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John Smedley On The New Galaxies
Gamespot has part one of an extensive interview with SOE CEO John Smedley about the recent and controversial changes made to Star Wars Galaxies. From the article: "Star Wars never hit that excitement level around here. It never got--there never was a critical mass of people here that wanted to play it. So we knew we could do way better. And I guess as much out of a love for making these kinds of games, even though that sounds corny, though it's true, we wanted to make this game better." We had our own talk with Mr. Smedley not too long ago.
Such potencial and all was wasted... SWG could be one of the best MMORPG built around a wonderful setting, but instead it was bland.
"Fantômas." "What did you say?" "I said: Fantômas." "And what does that mean?" "Nothing....Everything!" "But
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/arts/10star.html ?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1134234111-qM+OBZTgCE9+jbFl687Dv g
Must read.
Smedley is a liar and a thief. I'd normally never say that, but in his case, it's true.
Corporatism != Free Market
is thinking the millions of Star Wars fans, ranging in age from toddlers to 100 year old grandparents will pay them 15 bucks a month for a shoddy FPS wannabe. To risk your traditional RPG type customers for some unknown amount of FPS customers is just bad business, especially since there are much better Star Wars FPS type games out there that don't have a monthly subscription.
As a long time player of SWG, I have seen the game go from something was that fun to play to something that is being dumbed down for mass appeal. I understand that they are trying to appeal to a greater market to attract more people. They (SOE and LucasArts) have decided that the opinion of people that have played a while is irrelevant. Although numbers have not been published by SOE, it is estimated that their losses are far greater than they anticipated with the NGE.
I think part of what I read scared me. But it didn't when I read it at first, it was after a conversation I was having with someone regarding the another industry. It seems that other industries have relied heavily on their name brand to carry them through as well, and things happened and they had to tighten their belts. What will happen at SOE? I think that they are trying to target SWG to the "younger" generation.
Now we are hearing rhetoric and rumors from all sides to all extents about what is going to happen. Yes, I am still in the game, for now. Are more changes to come? Probably, but what will they bring?
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
The current version of the game is fun for he first hour or three, but after that it just gets boring. It's gone from being a game where you needed some time to familiarize yourself with the system, into being a game where the system is so simple there's nothing to familiarize yourself with. The price of this, obviously, is that there's no more diversity in the system. The result of this is that people will most likely buy it due to the fact that it's Star Wars, and because of the marketing being done for it, and they'll be playing it probably a couple of weeks, and then quit, because at that point it's become a second-rate shooter, and nobody pays $15/month to play that when they can play first-rate shooters online for free once the game is initially bought.
The only hope now is that SOE either rolls back the servers (very unlikely), that they put up a few "classic" servers (also very unlikely), or that they shut it down completely (seems pretty likely) so that someone else might start from scratch with a second Star Wars MMORPG.
Let me spell this out for you future game developers. Randomly generated content is not content, it's crap. The brain of even the slowest human can smell the difference between hand crafted and computer generated content. It's why the Turing test hasn't been passed, it's why automated customer service menus piss people off, and it's one of the reasons SWG failed.
Creating a massive world that was 99% empty might have seemed like a good idea on the surface, I know. You'd save all that time on programming, writing, implementing... you'd create beautiful cities (and you did), players would go to them and be merry... but all the rest of the world would be random. It didn't seem like a bad idea, I know. I can follow the thought process that led to SWG's design, and on paper, I can see how it might have sounded good.
But what you've got to understand, devs, is that there is no substitute for the human hand. Technology is great when used right, but it is not a good babysitter. Random levels worked for Nethack because it was a single player game, an ASCII game, and the design was genius for its time. But random will not work in a modern MMOG.
People need to fall in love with the world they're playing in, and a computer-generated design just can't inspire that love. Only the human hand can do that. Maybe in the next 20 years a genius programmer will come along who will write the algorithm that will be able to trick the human brain into loving it that way they love something painstakingly crafted by a human... but for now, you have to do it by hand.
