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SWG: The New Game Experience
There's been a lot of talk about the controversy surrounding the NGE changes to Star Wars Galaxies, but very little substantial analysis. Darniaq has commentary on the sweeping changes made to SWG, looking at how they've affected each system and what it means to the players. From the article: "Oh, hunting animals to sell their organic resources was a lucrative business, but that was combat as a means to an end. I didn't do it because fighting was fun. Even a number of attempts at combat revamps did not result in a markedly different game. They felt mostly like tweaks to a system most of the players had long since accepted. That it wasn't that fun for the average gamer didn't mean SWG wasn't fun for players. So why truly change a game when you're making money?"
From all accounts, it was a sucky MMORPG on release, was revamped into a suckier MMORPG, and is being revamped again into something even worse. Obviously anybody still playing doesn't give a crap about gameplay, and just wants to "be a jedi" or hang with on-line friends who haven't yet agreed on another game to migrate to.
Okay, maybe that wasn't the most insightful observation ever. I was just in the mood to post a comment using "suckier" as a word.
P.S. WoW pwns, bee-otch.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I was writing a post about how the guy didn't get it, but he does. Read the whole thing, kids.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
While I think the author writes a good and thorough review of the changes, He fails to recognize that the NGE removed some of the critical elements which made the game special. It's now just EQ-in-Space. For example, I used to greatly appreciate the ability to group with almost anyone, regardless of how far they had progressed in their combat abilities. We'd sometimes get our whole guild together for hunting trips, from the Master Bounty Hunters to the dancers who had just a little bit of rifle skill. We'd all go out hunting, and everyone would have fun, earn money, and gain experience. However, with the new system (and the previous Combat Upgrade) you had to face the same old problem of finding other players who were close enough to your level, then finding the monsters closer enough to your level, in order to actually do anything. My lvl 80 Doctor can no longer play with my wife's lvl 56 Spy, except to follow her around, fighting mobs that are gray to me, dropping the occasional heal on her. Another major problem is they've removed the ability to dabble. I used to love having just enough crafting skill to run my own harvesters and craft a few things, without forcing me to do nothing but that. My wife was a Master Image designer because she loved doing it, but can't do it all the time. Sometimes she'd like to grab her pistol and tour the Galaxy with me. Now, I can't craft, and she's had to give up Image Design, as it's been rolled into the Entertainer profession, which is strictly non-combat. Don't get me wrong, I like EQ-style games (we play EQ2 quite a bit as well) but SWG kept me playing because of it's unique features. Now, the lack of content and removal of unique features may drive us away entirely.
Who died and made Raph Koster god?
Damn, isn't there anything he doesn't screw up? All I remember from early SWG was how many of the annoyances were UO early days like. It was like the ultimate expression of feature creep.
So basically NGE is admission the original system was unsustainable from both a monetary and coding basis. They overcomplexed themselves into a ditch. Changing the game isn't a bad idea. Actively deceiving your player base is. SOE should be required to pay back the subscription fees for every player ever since the first line of code of NGE was laid down. They knew what they were doing, knew what the reaction would be, and then purposely made sure not to let anyone know as to maintain their income until the moment they changed.
Hell, I don't know who is more dishonest, SOE or Turbine; Turbine is the company who owns AC2 which recently closed, annoucning it was going to close less than a quarter after releasing an expansion!
They really should have released it as a new game and allowed the current player base to play the game they had paid for. Obviously this is another case of the developers wanting the players to play a game their way regardless of the desires of those actually paying for it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
All I remember from early SWG was how many of the annoyances were UO early days like. It was like the ultimate expression of feature creep.
Feature creep is right!
I never played SWG, but I remember playing Ultima Online back in 1997 and said to myself, "If all they did was fix the bugs, lag, and keep the client and servers from crashing this would be the greatest game of all time!"
Of course they would fix the current bugs, but would keep adding more features that brought on more bugs... Some worse than the ones before. Though I will admit were helpful, but there were tons of changes that just brough on more problems and annoyances.
My hunch is that if the developers stopped adding more features they'd be out of a job not having any more bugs to fix.
I'd like to see an MMO with a true finish, have a year long beta process, and be a finished game before it goes live to the public which the developers keep a hands off approach and give the power to the players make their own content.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I'm a fan of RPGS and MMOGs, but SWG had nothing fun in it at all for me, except the fact you should shoot while running, and that was sorta fun.
