Interview with SWG Producer Grant McDaniel

Robert Cox from SWG.WarCry.com interviews SOE producer Grant McDaniel on the three-year anniversary of Star Wars Galaxies. From the article:
"'There was certainly a concern over how [the NGE] was going to be pursued by the players, but we knew that to make the kind of game that us and LucasArts expected for a Star Wars online game, we needed to make the changes,' said McDaniel. 'And to actually be able to continue to support the game that we've got, we needed to make those type of changes, to make it something that we could really feel good about, that we could really make sure was a high-quality game that provided the action experience that you'd expect from a Star Wars game.'"

Comments

Why did you play pre-nge SWG?

[SmallFurryCreature]

The two games are totally different. That is the big upset. The problem for pre-nge fans is that they got no other game to go to. The post-nge fans do. Almost every other MMORPG is like it. Prebaked character classes, loot based economy, twitch to make up for lack of skill.

That I think is where SWG failed, it never succeeded in making clear what market it was for. It would like a bunch of Counterstrike fans wandering into a Jagged Alliance session and sticking around until Jagged Alliance became a bad counterstrike clone.

If you thought the game after the NGE was fun (or indeed post CU) then you must have absolutly hated the game before. So why? Because it was star wars?

SWG failed because they changed everything about the game. The jedi class had nothing to do with it. Only that the kind of people to get a kick out of being a leet class were not the type who should have been in SWG. The game called for more balanced players. If you want a score to show how good you are you need a system like WoW and EQ has.

But yeah, griefers suck. No matter if you are on their side or not. Let others play their game.