I'm serious, game devs. I'm trying to save you millions of dollars. Don't do it. Hire a bunch of high school aged D&D DMs if your budget is that tight. Just hire a human, k?
(oh yeah, and crippling bugs wrapped in unstable code that never get fixed are bad too)
My script don't crash! She crashes, you crashed her!
The real problem, if I recall, was a heavy load of grinding on most professions, making the game less enjoyable to casual players, because hunting or mining expeditions took a lot of time. This was a bit better on, for example, the Entertainer profession, but few people tipped the musicians in the bars and they could not easily progress in the economic system, which was quite ingenious with an eBay-like long-run auction system integrated.
So after a few months, I quit and put my subscription fee towards TiVo instead. My thought was "this game is kind of cool, but is it really as valuable as pausing live television and actually being able to program the VCR?"
Please mod them up... That NY Times article tells it all.
The original product attempted to deliver a innovative high-concept MMO in a IP that was fundamentally mass-market and accessible. I can't speak for the implementation of the "new" SWG - which from all accounts is hideous - but the overall strategic decision makes sense from a business perspective. Gamers who enjoyed the game for its ambitious design and aren't as interested in living out their SW wish-fulfillment fantasies get shafted, of course, but what can you do? The mainstream is a homogenizing force.
The first time you go in a group to dathomir and engage a lair of rancors. Well at least if you go in a good group (non buffed to the max group that can solo a rancor lair)
And that last bit is the problem. As you learned the game you found out that in the beginning you were hopelessly crippling yourselve. Your "action" points (health action mind) depleted only because you hadn't bought the proper buffs. Without buffs taking on a bunny could be a challenge. With them you could stand in a circle of enraged giant rancors and kick their but.
But this also ruined the fun. Gone were the carefully prepared expeditions. Do you know that at one point nobody went to dathomir without a medic in the group? When I left EVERYBODY including dancers and musicians were making the dathomir village run (if you don't know don't ask) 2x a day. (oh alright if you must know, to become a jedi you had to trade regular xp you gained by doing your chosen proffesion in the village. a 15 minute drive across dathomir wich turned the most hostile planet into a freaking highway)
Unlike other MMO games there was usually no problem in finding a group. Finding the members of the group was another matter. SWG may be the first MMO game to come up with the concept of the solo group. You see a high level combat character could easily handle the thoughest missions BUT was unable to get them when alone. You had to be in a group of about 5 to get the best missions (payout) so people grouped just to get missions wich they then did on their own. WEIRD.
After a while SOE realized the game was not going well and started changing things. One of them was the addition of dungeons. Not a bad idea in itself except that SOE populated them by enemies wich insane hitpoints and resists. So it became less exploring a carefull crafted story line in a dangerous location and more a constant 5 minute kicking contest. Most people just created a macro to trigger their best attacks and went to make coffee while clearing a room.
Remember those early usermade doom levels? Were every room had a dozen endbosses? Those levels that absolutly sucked? That is SWG "high level" content. Do a corvette mission once with a non maxed out combat character you will be death before you know it.
And that was SWG's biggest failure. It provided nothing in the middle. Once you had gone past the initial learning period it had a big void and then only the high level endgame were you either created a tricked out combat specialist and copied exactly the perfect template or you just didn't have a chance.
Same with crafting, nobody had any use for a mid level crafter. From almost the very beginning if you wanted to make money creating stuff you first had to grind to max level and then recoup your money by selling your high level goods. I tried chef and couldn't even give away my low level stuff.
Strangely enough it wasn't really the combat that was boring. What was boring was that sony decided that high level meant giving just 1 million hitpoints and 100% resists (yes 100% meaning they NEVER took damage) on all but one type of damage and if your proffesion didn't do that kind of damage, then though luck.
