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Sony Shutting Down Star Wars Galaxies MMO and TCG
flibbidyfloo writes "Sony has sent an email to current and former subscribers to its long-running MMO Star Wars Galaxies explaining that the service will be shut down in December. Here's an excerpt from the email: 'We write to you today to inform you that on December 15, 2011, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and LucasArts will end all services (MMO and Trading Card Game) for Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). The shutdown of SWG is a very difficult decision, but SOE and LucasArts have mutually agreed that the end of 2011 is the appropriate time to end the game ... In addition, we will be discontinuing the sale of all Star Wars Galaxies Trading Card Game (TCG) digital card packs as of today, June 24, 2011. Loot cards will not be redeemable in the SWG MMO after September 15, 2011. The TCG will continue to operate until the final service closure on December 15, 2011.'"
Can you imagine paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars on eBay for something that only exists in one of these games, then finding out a few weeks, months, or years later that it's going into the bit-bucket at the end of the month?
never heard of it and it probably sucks, well bye
..hack the servers and keep them open for another year or so? I mean.. their so good at keeping the servers offline, let's see if they can keep them online!
It's dead, Jim.
is this the New Game Experience?
I finally just unlocked my Jedi abilities!
This is why when companies decommission their software, they should just open source it and let everyone go nuts. Someone somewhere is bound to maintain a gaming server for this game. However, companies like Sony have the mentality where if they can't make money off it then no one shall have it.
I'd bet that a new Star Wars product gets announced just after the new year.
Give you a dollar for it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If you have a mother, and she's proud of you, that's a shame.
So? Did these people get enjoyment out of that hundreds of dollars spent? Is it better to buy a boxed game and never get around to playing it?
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
I'm surprised it has taken Sony this long to shut it down. Sony turned a great mmo into absolute shit. They even had a small window to rectify their mistakes by listening to the vast majority of players. Fortunately, there is the star wars galaxy emulation project, which is a pre-cu version of the server. There are plenty of people on there (almost certainly more than the official swg), and you don't have to pay a monthly fee. The only thing I am leery of is Sony pulling a Blizzard and shutting them down. For anyone interested, the url is www.swgemu.com.
As if tens of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced
At least with a meatspace game, like the trading cards, players will have a piece of memorabilia that may be of value to someone, if not as much as it means to them.
But when your collectibles are stored in an array that will never be loaded to RAM ever again, it's not even possible to be surprised on finding them in the attic while looking for your high school transcripts...
My June 2007 article in the online gaming magazine The Escapist about the 2005 "New Game Enhancements" that pretty much destroyed Star Wars Galaxies: "Blowing Up Galaxies"
If you think the fact something has a lifespan makes it worthless you're not the kind of person who should be allowed to write eulogies.
You realize you just compared valuing an MMO to valuing a person's life, right? I suggest you don't write eulogies either.
A coworker of mine said that after it came back online, a month after the SOE hack, it was a virtual ghost town. Not that it was vibrant before, but being offline for nearly a month just killed it.
Lenin's mummy thinks you're a fool.
Can you imagine paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars on eBay for something that only exists in one of these games
Nope.
The real reason Sony is shutting down the game? They discovered it occasionally caused sudden onset of acute Tourettes syndrome.
Move along, move along... to SW:TOR?
If people are willing to pay for virtual objects, then those objects have value. Period.
That might work for simple online games where it's mostly about the gameplay (say, EA sports games), but for anything with persistent objects that have value because of their scarcity, it won't make a difference. You need a secure central database/service to prevent hacking, duplicating objects, or whatever other form of cheating people can come up with.
If you let anyone run a mint, money will rapidly lose its value :)
The same thing happens with money when it hyperinflates. Your stocks become worthless if the company goes out of business. Your car loses can lose all value in a crash. Your house becomes worthless if it burns. By this token nothing has real value since anything can lose its value overnight.
Already been done, for the MMO. They're also making is better, by not adding the game-killing idiot-friendly "upgrades" that SOE added. See SWGEmu.
