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Sony & LucasArts Muck Up The Force
dakotamangus writes "Players of the massively multiplayer online game Star Wars Galaxies are feeling a bit like the films' besieged rebel army these days. To them, LucasArts is the evil Empire, raining down terror in their alternate universe. Says Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director at LucasArts: 'There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves.'" These latest mainstream press articles are just the latest examples of the profound backlash the NGE has wrought among the SWG player community.
For those of you who had jedi's and now their basically useless, you'll find this amusing (as well as anyone else for that matter)
Here, skip through the first minute and forty five seconds if you get fed up reading the text... Pretty funny stuff.
-FL
As though millions of nerds posted in terror, and then suddenly modded.
And I downloaded it and tried it out. It's supposed to be a 10 day demo, and I couldn't even get through the first without uninstalling it. The game is seriously buggy, it crashed numerous times, it stuck me in missions I had already done with seemingly no way out and wouldn't let me progress at all. On top of that it kept flipping me out of a game I was evaluating to purchase and on to the desktop and poppping up ads to do just that.
Here's a hint SOE: If someone downloads a demo of your product they are already thinking of buying it. Don't preclude people from using a demo to evaluate your product by harassing them to buy it. A better advertisement would be to polish the product you have.
Whoa, these comments from the Director are pretty revealing. First of all, it's an RPG, or was supposed to be. By definition, a lot of that *should* be exploring and learning new abilities. Second, this is (was) the only SW game where you had the _option_ to be Uncle Owen if you wanted. Some of the best times in game were actually the domestic stuff, running a shop with my Wookiee wife.
And thirdly, "Kill, get treasure, repeat..." I don't think there's much that can be said about that comment except that this woman is stuck in the earliest days of MMORPG theory. In fact, this kind of grind is why most people LEAVE the games.
Man, if you ask me, putting this woman in charge was one seriously bad decision. Maybe she's hot.
cancel your subscription. that'll get your point across.
How many people enjoy the new changes? Anything specific that you think is best?
The company is just plain meddlesome in all matters regarding the Star Wars license. LucasArts also torpedoed Decipher's Star Wars CCG, and for somewhat similar reasons. The SWCCG was too different from what was out there, and presumably didn't have the flash-bang action experience they wanted. While I won't claim that it was without fault, the game was killed before its time (even though it was after I stopped playing).
To veer slightly offtopic, they appear to be doing well with their LotR game and have expanded their license stable. Has anyone out there tried out the MegaMan(!) TCG? I'm having a hard time imagining it.
Oh, how original, how deep. Just the thought of thing that makes you feel like your in an "alternate universe".
Kill, get treasure, repeat.
Yes, that's exactly what I want in a game, how'd you guess?
Seriously, people who are into the quick hack-n-slash aren't going to quit playing WoW and start Galaxies, the people who are still playing Galaxies are probably doing so because of everything other MMOs don't offer, like the complex crafting system or player-created content.
Making your game a thoughtless treadmill won't help, at this point.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
Step One: pick demographic
a) Fat nerds without lives or money looking for an escape
OR
b) Hyperactive, attention deficit teenagers who like destroying things
Step Two: create videogame
a) Cheap, unstructured role-playing game that runs on office computers
OR
b) Expensive shoot-em-up requiring $300 video card
Step Three: advertise to said demographic
a) Slashdot, Wired, etc.
OR
b) CNet, ZDnet, etc.
Step Four: profit!!!
I'll leave it as an exercise to see how Sony/LucasArts fscked this up completely.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
When SWG started alot of people I knew who played it, (including myself) wanted to be just be that Uncle Owen character. I played an entertainer/musician myself with a bit of smuggler as well.A sexy Twi'lek in catina playing a song and dealing spice and slicing weapons in the backroom. I didnt want to be Han Solo, or a cutout of him. But thats where the game is heading now.
.. perhaps do it right this time.
The options that SWG gave you were amazing, the customization the various types of classes and skills you could make the housing, crafting and everything all really detailed, not too mention the customization of the look of your avatar. best I have seen(rivals COH/COV imo) but implimentation was BUGGY AS HELL.
Database corruption, rampant duping, broken quests terrible imbalances and aof alot of empty space. Once people min/maxed the best templates PVP went to hell(not that it was that great to begin with)
I think SOE orginally wanted to create a living breathing Star Wars Universe that you played in but it turned out to be more than they could handle so to "fix" the game they are dumbing it down (tho I like the combat changes having it a bit more twitch is a good idea tho once again.. BUGGY atm) slicing off a bunch of classes and who knows what else to make it SWG lite and hope that they get more people to come and play.
