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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.
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
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 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.
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