LucasArts is now a shitty company. You can count on one hand the amount of games they have released in the past 6 years that didn't have Star Wars in the title.
Who you going to ask whether Taiwan is a part of China, the people on mainland China or the Taiwanese?
I would ask the Taiwanese to be honest, since they freaking live there. So you ask the Tibeteans whether they want or consider themselves a part of China, or how they want to be a part of China.
Yeah I don't think you will find anyone that will disagree that Pre-CU combat was the best. I did like the system though, locking on to a target allowing you to single out and play it sort of like a mud.
I agree it needed to a revamp, but what the players got in the CU wasn't exactly what they wanted either I don't think.
I agree, I saw the many problems back Fall 2004 when development was essentially centered around 2-3 things.
Number 1 was that they wanted to fix the Jedi profession, which was a profession you unlocked by mastering 5 random and unknown professions of the 30+ professions. Jedi at this time were extremely powerful. The plans were to change the way to become a Jedi, they turned it into a quest that would take many weeks to complete. The other thing is they restructured the way the Jedi learn their skills. Now the problem here is they concentrated on fixing the Jedi for a very long time, and neglected the other professions in the game who still had many problems and issues that were not getting addressed. Smugglers not being able to smuggle anything was probably the funniest.
Number 2 was rushing Jump to Lightspeed, about half of the team working on Star Wars Galaxies was put on to rushing this game out, this was supposed to appeal to those that liked the old Star Wars flight sims and the new Star Wars games like Rogue Squadron. From what I can tell this seems to have lacked the dynamic content that was wanted, space was and still is pretty static.
Number 3 was the feature creep, new features would be added, and major bugs and issues would go unfixed for many months, if not a year or more.
When a profession got something that was two powerful or whatever, all that would happen is it would face a major nerf that made pretty much unusable. As one player described it in a longer post, they launched as an 747 and tried to change it into a F-16 midflight. It was a hobbled together mishmash of ideas and fixes. Things would break off, things would be patched on haphazardly with what could be little to no thought.
Even when they had plans for the Combat Upgrade, they decided to change that from what the players wanted to this new system that they were developing which was going to be completely different.
I agree the most recent Star Wars games haven't been very good, but I know many people remember X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter, and TIE Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance. You mention those games and their mouths drop, thinking about playing those again.
Lucasarts in recent times have seem to go from making good games to churning out money makers in my opinion. And by money makers I mean slapping Star Wars to every game they put out. I swear they are making so many Star Wars games based on the theory the more they produce the more money it will bring in and are just banking on the Star Wars name and hoping they get major hits every now and again.
Full Throttle was a pretty good game. Its sad to see Lucasarts go from putting out pretty fun games to just churning out Star Wars title after Star Wars title.
The thing is they said they had a development staff of 70, and that SWG has always had the largest development staff of any Sony Online game(my guess is the problem lies there, they run a dev staff based on the way smaller dev teams run). Even a development staff of 5 would probably not be able to pay for servers, bandwidth, food, and places to live with 150k a month.
There are a few ratios that are standard in the industry, the 1/4 and 1/5 models are basically during primetime in game, 1/4 to 1/5 of the playerbase is going to be playing the game. So with a 10k figure that means roughly 40k-60k people are subscribing roughly, the extra 10k is just leeway. There is another ratio that is pretty standard, basically in non-primetime, depending on how far away from primetime it is, you should see roughly 1/10 of the playerbase.
At one time it was pretty much guessed that SWG had about 200k-300k subscriptions, its hard to tell because SOE has never released any numbers. Now those numbers are much much less. You could say that the amount of space in game has grown, and it has, but the amount of times you run into people has drastically decreased. Before you could probably be literally out in the middle of nowhere and expect to run into someone, or be at a dungeon or heavily camped spawn and expect to run into many people. This simply isn't the case anymore.
In MMORPG's 10k players across 26 servers is pathetic. You could get 10k players across 26 MUDs. Which although are multiplayer are not massively multiplayer.
The funny thing about the huge list of fixes/changes, many of them are just broke features that were broke when they pushed the NGE out the door.
I hate to say Sony and Lucasarts are to blame together on this one. Either Sony because they didn't want to lose their license to the game or Lucasarts for not taking the massive uproar that this has caused into account.
I do agree, there was no warning, and there should have been. And pushing something out things to soon has haunted the development process of Star Wars Galaxies since the day it was released.
