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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?"
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
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.