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SOE Officially Announces The Agency, FreeRealms
Today the embargo ended for news on Sony Online Entertainment's two newest Massively Multiplayer Online Games. One, entitled The Agency is slated for the PS3 and PC formats, and will feature a spies and mercenaries theme so far unseen in the Massive genre. The other is FreeRealms, a fantasy title deliberately aimed at non-traditional gamers. It will feature whimsical gameplay and offer users the ability to create their own content, another first for a Massive title. Gamasutra has an interview with Matt Wilson, the studio director of SOE-Seattle, discussing the inspiration behind The Agency . "I think our big inspiration to develop this game actually came from watching movies. If you pay attention to all of the summer blockbusters there are lot of movies that come out around the spy/espionage genre. Whether it's James Bond, or the Bourne series all the way from Mission Impossible or even TV shows like 24 or Alias, it is a really big genre of information that is out there."
That's a tall order. They removed 37 individual professions which you could mix and match, and made 9 'iconic' professions that best fit a 12 year olds idea of what star wars is about. That's just the tip of a very large ice berg. It was a sandbox game for the most part. It was YOUR adventure, now it's just one of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess leia, etc... SOE completely re-worked the game, and forced a lot of players out that had the money to maintain multiple accounts. It is no longer an adults game.
You can do the research for the rest. The detractors of what SWG once was are the same 12 year old audience that it was changed to impress.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
It always seems that the most vocal critics of SOE are the ones that played SWG. Since that game wasn't very good to begin with, I don't see how them taking a chance and screwing it up even further, warrants such hate. Rabid SWG players "Pre-CU" are more disinterested in taking a hard look at the game from a honest viewpoint than UO players were. The bottom line is, subscription numbers were dropping, new subscriptions weren't being picked up, and the common thread of people leaving or not joining was "this game isn't a whole lot of fun." Some people will complain about anything for eternity. I still know people that think the Planes of Power expansion for EQ1 ruined the game because travel became easier. Most folks loved it, though.
It's rare you will get a UO fanatic to admit that unless you were into a gank-fest type mindset and in a guild that were similarly minded, UO sucked for anyone interested in soloing or non-PvP combat, until it was revamped. When it was revamped, the people that would have loved that change had already left for EQ1 and weren't coming back. It was a classic case of "too little, too late". The remaining player base was mostly furious over the change, as the gankfest had ended. It's kinda funny that once they didn't have folks not interested in PvP to attack and kill easily, the PvP side of the game (the dark shard) was almost always deserted. I'm hoping they git it right in the upcomming beta for the new UO.
It was similar for SWG. Most people that really wanted to play the game (myself included) left well before the CU update. SOE was trying to stop the bleeding of customers of a game that had a title that should have rightly seen several hundreds of thousands paying and playing, but instead saw a dwindling subscription base. In doing so, they got it wrong, but they tried. They've admitted they botched it, even. But, they had to do something. SWG was dying a slow but painful death, and only the diehards that actually enjoyed the crapfest that was SWG have kept on whining. Much like UO, the change came way too late, and pissed off the majority of the remaining subscriber base.
They did a great job with EQ1. Lord knows I played it for 5.5 years straight. And so did a large number of other people. Until WoW came out, it was the biggest MMO in North America, by most people's reckoning. I stopped playing after I got into the closed beta for WoW, seeing something that would fit a more casual playstyle better than EQ1. That lasted a whole 9 months after release, and then I was bored out of my skull with the poor endgame that WoW had.
They got off to a bad start with EQ2, and it got crushed by WoW, and rightfully so. But, I'd say that today's EQ2 beats WoW. It's very solo, duo, and group friendly, with the largest raid force needed stuck at 24. After quiting WoW and going back to CoH and some CoV, I went back and tried EQ2. I haven't left since, despite several beta runs in games like LotR:O, V:SoH, and others.
And a few people have ranted about Vanguard sucking. Well, it sucked before SOE got involved with it, and it's gonna suck for a long time, unless it gets a serious revamp. You can't blame SOE for V:SOH's weaknesses and all around crappiness. Sigil did that on its own.
Maybe if Tabula Rising really pulls it off, I will slow down on EQ2. But for now, I'm very happy with this SOE game. And so are a lot of folks that come over from WoW, having burnt out on the end-game content there.
The bottom line is, SWG players need to get over it, much like UO players need to get over it. I'm sorry a game you loved got altered in a way you and most of the rest of the subscribers didn't like. But just because 1 game was altered that way, doesn't make the game company suck. There are a whole lot of other games that sucked that some people really liked, that got canned instead of the company trying to fix things. At least SOE tried, even if they did screw it up.
They did it in other games already. Try EQ2 whole classes swung between random extremes, and the whole set of spells got changed at least twice. E.g., one of my characters swung from primarily dual-wielding damage-dealer, to primary tank who can't even solo random mobs without a tower shield, to primarily two-hander specialist. It doesn't even have the same abilities as when I designed that character. And crafting got changed into something not even resembling the same thing.
Now admittedly, I don't claim it's anywhere _near_ the magnitude of the SWG NGE fuck-up. That's not even close. SWG didn't just get randomly changed, it got turned into a whole other _genre_. You just can't top _that_ kind of achievement. Still, it just shows the kind of random changes to one's characters that Sony won't think twice about doing.
That said, if I'm to take a wild uninformed guess about the future:
I'm thinking more like... anyone else remember that in SWG smugglers _still_ can't actually smuggle? That content just doesn't exist.
Or that they created 4 flavours of the trader class in the NGE, and made them not able to even do the normal quests (since being stuck at combat level 1 kinda makes it impossible to actually kill anything for a quest fast)... and nerfed 3 flavours out of 4 into mostly making a loss? (Now duly noted, crafting in a lot of games, WoW included is mostly a time-sink on the side. But that's just the point: it's a secondary activity of a character mostly geared towards adventuring. But making a class that can _only_ craft and then making them produce worse stuff than the drops off random desert chicken, is kinda harsh.)
Or that they actually broke the Entertainers (you get items like posters which should start a quest, but they don't actually do anything), and the random generated quests send you to dance for some tourists... in an empty room without any tourists? Or that it tells you all the time that Entertainers are masters of extracting information from people, yet the content to actually do that simply doesn't exist after the tutorial?
Or that there's a shitload of levels of Politician, yet you went from zero to max the instant you join a city, since the content for all those levels just didn't exist?
Etc.
So I'm having this mental image of a SOE game with spies... that can't actually spy. And mercenaries which are stuck doing the same randomly generated quest over and over again, because that's all the mercenary content, but can't actually get any meaningful mercenary employment
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Bear in mind that, contractually, SOE had no say whatsoever in any of the things you complain about. In fact, SOE vehemently objected to every single one of them. But LucasArts, and George Lucas personally, have the final, absolute say over all game mechanics, rules, customer-service policies and such in SWG. SOE are essentially contractors doing the server administration, providing CS bodies and providing some coders working to specs provided by Lucas. The general opinion about SWG I've heard from the SOE people here in San Diego, from the front-line CS up to the execs, is "Never again.". And frankly I'm not suprised Lucas screwed up SWG with NGE, look what he did to his own movies with episodes 1-3.