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Lucasarts Through With Sony?
pdawerks writes "Heard through the grapevine: Apparently Lucasarts is displeased with the way that SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) has handled Star Wars' MMORPG Galaxies. The day after the JTL expansion goes live, they plan to announce the second expansion pack and the divorce between SOE and Lucasarts." This appears to be a complete rumor. However, I found corroborating rumormongering at SWG Warcry and Second Life Herald. Lucasarts has previously lessened their developer stable, casting doubt on this idea. I can't imagine Lucasarts could do a worse job with the game than SOE has, though.
You poor, deluded bastard...
This appears to be a complete rumor.
Then why did you post it?
There are many players devoting all their gamepaly to the jedi quests and ginding jedi xp. The notion that that all this work will be simply erased amounts to a complete breach of trust.
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
If anybody could do a worse job than SOE, it's LucasArts. LucasArts has a long track record of being their own worst enemy. All of their licenses have gone on to do better things than their own efforts. If the author wrote that last sentence as a jab at SOE, they failed miserably. There are better things to bitch and moan about than SW:G.
schild
editor, f13.net
I played SWG early on. Ironically I found the game to be so immersive and creative when it came to the realism of the world, that the gameplay itself took a back seat. I think this is a case of some great softare that has critically flawed game design.
Then again, it's entirely possible that SWG may be the most incredible MMORPG ever conceived, and because it seems to rely so much on player-generated content, it may take years before the game matures and shows what it's capable of.
However, the brilliance (or lack thereof) of the game may be moot. The other night I was in a club with a group of people and there was a Ms. Pac Man cocktail table game in the bar that people were lining up to play. Sometimes I think today's games have become so complex they've negated their value.
When you're playing a game that has 5000+ pages of documentation, with a minority hardcore community that considers you a n00b if you don't know that ALT-SHIFT-PgUp in combination with the alternative UI loaded and the spatial relativity ability received from completing the Lord Eladril quest will improve your defensive attack posture, you have to begin to wonder whether real life demoralization isn't preferable?
i'm going out now to kill someone with a tetrahedron.
Because if your consider SOE's track record with working with SWG, its not too hard to believe. After SOE pissed everyone off with their mass banning/kicking, Lucasarts was no doubt pissed off at SOE without even mentioning other disagreements (Jedis? Space combat? The fact that everyone jokes about being a cantina dancer?)
As an ex-employee of SOE, I would like to say that I haven't ever seen a more incompetent group of people. The company is short-sighted, money-grubbing, disrespectful towards their customers, and has management filled with more idiots than the RNC.
The developers churn out bloated crap that runs poorly on even the most powerful PCs. The developers have little concept of fun anymore... the original EverQuest development team - the people who made the company what it is today - are gone. They have largely moved on to form their own companies (such as Sigil) or to sit pretty on top of large royalty payments. SOE as it is today has no merit as a game company. Their games are too expensive, not entertaining, and so poorly performing that one is surprised that ANYONE would pay for such a product.
I hope that SOE tanks... I left those bastards because I had no sense of pride in my work. I know a lot of people there feel the same way.
Lucas whacked their internal development group but they can always find a third rate sweatshop developer to hack a game together for them. Nothing wrong with having to put out patches the day after a game ships when you find out it can't even be installed. Look for most of their stuff to come from Singapore in the future- http://www.lucasarts.com/international/data/singap ore.htm
If I had mod points right now I'd be boosting this score up.
There's a reason why classic gaming is so highly regarded and fondly remembered by hardcore gamers and even the more casual type who had at least an NES.
Games were about puzzles and intuition. Now it's twitch skills and MMO's which you have to relinquish part of your life in order to justify the monthly fee.
Ironically the largest and most advertised technical achievement of video games is what, I think, is creating a stagnate market. 3D graphics launched video games into more homes than ever before thanks to proliferation of fast PC's and Sony Playstations.
The down side is that as graphics advance and everyone wants even more realism, it takes longer to make a game that isn't rife with bugs, which results in watered down games that only look prettier than what we played the previous year.
