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The Saga Of Star Wars Galaxies Recounted
Thanks to GameSpy for its three-part article discussing the 'long and storied history' of PC-based MMO Star Wars Galaxies, noting: "Regarded as one of the most ambitious MMOGs ever launched and greeted with hype spawned from decades of movies, no other game has had a more difficult road than Galaxies." The piece goes on to argue: "The most conservative estimates of Galaxies' stable player base estimates approximately 100,000 active players", although Sony Online's chief creative officer Raph Koster disagrees with that figure on Waterthread.org, countering: "GameSpy is way off. We get more uniques in a day than that, much less subscribers." The article concludes: "Star Wars: Galaxies attracted many, many people to MMOGs who had never tried one before. Many were put off by the initial lack of content. Despite the oft-stated fantasy of 'living in the Star Wars galaxy,' what many players truly want is to have a Star Wars adventure." Update: 03/16 16:49 GMT by S : John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment, has mailed us with official comment: "Star Wars Galaxies has much more than double the number of subscribers quoted on GameSpy. For the record, the title is doing very, very well and is the second largest MMO in the North American market."
has there ever been a game that's criticised by so many people, most of whom continue to play it?
I guess, thinking about some of the fan responses to Episodes I and II, there's something about Star Wars that shuts off peoples' criticial faculties.
I recently picked Galaxies back up. ( I beta tested it and played the first month. ) I did so at the behest of one of my customers, who told me "It's much better... It's finally where it should have been when it was released." After being back for about a week, I must agree. It's actually fun to play now, bugs are rarer and non-threatening... everything just seems more polished.
Now, I can't comment on the Jedi saga, but there was one factual error in the article I'd like to correct: The economy is quite broken, and everyone from the players to the devs knows it. Fonrtunatly, steps are being made to fix it, and several other positive changes in the works tells me that the devs are actually listening now and seem to care.
I think I'm going to stick around this time. I hate the Powergamer model ( ala EQ ) and I've been adrift for some time trying to find a new MMORPG I can call home. ( AO, DAOC, Shadowbane, FFXI, Horizons, even the Sims Online for God's sake! ) Hopefully, I can continue to call Galaxies home.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
The main problem with development? The coders were lazy asses who wouldn't sit down and work. I know this for a fact, 'cuz I was there, and I goofed off with them.
I was a coder at Verant/Sony Online while Galaxies was in development. I even did a little work on that project. (Bug fixes in the network code, mostly. Not enough to get me credited, damnit.)
In an average 9 hour workday, we usually spent about three hours playing Starcraft, and two more on Half-Life, and probably some more time on Quake or Diablo 2 or whatever happened to be new in a given month. On top of that there was the daily 2 hour lunch, that we usually took at a strip club. Add in plenty of time for checking your email, or leisurely wandering the building "looking for the producer" (actually avoiding him like the plague), and you could easily get through the day without so much as opening Visual Studio.
That's how it was for about the first year and a half of "development." Very little actual work got done. The first thing that made the team start coding was when Planetside, the rival project, finally got off the ground. (Your average game coder has an ego the size of Jupiter. When they heard that Planetside actually had parts of a working game, their egos made them get off their lazy asses and start working, because they didn't want to get beat by some bumpkins in the St Louis office.)
As the blurb recounts: Despite the oft-stated fantasy of 'living in the Star Wars galaxy,' what many players truly want is to have a Star Wars adventure.
Well duh. No one wants to take virtual dumps. Just like no one wants to see Luke on the space-crapper in the movies, or really long fart jokes for that matter. No one wants to be a faceless extra in a digital crowd scene in the on-line version. Quite the epiphany, perhaps if he'd payed any attention to story telling over the last 5000 years or so (how old is Gilgamesh anyway) he might have saved himself and everyone else the trouble.