Not sure about the TCG. A "digital TCG" is utterly stupid, IMNSHO.
You mistake price for value.
A lot of people do that.
It's why our economy is currently fucked blue by plutocrats.
Seriously folks. I don't buy games that don't have private or dedicated servers. Would it really be such a bad thing if little groups of players could host their own worlds? They can't really compete with the experience of the main servers, but at least some people would be able to play, even after the game's plug has been pulled.
Some determined players have done so with WoW by reverse engineering the client server protocol, so I gave it a spin -- It wasn't my cup of tea, but my brother became a subscriber because of the added exposure -- That's right: Blizzard made money because a private server existed.
Some people don't have the time to grind forever -- the private servers can have different exp rates; WoW and RuneScape servers I've seen do, anyway. One such WoW server almost won me over due to the benefits afforded to the time-challenged player.
It's really a shame that games have to die at all. Welcome to the future folks. There is some hope, some FPS franchises still have dedicated servers that players can run... but, for the most part it looks rather bleak.
Some game titles are deprecated for no good reason eg: Halo2 multi-player is canned. How the hell does this make sense? When playing most of these games one player's console becomes the "server" for the others... All you have to do is ALLOW the game to talk to other games and bingo, multi-player. However, we can't do this -- and that makes me mad.
So, 5 friends and I all join up in party chat. We then all pop Halo2 in the 360. We can each see that the others have inserted the game by looking at the Icon next to our names on the friends list. Our XBoxes KNOW that we are all playing the game, and we have connections to each other ALREADY because of the party chat. However, WE CAN'T play online together because the matchmaking server was killed (because of Halo3 & Reach no doubt -- bet they'll eventually get killed to force migration to other new games too).
Now, there is such a thing as unranked matches, so the score keeping server isn't an issue... Additionally there is LAN play. So, we all join my VPN, and play Halo2 -- No XBox Live needed (we use it for party chat and coordinating matches). THANKS FOR NOTHING MICROSOFT! My XBox Live subscription seems to lose value over time... not.. very.. smart.
That's when we all made a pact when in comes to new games: No private/dedicated server? SCREW IT -- DO NOT WANT.
I had a friend that worked for Sony Digital until recently. His former coworkers were all laid off and their satellite offices were closed with all of the work and properties folded back into their headquarters. It seemed like it had been coming for some time - they just kept getting non-committal answers about what direction they should have been going in, focusing on, or even completing. But since all the staff that was laid off locally were the people who maintained the SW MMO & TCG, this was only a matter of time.
I won't invest money in a game/experience and spend weeks or months of time playing only to find out one day it's denied to me and I can't revisit it. They should have gone more the way of City of Heroes. But the best thing would have been if online game companies escrowed their code for an open source release (of some form) when the game died, that would be a major feature to me that would make me consider investing hundred of dollars in an online game.
No, you're the one confusing price and value. Price is what the seller is asking for the item. Value is what people are willing to pay. If a guy selling virtual hats sets the price of a hat to $5, and he gets people buying them, then that indicates that his virtual hats are worth (at least) $5. If he later increases the price to $10 and people stop buying them, then that indicates that the value of hats is less than $10. This is no different than it would be if the hats were physical objects.
Someone was trying to make an OS version of it and ran it for a while with pre-CU attributes, but.... The CU killed that game, and it was sad'ish. I believe that Mothmar Friedsquid was one of my favorite online identities ever.
Can you imagine paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars on eBay for something that only exists in one of these games, then finding out a few weeks, months, or years later that it's going into the bit-bucket at the end of the month?
I sold one of my characters for several hundred dollars, but it was at the height of that particular game's lifespan. SWG characters may have been valued in the hundreds and thousands - I don't know, but if SOE is discontinuing service my guess is that the game is well past it's prime - and characters aren't valued for very much anymore.
Look at how much people pay to go see a movie in the theaters, all that money down the drain with only a tiny scrap a paper and, depending upon the theater, Hep C to show for the couple of hours of your life that just was thrown away.