This meant that the end fights always became just a matter of having a good buff and then just beating away for 20 minutes. As a tka I even had "fights" were I would engage a night elder wich I couldn't damage but to keep her attention while a rifle specialist attacked her mind pool. Both of us used macro's and we chatted about how much it sucked we didn't get in the WoW beta.
SWG tried a lot but it also failed in a lot of areas. I think that they forgot during the initial design to hire somebody from out side to review it and give an unbiased opinion. There were just to many problems for the game to have a chance of success. What SOE is doing now is fixing symptoms not causes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's really a shame that they're doing this to the game. Sony is, once again, pissing me off. It's not fair to all of the gamers who have put so many months into the game.
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in the version of Star Wars Galaxies, does Greedo shoot first?
Every living creature on earth dies alone.
I'll put aside the question of whether Star Wars Galaxies' random content was good or not. I'll even grant you that it might not have been possible for any Star Wars game to be randomly generated -- it may have been possible to get that workable engaging, but for the sake of my point I'll concede it.
...have no "hard" way of harming the player. When overcoming player death is as simple as clicking a respawn button, no monster is really that dangerous. Rogue had *common* monsters that could do permanent strength damage, could quickly drain levels, could confuse with a glance, permanently degrade armor, etc. Nethack, of course, has the infamous cockatrice, Medusa, monsters that can curse items, monsters that can burn with a glance, thieves, and many others.
...are all essentially aliases for each other. This is related to point A, I think, in that many games tend to support umpteen different types of damage, but the main way in which they are differentiated from each other is in the kinds of resistances a player may have. (This is a reason I don't play Angband, despite its being a major Roguelike.) Often, many of them tend to behave in the same way as the others, have the same general types of attacks, and ultimately, due to the reluctance of the designer to have them do really bad things to characters, don't have anywhere near the personality that Nethack monsters have.
I don't think that random content is inherently bad. I don't think it'll always look like a computer made it and not a human. I don't even think that always matters.
You invoke the sacred and holy name of Nethack as a talisman against the gameplay it stands for, but the plain fact is, no one's ever tried to make Nethack-style random gameplay work in a commercial product. (Diablo does not count for reasons to be revealed.) And Nethack, despite how it looks, is absolutely not outdated -- indeed, its open source nature has spawned dozens of interesting and creative patches for the game, ranging from special levels (Lethe, Heck2) to new monsters (Biodiversity) to entire new play mechanics (Color Alchemy, described below).
But it is not controversial to say something like "Nethack rulez" on Slashdot, in which the radio of Nethackers as opposed to the general population is, shall we say, higher than normal. So to avoid mere karma whoring, I'll attempt to explain how to make random content work.
You do it by randomizing more than just maps. (Re Diablo: There.) Having an infinite amount of terrain to explore is not enough to make a game interesting. Roguelikes do it by also randomizing the item definitions, restricting player knowledge of them, and making their discovery a major part of each game. Some games randomize still more, or provide mechanisms by which the basic item randomization has profound effects on the game. Examples: The presence and alignments of altars in Nethack has a profound effect upon that game, even though technically they're just part of its map generation. ADOM generates different alchemy recipes each game, which can potentially give players a potent source of resources. There is a user-created patch, Color Alchemy, that does something similar in Nethack: instead of having that game's potion mixing system be based upon type (Healing Potion + Gain Energy Potion = Extra Healing Potion), it's based on the color in the potion descriptions (Whatever Red Potions are + Whatever Yellow Potions are = Whatever Orange Potions are)!
Also, randomly placed monsters are not interesting in a game in which they...
A.
And all true Roguelikes have permanent character death. When that foe around the corner could suddenly destroy your entire character, let alone his stats and equipment in ways that are not trivial to overcome, then that random generation begins to really mean something. Show me a MMORPG like *that* and I'll be there like a shot.
B.