Tedium and challenge are not the same thing. There should be tedious tasks. They should be the window dressing on the world, things that can be picked up and left off without consequence that hint at a bigger world. A world the heros are too busy to live in but not so busy they can't visit. The challenges, the real obsticals to ends shouldn't be tedious. They should be challenging, and engage people with more than mindless repetition. The social element of MMO's can alleviate some of that, allowing people to step back and trade some of the tedium in for the challenge of teamwork. But if every MMO just wants to be the last 2 levels of the original Ninja Gaiden without the cinematic sequences, they've missed the whole point.
If anything the continued patronage of their customers is a testiment to the durability of the brand, and their connection with it. It's said that a person can learn to tolerate almost anything. And just because they'll accept extreme mediocrity over the short term in now way implies that it is a worthy end to be aspired to.
"My character worked to explore every last crevice, be a supplier for a couple of merchants and lead a Rebel guild. He became one of the first on Ahazi to get the 'Mark of Intellect'. I did every possible thing you could conceive of except change professions."
- Dave A., Jedi, Ahazi
Looks like an editor clearly chopped off part of this quote.
The missing part probably goes something like this:
"I did every possible thing you could conceive of except change professions and I still hadn't unlocked my jedi slot. Then I found one of those holocron thingies after killing about a million local toughs outside a starport on Corellia. It told me I had to be a master dancer. So I'd log in every morning after server reset and AFK macro in Theed. Once I made master dancer I still hadn't opened that %^$&**(%$# FS-slot. Back to killing local toughs outside the starport. Finally after 2 weeks of this I got another holocron. It told me I had to become a master chef. I wanted to shoot myself. Anyways I ground my way to master chef and surprise, surprise, I still hadn't unlocked the FS-slot. I decided that rather than wasting any more time hunting for a holocron I'd just grind my way through all the professions. After grinding through armorsmith, weaponsmith, swordsman, TK, tailor, image designer, carbineer, fencer and finally architect I managed to open a force sensitive slot."
At least not real fast. The dev team reached a sort of critical mass with the vehicle publish. The last pub was underwhelming to say the least (Imperial Crapdown, Lagout, Crackup, among a dozen other plays on the original). Hell, they turned off cantina harassment and I still have yet to be scanned by a probe droid. An entire publish that basically amounted to adding more Imp spawns to 3 cities.
Publish 7 goes live today, and for the non-subscribers today's theme is the "Droid Invasion". This will consist of updates to 3 currently existing player craftable droids (including replacing r2, r3, r4, r5 unit heads with blaster cannons... I shit you not). There will also be an instanced dungeon (finally)... the blockade runner from Episode 4. Cool, huh? Not really, because it's overrun with the "roger roger" droids from Episode 1. Where they're being controlled from is anyone's guess.
About the only good thing to come out of the last month of dev time is a cap on defensive attributes, which should cut down on the gode-mode templates a bit.
Again, for the people that don't play... a high defense template combined with a good set of armor and buffs basically makes you unstoppable. I've watched people geared like this take on 15 or 20 unbuffed opponents and come out the winner. The kind of feat they said was reserved for Jedi.
I've never played and MMORPG, but have always had a n interest in them.
When the article talks about "grinding through" professions like tailor or whatever, what does it actually entail? Is it literally just:
1) select "make trousers"
2) click on raw material slot in inventory
3) wait
4) goto 1
until you get enough XP? Or is there more to it than that. It doesn't seem much fun paying $15 to be a keyboard macro.
DarkZero is eloquent. Most gamers are inchorent. The difference is one of expression, not necessarily emotion.
I don't want to craft, and I don't have the time to grind professions. There aren't any interesting loot drops. What exactly do I get to do? I'd love to PvP, but everything I read and saw indicated that PvP was highly unbalanced in some cases, and generally over far too quickly.
Oh, and the mobs are dumb as stumps, so regular hunting is even more boring than games like DAoC, where there's some rhyme or reason to mob's responses.
-Jeff
P.S. Not to mention the baffling decision to let Jedi off-the-hook. Now all the powergamers will have a Jedi, and that will become the standard for PvE and PvP content.
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
I can understand how allowing only members to post will reduce
the amount of noise on the forum, but how does not letting the rest
of the world read them have any effect one way or the other?
Sounds like prime evasive management BS to me.
