Star Wars Galaxies System Revamps

Star Wars Galaxies has been out for over a year now, and Sony Online will be attempting one of the most ambitious moves in a MMOG to date. They're completely overhauling the combat and loot systems for their game. Now that Jump to Lightspeed is finally out, they've made available high level concepts for the combat revamp, concepts for the loot revamp, and actual data on the first loot revamp pass. From the combat revamp: "Star Wars Galaxies is making bold changes to its extensive in-game combat system. The goal of this all-encompassing set of changes is to make game play more strategic, more interactive and ultimately more engaging and fun for players of all levels."

Comments

hopefully others will follow suit.

[Moustache N Tits]

I'm glad to see Sony isn't just sitting back and letting their MMOG go down the drain. I haven't played it because I've heard nothing but bad/medicore reviews of the game. While it's not the safest thing (maybe they'll make the game worse!) but it's good to see that they are trying to make changes to a possibly great game. I hope others will follow suit and make major changes to games that are just total crap out of the box. Bug fixes can fix all the problems in a released game and I'm glad to see someone (Sony) is finally seeing this... too bad it's a year and a half too late =-}

Re:hopefully others will follow suit.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is too little too late. In SWG, SOE focused too much on creating a world, and completely and absolutely forgot it was a game.

Add to that huge technical problems (a database system that still results it random missing items from time to time), many more major bugs that still have not been fixed, horrific managment (combat revamp should have been priority number 1, and should have been finished over a year ago --- not to mention a playable jedi class/hologrinding and the chaos that has caused), and you have the biggest flop in MMORPG history.

This game should have had 500k to 1 million subscribers easily just based on the Star Wars franchise. Instead it is in the 200k range, and it will never grow from that.

As other people have said, with WoW and EQII out now that number will shrink significantly in the next few months. And then MiddleEarth, D&D and others will be coming out to take even more subscribers away from SWG...

Jump To Better Gameplay

[blueZhift]

I too am glad that SOE hasn't given up on SWG. I last played it about a year ago and finally left for FFXI because there just didn't seem to be enough content or people around to play it with. With JTLS out and the announced improvements (plus an upgraded computer!) I'm tempted to dust off that old SWG box and jump back in.

They also announced that they are doing a fully localized Japanese version. I wonder if they will follow the FFXI model and allow NA and Japanese players to play together on the same servers. I know that there are language and culture issues from the FFXI experience. But on the plus side, having players around the globe means that there is almost always someone to play with, which for SWG might mean fewer seemingly deserted cities.

It's a shame they didn't do this last year

[Jaeph]

If they had fixed combat and instituted real loot a year ago, I probably would have stuck with the game and played many more months.

As an old board wargamer, it strikes me that SOE's problems are the classic "nice design, poor development". They had lots of nifty ideas, a really well thought-out crafting system, but the game (not even talking about code right now) needed much more development time to flesh out the broken parts and to dump ideas that sounded great but didn't work well in practice.

Oh, and to nerf combat medics too. :-)

-Jeff

Re:How did they get it so wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

My questions is, how did they get this so wrong? I mean, combat and loot are two MAJOR gameplay components.

The game should have been called "Star Wars: Raph Koster's Player Run Economy Experiment". Loot was always shitty because it was a law that looted stuff could not be more desirable than a player made version. Combat was half finished because the economy and crafting professions were always priority number one.

Yet we still have runaway inflation, some crafting professions going poor and the fucking wep and armor smiths turning into credit barons.

The root of the problem is that this IS NOT a Star Wars game. It's something far removed with the Star wars liscence stretched over top.