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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.
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.
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"
From my own past experience with declining MMOGs, it won't really get the point accross. Developers very often dig into a vision of their game and not even the enjoyment of their users will dislodge them. I watched one game go from tens of thousands of players - not enough to make the developers rich, but enough to pay for itself and give the dev team some "night job" income - down to barely a hundred now because of the increasing amount of tedium and clicking being added to the game, and for stupid reasons or no reasons at all.
Me, and thousands of others quitting didn't put a dent in their resolve to make a game that can be used to test the effective lifespan of any mouse on the market, but it did do good: I am no longer annoyed by the game, I know longer have to deal with the developers ass-backwards approach to problem solving, and I have an extra $12 a month to spend on other things. I'm happy.
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 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.