No sig for you!!
Here's the position at Lucas Arts:
r ector
http://www.lucasarts.com/jobs/descriptions/?ID=di
Why the fuck would they be hiring somebody so high up if they didn't plan on going through with this shit? Good riddance to SOE, maybe I'll reactivate my account.
People quitting as a result of their less than promised gaming experience and service.
As a result of so many people cancelling their accounts, SOE has outsourced a good portion of their CSR staff to India in order to make their margin...(No joke)
A complete lack of understanding of RPG gaming. Game designs have been implimented in this POS with no comprehension of the "give and take" method of RPG gaming, thus leaving a completely unbalanced end result.
A dev team that is completely out of touch with the Star Wars universe, and as such create situations in-game ad-hoc and in some cases contradict the current published works based on G. Lucas' creation.
I've played this game since Beta. I've beta tested many titles, including some SOE titles...(Evercrack comes to mind)...the game was released at bare minimum, 6 months too soon. 45% of content that was present in Beta was removed at launch. We (the Beta testers) told the dev team that the game wasn't ready, what still needed to be done to make it ready, and what needed to change to make it ready with the current code base. All of this was ignored by SOE. I've seen very few positive changes in the game. Many of the changes that have occured in the game were done to appease a vocal minority, and upset the majority of the community.
combat classes were given lipservice. Any class that *should've* been "uber leet" as the kids call it, were nerfed. Unpopular classes were given enough attention to keep them barely playable. Popular classes were either left somewhat untouched, or changed so that the *most* popular classes could defeat them easily.
Finally, anyone who criticized SOE, the Devs, or the CSR's for their haphazard design, unprofessional behavior, or lack of vision and direction, were summarily banned either from the forums, game, or both. (I myself have been banned numerous occasions for pointing out the shortcomings of SOE's support staff.) I also don't have to remind the Slashdot community that for a very long time, the SWG Forums were closed to the general public because there was such a huge sense of anger and dissatifaction that was conveyed by the player community. (for fear of a potential new customer seeing exactly how bad the game actually was.
Personally I think LucasArts taking the reigns from SOE will be the best thing that ever happened to the game. Even if they do a poor job, SOE hasn't lived up to the expectation the players had.
Who cares about the ozone layer?...thanks to CFC's I can write my name......IN CHEESE!!!
...I signed up about 3 weeks ago, played the first day and enjoyed it despite the strangely poor performance, then the servers were down the next day. And the next day.
And the day after that. I think there was one more day I got to play, then the servers were out again. I gave up and deleted it after the first week. The servers were actually running for a grand total of three days worth of play, and were down again when I checked back a couple days later.
As a veteran SWG player I can say, we are seeing subscriber losses on our server that are staggering. Folks in the JTL beta are leaving, saying it blows goats. Everyone is pissed and angry all of the time at SOE, its CSRs and the Dev team. The dev team seems totally incompetent and often lies to the userbase. Sony is killing SWG, and many players are waiting for EQ2 or WoW to come out before finally moving on. I recently saw a link to a Lucasarts page hiring a director for SWG, and I am hopeful that any change in leadership and management can save this project from being the biggest MMO disaster ever. Time will tell.
This rumor could simply be a great marketing move by SOE. I (as well as many other folks) have been planning on dumping soon. I was gonna give JTL a try, but after playing the beta I'm not so sure. But, man, if we know that Lucasarts might be taking it over, I might keep my account for a few more months to see... that's just what Sony wants you to think.
if the story is true its probably something both sides want more or less
swg is not the success sony expected it to be and i guess the payments going to lucasarts are maybe higher than sonys swg income
given that they want to get rid of it and lucasarts on the other side wants to rescue their reputation
that job add posted earlier seems real and supports this "rumor"
...head over to Lucasart's website and look at their job postings. Doesn't sound like much of a rumor if you ask me.
Who cares about the ozone layer?...thanks to CFC's I can write my name......IN CHEESE!!!