Well.... To be fair, this was inevitable, they screwed it up way too badly with the NGE business. Still, kinda sad to see it go... It was my first MMO, and I spent a few years on it, making online friends in the process, being part of the community.
Even if the characters aren't worth as much, the CCG is a big deal to get rid of. People paid money for the "Virtual Cards" and when this is done, they'll probably be deleted. Most of the online CCGs go by the "you can get the physical version if you have a full set, but doubles are a waste" model. That model means, that a lot of these virtual collections are destined to just be deleted (only full set portions can be redeemed). Considering there are CCGs now that have been dead for a long time now and still have resale value (try finding a lot of Doomtown or Legend of the Burning Sands on the secondary market these days), this stinks a little for people who paid for a virtual card game.
If Xbox live was up for Xbox 1 you could play it. The issue has nothing to do w/ Halo but the fact that they killed all XBox Live functionality for all Xbox titles. This is because the emulation layer would break given subsequent changes in the XBox live service. MS didn't want to run two parallel live services, so they tossed XB1 games onto the fire for "not backwards compatible"
"WE CAN'T play online together because the matchmaking server was killed (because of Halo3 & Reach no doubt -- bet they'll eventually get killed to force migration to other new games too). " No, they will eventually get killed because resources are not infinite and the cost of maintaining and supporting those servers to allow for continued game play is no longer worth the effort to the company. Considering how long Halo 2 multiplayer was supported, more than 6 years well into the release of the next game in the franchise, I'd say you got your money's worth out of it. Its great when private servers are set up, but the idea that a company is screwing you over because they don't support online play indefinitely is absurd. Unless they advertised the multi-player feature would be available for a given amount of years and came up short, you knew what you were getting into.
You know the WoW server emulators don't handle most scripted events (such as raid encounters). It isn't really the same thing. There's also the fact that gear can be modified and made deliberately over powered by people running the private server. Not much fun to PVP if mr. admin has a one-shot-and-you're-dead bat.
Private servers make sense for simpler games like FPS (although cheating can still be an issue) but not as much for MMOs. They're okay if you want to dick around but they don't replicate the experience of the MMO fully (at least in most cases) and they generally aren't running on server and network setups that can handle the kind of load that a large company can handle.
They aren't games in the sense of I bought the box and I have it forever. They are SERVICES and like other services, when the moneys no longer there to be made they tend to get shutdown.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Unless they advertised the multi-player feature would be available for a given amount of years and came up short, you knew what you were getting into.
Which was his point exactly. He knows what he's (not) getting into, which is why he won't buy it. I'm on his side. If they can't be arsed to let me run a private server for me and my friends (yeah, both of 'em!) then I can't be arsed to give them any money.
LucasArts presumably would rather SWG players join the new Old Republic MMORPG rather than play SWG on private servers.
I was amazed that the TCG was popular. It was an obvious moneyspinner by Sony to get people to pay for trinkets in-game that should have been available through the in-game crafting system. I find it hard to sympathize with anyone who paid real money for that crap, especially since it's been obvious for years now that Sony never had any intention of putting real development effort into the game and therefore they were just riding the downhill slide to make profit with no investment.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
Uh, you do know that this isn't their only MMORPG, right? You also know that a lot of the code that went into this is probably used in existing MMORPGs that Sony runs as well, right? You also know this code will be reused, right? And you also realize that the legalities of opening up a game that contains IP from a multi-billion dollar franchise this isn't entirely encompassed in the game with multiple invested partners and copyright holders would never get 100% agreement from all the interested parties, right?
I swear, every single time a bit of software goes by the wayside all you guys can do is cry "open source it" and you look like such a bunch of fucking retards for not seeing all the hands involved in most of these efforts. No wonder people who understand these things just look at you guys like a bunch of 12 year old idiots. You know nothing of which you speak but every fucking one of you claims to be an authority in matters of IP, business models and licensing. Give me a fucking break. Sony couldn't open source this if it was their dying wish. It has nothing to do with greed, it has to do with agreements that were made in good faith and millions of dollars invested in IP that is still going to serve a purpose long after this game goes the way of the dinosaur.
