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.

Comments

Re:Changes...

[GeekyMike]

I was a player of SWG for the first year and a half after the introduction of SWG. I played for about 16 months, hoping Sony would get their stuff together and build the game I dreamed of. I watched the Empire get killed by the superior numbers of rebel scum crying for a nerf (albeit the old AT-ST was overpowered, it kept rebel scum down). I watched the promising new dungeons come out, and thought it was a good start. I explored the dangerous planets on foot in hope of adventure. I even ground holocrons in hope of being one of the few to unlock Jedi. I saw the game degenerate to Jedi on each corner. I even downloaded the beta of JTL over dialup to see if anything would keep me.

I left despite RL friends asking me to come back. Sony killed this franchise while George Lucas raped my childhood dreams. Please take the dog behind the barn and pull the trigger.

Sony had a loyal fanbase in the forums with good ideas and implementations. Many professions remained useless despite many promises by the devs "We're working on it guys, what do you want?" then ignoring the myriad of responses. If you want to gain more gamers, listen to gamers to find out what is important.