Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's the same with most games. People keep saying "This game sucks worse than anything else I have ever played! I should know, I play it 24/7!". One can only speculate as to why people keep playing games they allegedly hate so much...
The same reason people complain about tons of other things that they still use every day: They're problems, but not deal breakers. For instance, DirecTV does a lot of things that annoy me. They force well over one hundred pay-per-view advertisement channels onto my service, they send me "mail" that causes the green mail light to light up, but the mail is never anything more than pay-per-view advertisements, and they leave channels that are inaccessible in my channel list just so I'll see their little advertisement that tells me that I could have the channel if I paid more. All of it is very annoying and I've definitely griped about it a couple of times. But am I going back to cable? Hell no. It's still WAY better than cable, and even though those little problems are annoying, the rest of the service is still excellent.
That's probably the same way it works with Star Wars Galaxies. Most of the people that complain about the way Jedis are implemented are probably still enjoying the other fighting classes a whole lot. That enjoyment is enough to keep them playing, even though they wish the game were a little more polished.
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.