Or you could play the games because they are fun instead.
So the fact that this 'difficult decision' is being done just in time to ensure that the travesty remnant of SWG isn't a viable market choice as SW: TOR is about to become a high profile, high hype option?
Difficult?
They want it gone to support the new flagship and hopefully forget half a decade of ridicule and bad press on their franchise.
Somehow I don't think it was difficult at all.
The value of something is up to the individual person to decide. If they like it and wish to buy it, then what you think of it is rather irrelevant.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I felt a great disturbance in the force. As if thousands of dorks all cried out at once.
umadbro?
pre NGE SWG
they've had star wars galaxies free shard pre-nge rules up for quite a while and is very successful.
If nothing else I have to give SOE kudos for giving almost 6 months notice. Most MMOs shut down with maybe 2 months warning, if you're lucky.
And in the end.....nothing of value was lost.
Game sucked badly IMHO. Good riddance
"No! Never! All that iProperty must be kept locked up and unused forever because there might be a single still shot they can reuse somewhere!! What do those players mean, they want to set up their own rogue servers to keep it going? Get the terrorists NOW!! P.s. We agree it's the appropriate time to end a game *before Christmas* so that here will be two sales weeks forcing familes of gamers to buy them something else!"
/ SarcasmQuotes
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
halo 2 servers where not axed untill xbox live was axed for the orignal xbox. at that point they relly had no way to keep the servers up.
All value is subjective and so it is as real as any other value inside someones head. I could easily replace your comment with the following that includes items in more traditional markets, for example:
"Can you imagine paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars for lottery tickets that only payout if the state or company is still solvent, then finding out later that it's going into default at the end of the month?"
There are many other examples of this(some which even more closely match the complete dependence of the product upon the continued service of the provider), but this is sufficient. Value is not objective; it doesn't exist outside of a persons head. So, in that sense, nothing has real value.
Actually most of the SWG emulation scene stuff got killed by the egos of the SWGEmu guys. There was a ton of bickering and fighting right after the first open source release (which I can't remember being publicly ridiculed, but if you saw how little code they actually had after 6+ months of 'writing the server' and having 'almost complete documentation of the protocol', you would've been thinking it) Then the community's headbanging trying to get their own code added into the 'official' codebase while various amateurish windows-oriented hacks broke subversion revisions almost daily for those of us trying to run it on linux. Then there was the reliance on mysql, with hardcoded mysql commands for saving and loading, the lack of documentation, and initially no object support, and no cross-client map updates (Initially you could all be connected and chat but not show up.) Then you could chat and could show up. Then there was that darned heightmap getting in the way, etc. Eventually they said 'fsck it' we're going back closed source. Then there was the source leak, then more drama, then the competent and adult members of the community deciding it wasn't worth their time. Fast forward 5 years and they kinda sorta sometimes have most of the Pre-JTL (space) world working, but with maybe as many items as were around just slightly post-beta. Paint boxes for speeders don't work. Housing works, but most other buildings act as little more than houses. The whole code of the app is a closed source library that crashes your server after an hour, and at least used to only allow 10 players at a time.
Generally speaking, the SWGEmu team is about as competent and fascist as SOE were all those years ago. And much like SOE SWGEmu has been a social failure as a result. How many of you remember any of the old file repositories or other sites covering the emulators? How many of you remember the community during the 3-6 months immediately following release, when everybody was trying to post the latest hack to add support to the game, protocol specifications or not?
Honestly I fired swgemu up once like 6 months ago just to see what was going on. Then after banging my head against it for a while, and watching features that had worked in it a few months ago disappear (yet again), I gave up, shut it down, and proceeded to go play STO with a friend, decide it wasn't worth the money. Play LOTRO, get bored with the playerbase. Play TDU2, get bored with the playstyle. And finally? Get an RL because I couldn't for the life of me find something more interesting online.
