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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."
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 =-}
Grease & Counterbalance
...does Han still shoot first or not?
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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.
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With SOE also supporting EQ2, I don't know that it necessarily matters. In my opinion, they should just abandon the trainwreck that is SWG and throw more resources at EQ2. Perhaps even an SWG2: Return of the Content.
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I played SWG for about 4 months in beta, and about 6 months after release. My questions is, how did they get this so wrong? I mean, combat and loot are two MAJOR gameplay components.
This is a design flaw that was either overlooked or ignored because of the rush to release a product that wasn't ready for release. Either way, this is a project management issue, and should not be tolerated. Why should players wait 1.5 years after release for fundamental game systems to be fixed - especially while paying a monthly fee?
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
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
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
SWG is not the same game it was a year ago, and I like the organic nature. I actually appreciate that SOE is willing to invest in rethinking major parts of the game, mostly driven by user feedback. Any good software evolves over its life cycle. And in an MMOG it's impossible to know what the in-game dynamics are going to be until you have an active population.
I know a lot of people get frustrated when their chosen profession gets nerfed, but you should just roll with the punches and treat them as new challenges. Think of it as similar to adding a new quest. As a Droid Engineer I went through some major revamps of the way droids work, but the end result has been better for the game. And while I have sympathy for Creature Handlers who went from the most envied profession to insignificance, it is much more Star Wars-like to use droids and vehicles than it was when everyone had three pets.
The loot revamp serves to respond to how much players like loot, adding more dimension to the loot drop experience. Everyone loves getting low-use schematics to craft rare items and the revamp is expanding on that idea.
Combat on the ground is a big issue, being very much a turn-based experience. You queue up your actions and hope they beat out the sequence of actions your opponent (player or mob) queues up. The JTL expansion has FPS combat between ships, which is in sharp contrast to the ground combat system. A better system for combat is definitely desired.
Predictability: All NPC's should have loot and players should have a rough idea of what loot is available from which NPC and to some degree the lewt should be phat.
Ugh...
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