God spoke to me.
Can we get starwarsgalaxies.slashdot.org so games.slashdot.org will stop getting 18 posts per day about the NGE?
I mean, isn't there another franchise us Geeks, Nerds, and Dweebs can obsess about that doesn't originate from a billionaire rip-off artist.
After Episode 3, I refuse to give George Lucas and all of his spinoff companies a dime after the years of wasted time hoping for and anticipating his next movies and games. The games are getting worse and derivative, much like the last 3 movies.
If we keep throwing him money, it will never change. He will keep coming out with crap because we all want to believe in the Force and hope that each new tidbit of story we can get out of him will recover our faith in it. How much dissapointment can we put up with?
Rise up and grow a pair, and end Star Wars once and for all. Don't buy SW products and stop talking about it online. Perhaps if Lucas sees how utterly unmoving his crap has become he might actually innovate again and offer us something new we can obsess about for the next 30 years.
Friends don't let friends care about Star Wars!
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Most of my Ultima Online guildies ran to SWG when it came out, having been long-time supporters of the franchise, and enjoying an open semi-sandbox style of gameplay.
While I'd like to see them back into UO, I doubt it'll ever happen, as MMOs are constantly getting EQ'd to death, or plagarized in different manners in attempts to capitallize on the success of whatever top multi-player RPG is the flavor of the day.
Diablo II got UO pretty bad, and it looks like EQ and its ilk are responsible for the retardation of SWG.
I really, really fear whatever the devs of these games are cooking up currently, as it is no doubt 100% WoW-based...
"Can I have your stuff?"
I have played SWG since the beginning, in between taking breaks out of frustration as virtually all players have. I've watched with anticipation the original launch, and had fun exploring the early world, exploits, anomolies, class nuances, glass-eating trials-going-nowhere, and numerous bugs, as well as the later constant uncertainly which accompanied any proposed patch. I had a lot of fun, especially in the early days.
From what I knew of the early, original developers of SWG, I believed what they were trying to do was truly innovative and original. The best and the brightest from Verant wanted to create an all new, much more dynamic world that turned traditional MMORPGs on its side. In the early game you can see their vision in the crafting system, unusual classes and an experience-based system that caused characters to "gravitate" towards specific classes rather than be pidgeonholed into a specific path. There were all sort of seemingly innocuous and peripheral activities one could engage in, that for no logical reason, attracted a lot of participants. The original game was most certainly not some haphazardly put together system. You can tell a lot of thought went into it and it was a lot more balanced than people give it credit. The big problem is that the game *required* a significant routine population of players in order to function properly. But knowing that the design was set with the immensly popular Star Wars universe, and produced by the most successful MMORPG developer, now in concert with SOE's resources, it makes sense that the developers could count on this.
Then came the chaos.
The game started to change. Rather than patch minor glitches, updates started to alter the fundamental aspects of the gameplay.
When I think of SWG, it reminds me of the movie A.I. - you can see Kubrick's vision in the first half of the movie, then somewhere along the way Spielberg steps in and proceeds to turn the whole movie into a worthless pile of shit that makes you embarassed to admit you paid money for this trash.
Looking at things from the outside, it seems obvious to me that SWG was killed by having two groups, with two different visions, fight over the nature of the game. In reality there were probably three: the developers (Verant/SOE), Sony corporate, and Lucas and his minions. My opinion is that the Lucas people, with the support of SOE corporate (who probably didn't want to trash their rep with Lucas because of other areas of collusion) pushed the development team around and forced them to implement this haphazard mess of patches and redesigns, which of course, completely alienated the original player base.
I think what killed SWG was Star Wars; was Lucas and their people. If they had launched this game without Lucas and their meddling people, it probably would have had a much better chance. Instead, there were too many cooks in the kitchen and they fought over how the game was supposed to work and they killed it. And now, I suspect the redesign is merely an attempt to save face in one form or another due to some contractual obligations. At least, this is my opinion, FWIW.