Maybe it's just me, but gaming, be it console or PC seems like it is dying a slow lingering death. The last 5 entertaining games I've played that weren't from the 90s were all for Android, and honestly if my touchscreen hadn't died, I'd still be busy playing them. Too busy to write a 3 paragraph post on this subject :D
Forcing families of gamers to buy them something else? Seriously? I find it hilarious that when the Opera article went up the first ten posts was about how few users the software had. The only software I can think of that has solid name recognition but less users than Opera is SWG.
The whole 4 players of this game will have to move on to something a bit more respectable... like Runescape or some shit.
Tourette's is not something to joke about. Hopefully you never have a child affected by it.
Chocolate nipples.
www.swgemu.com
Hey looks like the population will move to the free, original rules emulator that's been created :)
I play there, just needs more people.
That's why I invest only in tangibles like Beanie Babies, comic books and baseball cards. Lots of things with little intrinsic value take on greater worth according to the vagaries of the times; I don't see virtual items being that different. The trick is the same as it always was- Buy Low, Sell High!
The reason all pre-xbox 360 games no longer work on xbox live has nothing to do with the servers being there or not. They were discontinued with the dashboard update that expanded the friends list. Many if not most of the original xbox games were hardcoded to only handle 100 friends, and more than that would have resulted in strange issues in almost every game for the original xbox.
No problem. Nethack is still up.
http://www.nethack.org/
Right. People can and do run pirate WoW servers -- admittedly mostly to avoid paying, but it is entirely possible to play on one of those and earn digital items the same way. They aren't transferable to other servers, so it's more like, if you choose to play in that world, only the admins can run a mint -- their money has no value on other servers.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You never throw anything away? It never wears out and is no longer useful? Just because a piece of digital property might go away one day doesn't mean that it hasn't served its purpose and value.
There is already a FREE emulator for the swg server; swgemu.com
Does require you to own the game for a client, though.
Not the same thing as sony making swg open source, but based on postings by swg devs etc, that's probably for the best. The code was rumored to be a complete disaster. Also, the current revision of the game really sucks (compared to older revs) because of changes made in the "NGE" update from a few years ago.
There will be much turmoil.
Back before the big shake-up, when the servers were only just open to the public I had an account. I remember the novelty of running around the alien landscapes. Curiously they had an entire macro language that was available to users. After a couple of days spent refining my lie-sleeping-on-the-sofa-while-hunting macro I decided I wouldn't be subscribing beyond my 30 days. Highlights of my visit - writing the macro. It may have gotten better later, it may not. Nobody cared.
as if dozens of voices suddenly wheezed out in mild discinclination and were eventually silenced. I fear something vaguely ambiguous has happened.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You and your friends can all jump on XLink Kai or XBConnect and play Halo 2 together still. :(
Unfortunately 360 games have a 30ms ping check added to them so when the XBOX 360 servers shutdown after the release of the XBOX 720 the multiplayer games will be dead
You expect these communist slashtards to understand simple capitalism?
foo is not something to joke about. Hopefully you never have a child affected by it.
Fuck cunt shit motherfucker
I sure laughed. I guess you got your point, then.
That one isn't Sony (it's EA). They are probably shutting it down because the number of subscribers is insufficient to justify maintaining the infrastructure of servers and people that it requires to run.
Most companies will run their MMOs forever, if there's the customers. Why wouldn't you? However, there is a a minimum level of subscribers you have to have. While not every MMO needs the massive staff World of Warcraft has, you still have to have a few people working on various things, you have to have some servers to run it, and so on. At some point your subscriber base drops low enough they won't pay for that and allow for a profit and that is the time to shut things down.
But if people just play it for run, what's the problem? People will quickly find out which servers have modified the code to create a fun, free game.
its called dedicated quake 3 servers =P and quake 3 is funner then halo any day of the week lol
anyway I agree with the OP - games were designed robustly to last until hardware support was an issue (which should be "when the transistors burn out" for consoles)
now games are designed with a kill switch mentaility - not plugged in, not signed in, not on our network? booosh... 6 years is a big leap from 10+ years for games like half life, counterstrike quake, duke nukem (which you can still play online and fairly well) even today...
technology blah blah is a cop out answer, we have more bandwith and CPU today then we ever had so its not like games are becoming such behemoths that we need a supercray run by M$ to host our games
They're not going to open source something which has a substantial amount of reusable IP.
