK FOR THE REBELLION!!!" would be killed rather quickly...
And it's one thing to get a repeating mission to go deliver something or go kill a lair of some beast, but to get a mission to kill a specific person, and then to get it again? With the same mission description? So what did I do the first time?
These aren't complaints on the game mechanics, just on the implimentation. And a sign that maybe the creators don't care about keeping true to the SW Trilogy as much as I'd like. I'm waiting to pass judgement on the revamped Jedi system, but will be extremely pissed off if there's a new Jedi Mission Terminal in every city and you can get force points by completting them.
If I wanted to play a game where I could get magical powers simply by leveling, I'd have chosen something else. An inherent nature of the Jedi is that they're more powerful than pretty much anyone else. Maybe that's an impossible thing to achieve in an MMORPG, and I know there's no "accurate" way to portray The Force in a MMORPG, but I really hope they can do a little better than having mission terminals or some such shit.
-Trillian
They really screwed up from the start. What kind of crackhead came up with a system where you spend hours upon hours building up a character that you will quit playing as soon as you unlock the force slot? If they want to make players happy AND make them stick around for a long time, they should make the Jedi class available to everyone from the start. BUT, make it really hard - through both time involvment AND ability/knowledge, to be a good jedi. That way every weenie who wants to be a jedi gets their wish, but only the ones who take time to develop their character actually get to be the kind of jedi that we saw in the movies.
Since release, there's been several very large patches, major revamps to several professions, and now a total revamp of the Jedi system. So, again, why would I pay $50 up front?
Let's not forget the fact that, despite these large patches, the addition of vehicles, not only are the players paying fifteen dollars a month to play, but inevitably there will be an expansion pack, which will be yet another twenty to thirty dollars; which doesn't include a free month of play (seeing how they've already hooked you). It's bad enough that the patches for some of these games are already enormous (Final Fantasy 11's install, anyone?) and are often adding significant amounts of content (vehicles in Galaxies), but often MMORPG expansion-packs come off as glorified patches. After all, in order to keep parity with the players who have bought the expansion, there is often a rather sizeable patch for the un-expanded players, just so they can see others using what they didn't buy. To me, that's considerably more insulting than the initial fifty-dollar payment for the game.
Forever, if he wasted his time playing video games.
Instantaneous, his midi-chlorians told him how!
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
This is classic SOE management. They will release some goal to the playerbase that is extremely hard to reach. A small portion of the playerbase will work extremely hard, and reach that goal.
The process of working so hard, makes the goal have a high social value. People are impressed, amazed, they want to reach that goal too.
Enter round two, the difficulty of reaching the goal is significantly downgraded. Now a large portion of the paying game playerbase, who were unable to reach that goal before, can go for this highly coveted goal.
Round three, they make it even easier.
It's all about making players want something bad, and eventually making sure all (or most) players can get it. It's a good way to ensure your $9.89/month keeps coming in.
Note, they've just announced this. It's not live yet. But I bet a bunch of people who are bored with SWG, who might cancel their accounts, will stick around now because now they can hope they'll become jedi.
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I support spreading santorum
Something as core as how the Jedi system works being revamped tells me once again that SOE have no clue when it comes to effective game design and making sure they get it right first time. It's one of the reasons I stopped playing Everquest, and is a big factor in me not playing any more of their games.
Seeing as they gave out holocrons to everyone for Christmas, I hope the changes in the whole jedi mess won't ingore that. Grinding though professions that the holocrons tell you does indeed suck, but if they do away with the holocron having something to do with the "jedi path" it kind of sucks for the people who couldnt get one until they gave them out for presents (most people for 2 in fact). Whatever the case, I do agree that grinding is probably the only way to make the game hard enough to accout for the path to jedi being hard. I also like that it's way harder to train in the jedi profession once you make it. I want it to be hard, otherwise it's pointless.
That being said, I don't like making a whole new character. That's just stupid.