I just think they should kill the game and go with SWG 2
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
I don't play it but from what I heard, it sucked much anus. There are a lot of games recently that are a flash in the pan. People play them long enough for the next anime oriented game to come out and then drop it. But, back to the Megaman. No one bought it at the local gaming store. They sent it back unopened, same for G.I. Joe .
MtG stiles rules the local scene and A Game of Thrones is not bad (need to read at least the first book to get into it though).
Starship Troopes miniature game is rocking for me right now.
-JM
Nice job.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Before the NGE I felt like Lando Calrissian. I've been a droid engineer since I started playing, and I have created a comfortable enterprise as a crafter and merchant. Through all of that I maintained some amount of combat skills so I could go on occasional fighting jaunts to keep things fresh. As a combatant I could also participate in the Galactic Civil War (GCW).
Ironically, the NGE class of trader is supposedly based on the iconic representation of Lando but it has made me less like him. I have been stripped of all combat capabilities and can no longer participate in the GCW. As a trader I can only make and sell things, never going on any quests like everyone else. Over 90% of the content is no longer available to me to participate in. The player economy has been destroyed by the elimination of item decay and the addition of loot drops of stuff that used to be purchased from crafters. Only fighters can play SWG now, with traders propping up an increasingly pointless player economy. My trader is a ghost in the world.
"...We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat..."
That's not gratifying in the least. Try again.
can someone tell me wtf NGE stands for?
We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer.
Unfortunately, for every Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars universe, there's a hundred Han Solos and a billion Uncle Owens. If the only compelling content you can create is for Han Solos, you'd better have some very good AI to fill the Uncle Owen roles. If the only compelling content you can create is for Luke Skywalkers, then congratulations, you're writing a single player game. The only reason to put a thousand Luke Skywalker players in the same universe is because a few of them can be tricked into giving you monthly fees that way.
This isn't a Star Wars specific problem, of course. Heroic epics are epic because they involve unique heroes performing universe-changing actions. When your weeks of character development finally make you able to reach and slay the uber-dragon, that dragon had better stay dead. When an NPC congratulates you on your successful quest one minute and hands the same quest to someone else the next, it becomes obvious that you're not interacting with a story, you're playing a pretty modern version of pinball.
Of course there's no easy way to fix that - it's easier to write scripted content and hand out copies to every player than to write code that makes it natural for players to create their own content. I'd like to see MMORPG worlds evolve like SimCity/Civilization/Masters Of Orion/etc. games - frontier settlements would be founded by groups of players not created by designers, and enemies would actually threaten to destroy those settlements not just sit in dungeons waiting to be killed.
Part of the failure is the players fault, not sony.
Sony gaves us a sandbox, a bugged sandbox but still a sandbox. NOT a game on rails. SWG is closer to such games as The Sims or MS FlightSimulator then any single person game. Even Never Winter Nights wich relies so much on the user for content cannot compare. NWN after all still is a very story driven game even it is the users that write the stories.
Even sandbox games like the Tycoon games do not compare as they usually give you a clear start and end date.
Like MS flightsimulator it is up to the player himself to create his story. Wether you find that fun depends on how good you are in making a story out of a flight from airport A to airport B.
Why MS flightsimulator? Well just like in that game it is very easy to make it extremely boring. You can choose the most advanced aircraft, perfect weather, forgiving aerodynamics, no hardware failures, no crashes. OR you put yourselve in an obsolete prop plane with no fuel, failing engines, stuck landing gear in a storm of storms on an artic runway that is iced up and a sea 10 meters beyond the runway.
How does this apply to SWG? Well I told this story before on /. but lets just dupe myself to stay in the spirit of /.
SWG gives you several planets on wich to do your thing. Starter planets, medium planets, hard planets and "you get eaten" planets. Dathomir stand at the top and is a seriously hard place.
But I am getting ahead of myself. When you start the game and make the mistake of joining a small european server and choose the wrong starter planet (no longer possible but it was when I joined) you find yourselve all alone with a pathetic starter kit. Figuring out the basic game is easy enough and you start you first mission (SWG has no quests, just random missions of go to X kill the critters there, get paid) killing toads or bunnies. Immidiatly around your starter city things are relativly safe BUT just 1 km out things get nastier and you will probably do a fair bit of running or carefull circling nasties you have no hope yet of tackling.