This doesn't really apply to shooters. Unlike MMOs, which need a complex environment to be maintained server-side, shooters lend themselves well to simple LAN play. Cutting the ability to play over LAN for completely arbitrary reasons, and when it would require no resources from the company -- that's the kind of stupidity that hurts.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Try Tremolous. It's an opensource RTS/FPS blend, and installing a dedicated server doesn't seem hard. (Although there are plenty hosted by others.) It's got a pretty good community. It's the only FPS I played in the last 2 years, and I don't miss the canned railshooter experience. (I usually play the 1.2 gpp beta on the official servers, that's where most of the folks are.)
Also, there's a quite a bit of emphasis on teamplay. Lone wolfs don't win the match.
From the SWGEmu site ..
Q. Has SWGEmu ever seen Sony Online Entertainment's code?
A. Absolutely not. In fact, Sony Online Entertainment persists that they have lost the code entirely. ...
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Except the trading cards aren't a meatspace game. It's a digital trading card game.
Granted, it was designed by Wizards of the Coast, so maybe it might end up making the transition to the real world. However, the way it stands now users will lose access to their cards in December.
Since Bioware is releasing their Star Wars MMO shortly after SWG shuts down, LucasArts would want this old abomination out-of-the-way before that one releases. I don't blame them. There have been few MMOs that have gathered such hatred and discourse as SWG did after a complete game architecture "patch" mid-stride.
You do realize you just lumped "hacking and security into an article about Sony".
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Sony should follow in the footsteps of the OpenSim project and allow people to web together their own SWG Universe.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Your house doesn't have any real value, too, if it gets carried away by a flood.
This just serves to support the validity of the parent's claims.
As you have stated, the server emulator software out there is FAR from perfect. Even if the private server software worked flawlessly, Blizzard frequently sends cease and desist letters out to the operators (and in some cases will sue them if their operation is big enough).
Some day in the future, Blizzard WILL take down WoW. The game is still going strong right now, but eventually it will be the pale shadow of the cash cow it is today, and thus be deemed unprofitable to keep running. Since Blizzard is likely to remain in the MMO business (they are working on a new MMO codenamed "Titan"), it is extremely doubtful that they will release dedicated server software that will allow users to more easily set up their own WoW servers. This means that anyone who still wants to play it is going to be stuck with the imperfect emulators, and given how Blizzard likes to aggressively defend its IP, they'll probably still send C&Ds to operators.
They killed the game years ago, this is just it's final death-throes. No big loss here, really.
I wonder how long it will be before Final Fantasy XI goes offline? It's almost as old (although, the abysmal failure that is Final Fantasy XIV may keep it around for much longer than anticiapted).
As far as anyone who actually played the game is concerned, it closed when they did the combat upgrades and new game enhancement bullshit that basically turned it from fun to boring.
When they decided to cater to the lowest common denominator and let anyone be a Jedi, it was already over for SWG.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Seriously?
I hope my kid doesn't end up with Downs Syndrome, missing a limb and still born as well, but that doesn't mean I can't have a sense of humor as well.
Stop being such an over sensitive pansy. Words don't actually hurt you.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So, you spend a bunch of time on a private server that may be taken down at the whim of the admin? That seems to be an ever bigger waste of time than playing a MMORPG that gets cancelled (or playing one at all, depending on point of view ;)
Not to mention it doesn't sound like much *fun*, anyway... I'd trust Blizzard developers/designers to do a bit better job than some people trying to copy their stuff, not to mention what is most likely a sad sack group of other players on the server. Not really an "MMORPG" at that point, more of an "MORPG"...