So, I think you can indeed make randomly generated content, but it can't be half-assed. And ultima
The NY Times article is a perfect example of what has happened to many of US!!! The veteran SWG player base who've played since or launch, often with multiple accounts -- were very powerful, wealthy and able characters in game. SWG was the only game I played, even though I own many many games. These were *VERY* happy times for me, making friends in game and me and my brother reliving our childhood. This article serves to inform the public who aren't privy to the game concrete proof that the NGE was a failure -- not Mr. Smedley's and the rest of the SOE goons twisted take on reality.
My request to SOE is to release the original server code to the community and let us do it ourselves. As far as content is concerned, the player base was the content for me. Since my entire guild and brother left after the NGE, the new game just isn't worth it. My reasoning is this - I paid $80 for your game. Now the product is totally different than what is written on the game box. The manual is freaking worthless because the game is so different.
It sounds to me that since EQ2 isn't doing as well as they hoped, SOE just opted for a half-assed remake of SWG instead of SWG 2? Either that or a developer went postal on them in an unusual way.
Well here's a free idea to SOE: Allow players who reached the end game ne allowed to create areas, items, etc. I played on a mud (genocide) and when you reached the highest level a player gets to create their own realm.
Regards,
Piki Punobi [SK]
Corbanits
No, the real question is how on earth did anyone at Sony think creating a Star Wars MMO was ever a good idea? Yes, Everquest works to an extent, but that's pretty much a free-form RPG world built from the ground up. On the other hand, everyone knows Star Wars and consequently wants to be a hero - a Luke Skywalker or a Han Solo, and just applying the same sprawling structure to the game has resulted in one big mess. Plus there's the fact that there can be no semblence of contuity in the game.
What Sony should have done was have set the game in the Knights of the Old Republic time-period, which would have given them a great deal more freedom for a start, and actually allowed them to have huge Jedi vs Sith battles, and actually thought things through. Instead they just seem to have slapped the Star Wars licence on the Everquest engine and left it at that, resulting in a massive non-directional mess. I think the game's just too broken to be fixed by any changes Sony see fit to make.
I could care less about this new type of content they want to put into the game. The reason I played, and kept playing was because of reneable content. Such as the following.
1) The community. I could go into a cantina and talk with people. The community was the best renewable content.
2) PvP, all sorts of PvP exited that was renewable.
-Player Event Compititions.
-Player Bounties on Jedi
-The Galactic Civil War(GCW)
My only problem before the NGE was even annoucned was bugs, Improve the GCW and bugs.
For a guy who claims to have answered questions on the SWG forums. Here sure dose a good job consolidating his answers.
s er.id=308531
Total of 5 posts.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/view_profile?u
It just looks like he didn't because of lag.
One major handicap SWG has always had. And something I've never seen addressed in any of the dozens of post-mordems I've read about it, including this one, is the crippling economic drain designed to make players constantly work just to maintain what they already have. I suppose it was made that way so players would have something to do, due to the lack of worth-while content. Building 'maintenance/rent', city taxes, item decay, dissappearing factories and harvestors, etc. I played SWG for a year, and I can't tell you how many people quit because they took a week off from playing, and lost every item they owned because their house dissappeared. It has left no incentive for former players to return to the game. It's a huge slap in the face actually... I personally had millions of creds worth of items, in about 5 different houses, when I cancelled my subcription. All that stuff is simply gone now, and if I re-opened the same account I had spent a year playing, I would have no items, short of the creds in the bank... and with this NGE I wouldn't even have any experience or any professional ranks. That is huge hurdle to getting former players back in it. Anyone who spent time playing SWG before probably doesn't want to come back and have to spend months just getting back to where they left off. Just short-sighted MMO design at it's worst. My personal experience with MMOs covers AC2, WoW, GW, and some more obscure korean games. SWG is the only one I know of where if you cancel your subscription for a couple of weeks, you're character loses everything... as if you've never played before. What other games do this? I suspect the best market SWG could ever hope to attract are the ones who have shown interest in it before. Right now there are about 4 or 5 former players for every current player, and that's assuming the estimate of 200,000 current players mentioned in the interview is accurate... which I kinda doubt. Who are these 'new players' they're hoping to attract? People who haven't heard of SWG yet? People who wanted to play before, but were sorta hoping for a full-scale redesign before trying it? It's just stupid all-over.
