Slashdot Mirror
Galaxies To Beat World of Warcraft?
We reported previously on an interview with John Smedley being run by Gamespot. They've put up the second part of the interview, and in the closing paragraph John takes the gloves off. From the article: "One thing that I love about our company is that there is no 'quit' in this company. It's about making sure that we have pride in what we do. People within the company feel so much pride in this game that they want it to beat the crap out of World of Warcraft. That's something we feel very passionate about. We know we are capable of making the best stuff out there, and I'm proud to say that with the changes we're making in Galaxies, I think we're headed in the right direction."
Galaxies doesn't have LeeRoy Jenkins!
No, that is what makes Battlefront 2 works, what makes JK2 work. No one will pay month after month for that same experience, which is the premise of the MMO revenue model. What people pay month after month for is the sandbox with complicated options and roles to explore. I was playing Eve for a while - which is in a Star Wars-like atmosphere - and I was trying (and failing, that's another story) to become a manufacturer. Not a space pirate or Luke Skywalker - a Manufacturer/Industrialist. I sold the cheapest ammo in several solar systems. I would play a more economic game in SWG if I could have.
Even Battlefield 2 seems to have more depth than SWG does now.
I played WoW for about a month when it first came out (two days after released) and haven't touched it since. It's probably about the best MMORPG I've ever played, but it's stil just a level-treadmill. Nothing much exciting happens in it - even on a PvP server.
John Smedley is obviously getting his crack from the same source that supplies Darl McBride.
I have played WoW. It's an ok game, but I didn't like it all that much. It's not my style. I consider WoW to be a game that appeals to the lowest common denominator. It's pure hack and slash play with cartoony graphics and shallow, repetitive "kill foozle" gameplay. Star Wars never has been lowest common denominator, and neither should SWG be.
I have played SWG for a year and a half now. I have FOUR accounts. I have mastered almost every combat profession that the game ever had, including full template Jedi, which prior to the NGE, took months to do, and rewarded you with a character that, if played right was the most powerful in the game.
SWG is the only game that I have EVER played constantly for a very long period., mainly because there was always SOMETHING ELSE to go do!
And SWG never was a failure. We have (had) 200-300K subs, which made us a solid top 10 US MMO, a number 90% of the MMO's out there would die for.
Instead they chose to nuke the game, because they decided that those who made it what it was are now undesirable and they want the lowest common denominator crowd.
For the good of the industry, and for everyone who is a customer of MMO's, I hope SWG fails so horribly that it closes by Feb. For SOE/LA to do what they have done to everyone who ever gave them a red cent and get away with it, and to be REWARDED with larger sub numbers for it would be the doom of EVERYONE who is a customer of a MMO. They will ALL start doing the exact same thing TO YOU.
Even WoW...
Corporatism != Free Market
Disclaimer: I'm a WoW addict. This is written from that perspective, but I feel my point about the companies' histories remains valid.
Put a different way, I think what parent means is that in the land of MMOs, you're buying the expectation of content as well as what's currently there. WoW's strength, even despite the very long gap between the 1.1 and 1.2 patches, is that Blizzard has done "the little things" to keep the game at least somewhat fresh. They've made mistakes, sure - like ignoring midlevels and gearing too much new content to level 60 (maximum) - but they haven't actually done anything that could or would be perceived by the community as malicious.
SoE has. Time and time again. I think that speaks more toward the futures of the two MMOs than even the strengths of the games.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Actually, this is the crux of the problem... SWG is THE test that will set the course of the future of the MMO industry:
Do you remain loyal to your customers, listen to them, make the game for them?
Or...
Do you commit yourself to those who ARENT your customers, listen to them, try to make a game for them, and ignore those who have paid for 2.5 years of development?
Most MMO's do not do radical change for fear of alienating their base and closing down.
If SOE gets away with what they have done to us, prepare to see EVERY MMO vendor, including Blizzard, walking all over their base.
Of course, I believe that SOE has no chance at all of making this a go. I lived through the original radical (it seemed so at the time) change, the Combat Upgrade of April `05, and that reaction was a mild protest compared to what I have seen with the NGE.
Corporatism != Free Market
Smed is taking heat for all of them, so I guess it's understandable that he's taking serious amounts of Valium (or gin) to get him through interviews.
My script don't crash! She crashes, you crashed her!
The real problem with SWG was not that it never seemed able to make up its mind about what it wanted to be. In its attempt to be everything to everybody it ends up pissing off everyone. Instead of fixing the bugs they kept redesigning it and introducing even more bugs. I remember after the combat revamp (the first) that you would sometimes drive across places so fucking teeming with live that it was insane. Lairs with 30-40 critters around the entire horizon filled with prey. Granted it was amazing the game did not grind to a halt displaying it all but geez that bug should never have made it past testing.
This guy just doesn't seem to have a clue and if he thinks SWG can in this form compete with WoW he should have himself committed. This is no longer marketing speech this signals a severe mental disorder.
