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Star Wars and Raph Leave SOE?
Gamespot reports that Raph Koster, chief creative officer for Sony Online Entertainment, has left the company. While Gamespot seems to confirm this news, there are a number of MMOG-related rumours swirling at GDC. Mythic may be in EA's sights for acquisition, and Sony Online may soon be losing the rights to the Star Wars license. IE: No more SWG. Grimwell online has a rundown on these virulent rumours. Chris Kramer (from SOE) said words to the effect of "We're in it together for the long haul." SWG will be staying with Sony Online for some time to come.
I played Everquest 2 for a year and 2 months. With 3 large combat changes the game is not what it originaly was when it came out. Which caused me to leave.
:P
I believe the same thing happened to SWG where they changed the game a great deal too much.
I don't know to many MMO players that are happy with the way SOE is doing business. It seems that in SOE's quest to gain more patronage, they fail to realize that the customers already in the game are playing it for the way it is. They don't want it to change drasticaly to gain other players that are looking for a more laid back game play.
If i wanted to play a game for 30 minutes and acomplish something i would play WoW. If i want to play a game that i won't be able to do anything except travel across the map in 30 minutes I'll play EQ2. For me i loved the complexity of the game. They've done away with that. And in turn they have done away with my subscription.
I see this as a signal that their are alot of troubles brewing within SOE.
Just a gamers Opinion though
Raph Koster is excellent at designing unfun games. I'm not sure this is a bad thing for the company "losing" him...
IMHO , SWG was doomed from the get go. The reason is that they had a great IP to develop a game off of. They had two options they could go for. Either make a game for star wars fans, or make a game for MMORPG players. They tried to straddle the fence and it cost them. The SW fans didn't feel that this game was any more SW than any other sci fi based MMORPG other than character references and some races. I mean really now, how many beast tamers did you see in the star wars movies? They got a similarly tepid response from MMORPG junkies because it really wasn't anything innovative to the genre and was cursed with some bottability issues. So they roll out NGE to try to fix this. Problem, the hardcore SW people have already left, and you remake the game to try to be more appeasing to what they're looking for. This annoys the MMORPG people because now it's even less of a game they can get into. In a perfect world it would have been "Hey, you got Star Wars in my MMORPG! No you got MMORPG in my Star Wars! Hey these are two great tastes that taste great together!!!" Instead we got "Hey, you got MMORPG in my star wars, and I seem to have gotten some Star wars in your MMORPG, how about we let this Sony person throw it on the ground and piss on it?"
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
SOE has screwed up SWG long enough, if they loose the licensing, who really cares? The few remaining players will be bummed, and rumors will float about some other company trying to do SWG right.
But having yet another solid and profitable independant developer like Mythic sucked up into the oppresive regime that is EA?!? I find that to be a much more disturbing thought.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Given that one of the other rumors is:
Smedley Getting the Axe at SOE. This is a bonus entry, not from GDC. Something I was actually told last week and wanted to sit on and fact gather. At this point with Raph gone and SWG in question... it's hard to think this wouldn't be on the table.
I wouldn't expect Smedley to say anything else.
Him leaving wouldn't change my opinion though: I will never play an SoE game again.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
MMORPGs have become completly derivative of the genre as a whole. I can generically describe every MMORPG ever created as a game where you create a character, choose a class and then go out and complete missions. With the quests mostly consisting of killing monsters or some other NPC.
Sure, they have tried to throw in distractions such as housing, and guilds and different quest branches. (I.E. questing to gain a title or questing to gain an item, etc..)
I purchased EQ2 recently, because a year or so ago it was described as a unique game, with something different. By that I am referring to the class system where you pick a general class at first and specialize as you gain levels. From a magic user to a priest for example. But no, when I played it, you got to pick your class up front and that was your class for the rest of the game.
I actually think UO is the best MMORPG on the market. It make not look great, but it has way more variety. An Elder Srolls MMORPG would be incredible.
As it stands right now, SWG is in a tough spot. Those who want a space-based persistent world, with bounty-hunting, smuggling, and space combat have a great alternative in Eve.
Those who want sword fights, magic powers, alien landscapes, weird creatures and chainmail bikinis have pretty much every Fantasy RPG to play.
Those that want wear funky armor, control an army of robots, and use a blaster that allows you to shoot first can play City of Heroes.
Aside from Branding, exactly who is SWG trying to appeal to? Everything they might have is being done better by other games.
--sugarman--
While I wish no ill will on Raph, Star Wars Galaxies is a textbook example of a misguided project.
Star Wars is one of the most regonized and highly regarded franchises among video game consumers. Players have high expectations, and why shouldn't they? There's enough material there for an engaging and interesting MMO. One has to wonder, how could you mess up a Star Wars MMO?
Well, here's how:
1. Launch a buggy game your beta testers tell you is nowhere near ready.
2. Have no player-controlled starships. Space is just like "zoning" in EQ.
3. Have no class balance, and then screw up class balance. Make sure your producer's favorite class (pet handler) is insanely powerful at launch.
4. Make sure entire classes, (droid manufacturer), are completely foobar.
5. Totally mismanage player relations, eventually cutting off public access to the forums to hide discontentment. Be sure to have a privately run, but public web site up for the producer where he talks about how players are sheep, more or less.
6. Planets aren't even frickin' round, and they have edges which are just high mountains.
7. Make sure questing is so stupid players don't even bother to read the templated instructions for what you are doing, and instead focus on the one or two variables per template. (Go here, blow up nest, run back.)