I do like many of the systems that were in the game, especially before the Combat Upgrade earlier this year, they had a really nice combat system I thought, and a fun profession system. Plenty of systems needed work and more testing though then they actually received.
Actually many players have stated they were willing to play the old version of the game with no more development support. They liked that version of the game that much. But even I know that although it would have kept players on and playing, they would have moaned to fix it. Sony Online just decided to quit trying to fix both versions of the game before this new version they put out which is a complete 180 degrees from the game before.
And to be completely honest the game has been in a form of beta since release, and the newest version of the game the NGE(New Game Enhancement) as it is called. The game has had many bugs, some that resurface in patches later on. Probably for the first 1-2 years they did the feature creep. The Development staff seemed to be concerned with getting as much into the game as possible. They made many mistakes and made professions extremely unbalanced. They never seemed to have any guide, or leadership or plan on what they wanted and how they were going to do it.
The crafting system in game has yet to be beat. Although with the NGE that has been made useless. Before all the best items were made by crafters, now in game is pretty much a loot based economy.
I don't know anything about code bases and the like but I can understand why it would be difficult and probably require 2x as many people to keep both versions of the game active. Essentially, it would be like trying to maintain Dr. Mario, and Tetris, both similar games, but with Star Wars Galaxies, you have two different UIs, two different loot systems, two different crafting systems, two very different crafting systems, and two very different leveling/combat abilities/profession systems.
Yes, it would be nice if we lived in a culture where puberty was celebrated... Maybe not celebrated to the point where those who are late bloomers start to have problems for being late bloomers though....
Then again, having sex being as taboo a subject as it is, probably doesn't help things.
Sure, WoW is at the forefront of selling its game... but does that mean its the best? Checkers is a fun game, but most would say Chess is a better game compared to Checkers. And I hear of many people that get bored with WoW and the lvl 60 grind.
Sure WoW is the frontrunner on sales and subs, but its also one of the few games that is sold in pretty much every continent. Its a game that has players Worldwide. Lots of other games don't get that.
Blizzard is also a well liked company by the players of their other games.
Take EVE online, I think they should be a clear frontrunner of MMORPG's, because they trully make the game MMO, 22k+ people on one server. No other server has matched that capability yet for an MMORPG.
No, what you want is Diablo II / Guild Wars, not an MMORPG. MMORPG's were made for interaction, if you want to solo 99% of the time go play something single player.
Nope, sorry cannot tell you that you are wrong. Because you are correct.
They took an old game, changed it completely but left the same maps and resources, and NPCs, and few other things. But they changed how the players interact with the enviroment completely.
I will admit they did seem to listen to the customers in a half-assed fashion, even PRE-CU... The problem was the understanding what the players were saying...
Players would have a problem with a profession, and then SoE would go and nerf it. Then they neglected professions (smuggler, commando), and not fix specials. And feature creep. Every month they would announce something new going into the game. I quit when I found out about cybernetics because many other bugs had gone on fixed and many other ingame systems and mechanics could use better polishing.
If you took away the Star Wars from Pre-CU Star Wars Galaxies, and had another sci-fi/fantasy universe and other stuff, it still would have been a successful MMORPG. The main problems were the feature creep, and the bugs existing months, and years after being in game. Some were fixed to come up in later patches.
The HAM system was also poorly designed.
Although I am a Star Wars fan, I have to admit, the game's underlying mechanics were amazing, crafting system has yet to be bested. Player cities were pretty fun and the ability to interior decorate your home was pretty dynamic. The problems for this game have been well documented elsewhere, the problem with CU and NGE were also documented.
EVE Online is now where I play, and Star Wars Galaxies could have some of the game mechanics that EVE has, well they would have been successful 10x over by now probably.
Those moons would be nice, but Pluto is at an ideal distance. That and the fact that in space distance matters squat, if you travel 100 million miles at 20,000 miles per hour, according to what I know of basic physics without ever taking a physics class is that the probe 100 million miles later will still be travelling 20,000 miles per hour. Europa, Ganymede and Titan, we can get to probably in a shorter time but missions for those are probably on the drawing board with the problems we have learned from visiting Mars.
But I am not a rocket scientist, and I don't think you are either. All the planets in the solar system are pretty damn interesting if you look at each one individually.
