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Sony To Encase Half the Star Wars: Galaxies Servers In Carbonite
Impy the Impiuos Imp writes "Sony is apparently merging out of existence half its Star Wars: Galaxies servers. In spite of a number of innovative features (three health bars, choreograph-able dancing, music you can coordinate between several players, 'your own R2 unit and 3PO,' programmable droids, and so on), a complete overhaul of the combat system, designed to simplify it and make it more action-oriented, actually drove away more people than it attracted. It soon thereafter retired to that great, Sony one-fee-for-all stable of aging and also-rans in the sky. Still on life support, it was preceded in death by Sony foster brother The Matrix Online."
I played the game at launch... and 3 life bars is about right. If your health, action, or mind bar went below 0 you died and had to reload your clone.
All 3 bars regenerated based on your stats, but you used action and mind points to perform specific actions... oh, those bars could also be damaged directly by other players (in PvP) or specific mobs.
Even better, you needed other players to get rid of any "permanent" damage you took to said bars, which filled part of those bars with black.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
They are not really doing this, its just a slashdot mind trick. I suddenly felt that millions of voices yelled out and then were suddenly silenced or someth...... NO CARRIER
You don't release a game and then change everything about it.
You clearly haven't played Star Wars Galaxies. That thing was a fucking cultural black hole. It needed to be plugged before we lost something important.
But some of us liked playing Ben Kenobi, doing chores, fighting sand people every couple of weeks, you insensitive clod.
It's not so much blasphemy, as the title wasn't quite obviously a joke.
That is: It would have been amazing if someone had actually decided to go and encase those servers. That's the story I want to see.
As it is, they're probably not either -- probably simply being repurposed.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The combat system in Star Wars: Galaxies was actually completely revamped twice. The first revamp, called the CU (Combat Upgrade) went over somewhat okay. It resolved a few of the problems that the original system had, and it held a lot of promise. There were two major problems with the CU, though... One, it was just as buggy and unfinished as the system it replaced, and two Sony made almost zero effort to finish, improve, or troubleshoot the CU. The result was that even after several years into the game's launch, the core gaming system was still plagued with bugs, imbalances, half-finished ideas, and an odd mix of non-aesthetically matching game systems. Sony "solution" to all this was to simply redo the entire combat system again, this time calling it the NGE (New Game Experience). The problem with the NGE, though, was that like the CU before it, it was buggy and unfinished. At was it this point that the mass exodus of players began. Sony had already proven twice in a row that they had zero ability to actually finish and troubleshoot a combat system, and a large chunk of the playerbase decided that the NGE would be no exception. Sony also did a terrible job managing the transition from each system to the next. As in any MMO, loot, achievements, and other acquired goals/recourses play a major role in defining a player's sense of accomplishment in the game. Prior to each revamp, Sony promised that all of a players loot and achievements would be converted to something of equal usefulness in the next system. This ultimately proved to be nothing but a lie. All manner of loot and quest rewards were transformed into junk. Many players literally had months of effort wiped away in a single day. And this happened not once, but twice! The downfall of Star Wars: Galaxies was predicted from the moment the NGE was first announced. Sony ignored their playerbase when the game was launched, they ignored them when they introduced the CU, and they ignored them when they launched the NGE. It should come as zero surprise to them that their now former playerbase decided to ignore them back.
To save other not-quite-geek-enoughs from googling:
Star Wars Galaxies (abbv. SWG) is a Star Wars themed MMORPG (online computer game) for Microsoft Windows developed by Sony Online Entertainment and published by LucasArts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Galaxies
(isn't this the job of the TFS?)
WD-40 is not for rust or lubrication, it's for loosening stuck bolts or parts. It's not a general purpose oil and will evaporate in short order. RTFC
Uhh, lubrication is for loosening stuck things :-)
WD-40 is actually a combination of an oil/grease and something that evaporates really quickly like an alcohol. You spray it on when it's really light, and then it evaporates, leaving a heavier greasy substance behind which will stay there. So you can use it for many lubrication jobs.
