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?"

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SWG NGE A userbase divided (the HAM debacle)

[SmallFurryCreature]

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