I ain't buying it. For example, the Xbox could just give them 100 friends of the player's, starting with the most recently seen online... Any such arguments are irrelevent. MS has plenty of capital, they don't want to support something, they'll "extinguish" it -- I ran a 16 bit executable on XP... Xbox x86 games are running on the PowerMac in the 360... Tell me backwards compatibility isn't something they are pros at. Don't delude yourself.
As for the servers being gone -- the bungie.net servers maybe, but MS hosts the matchmaking & achievement servers -- look into XNA. If I'm using game X, or game Y, then I'm using R resources of the matchmaking server irreguardless of which game it is... If the game company wants to hard-code in dependency for another system that they know the game can't function without, then I'm out of their target demographic, for ever.
It doesn't matter anyhow. Because my friends and I have decided not to fall apart over the years (since high school), and dedicate a slice of each week to gaming and/or hanging out: We've decided to go back to PC Gaming where the environment is a bit more friendly. Here's a hint: Yesterday morning we had a nostalgic Frag-Fest in our old favorite Doom2 WADs. That game is.. 16 years old?
You can be an apologist all you want. Fact is, it takes 0 additional resources to allow unranked multi-player matches in most games. No more excuses for walled garden bullshit. An "advanced" option buried in a config menu that lets you manually set: "I'm a server, this is the level" or "Connect to server at IP: xx.xx.xx.xx" takes no time to create -- (I've seen the damn menu option, it was there for the testers, but it's been removed before going gold... it took MORE DEV TIME to remove it.)
If basic continued multi-player support beyond the planned obsolescence of the game isn't going to be supported in favor of a vendor lock-in system, we'll not be funding that decision.
SWG was never a good game, it was buggy as hell and at launch had barely any of the elements that later players took for granted. Simplest example: you walked.
Compared to far more complete games like EQ2 and especially WoW, it was rough but underneat its thick crust of bugs and half completed features was a depth that few games have matched. It wasn't the insane difficulty of a FF or UO either, it was depth but friendly depth. Take for instance the way you build your character, you didn't just have a simple tree with barely explained options you can choose between or the one useful feature at the end of a tree of useless ones. The character build was well explained with clear options and lots of choice.
For crafting you had to rely on other players but it wasn't the EQ2 style "spend 5 minutes to craft a 1 minute item". Once you had made a good item, you could produce it in a factory but you couldn't run it forever because sooner or later you ran out the materials.
SWG was a intresting mix between the UO's of this world and the WoW's. It wasn't as hostile as UO to more casual players but not as idiot proof as WoW. All finished of with just enough of a Star Wars sauce. Yes, it wasn't perfect Star Wars but at least it also wasn't yet more elves and goblins. Yes okay, so you had sword fighters, but they were space opera sword fighters, no cheesy fantasy sword fighters.
No other game has come close. Not so much because other games haven't been good but because they were a different genre. It is as if a System Shock fan is supposed to be happy with any recent shooter including Bioshock. System Shock might not have been perfect but that doesn't mean other games were worthy replacements.
SWG will be missed not so much for what it was, but for what the MMORPG genre has failed to become. There are a dozen WoW clones, there are even some extreme hardcore games but just in the middle, not so much.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is why when companies decommission their software, they should just open source it and let everyone go nuts. Someone somewhere is bound to maintain a gaming server for this game. However, companies like Sony have the mentality where if they can't make money off it then no one shall have it.
An open source SWG with non-Sony servers would compete with Sony's other MMORPGs (EQ, EQ II, and Vanguard) and also with their non-MMORPG games. Why would they want that? If they were exiting the game market completely, then maybe open sourcing would make sense.
Price is what the seller convinces the buyer to pay.
Value is what the buyer should have paid.
Like I said. Fucked blue.
Then there's no such thing as fraud. I'll alert the DoJ.
If such a law tries to state that the value of something isn't subjective, but objective, then yes, no such thing exists (as far as I know).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
By which you mean "What I, blair1q, would personally have paid". No other meaning is possible. And you know that it is a lie. This is always true of those like yourself who attempt to pass of their opinions as fact.
Yes, I can imagine doing that. This is why I have never done it.