I played the first month of SWG hoping it would be like the game the described in their original design documents. It was a boring timesink. Combat was poor, PvP was poor. Waking up without all of my stuff I worked like 40 hours for once, really sucked. etc. While MMO developers may cry that they can't have "real" PvP or Combat because people will just quit, some people quit because PvP isn't properly designed. I'm one of them. Spending 4 hours doing repetitive delivery missions just to declare yourself "eligible" for PvP isn't fun, it's a timesink. I wouldn't mind losing 4 hours of work because I lost a PvP fight. I mind more having to do 4 hours of work for no reason.
The mood of the game was all wrong too. It never felt like the galatic civil war was going on. You never felt when you were in a rebel city that imperials might just storm the place and kill everyone. You never had too much fear running around a neutral city if you were a rebel either. It never felt like a bounty hunter might be hunting you...It felt more like the sims online, with all the dancers and artisans around. The game was more about socializing and economy than war, they should have called it "Star Sims" and made everyone an ewok or a gungan.
Gamespy's article on how jedi work (or for the most part, don't work) in SW:G is indicative of SOE's horrid production/design philosophy when it comes to games. Essentially they offload all the cost of gameplay decisions and testing to the players - lumping out outrageous monthly fees and then using gamer ideas and quality assurance data to slowly improve the games in the hope of keeping them around.
This is clearly true in SW:G, where being a Jedi makes no sense and yet SOE declares it "meets their design goals" but they'll change it in the future to gamer demand.
In other words - they didn't really spend much forethought into how jedis should work in the game, they just slapped it in there and let the gamers sort it out - at cost.
PlanetSide has the exact same issues - it's gameplay has changed significantly twice since I left that game.
I'm all for developers listening to gamer feedback - but it's way different when the developers seem incapable of getting it done right without that feedback.
Yes and I would add that not only do players do this, they they have multiple accounts and use 3rd party software to do it.
For example, I know two players IRL with multiple accounts, one with 4 accounts, another with 2. Both use software (e.g. Visual Basic tools) to simulate mouse clicks to 'train' characters while they are AFK, even at work (they can use VNC to check on them from time to time). They have multiple accounts because of the limitations on the number of skill points an individual character can have, and because it's so hard to find someone you want with the skill you need to team with, even at peak time. It's also a lot easier to make money in game when you are your own little production firm.
This is what the Jedi's, and those seriously chasing the unlocking of the 'Force Sensitive Slot' are doing. In fairness, it's actually the only sensible way to progress in the game, because it's such a tedious grind.
I just think, to hell with that, if I want to do that I'll spend my time writing productive, open source software, or writing battle bot scripts. I don't want to write Visual Basic scripts to play an RPG for me! It's certainly not what SWG is billed as. It's certainly not an RPG in any classically understood sense of the word. As an RPG, it's the single WORST RPG I have ever played.
It's as if someone had written a text based MUD, and all the items were so expensive, and levelling was so difficult, the only way to progress and keep up was to write a shell script to play it for you (go north until you find a troll, kill troll, retreat/use health vial if damaged, repeat). Now that can be fun in itself, but that's hardly the game it's been billed as at any point, but that's exactly what it is, and exactly what you need to do to stay even remotely competative with market prices and in Player V Player combat.
I don't think the development team have any idea how much this game is completely dominated by the behavior of power players, they don't know, or they don't care because it means players either have multiple accounts and are power players, thus earning them lots of money, or they have one account, but find it so hard to progress they are subscribed for months before they can start to get on their feet. I would be they know this is a formula which works with EQ and they have no interest in creating a 'game' in the traditional sense.
The only massively multiplayer title that SOE have that's remotely close to a modern game is the FPS game PlanetSide (and that's got it's problems atm).
I think every man and his dog is currently looking forward to World of Warcraft and hoping they get it right (they've started with a good engine, the Unreal Engine, which is a great first move). It's a shame, I _really_ wanted to play a multiplayer Star Wars RPG like the single player KoTOR. SWG certainly has the content, but not the engine or the gameplay.