Now if they could just give the game a real Galactic Civil War, I really think less people would strive for jedi. Let's hope the next patches (Publishes 6 and 7) gets all this fixed.
People only obsess with jedi because there isn't much else Star Wars like in the game!
Just my 0.02 USD
increasing my lightsaber collection!
However, I do understand why they came up with the system they did. Because it takes FOREVER to build up the character to make the jedi (subscription $$$) and then even more time to build up the actual jedi (more subscription $$$). This is Verant we're talking about, thats the only reason behind it.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
As mentioned, anyone who knows Sony Online Entertainment shouldn't act surprised. You don't pay Sony a monthly charge to play their games, you pay them to playtest them.
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Look at PlanetSide, they post-beta they continued to "tweak" the gameplay over and over agin, nerfing things, adding more CTF type rules, etc. etc.
Patches and additions are one thing, or even completely unforeseen exploits to the gameplay one could see as necessary changes - but to continually rewrite the core gameplay (and let's face - becoming a Jedi is pretty core to Star Wars) is just proof that they didn't know what they were doing in the first place.
It amazes me anyone still gives them money on a monthly basis. Even if you like the game, how do you know you'll like it 6 months later when they "fix" some more
That's something, in my mind that is society wide. This is the sort of thing that sticks in my craw. These people, they have no pride in their work. They think they need to get the payment up front. That in a nutshell, they have to trick people into buying their chairs.
This goes for business, politics, technology, entertainment. It's just a lot of deception. It's about fooling people into thinking you have a good product, not actually having one.
I think this move has probably much less to do with the community and more to do with money. A lot of people have stopped paying there subscriptions altogether, especially since Knightsof the Old Republic for the PC was released...
The SWG patches have not always made things easier. Plenty of things (e.g., weapons, creatures and even professions) have been nerfed to eliminate people running around as one-shot killers. These were gameplay balancing patches and have worked pretty well.
A recent patch implemented a cost to dying which caused everything in your inventory to decay. Prior to that people were doing PvP for the hell of it, and the game really suffered. It lost its roleplaying nature. Now that it hurts to die, there is much less of this going on and the galactic civil war is playing out in a more reasonable way, with large enclaves of the various factions.
The patches in SWG have been pretty positive overall for improving gameplay and keeping balance, although occasionally the patches make things worse. The nice thing about SOE is they're flexible enough to undo things once they realize the problem. I think the holocron-based Jedi grinding is one of those mistakes, and this new approach has promise.
While I agree that being a Jedi should be unreachable to all but the most dedicated of players, I can't see why the game designers can't implement something easy to limit the number of "in-game Jedi" without destroying gameplay and player enjoyment.
Allow me to propose an idea: Have an in-game Jedi limit comprised of a hard and a soft threshhold. Both thressholds are based on a small percentage of the number of accounts in the system (note, this is accounts, not players). Once the soft threshhold is reached, the game becomes slightly more difficult for all Jedi in the game (for example: mobs will target Jedi characters more than regulars with a greater chance to hit and greater damage as well). As Jedi attrition increases the in-game number may drop below the soft threshhold and the game is as normal. Of course, this assumes permadeath for force-sensitive characters -- which I think is fair. If you don't want permadeath, don't play a Jedi. Obviously, if the hard threshhold is reached, no more force-sensitive characters will be allowed.
With this scheme, it would seem that a soft-threshhold of 0.25-0.6% and a hard-threshhold of 1-1.5% would be along the lines of what was seen in the movies, and could be adjusted dynamically by the game developers, and could be server dependent.
This seems to me to be a simple way to allow players to reach being a Jedi, give them challenges while being a Jedi and also allow for new players to become Jedi if they are willing to go through the trials and tribulations necessary to activate their Force-Sensitive character slot.
Disclaimer: I have never played SWG, as I am waiting for SOE to finally deliver on the promises they have made from the beginning, however I have been following the game and am wondering why the game designers haven't thought about implementing such a system on top of hard-to-find Jedi-oriented quests. I agree that being a Jedi should be difficult to extremely hard, but establishing population limits on top of that seems to be a no-brainer.