I think it's obvious though, from even examining the game in its early stages, that there were at least two distinct factions pushing and pulling the game in different directions. The original developers wanted to create a more free form world where players weren't primarily directed by missions or levelling, and then others seemed to want to alter the game so that player success could be more easily qualified and quantified -- at the expense of the game's core design. This is a shame because SWG in its early stages was like GTA in that it presented a wide variety of options besides going on missions -- and this model has subsequently proven to be very appealing and lucrative, but someone (IMO the Lucas team) kept whining about this or that and eventually got their way and ruined the game in some kind of effort to reinforce brand identity.
So now SWG has been turned into a ki
I don't play SWG, but I did try out the trial. I thought it was kind of goofy and buggy in places but not particularly horrible.
A friend of mine who I played World of Warcraft with was an ex-SWG player, so I mentioned to him that Sony had totally changed the game around. He tried the trial and then shortly after - reactivated his SWG account and quit playing WoW.
He had played SWG back at launch time, leaving just before Jump to Lightspeed came out. His opinion on NGE seems to be primarily that they streamlined a lot of stuff in the game. He is also enjoying playing the space flight portion which is now free and not a seperate pay expansion.
It makes me wonder, how many people are like the author of the article and my friend? How many account reactivations have they seen?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I've been playing SWG since the early days, and it has always had way too many bugs in-game. Instead of focusing on fixing bugs, SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) has spent its efforts throwing out expansions and revamps. While these are good additions to the game, they come with their own new sets of bugs. NGE was the absolute worst. Setting aside whether or not the changes were good, the number of bugs is unbearable. For weeks after NGE was pushed live none of the basic quests worked properly. Hell, Jabba's Palace (one of the major theme parks) was broken for weeks. NGE would have been a lot easier for the players to swallow if it worked. What we got was a radically different game that was barely beyond alpha quality.
The reason I like SWG and stick with it is because it's a unique MMOG. It's not fantasy and magic (which are fine). Before NGE it was also more like an empire-building game experience, where you were less focused on immediate mechanics and played for a greater goal such as strengthening your guild or creating a major commercial enterprise or organizing huge cantina song and dance events. The "sandbox" play let the players create things to do in-game, which seems a bit different from a lot of existing MMOGs.
With NGE I'm not as happy with SWG as I was. I can adjust to the play, but the changes to rigid, limited character classes and the loss of the player economy and social network has really damaged the appeal of the game to me and many others. I've been casting around for a new MMOG to go to but don't see anything out there that's more like SWG and less like WoW. City of Heroes/Villians is unique, and Pirates of the Burning Sea has potential (Star Wars on the water?), when it goes live. But most MMOGs seems to be WoW-like dragon magic settings, even the much-hyped Dark and Light.
Give me science fiction over fantasy, that's my preference. Oh what I wouldn't give for a decent cyberpunk (not Matrix Online) or even a steampunk MMOG.
Almost every RPG like game gives you a health bar. As you take damage it lowers. To counter that you usually are given some way to heal yourself (or get members of your party to do it for you) as well as way to temporarily or permantly increase it. Improve the self-healing/regeneration capability and of course ways to prevent getting damaged in the first place like armour or agility.
Next you get an action bar or mana bar or whatever from you pay your special attacks. The heavier the attack the more action points taken. Drain them all and you depend on your basic usually weak attack. Mana bars usually have mana potions to refill it. Basically the action/mana bar is a tool I think to prevent players from just spamming their most powerfull attacks constantly.
In MMO's it seems extremely important to limit the players power. I hit the "not enough energy/action/mana" limit far more often then in any single player RPG. Most often it seems to be method used to limit wich levels of enemies you can fight and wich level of enemies you can fight with.
Let me explain. You make a group with a fighter a healer and a heavy hitter (mage). You can then take on enemies that are a lot tougher then any of you could take on solo. Why? Well the fighter will be the one taking all the damage, this is called tanking, but that doesn't matter because the healer will just spam his heal spells. As long as the enemy isn't so hard they kill the fighter between heals you can then just wait for the mage to do his work.
So most game limit the healer. This doesn't just prevent you from taking on enemies that the designers have deemed to though for you. It also prevents grouping outside your level range.
A low level healer just can't cast his weak healing spells fast enough to be in a high level group.
I don't know why MMORPG designers desire this. Lord of the Rings has noobs and maxed specced characters going on an adventure together but this is a NO-NO in MMORPG land for some reason. I think the logic goes along these lines, well everybody else does it so we should as well.