Payout is crap and the money drain is big. Now in a move that is radically different from other MMO's SWG did not force you into a role and in fact you could easily get started in all the proffesions you wanted. A scout/medic/entertainer/melee/ranged/crafter combo was doable. At the start. Advancing in a proffesion cost skillpoints of wich you only had 250 limiting you in how many specialisations you could buy BUT in the beginning it paid to be diverse. It allowed you to heal your own combat damage and make some stuff. Important because as I said the game was deserted.
I then stumbled across another player who suggested I hop of planet to the central hub and gave me some kit and money to get me started. I literally leaped ahead. I could now afford a vehicle and some food buffs.
I did not yet find out about doc buffs (maybe they did not even exist yet) and that saved the game for a while.
With some more experience under my belt and now a frequent member of large groups I saw someone asking for players to join a dathomir hunt group. Now I knew enough that that place was dangerous, rancors and all, but that it was also something I wanted to try so me and some others joined up. In hindsight we were all NOOBS but it was still in that stage of the game when no group would leave without a solid selection of players such as a scout and certainly a medic or better a doctor (can ressurect dead players). Half medics like me were given healing items by the real medic just to give the group a better chance to survive and then we were off.
Dath was dark, cold and rainy. Some imidiatly called their vehicles and were told not to unless since this was suicide. We were going to walk. If agroed (attacked by hostiles) we would just have to fight, running in every wich way on your own was also not recommended.
We got our missions, a large group of I think about dozen players so we had
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
SWG in theory allowed you a lot of freedom. For instance in armour choice. Many an rpg simply gives you constant upgrades and you have the choice of getting killed or wearing the best armour.
In SWG the heaviest armour carried the penalty of restricting your recovery. Simply put in clothes you would take more damage but heal faster, in armour you could get to the point were you no longer healed.
Now they had 1 bug and one design flaw that ruined this choice. The bug was that computer controlled enemies only targetted some of your armour outfit. So you simply wore only part of an armour set getting the high resists but not the high penalty.
Second was that buffs could easily compensate for the penalties. So you had all the leet kiddies running around in their underwear and partial armour calling those choosing full armour of full clothes noobs.
They never really fixed this directly.
Same with content. Remember when they added the Endor bunker? The huge gathering there and then the shock when you found out what was inside? Monsters that took 5 minutes with 20 players to take down? Animal trainers not even possible to take part because you can't call pets inside and anyway they don't fit in the dungeon? Rifle not really an option since it is to small etc etc. Area attacks hitting monsters in other rooms.
That was their idea of "content" a leet kiddie playground.
SWG had something but it was ruined.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What I really don't understand is why SOE/Lucasarts didn't just make this update a sequel. SWG is far too long in the tooth for a major update to bring in new players - those of us who never picked up the game because it takes five minutes to kill a wamp rat with a blaster pistol have already played newer, better games and are probably not too inclined to start playing a game in which the designers only made changes based on player feedback over two years after release!
SWG had the Narf hunt, a mission with good payout, relativaly harmless enemy in a safe enviroment close to the hub of player activity coronet. (Has any SWG server ever developed another hub then coronet?)
What sony should have done the moment they realised (they did keep these statistics) that the majority of kills were narfs to make these critters less atractive to kill. Within the game the code already existed to do this. They could even have added some story content because of it.
Method A: Because of overhunting the narf is going extinct, simply remove them B: Because of overhunting the narf has become a sickened create and now causes disease in the attacking player. Very effective as disease causing enemies were way down on the list of preffered missions. C: A the empire orders hunting narfs illegal as the money gained is being used to fund the rebellion. Attacking narf lair causes an imp shuttle to drop a squad of hostile stormies who penalize imperial players and kill rebel players. Code already existed for this but was used for smuggling checks.
Do this for every to popular item in the game, make brandy illegal and those who trade in it suseptible to imperial raids. Make being buffed up a crime (like being under the influence). Use the game universe to steer people away from undesired behaviour.
Everyone flocks to coronet leaving the other places deserted and making the lag unbearable? Fine, travelling through coronet costs a certain fee payable immidialty.
SWG even tried some of this. Critters dropped crafting resources but their stats varied from time to time changing wich critter was best for hunting if you hunted to sell. They should have made this even more important and less purely random. Oh well. maybe next time
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
With all these newsposts about SWG, I started to feel nostalgic and went looking for old threads that I had posted while playing the game.