So, according to this, it's doing better than FFXI, which just cleared 1 million users, right? I'm sure that they are including all of their european users on US servers. I'm just kinda curious as to how he can make that claim when even DAoC is doing better than SWG, or it was the last time I checked.
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
Where this works out with far better is in the single player realm, where you arent competing with thousands of other people. MMOGs eventaully dilute down into a pissing contest, where people distinguish themselves with the most uber-1337 gear, or something sissy like becoming a UO-style fashion designer.
I honestly prefer the way FFXI handles this, with cutscenes and individual, client side dialogues. Now while you are still one of 100,000 shlubs saving the world, at least you are given the illusion of being 'special'. There is also a limit to how unique your gear can be, so most well outfitted level 30 monks will probably have pretty much identical gear.
It really doesnt matter to me anyway, because Im not seeking to define myself by what my character wears, or gear I have, or how 1337 i am. What will always distinguish the player, no matter what the game, will be the actual skill of the player.
As Plato said, there are two problems which can effect members of a society- wealth and poverty. A player relying on unbalanced equipment to cover their deficiencies will not be as good, and likewise a system where a player cannot afford to keep pace with their level's requirements (either in time or equipment) will make the game prohibitively difficult.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
"Star Wars Galaxies has much more than double the number of subscribers quoted [...] and is the second largest MMO in the North American market."
Well, then i would like to see the hard number of subscribers if this is such a marketing issue that this person feels the need to actualyl email about this.
As for the part about being the second largest in the N American market - where does it rate in the asian market. If you want a hungry mad mob of people wanting to play MMOGs - you would be focusing hard on the asian market. The asian market is nuts for all things online....
For example Ragnarok is an extrodinarily successful game there - and with a *free* *small* client - it has found a perfect market entry point. They still charge a monthly fee which the people are happy to pay.
Here in the US - the market is very fickle when it comes to the games we will play online from a loyalty standpoint. We have the luxury of higher income and more accessible broadband to our homes - but the asian market is different in the way they play the games because 95% of the games are played from internet cafes. Many of the internet cafes have slow access, and because of this many games are played locally.
This is not true of South Korea however, where high speed internet access is available at many internet cafes and homes - but the community of playing the games at the internet cafe is still there.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Progress quest. It's hilarious to watch your character's items, and the spells/armor you get.
i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion
Is that MMG are supposed to be all about the community, go online, meet people, play together. But what I don't understand is why don't they make the games compatible with existing communities.
For example I have a friend who plays EQ, he has played for years and has a high level character. I hear him talking about this game and all the fun he has, battling monsters, exploring dungeons, pushing his character to the limits. I think that sounds like fun, so I go out a buy a copy install the game, hand over my credit card, log in, only to find that I can't play with my friend.
Oh sure I can see him in game. He can show me around the cities and stuff, but I can't play with him. The monsters at my level are trivial for him. I can't group with him, I can't go to the same zones, I can't fight the same monsters. I won't be able to do anything fun with him until I put in a massive amount of time on my own and hit the level cap.
The design of the game forbids it from being an extension of an existing community. The thing that I find really baffling is that the game isn't all that different at higher levels. Your still attacking monsters, and exploring dungeons it's just they are a different level, that's it! Sure there might be a trick or two thrown in, but it's still the same principle
There should be nothing stopping me from grouping with my friend from the moment I log into the game. Sure I won't be as fast or as strong, nor have any of the super cool abilities he has, but I could still contribute, and most importantly I could enjoy the experience of playing with my friend, talking about it at the office.
The first MMG that combines that fun of EQ without the silliness of the levels will take this genre of games to the next level.
ProgressQuest?
...And not "Active-Paying-Subscribers"?
They did the exact same thing with both press release's they put out right after the game came out - but it was "Registered Users" back then. I still play SWG and i have a hard time with that 200K+ Figure - Alot of poeple (Myself included) who have put up with the Bugs, and Nerf untill now- are getting tired and moving on now that there are more chocies coming out (CoH, L2, EQ2, WoW, Etc).