Why is it so bad? MMORPG's survive or not because of their ability to give a social game. Artifically limiting who can group with whom divides up your player base. Or put it another way. You run the risk of alienating new players because they can't find anyone to group with.
Anyway, I was talking about the Health/Action bar.
SWG did this a little different. It gave you 3 primary bars, Health Action and Mind (HAM) each with 2 subbars.
Now unusual for most RPG games an enemy could damage each one of the HAM bars. So you could be killed if either reached 0. Or rather you were knocked out and then killed by the more lethal critters. This is a HUGE difference from other MMO's. Remember special actions take away from your action bar in every RPG BUT you do not then also have to worry about dying if it goes empty. Even if it is drained completly you still can keep on fighting.
In SWG you could easily kill yourselve in a fight by using up your HAM points doing special attacks only then to suffer one enemy hit and bam you were down. Depleting the ham bars was a typical newbie mistake.
The two subbars to each HAM bar dictated how much points a special move cost and how fast you recovered. Most players maxed these at the cost of their total HAM points. Faster recovery was better then having more points and obviously special actions costing less was a boon as well.
SWG was also unique in another aspect. You did not gain extra HAM points as you levelled up. You could redistribute them within certain limits set by your species but the total remained the same throughout the game.
The experienced RPG players will spot the problem. What about about later enemies, do they do increased damage. Why yes they do. So while in the beginning an enemy needs to land a dozen or more hits to deplete your bars a later enemy can do it in one hit.
Yeah well but you gain better armour and skills to reduce the
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Amen to that. UO is all but ruined by the semi-annual feature barrage. Sometimes it is worse than others, but it is almost never in the best interest of the game. If they offered a "clean" server, that was essentialy the same gameplay-wise as early UO, but patched the known bugs, it'd be a unique and incredibly appealing game to me again. I still play currently, but so much of the world either doesn't match itself, seems a pointless waste of coding time, is unbalanced or is just flat-out broken. I would love to see a good concept come to life, ge tthe bugs worked out, and be left alone content-wise. There's a reason I still play the Legen Of Zelda almost annually - I like the original feel and structure. It's a good formula. Some people just don't know when they have it right, and can't stop adding things into the mix.
"Can I have your stuff?"
This left me with enough points to be a bit of a scout, harvest, and a bit of crafting. Oh nothing major, just fireworks. I liked them and very few people seemed to want to bother making them but there was always a need for them.
I actually was rather good at it and I got fairly frequent requests for packages with some amazing money offers. 1 million for a fire display? Payed in ADVANCE? Why yes sir, thank you sir! Oh sorry madam.
The wide grouping was also a lot of fun. Another char I think was ranger/creature handler. Yeah I know but it was fun pre-doc-buff. Had 2 big red rats and 1 small black one. Called Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis. The ratpack. Got a few laughs and they were pretty good.
Granted cats were better as they could keep up with your swoop but anway we were talking about grouping.
Dancers, crafters, rangers the whole non-combat group hanging out together. Oh sure the medic/docs had to pay a lot of attention but on the whole it was no super hassle. It could be done and everyone would even get xp. Such groups were especially good for getting some of the less common resources.
No more dabbling (worse if you respec to crafter/entertainer with an existing char you instantly a master) and grouping only in your own level range. Yuck. There is a reason EQ2 isn't setting any sales record either you know? No need to make it EQ2 in space.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ugh, forgot I had 'HTML formatted' selected. Sorry for the illegible block!
:)
Here's how it should have looked:
I take a slightly different view.
There's a difference between substantially losing players in a short period of time, as is happening now, versus steady decline of subscriptions over a much longer one. It's a Peak/Valley view versus a Slope one I'd guess. In any case, here's the problem:
Over a long period of time, SWG was probably losing more players than gaining. This is because the game had a fairly niche appeal. 200k-300k is nothing to sneeze at, but while some companies only see those numbers as a far off distant dream, SOE surpassed those handily with their flagship game. In theory, their "expertise" *combined* with one of the largest consumer licenses in the world, should have resulted in at *least* the 515k subscriptions they capped with in EQ1.
They didn't. Not by a long shot. I'm careful to note that the source of numbers we all bandy about is generally questionable, but even just going by MMOGchart.com, SWG hit a plateau, and never really migrated. Then SOE stopped reporting numbers on a per game basis anyway, but that's an aside.