8. Make sure PvP is totally hosed at launch.
9. Don't bother to react to major economy-ruining bugs for days, even after reports flood forums, so that money is completely devalued.
10. Make the #1 fantasy of every player, becoming a Jedi, completely out of reach to smart players who maybe, like, have a job, and within the reach of mindless drones who play your game 24/7.
Anyways, the game was fscked all along, and the final news that the combat/professions system needed another overhaul was just the coup-de-grace.
RIP; lesson learned for Lucusfilm.
LucasArts isn't exactly Nintendo when it comes to protecting its brand names but they're not stupid enough to continue to let the Star Wars name be burned alive. (SWG is the laughingstock of MMOs these days.)
Subject was a direct quote from the article, move along.
I was on the tail end of the EQ2 beta and also played for a little while before being lured away by WoW...which I played for over a year.
Then I read a couple of reviews of the "revamp" of EQ2 and I went back to take a look. I was really impressed by how far it had come and decided to continue on with my character. There's a lot of depth there that was lacking when it first came out.
Traveling around in EQ2 isn't bad...no worse than WoW. But then again, I'm one that thinks traveling around EQ1 is WAY too easy than it used to be. The "good ol days" for EQ1, to me, was only the original game and the first two expansions...Kunark and Velious. After that it was the vocal whiners that got the game to where it was almost "teleport directly to the mob, have the mobs line up, die automatically for you, you get the experience, you get whatever you needed. NEXT". It was fun when it was more of a free-wheeling place, where you had to sell your own stuff, where you had to get a port out of some place. The world of EQ seemed SO big back then. Taking a Barbarian from Halas to Freeport was a daunting task of running through the Karanas. It was great. It was an adventure right there. Now...meh...you're a barbarian in Halas just gate up to the Plane of Knowledge and go wherever you want. No biggy. And to me, no fun. Again, that's just me. I'm a little goofy.
But I've been having a blast with EQ2. Well, not at the moment as all my attention is on Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
The Star Wars Devs (and Raph the supposed 'Genius of MMOGs'in particular) should have realized that in a genre selling 'you are the hero' that everyone wants to be the hero, aka a JEDI.
/tells saying how he 'pnwed' him and his mother. The only reason people play nice in MMOGs is because of PvP limitations.
Everyone wants to kill the hero.... And take his things and send him nasty
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Today there are dozens of Dev and producer posts that are out to counter the new wave of horrible press their lack of work and attention has created. It's all a joke so they can say, "Look how much we communicate!" when in fact it's their last ditch. The producer tripling his post count in one day impresses the small minded idiots, who get star-struck when a "red-name" (Dev) makes a post, but everyone else sees it for what it is : a glass of water thrown on a rampant house fire they created themselves because they simply didn't do what they promised. Again.
They are crooks (taking money for expansions one day before telling us the original game was getting shut down and they were putting a new one in, the NGE), liars (so many lies...some posts deleted later when they didn't think anyone was looking, but many remain), and don't understand the concept of setting a schedule/goal and getting it accomplished. Whatever dickhead is really in charge (Smed says it's not him today...then who the hell is it if not the producer?) needs to find employees who a) know their job, b) know how to do it efficently, and c) keep to some semblance of a schedule. They cry that it takes months of man hours to make a simple change - well, in that case, it's shoddy code to blame.
I wish Lucasarts would dump SOE - put the damn game out of it's misery. It's a complete boil on the arse of the Star Wars franchise, and the suits at SOE have spent three years telling people they were going to deliver a game that has never materialized. I've finally cancelled myself, and the only regret is that I spent any time at all playing a game where I was constantly told the "next big thing" was coming that would make the game an actual Star Wars experience; if the smug jack-offs like Smedley spent 1/10 of the energy they spend spinning shit, telling blatant lies about the game to trick people into playing/staying, into actually fixing the game, you'd have the biggest/best MMO in the Galaxy.
Unfortunately, that won't happen - SOE has ridden this pony as far as it can, and only the hardest-core-take-it-up-the-arse from the DEV fanbois (yes, I'm talking to you PsychoPyro, who kisses so much arse *I* get the bad taste in my mouth) are still there. I used to hope for the best, but they always deliver the worst. Eventually, even the most ardent supporter (except for the crazies, who are usually 16-year old bois who think when they get all growed up they could work for SOE so they start corporate kiss arse now) must realize that the game they say it will be never will be, any more than you should believe a leopard who tells you he's going to rearrange his spots. It's just not going to happen.
So, by now people have seen the news. Yes, it is true I am leaving SOE.
Why? Well, I've been here for gosh, almost six years maybe? It's been a good ride, and I think we've gotten to do some really fun and interesting work. But I am getting interested in doing some stuff that is a bit off the beaten path -- really, anyone who has been reading the blog can see that! -- and while SOE feels it's really cool stuff, it's just not where they are at right now. My contract was up, and it was the right time to poke my head up and look around, that sort of thing. It's all quite friendly, and actually, I hope that I'll work with SOE again in the future, because there's a lot of wonderful talent here and a lot of cool technology, and a lot of friends.
So, sometime soon here I'll be off on my own. Nope, no announcements about plans or anything. I don't have a new studio in my back pocket, I don't have a job lined up, any of that. And... we'll see what comes. I'm thinking sleeping in next week sounds good.
Oh -- the old email still works, for now. You can always post a comment or use the email addy at the bottom of this page to reach me, too.
All sort of anti-climactic, huh? ;)
Personally, I think he is one talented individual who would absolutely shine in a less, shall we say, strangling environment? GL Raph!