It may amaze some people but in MMO land some people LIKE being an entertainer, yes even a hairdresser. Some people really do enjoy being a cheff or general crafter. Other enjoy going out hunting not for money or xp or leet loot but to find the supplies that the crafters need.
But such a game is not for everybody and would need to be very clearly targetted. An open sandbox style game simply requires a different kind of player then well a fps linear story game.
You know what is odd? The game Guild Wars is advertised as a PvP game yet its quests are actually bloody intresting, with some nice stories and scripted quests that actually are a lot better then the typical EQ2 "go kill ten bears for the next page in a book" quests. GW has NPC's fighting along side you, a central story that actually advances, and in general is very suprising especialy when you consider that it is not a quest game at its heart.
Worse GW is better then EQ2 because you can far more create your own character, you have a maximum of 8 spells from a wide section and while there are only 5 jobs available they have a massive spell selection and 3 specilisations and you have to select a second job as well giving you a huge amount of choice as to how to build your character. Compared to EQ2 where everyone uses the same spells it is a breath of fresh air.
In fact it is a bit like SWG. Well SWG BEFORE Sony made it clear that anyone not adopting the one template to rule them all would just not be able to play with the higher level content. When Sony's idea of a good high level dungeon is filling it with critters that all but the most specced out combat classes can't handle then it becomes clear that Sony decided that the sandbox was not what they wanted.
Remember KOTOR? Nice game but hardly "open". Just try to make all your characters ranged weapon fighters. It was suicide. Jedi was you path and you would damn well take it.
SWG slowly rotted, partly because of bugs, partly because sony either encouraged or failed to discourage the use of quick paths to victory and partly because to many of the players allowed themselves to be drawn in by the lure of the xp grind.
In a recent /. article I put up a post about how SWG was fun before the doc buff and I describe a hunt on dathomir. Perhaps I should also write about how live was AFTER the doc buff became wide spread.
My Sabrak(?) was now an elite TKM/Sword Specialist. Sword being used to do the big damage, TKM for its fantastic healing and for the cheap damage that vibro knuckles give (top sword cost a million, top vibro knuckle a few thousand, your choice). The day would start with unloading your inventory of the previous day loot and checking your armour. Depending on how much you cared about looks your outfit would be the select pieces of armour that critters actually hit with the non-hitted parts of your body wrapped in clothes. If you could be bothered, many couldn't and fighting in your undies was perfectly acceptedle in the SWG universe.
Weapon check to see it had not deterioted to far. Then
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
For those who don't know, Mechwarrior (MW) was a really cool minatures game put out by WizKids (of MageKnight fame... and yes, I know the FASA MW game before it....) So I bought a crapload of minatures, played the game, loved it, and then the hammer dropped. They basically said "We're changing everything, dear players, but we're doing it FOR YOU!... By the way, you know all those minatures you've collected? Yeah, they're being retired."
So they came out with new rules, new minatures, whatever. I suppose they just expected me to run out and drop another couple hundred on new minis. Needless to say, I boxed it all up in the garage and haven't played since.
Screw you, Wizkids.
and screw you too, SOE
For instance, there's several things I saw in his responses that bugged me.
I don't know about in Asia, but in the US, the subscription prices for Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest II, and World of Warcraft are all about the same. So, why aren't they listed there, too?
Obviously, you haven't learned it as well as you thought. SWG used to be close to one hand playable, but you removed the "hold right mouse button to run" feature from SWG in the NGE upgrade. That means, you can turn and shoot with one hand, but you can't actually move.
WoW, on the other hand, lets me:
With the exception of chat and logging in, there's nothing I can't do using just the mouse. That's something I don't remember being able to do in SWG or EQ2, both of which came out after EQ1. SWG's switching cursor modes made this particularly impossible.
Now, having commented on John's comments above, I also have to say this: Word of mouth is a powerful thing. I know 10 people that myself and my brother convinced to buy World of Warcraft, after we played it in Open Beta. These people closed their various Everquest, Everquest 2, and City of Heroes accounts to play WoW.
SWG, on the other hand, is getting disrecommended by people, because, quite frankly, you ruined the experience for them.
While we're on the subject of ruining SWG, Julio Torres, SWG's Producer at LucasArts, said
This is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Your changes blind-sided everyone, even your own Player Correspondants, who are your main "focus group," and the people who you "officially" asked for opinions on fixing the game. They're the people you should be listening to. They're the people who, the day that the NGE was unveiled, said "we didn't know about this in advance." (I can't find the exact quote, as the NGE boards are hidden on the SWG Forums.)
In fact, you willfully withheld information from them and the community about the changes that you were about to make to the game, until the very day the changes went up on the test servers, the day after you shipped pre-orders for the latest expansion, even advertising things like this:
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Does SWG compare with World of Warcraft? I sure as hell don't know as I haven't played either game; I must be the only City of Heroes player in this discussion. But I do try to keep up with the MMO world. And....
