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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.
cancel your subscription. that'll get your point across.
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.