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.

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How about content?

[Somatic]

Smedley: We spent quite a bit of time and money doing product research. We did a number of focus groups and talked specifically about changes that we could make to the interface, to the combat, and to the overall gameplay experience--to make it a lot more fun. We also did surveys asking the current user base what was missing, what were things we could do to make the game better.

And in all of these user surveys, apparently no one ever said they wanted content, and that's why there was none, right?

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)