What's happening now is, IMO, a convergence of the original bad design and the community.
The original SWG design was innovative, experimental, and horribly mangled. As a previous poster noted, once you'd figured out the action system, you could stand amongst a crowd of Rancors and laugh. This may be amusing if you like god-mode but it makes developing challenging encounters impossible.
So, as another poster noted, MOBs with complete invulnerability except for one weakness were released; this is also horribly broken.
Then, add the Jedi system, which involved horrific mind-numbing grinding BUT still resulted in a massive surplus of Jedi (particularly for galactic civil war era). More horrible brokenness.
Now kick over the system once (CE) and what sort of playerbase do you have left? You have the sort of players who are fanatically attached to their characters, particularly to their several accounts worth of characters since SWG had the rare (for a reason) feature of only allowing one character per server (plus jedi slot for those who did the grind). People who have 'invested' uncounted hours in their personas.
Now during the original era, and during the CU era, does anyone honestly remember anyone recommending SWG? Not I. There were people logging into MxO (!) who proclaimed themselves refugees from SWG. On any gaming board and particularly on the official board you could hear people complaining daily and bitterly about how broken SWG was.
Now what are you, if you're the designer, going to do with this? Let it be, to slowly dwindle to unprofitability? Maybe. You could milk it until it's dry. But maybe Lucas doesn't care for that. He's just released a SW film that actually stirred interest instead of disgust from the SW fans. So, you take the other option: fix it.
Unfortunately fixing it means completely kicking over the applecart on the existing players, but since they complain daily and bitterly about how broken things are you'd suspect they'd go for the change.
Nope. The one thing gamers can't stand is change. Whether bad or good, and I've seen both in many MMOGs, *any* change is only guaranteed to produce one thing from the playerbase: howling outrage.
What if Lucas cancel SoE and team up with Blizzard for SWG 2.0 - World of Starwar setting in other era. replace alliance with Jedi, replace horde with Sith. Now that would be interesting.
Anyone familiar with the way LucasArts alienated its legions of Adventure Game fans knows that this not unusual.
Cancelling the release of Sam and Max 2 weeks away from the release after fans waited 10 years for a sequel marked the end of respect for LucasArts. This was a company which had been heralded as the innovators of some of the most memorable and enjoyable games of all time.
Cynics believed that LucasArts would stop at nothing to feed the Star Wars machine, which is credited with having cost many of the finest developers their jobs. Ironically even the Star Wars franchise wasn't safe from the blade of the LucasArts marketing light-sabre.
Long-term customer loyalty seems to weigh lightly in the minds of the powers that be. They are banking that the new legion of customers can out-spend, and thereby outrank the existing ones. While this may have been true of the relatively niche adventure gaming population, once hard-core Star Wars fans lose respect for LucasArts, it's hard to imagine to whom they will be forced to turn next...
"Happiness - We're all in it together"
Just save the toruble and play WOW.
More BS from SOE.
Lies, lies and more lies... do I sound bitter? You're damn right I am, having been a paid subscriber since Dec 2003.
There was a rumor going around that SOE's contract with Lucas ends this coming May. I'd be surprised if SWG is around after that.
The only way this game would draw it's previous numbers is to roll back to pre NGE and start servers up again, leaving the existing NGE game running for whoever wants it. And ha, what are the chances of that... good bye SWG.
If you really want to beat WoW, for starters how about making the game playable on PC and Mac? Sony has repeatedly marginalized Mac players. Blizzard came out of the gates with a dual-platform game and showed that it's possible. Sony, on the other hand, comes out with Everquest Mac literally years after the PC release, just shortly before EQ2 is announced. Pathetic.