Thats what made Star Wars. Thats exactly what Star Wars Galaxies didn't have, nor did it have plans for it. They did do a short storyline quest at one point early on. The thing was it was over to long a period of time, and you had to be a member of Imperial or Rebel faction. Which I know I didn't join at all because it was the PvP part of the game. And the old parts of the quest disappeared, so it added no new content to the game whatsoever. Specifically what was needed on that part was a storyline being told. There was none whatsoever. The quest journaling system was also nonexistant.
I would say you could set the game at a specific point in the Star Wars Saga but you have to tell a story... Han Solo sat in the same place, in the same Cantina for what 2 years in the game. Vader, Thrawn, and the wrinkly old Emp have been sitting at the Retreat for the same amount of time.
Since no-one seems to care about this, I may as well pass on an off-topic question... if the time setting is post-New Hope, how is it that people are able to play Jedi? Are there no Jedi in SWG? I thought for sure I had read about characters being Padawans and Knights.
In the former profession system, you got to be able to get a Jedi character by mastering professions, there was 30+ some professions so mastering them was no easy matter. Thus started the hologrind. Which made the economy in SWG go boom because everyone was grinding things out, which meant they were going through weapons, armor, in the combat professions, and when they were mastering crafting professions they had to make things which require vast amounts of specific resources. Then they added the force quest, which made it an entire different task to become a Jedi, you did a very long quest for it that would take many weeks. Now with the NGE they gave everyone the ability to be Jedi. Before the Jedi were an alpha class they were extremely strong, now they are on par with every other "iconic" profession. Its easier to balance and equalize 9 professions then the 30+ professions they had.
The thing is, being Star Wars, and the Star Wars franchise, of course the customers for the most part would definitely want to play Jedi at some point.
So yeah, you can play a Jedi when there should be no Jedi running around.
If you think about it, its a hard thing to create a MMORPG based on Star Wars. All of the movies happen over a couple of fictional years, people die and the things drastically change. And to concentrate all of that history on one specific timeline point is just silly, because some people would want to play Before A New Hope, Some before Empire Strikes Back, some after Empire Strikes Back, and some After Return of the Jedi. And who wouldn't want to take part in the major battles. There is plenty of stuff to work with because of the extended universe with the books.
The thing with the Jedi in the game though? I think the best defense for that is the Greedo defense, shoot first ask questions later.
By moving the timeline forward, Sony can use this as an excuse to plan a bunch of new expansions.
Anyone want to bet that they still won't fix outstanding game bugs before new expansions come out?
I will go one step farther. I will bet they will release another expansion before they are anywhere near done to finishing the majority of the content and issues for the NGE.
That would never happen. I used to play on Bloodfin, and the PvPers would regularly be able to crash the server or planet. 100+ pvpers in one city and the server was toast. And this was over a year ago before the CU and the NGE, using what was essentially a DikuMUD combat system. The fun part was you could come across the PvPers in a big battle in a town nobody ever visited for anything(because there was nothing there, no quests, no reason to even pass through except it being close to a dungeon. People were always in Eisley, Theed, but mostly Coronet waiting for the buffs to go to Dant.
If they ever made SWG 2, probably going the Guild Wars route is probably going to give the people more of what they actually want for the Star Wars Experience.
I loved SWG though, the 30+ professions all the planets. The problems before the CU and the NGE have all been outlined many times before, but the Devs never seemed to listen, even the smugglers had to wait what 2 years for a revamp or something, and they still can't smuggle.
I started out as an artisan, and moved to a rifleman, ranger. Then the nerfing started.
To get a game on the new consoles. You are going to investing a couple hundred thousand dollars for just a small game concept demo to get actual funding for the full. For the older game systems, something tells me less money was needed and the yield was much higher when you did make a best seller.
The way you are going to see games come about is the way GTA started. It started out as a simple little 2d top down game, and now its become this great 3d game. Innovative games are going to start small, then after a successful release or two of a game model, then you will see the funding pour in to get a game that has innovative mechanics with a larger market in mind.
Chess wasn't invented over night, it developed over time. And the same happens in the game market. There are plenty of games out there that have pretty unique and innovative features. My favorite was the crafting and resource system that Star Wars Galaxies has/had. Although its not the same as it used to be, the entire game has done an about-face though, the company designing it decided to essentially start from scratch, just using the same engine and some similar mechanics.
Installing linux, even different distros always has resulted in some problem occuring. Windows, when I reinstall, or reformat and reinstall, or even install clean, the problems are none to minimal. The worst is finding some error and having to google it. Googling errors for linux have a likelyhood of pulling up a solution as not pulling up a solution.