To start out, I played from launch day, I even got in on first day before they did the wipe and started again the next day, due to database issues.
I played to one and a half years, then dropped my account primarily due to a new job where I was not going to be home to play as much.... Anyway...
My first few months were spent picking up any skills I was qualified for. I think I had a little of every starting profession tree for awhile. I had no idea who I wanted to be. All I knew was that this game was the opportunity for me to have a life inside the StarWars Universe. I was going to be me, not some character in a movie, but me.
I decided I wanted to be a Master Ranger and a Master Creature Handler, with a 1001 in Master Rifle, just enough to get by on every world, in fact I think I was one of the first dozen Master Rangers on my server, I wore that title tag with much pride. I would spend hours running across the planets, checking out anything that looked interesting and unique. I would spend hours out in a camp watching the animals at the nearby lairs wander around, and sometimes I would have a stranger come across my camp and sit for a bit. Some very nice conversations were had around the campfire, covering everything from in and out of the game.
When not out wandering the planets, I would just near the entrance to a starport with a pet or two laying next to me and just watched the other players interact. Always some interesting eavesdropping around the starports. I did not run missions unless the rent was due on my storage house, but that did not cost much to cover, so I spent most of my time doing what I wanted. I enjoyed that and if you dropped my character out in the middle of nowhere on any planet, I could probably recognize where I was and find my way back with little problem, sad isn't it? On some occasions I also would head out to take on some of the most dangerous creatures in the game and I would use only the tools I had acquired from my professions, which was not a lot of offense, lol.
I used to use skill and technique, I used to hit and fade, I used to know which animals hated each other and so therefore which to run by when being chased. I learned a lot about the creatures in the game and how to survive.
I even went a few months without dieing, and only being incapped a few times, and that was when I would spend weeks on Dathomir and Endor and Yavin IV. I did not use buffs, and I did not use armor, as it drained my resources too much when fighting. I played the game my way and had a blast. This was all before mounts or vehicles were available.
Then the Hologrind came about. Things changed a lot.
I can state quite honestly that I did not care to be a Jedi. There were many games around for me to be that. I just wanted to be a background character in the SW Universe. I did nothing to become a Jedi, except play the game. One thing about playing the game my way is that I became a badge collector, I had many location badges, every one that I knew of, plus my three profession badges, I had over 60 when the changed the Jedi thing around to being related to badges, and then boom, my uniqueness was gone as people rode their vehicles to all the locations receiving badges in a few hours what took me months to find. I started seeing Jedi everywhere, in the cities and out in my wilderness. The turning point for me was when I Jedi on Endor jumped my mission and got me aggroed and incapped as I was preparing my pets for the assault. That is the day I decided to kill Jedi and become a Bounty Hunter.
I dropped my beloved Master Ranger and worked on becoming a Master Bounty Hunter. I learned my profession very well. I took time to learn it. I found every Informant available in the game and even created a large Informant list post on the forums for people to print out. I sp
And once again Sony proves that they are only able to alienate their customers.
How many feet do they have left?
Aim at foot... fire...
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
Players of the Massivly Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game "Final Fantasy XI Online" are mad. So mad that some are ready to march to virtual war against the games development team. Plans are in motion to cause servers to crash (specific details with held by request).
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While pretending to repair a problem in which one player could use a monster to kill another player in this non Player Vs Player (PvP) game, the developers decided to work the changes to instead prevent players from being able to play without relying on 5 to 17 other players to so much as spit. And players can still kill players in this non PvP game.
Before:
http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10;mi
After:
http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10;mi
Whats midly amusing is the players themselve suggested the change, along with heaps of other possable ways to fix the problem, and the developers chose the one method that would cause the maximum amount of frustration.
"Players of the massively multiplayer online game Star Wars Galaxies are feeling a bit like the films' besieged rebel army these days. To them, LucasArts is the evil Empire, raining down terror in their alternate universe."
No, the rebels weren't supporting the evil empire with monthly fees. The players aren't the rebels, they are the imperial peons upon which the empire is built. If they really wanted to harm the empire, they'd stop paying those fees and find some other MMORPG.
With all the rabid talk of "the market" and other anarcho-capitalist tripe on Slashdot, you'd think some of these players would be good little capitalist consumers and take their money elsewhere.