MMOG Fortunes Rise And Fall

ringbarer writes "The disappointingly mismanaged MMO Star Wars Galaxies has hit another low. The Japanese translation of the game has barely managed to reach its first Birthday, and now it's been canceled. A Rough translation is available, but the original untranslated news can be found here." I'm not entirely sure, but it seems as though players who've paid beyond the end of December will have their accounts transferred to a US/EU server if they're so inclined. Otherwise they'll have their money refunded. Apparently money isn't something SOE is smarting for, at the AGC this past week President John Smedley announced that they'll be releasing what is essentially a free MMOG, with no monthly fee. Speaking of free, the always excellent Puzzle Pirates is essentially doing the same thing. They're also doing some crackerjack Halloween Events tonight, if you're interested in some swashing and some buckling. Dark Age of Camelot's events for today's holiday sound pretty neat too.

Comments

Is SWG really faltering?

[kherr]

SWG has had its ups and downs (many would say mostly downs), but the servers I play on seem to be growing in population. There has not been any server consolidation, so it's not a situation of coalescing populations. The third expansion, The Trials of Obi-Wan, is about to go live (it has already for pre-orders) and seems to have learned from some of the WoW successes. The new planet, Mustafar (the lava planet), is geared for higher-end characters with harder, longer quests. There are a number of instance dungeons involved in the quests, eliminating the original problem of waiting for a previous party to finish.

It's unfortunate that SWG Japan is not going well, but the game itself seems to be overcoming a lot of the chaos caused by the combat upgrade a while back. In fact, a lot of the loudest complainers are now running around bragging about how they can solo the toughest mobs. Those of us who prefer a more cerebral combat system long for the old one, but we have adjusted. Change is guaranteed in an MMOG, I think.

Re:Is SWG really faltering?

[Phil the Canuck]

It's a good expansion for sure, but I have to question whether or not they've learned from the past. Many players are currently gated in quests waiting for over-camped static spawns to appear. What's worse is that for at least one quest the static spawn NPC also has a 1-in-eleventymillion chance of dropping a very desirable loot item, making the spawn camping unbearable.

We Need Better Terms

[quantax]

The terms being used lately have been pretty vague and incorrect. Sony is not releasing a free MMORPG, its releasing a non-subscription based MMORPG in which you pay for it once. Then the question comes about, are they going to do what Guild Wars does? As Guild Wars is not a true MMORPG but rather a pseudo one with MMO elements since with the exception of the cities, everything is instanced. This keeps their costs lower as well, so I wonder whether Sony will be going the same route as well. We need to come up with a term to describe these games as calling them MMORPGs is misleading. Diablo2 was not considered an MMORPG, and it wasnt, but if you remove all the shiny stuff, thats what Guild Wars is undernearth for the most part: communal meeting points (Battle.net) that are jump points for quests and missions. I own Guild Wars, its great fun, but it shouldn't be called an MMORPG anymore than Diablo II on Battle.net should be called one. Perhaps MRPG or something along those lines.