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LucasArts is now a shitty company. You can count on one hand the amount of games they have released in the past 6 years that didn't have Star Wars in the title.
Alas due to inflation that will be like asking for 1 million dollars in 1997.
Somewhere out there, Journalists are looking into their pants, and finding they have testicles. -paraphased from Penny-Arcade.
Who you going to ask whether Taiwan is a part of China, the people on mainland China or the Taiwanese?
I would ask the Taiwanese to be honest, since they freaking live there. So you ask the Tibeteans whether they want or consider themselves a part of China, or how they want to be a part of China.
Yeah I don't think you will find anyone that will disagree that Pre-CU combat was the best. I did like the system though, locking on to a target allowing you to single out and play it sort of like a mud.
I agree it needed to a revamp, but what the players got in the CU wasn't exactly what they wanted either I don't think.
I agree, I saw the many problems back Fall 2004 when development was essentially centered around 2-3 things.
Number 1 was that they wanted to fix the Jedi profession, which was a profession you unlocked by mastering 5 random and unknown professions of the 30+ professions. Jedi at this time were extremely powerful. The plans were to change the way to become a Jedi, they turned it into a quest that would take many weeks to complete. The other thing is they restructured the way the Jedi learn their skills. Now the problem here is they concentrated on fixing the Jedi for a very long time, and neglected the other professions in the game who still had many problems and issues that were not getting addressed. Smugglers not being able to smuggle anything was probably the funniest.
Number 2 was rushing Jump to Lightspeed, about half of the team working on Star Wars Galaxies was put on to rushing this game out, this was supposed to appeal to those that liked the old Star Wars flight sims and the new Star Wars games like Rogue Squadron. From what I can tell this seems to have lacked the dynamic content that was wanted, space was and still is pretty static.
Number 3 was the feature creep, new features would be added, and major bugs and issues would go unfixed for many months, if not a year or more.
When a profession got something that was two powerful or whatever, all that would happen is it would face a major nerf that made pretty much unusable. As one player described it in a longer post, they launched as an 747 and tried to change it into a F-16 midflight. It was a hobbled together mishmash of ideas and fixes. Things would break off, things would be patched on haphazardly with what could be little to no thought.
Even when they had plans for the Combat Upgrade, they decided to change that from what the players wanted to this new system that they were developing which was going to be completely different.
I agree the most recent Star Wars games haven't been very good, but I know many people remember X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter, and TIE Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance. You mention those games and their mouths drop, thinking about playing those again.
Lucasarts in recent times have seem to go from making good games to churning out money makers in my opinion. And by money makers I mean slapping Star Wars to every game they put out. I swear they are making so many Star Wars games based on the theory the more they produce the more money it will bring in and are just banking on the Star Wars name and hoping they get major hits every now and again.
Full Throttle was a pretty good game. Its sad to see Lucasarts go from putting out pretty fun games to just churning out Star Wars title after Star Wars title.
The thing is they said they had a development staff of 70, and that SWG has always had the largest development staff of any Sony Online game(my guess is the problem lies there, they run a dev staff based on the way smaller dev teams run). Even a development staff of 5 would probably not be able to pay for servers, bandwidth, food, and places to live with 150k a month.
There are a few ratios that are standard in the industry, the 1/4 and 1/5 models are basically during primetime in game, 1/4 to 1/5 of the playerbase is going to be playing the game. So with a 10k figure that means roughly 40k-60k people are subscribing roughly, the extra 10k is just leeway. There is another ratio that is pretty standard, basically in non-primetime, depending on how far away from primetime it is, you should see roughly 1/10 of the playerbase.
At one time it was pretty much guessed that SWG had about 200k-300k subscriptions, its hard to tell because SOE has never released any numbers. Now those numbers are much much less. You could say that the amount of space in game has grown, and it has, but the amount of times you run into people has drastically decreased. Before you could probably be literally out in the middle of nowhere and expect to run into someone, or be at a dungeon or heavily camped spawn and expect to run into many people. This simply isn't the case anymore.
In MMORPG's 10k players across 26 servers is pathetic. You could get 10k players across 26 MUDs. Which although are multiplayer are not massively multiplayer.
The funny thing about the huge list of fixes/changes, many of them are just broke features that were broke when they pushed the NGE out the door.
I hate to say Sony and Lucasarts are to blame together on this one. Either Sony because they didn't want to lose their license to the game or Lucasarts for not taking the massive uproar that this has caused into account.