I am a pre and post NGE/CU person (NGE = New Game Enhancements, CU = Combat Upgrade). I actually stopped playing SWG in pre NGE because the game really sucked. It had nothing to do with the complexity. I love complex games. The game just had no direction. I was given a small tutorial and just dumped out there. Sure, it was cool that I was just dumped into the Star Wars Universe, but the complexity really hampered it (take a look at how simple WoW is if you even want to come at me about simple games sucking).
I will not defend everything about SWG, but there is a huge aspect that most people skip right over, which is space. Everytime SWG comes up, nobody even mentions space (i.e. JTL or Jump to Lightspeed).
Most people wrote SWG off without even doing anything in space. I have been playing SWG for over 3 years and my character on the ground is still not at max level, but I have a maxed out pilot with some incredible ship components.
I assure you that fighting pvp in space is not just flying in a straight line and going after the target. Well, you can go ahead and do that against me if you want and see what happens.
SOE could easily pull JTL out of SWG and have it its own game. It is honestly that good. Anybody I talk to about SWG will sit there and spout off the random retarded comments they read in places on the net, but every single person when trying to rip on SWG will completely leave JTL out of the picture as if that entire section of the game does not exist.
I have tried multiple MMO's based on the ground (SWG, Guild Wars, EQ, and a few more) and I can honestly say that ground MMO's all in all are just boring. When I say ground, I mean you are confined to that planet. You may have some type of mount that can fly, but in the end, the point is for your character to travel somewhere on foot, kill some stuff, and then move on.
JTL customization of ships is incredibly robust. I mean, you can literally pick the type of ship you want to fly based on the way you fly, and customize the ship parts based on the way you fly. Do you want to be the captain and manage a crew? Maybe you want some small and agile, etc. The list goes on and on of what you can do. You can fine tune anything from the engine and reactor up through the weapons, shields, and a bunch of other components (even the paint job and textures used for the ship can be customized).
You want to talk complexity and saying that SWG messed it up, JTL is still very complex. The only other game that even comes close to rivaling JTL is Eve Online (and that is basically an economy MMO wrapped in a space backdrop). Even EVE Online can't hit the customization of what you can do with your ship and how you fly it in JTL.
Everytime SWG comes up, watch, I am serious, watch how many people will rip on the game and either spout the same redundant stuff that was on the internet, or completely skip over and not even mention JTL.
JTL is a part of SWG. JTL is incredible. JTL was not completely revamped during NGE. Do not even start the, "Well maybe that is it problem. It needed a change" since most of you are just finding another outlet to vent about SWG on the ground changing.
Here is something I have not seen anybody post about: Your classes did not get destroyed. All of these people claim that after a few years of "fine tuning" their classes, they lose them, that is completely false information. People that kept their accounts through the transition also kept whatever character classes they had as well. So if the person had spent 2 years on a Chef/Bounty Hunter, when the transition took place, they still had a Chef/Bounty Hunter.
The change they did was that instead of over 20 specialization to pick from, they took it down to 9 and they included Jedi. One thing the preNGE people have bitched about since NGE is the fact that they had to work for Jedi, and then post NGE people came along and could just pick it.
Well, that means none of you are going to play Old Republic, right? Wel
The world is how you make it
but in what other game could running out of mana kill you?
Star Ocean. Which is infuriating when you're at a low level and resurrection items are damned expensive, but not such a problem later in the game.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
> I don't have WOW experience, can you reframe this in terms of Eve Online?
Imagine you could now only be a specialist in frigates OR destroyers OR cruisers OR ... OR dreadnaughts.
And your drones all went away.
And you were a battlecruiser who had good DPS and good remote repair/shielding, and you logged in one day and found a popup that said, "Good DPS or good healer, pick one. Now."
So you picked DPS, but now you just had a handful of damage clickies, and the entire warp scrambler/webbing stuff was gone, and people just stood there and blasted at each other until only one side was left.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.