They have had to have dropped at least a few million in dollars, and countless thousands of man hours in development over the six months (estimated) they spent on the NGE. Just getting something like this *started* requires major approvals within the company, much less with the licensor. A few hints have travelled the webs on how it happened, but regardless, this is a hugely tremendous effort not taken lightly.
They knew they'd lose people. They probably didn't think they'd lose as many. However, we here, and in most places, really have no idea how many people they actually lost. So we can't really know whether their bet paid off until they either announce record new subscriptions, or close the game
But however it turns out, they didn't just hack out some code tweaks. They did this major overhaul because they projected through the next few years and realized at some point in the near future, they'd fall under the necessary revenue to pay all the fees owed.
So close the game and start firing people or take a major chance at pissing off some players. This was not an easy decision for them, and I'm still surprised they went ahead and did it.
The fact that people continue to play that trash is a testament to the power of the Star Wars franchise. I'm sure the game as some great features, but I think the problems and Sony's business practices far overshadow anything positive. Other games have failed for less. If Galaxies had been a generic fantasy game the servers would have already been shut down.
Easy way to spot them? They are the ones not dancing with a weapon equipped.
The levellers. Levelling up is the name of the game and XP is your e-penis. They want fights, they want fights that give max xp and they want to get a character that is super powerfull.
Easy way to spot them? They are the ones in horribly mismatched outfits or even underwear. Just the stats matter nothing else.
Of course almost nobody is 100% one or the other. That would be too easy for game developers BUT nobody is 50-50 either. The two sides really are each other opposites.
The sandbox people do not care if their character is less powerfull then another character. They at most care wether they can be the character they want (for instance a death dealing dancer was not possible, should all SWG proffesions cost the same amount of skill points). That their ranger/medic does a fraction of the damage of a combat character is not important. Their choice.
The levellers DO care. OMG GOD, sword can do 10% more damage per second then fencer? NERF THEM. They like competition but also want it to be fair. To them the mix and match is about getting the best results. PvP players are even worse, have to be, because what is the point of a duel if the winner is already known?
Perhaps the biggest difference is that levellers dream of being able to solo X while sandboxers can't see the point of soloing in an mmo.
Worse is that both groups do not like each other much. The Levellers see the Sandboxers as a bunch of low level roleplaying freaks, the Sandbox people see the levellers as ill mannered script kiddies always looking for the latest exploit.
Obvious example? Image designer. Now if there ever was a profession were a player should not care about maxing XP results it was image designer. Boy were they screwed. This meant that only hardcore sandboxers did it. Levellers had a use for them because even the most hardcore leveller wants to change their looks sometimes BUT there was a mismatch. Levellers would ask for an image desinger to change them, the nicer levellers would come to the ID but many seemed to think that the ID should come to them and just cough up the travel costs. Paying for the ID session? Why? The ID gets XP for it so why should I pay for it? That master image designers have no need for XP seems something a leveller cannot understand.
Same with other "helper" jobs like entertainers. Levellers are lousy tippers. To them XP is the name of the game and they cannot understand that the best entertainers can only get money from tips.
Medics? Just as bad. Healing costs resources yet levellers will not help medics who kept them alive either by donating resources (if they even have the skills in aquiring them) or paying for the job. Hell I seen levellers who had to be constantly healed and then try to sell medic loot to the healer that saved their skin. No wonder medics died out.
With NGE sony seems to have decided to aim for the leveller crowd. An intresting move since there seem to a be a lot of them. Small problem? The levellers left and went to WoW. It is the Sandbox people that have stuck with SWG through thick and thin and it is them that are most badly screwed with this update.
No more mix and matching your own job. Clothes and armour are given not bought from crafters. Less of a crafter run economy. The whole combat level crap. No, SWG went from a sandbox/leveller hybrid wich was bad enough to a leveller game. All very nice but WoW does it better.
I don't know if there is room for a sandbox only game. Compared to the standard leveller games that are EQ and WoW. The sims is a sandbox game and it sold amazingly well. Its online version did not. Can a mmo "the sims" work. I think so but you need to design a true sandbox game and not some weird hybrid. A true sandbox game is not about levelling up. This is hard as levelling is easy. Just as
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.