I do agree, there was no warning, and there should have been. And pushing something out things to soon has haunted the development process of Star Wars Galaxies since the day it was released.
I do like many of the systems that were in the game, especially before the Combat Upgrade earlier this year, they had a really nice combat system I thought, and a fun profession system. Plenty of systems needed work and more testing though then they actually received.
Actually many players have stated they were willing to play the old version of the game with no more development support. They liked that version of the game that much. But even I know that although it would have kept players on and playing, they would have moaned to fix it. Sony Online just decided to quit trying to fix both versions of the game before this new version they put out which is a complete 180 degrees from the game before.
And to be completely honest the game has been in a form of beta since release, and the newest version of the game the NGE(New Game Enhancement) as it is called. The game has had many bugs, some that resurface in patches later on. Probably for the first 1-2 years they did the feature creep. The Development staff seemed to be concerned with getting as much into the game as possible. They made many mistakes and made professions extremely unbalanced. They never seemed to have any guide, or leadership or plan on what they wanted and how they were going to do it.
The crafting system in game has yet to be beat. Although with the NGE that has been made useless. Before all the best items were made by crafters, now in game is pretty much a loot based economy.
I don't know anything about code bases and the like but I can understand why it would be difficult and probably require 2x as many people to keep both versions of the game active. Essentially, it would be like trying to maintain Dr. Mario, and Tetris, both similar games, but with Star Wars Galaxies, you have two different UIs, two different loot systems, two different crafting systems, two very different crafting systems, and two very different leveling/combat abilities/profession systems.
Yes, it would be nice if we lived in a culture where puberty was celebrated... Maybe not celebrated to the point where those who are late bloomers start to have problems for being late bloomers though....
Then again, having sex being as taboo a subject as it is, probably doesn't help things.
Sure, WoW is at the forefront of selling its game... but does that mean its the best? Checkers is a fun game, but most would say Chess is a better game compared to Checkers. And I hear of many people that get bored with WoW and the lvl 60 grind.
Sure WoW is the frontrunner on sales and subs, but its also one of the few games that is sold in pretty much every continent. Its a game that has players Worldwide. Lots of other games don't get that.
Blizzard is also a well liked company by the players of their other games.
Take EVE online, I think they should be a clear frontrunner of MMORPG's, because they trully make the game MMO, 22k+ people on one server. No other server has matched that capability yet for an MMORPG.
No, what you want is Diablo II / Guild Wars, not an MMORPG. MMORPG's were made for interaction, if you want to solo 99% of the time go play something single player.
Nope, sorry cannot tell you that you are wrong. Because you are correct.
They took an old game, changed it completely but left the same maps and resources, and NPCs, and few other things. But they changed how the players interact with the enviroment completely.
I will admit they did seem to listen to the customers in a half-assed fashion, even PRE-CU... The problem was the understanding what the players were saying...
Players would have a problem with a profession, and then SoE would go and nerf it. Then they neglected professions (smuggler, commando), and not fix specials. And feature creep. Every month they would announce something new going into the game. I quit when I found out about cybernetics because many other bugs had gone on fixed and many other ingame systems and mechanics could use better polishing.
If you took away the Star Wars from Pre-CU Star Wars Galaxies, and had another sci-fi/fantasy universe and other stuff, it still would have been a successful MMORPG. The main problems were the feature creep, and the bugs existing months, and years after being in game. Some were fixed to come up in later patches.
The HAM system was also poorly designed.
Although I am a Star Wars fan, I have to admit, the game's underlying mechanics were amazing, crafting system has yet to be bested. Player cities were pretty fun and the ability to interior decorate your home was pretty dynamic. The problems for this game have been well documented elsewhere, the problem with CU and NGE were also documented.
EVE Online is now where I play, and Star Wars Galaxies could have some of the game mechanics that EVE has, well they would have been successful 10x over by now probably.
Those moons would be nice, but Pluto is at an ideal distance. That and the fact that in space distance matters squat, if you travel 100 million miles at 20,000 miles per hour, according to what I know of basic physics without ever taking a physics class is that the probe 100 million miles later will still be travelling 20,000 miles per hour. Europa, Ganymede and Titan, we can get to probably in a shorter time but missions for those are probably on the drawing board with the problems we have learned from visiting Mars.
But I am not a rocket scientist, and I don't think you are either. All the planets in the solar system are pretty damn interesting if you look at each one individually.