I can't preview this comment due to a bug in Slashdot, so I apologize in advance for any errors in formating/spelling/etc.
It's quite possible that the game designers have implemented some of the suggestions above, and if they have, great!
However it seems to me that much of SWG is being constantly revamped. One of the first things they should have done was handle the intricacies of being a Jedi, and instead it seems like this character class was added as an after-thought to satisfy the audience.
Having not played the game, yet -- I'm still reserving judgement. I just hope that once the revamping of the class has been finished, that it is done in a manner that attempts to draw more from the Staw Wars mythos rather than classic MMORPG lore. Camping Single Mobs is one of the worst designs that has come from the MMORPG revolution and I'm hoping that more creative solutions can be employed in making the Jedi Path challenging, as opposed to mind-numblingly frustrating.
- Cliff
Wishing I had a working Preview.
they should make a jedi hunter class that can hunt and perma death the jedi
Good idea!
I'm actually glad to hear that the whole Jedi thing is going to be cleared up and revamped. A holocron told my brawler that he should become a master doctor. Imagine my shock and dismay! Seriously, though, I hold that they will maintain some kind a mystery to the process making it very hard for most, but occasionally easy for a select few newbs based some randomness coupled with in game actions.
I played SWG a couple of months last summer, then quit after getting tired of Fed Ex runs that usually got me killed. It just wasn't that much fun. So I decided to quit a while and then returned about 3 months later when the vehicle patch came out. One thing I noticed on return was that the missions had gotten quite a bit easier. They aren't pushovers, but definitely more fun for the casual gamer. Still, I'd like far more story than I've seen.
Grinding levels isn't going to keep most people playing, but a truly all encompassing story and in game events would. Most of the time I play as a wookie artisan, and quite frankly the Galactic Civil War doesn't mean squat to me. I do crafting missions and make stuff to sell, but I don't think any of those things impact the story line at all. That shouldn't be a the case at all. At the very least all missions should have some kind of faction points associated with them.
Yeah, I know that an all permeating story line will be hard work. But that would truly hook people and keep them playing to be a part of an epic drama that was different every time it cycled through. I suppose that's the holy grail of MMORPGs!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
this game is everquest with star wars skins.
the level grind is there to keep you paying and playing. It is almost like they want you to gain an addiction because you will never kill enough, or gain enough levels.
stay away from this game.
SOE will make changes to the game only when the bottom line is affected. When too much $ walks out the door, they will make the game just a tad bit easier, and then continue to 'tweak' the ease of the game as the server population drops out of desperation when folks leaves in droves.
dont be a victim, get away from MMORPG's and get back to FPS's. Quake, Half-life, Doom..great games without the hassle of SOE crap.
This is a pretty big change to SWG, personally I would be pretty damn miffed if I had played SOEs little holocron collecting game and mastered and nuked multiple classes just to unlock a force sensitive slot, especially since how mind numbingly boring playing alot of these classes is.
.. level a up a Chef, or ugh... Droid engineer.
I feel for anyone that got there holocron and it said
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
The obvious thing to do (given the starwars mythos) is make becoming a sith relatively easy in comparison to becoming a jedi, but have it so that sith do have perma-death, whereas jedi can come back!
I played the first month of SWG, which was fun but very time consuming. I left because of lack of direction twards the Jedi path, lack of content, and lack of PvP.
:/
Between the change in how to become a Jedi, and the vehicles, I might actually go back. If SOE is getting more customers, then they did the right thing.
They should in some way compensate the people who are Jedi already though since they worked so hard.
My first said marksman. Since I was already a pistoleer, that wasn't a problem for me. My next said master droid engineer. Now that was a problem. I tried the crafting professions in the first couple weeks of the game. Fucking boring.
I'm glad they're changing the system. I can continue to play however I want, and still have a chance to make a Jedi on my server someday.