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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.
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"
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.
the fans might not be as - forgiving - as they once were ...
No no no...
The line is:
"We shall double our efforts."
"I hope so, Director, for your sake... The fans are not as forgiving as I am."
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.