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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."
Who knows? The only people who can actually witness the people who both complain about the game and play the game are the people who play the game as well; the forums are subscriber only, so no outsider can really see what the issues are. Instead we have to take the words of the reporters and the developers, which this article clearly shows as being questionable.
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.)
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.
"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."