Okay, someone correct me if I'm wrong on my facts here.
Item 1: They release the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion. A full, buy-it-at-the-store update to the game, so it took a while to ship. Available in boxes, which take a while to print. Containing loads of new content for a number of classes, and that couldn't have been quick to develop.
Item 2: Two days after its release, they implement NGE. Entire thrust of the game changes. Over half the character classes evaporate into the ether. Some of those classes were the same ones for which new content were created for under Trials of Obi-Wan.
Hopefully NGE, which affected the entire game, took more time and sweat to implement than Trials of Obi-Wan, which was a standard new content expansion, did.
So logically, BOTH projects must have been in development at the same time. Logically people on the Obi-Wan team must have known what was coming down the pike. And they had to have been super demoralized to see what was coming, right? Or maybe they didn't believe it would really happen?
But working on two wide-ranging, world-changing events at once? That's a lot of wasted developer muscle and energy, and I don't think that a sane development process can account for it. I think, more likely, that some schizophrenia was involved, so I present these two possible scenarios:
1. NGE was slapped together at the last second, as a result of some unseen-from-outside pressure, either from Sony or Lucasarts. Someone didn't meet a quota, and judging from Smedley's comments it must be a damn big quota, so someone panicked. A bad, bad situation.
2. There was some kind of internal upheaval at Sony, or Dilbertesque maneuverings prevented communication between teams, or a power struggle between old guard and rising stars took place resulting in a fulcrum shift in the teetertotter of SOE office politics. One power bloc was responsible for Obi-Wan, the other, NGE. An even worse situation than scenario 1.
Either way, something is happening there that is causing them to make drastic, ill-considered changes in their game. And any smart player should be able to see that the risk that it'll happen again is exceedingly great.
Even if the NGE produced the Metaverse, I would think that Sony has now destroyed the customer base of Star Wars Galaxies completely. And such is the depth of the incompetence displayed here that I would be surprised it if didn't wash over into their other online properties.
This is SOE's Edsel.
One of the great things about PnP RPGing is that it is truly a sandbox. The DM/GM of course prepares much but the players might up and decide that they are going to go into castlebuilding instead of delving another dungeon, and because the group are friends and are cooperatively playing (even when their characters are adversaries), it all works out.
In an ideal world this concept just carries over to online play and scales indefinitely, and hundreds of thousands of players all get along even if one is a Sith and the other a rebel leader. Unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world.
EQ et al. have their roots in MUDding. I wasn't involved with that; while MUDs were on the rise I was engaged in online air combat; but the experiences are similar.
While the bond of physical proximity was cut in these early games, the community was still small, which meant it was self-policing. If your online game regularly has 100 people on, you get to know those guys quite well. If Lord Doofus shows up and disrupts the game, everyone else does something about it; and if Doofus disappears but re-emerges as Dink, nobody is fooled. So it was still safe to have a sandbox. In air combat games occasionally a bug would crop up which could be exploited; but since the community was small it was agreed not to use 'cheap' tactics and any player who did was generally hounded until they stopped.
When the idea was scaled up to the MMOG level, with many thousands playing at once, both the safeguards of proximity and community were lost, replaced by anonymity and indifference. When that happened the thinking "because I should" is lost on many and in its place "because I can" comes in.
Now it becomes problematic to be open-ended, because for every player who wants to do something unique in a good way, there are several whose thoughts revolve around finding ways to abuse the game system. Here's an Uncle Owen, who wants to be a moisture farmer, but right behind him is Uncle Pwn, who is busy pharming instead and selling money on the 'secondary market.' Now the good player is ruined, because the market is pooched.
Likewise SWG may have had 37(?) classes but really if you wanted to win you found a min/max combination, of which I'm quite certain there were far fewer than 37. Same thing happened in EQ; there are 10 expansions and I-don't-know-how-many zones but in practice all new characters go to zone A then B then C then D and 40 other alternative places to adventure sit empty. Similarly, in DAOC, theoretically you have the choice to specialize in several different areas but forget that, you'd better be specced exactly the same as everyone else or you're done for when you reach the top levels.
What looks like open-ended, when subjected to exploiters and abusers and not tamed by community, becomes only an exercise in min/max and is in fact far more restrictive than an apparently closed-ended class system.
In short, any game system open-ended enough to allow free-form roleplay is also open-ended enough to abuse, because the number of permutations becomes too high to test. Further, any game large enough to qualify as a MMOG doesn't have a self-policing nature.
That was one of SWG's design problems, and the only way out was to tear up the old system or make a SWG2. I don't know why they didn't make a SWG2 and let the people who liked the game as is remain. Maybe they looked at the EQ2 vs. EQ1 numbers and decided it was a poor investment. Maybe Lucas leaned on them and said that there will be only one Star Wars MMOG, not two. Who knows?
What I do know is that I had no interest in joining the old SWG, either in its original incarnation or in the 'CU' phase, because of this.