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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."
Step 1. Stock up on X resources
Step 2. Set macro to constantly use X resources to gain skill levels
Step 3. Leave computer on for a few hours AFK
Step 4. Repeat
Step 5. ???
Step 6. Jedi!
Not very fair for those who don't know/care/want to take the time to set this up is it? On top of that, people who did this would damage the player run economy. You might have momentary gluts of a certain product or have momentary shortages of a certain product leading to a very unstable economy.
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.
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.