Storytelling. Epic. Heroes. Battles.
Thats what made Star Wars. Thats exactly what Star Wars Galaxies didn't have, nor did it have plans for it. They did do a short storyline quest at one point early on. The thing was it was over to long a period of time, and you had to be a member of Imperial or Rebel faction. Which I know I didn't join at all because it was the PvP part of the game. And the old parts of the quest disappeared, so it added no new content to the game whatsoever. Specifically what was needed on that part was a storyline being told. There was none whatsoever. The quest journaling system was also nonexistant.
I would say you could set the game at a specific point in the Star Wars Saga but you have to tell a story... Han Solo sat in the same place, in the same Cantina for what 2 years in the game. Vader, Thrawn, and the wrinkly old Emp have been sitting at the Retreat for the same amount of time.
Since no-one seems to care about this, I may as well pass on an off-topic question... if the time setting is post-New Hope, how is it that people are able to play Jedi? Are there no Jedi in SWG? I thought for sure I had read about characters being Padawans and Knights.
In the former profession system, you got to be able to get a Jedi character by mastering professions, there was 30+ some professions so mastering them was no easy matter. Thus started the hologrind. Which made the economy in SWG go boom because everyone was grinding things out, which meant they were going through weapons, armor, in the combat professions, and when they were mastering crafting professions they had to make things which require vast amounts of specific resources. Then they added the force quest, which made it an entire different task to become a Jedi, you did a very long quest for it that would take many weeks. Now with the NGE they gave everyone the ability to be Jedi. Before the Jedi were an alpha class they were extremely strong, now they are on par with every other "iconic" profession. Its easier to balance and equalize 9 professions then the 30+ professions they had.
The thing is, being Star Wars, and the Star Wars franchise, of course the customers for the most part would definitely want to play Jedi at some point.
So yeah, you can play a Jedi when there should be no Jedi running around.
If you think about it, its a hard thing to create a MMORPG based on Star Wars. All of the movies happen over a couple of fictional years, people die and the things drastically change. And to concentrate all of that history on one specific timeline point is just silly, because some people would want to play Before A New Hope, Some before Empire Strikes Back, some after Empire Strikes Back, and some After Return of the Jedi. And who wouldn't want to take part in the major battles. There is plenty of stuff to work with because of the extended universe with the books.
The thing with the Jedi in the game though? I think the best defense for that is the Greedo defense, shoot first ask questions later.
By moving the timeline forward, Sony can use this as an excuse to plan a bunch of new expansions.
Anyone want to bet that they still won't fix outstanding game bugs before new expansions come out?
I will go one step farther. I will bet they will release another expansion before they are anywhere near done to finishing the majority of the content and issues for the NGE.
Publish Notes for Publish #Nevergoingtohappenever
* Tons of Content added, even a system for players to create content!
* Majority of the bugs that have been logged since the inception of this game and were never fixed... have been fixed!
* Development and CSRs, now recognize players as customers and fellow human beings.
That would never happen. I used to play on Bloodfin, and the PvPers would regularly be able to crash the server or planet. 100+ pvpers in one city and the server was toast. And this was over a year ago before the CU and the NGE, using what was essentially a DikuMUD combat system. The fun part was you could come across the PvPers in a big battle in a town nobody ever visited for anything(because there was nothing there, no quests, no reason to even pass through except it being close to a dungeon. People were always in Eisley, Theed, but mostly Coronet waiting for the buffs to go to Dant.
If they ever made SWG 2, probably going the Guild Wars route is probably going to give the people more of what they actually want for the Star Wars Experience.
I loved SWG though, the 30+ professions all the planets. The problems before the CU and the NGE have all been outlined many times before, but the Devs never seemed to listen, even the smugglers had to wait what 2 years for a revamp or something, and they still can't smuggle.
I started out as an artisan, and moved to a rifleman, ranger. Then the nerfing started.
To get a game on the new consoles. You are going to investing a couple hundred thousand dollars for just a small game concept demo to get actual funding for the full. For the older game systems, something tells me less money was needed and the yield was much higher when you did make a best seller.
The way you are going to see games come about is the way GTA started. It started out as a simple little 2d top down game, and now its become this great 3d game. Innovative games are going to start small, then after a successful release or two of a game model, then you will see the funding pour in to get a game that has innovative mechanics with a larger market in mind.
Chess wasn't invented over night, it developed over time. And the same happens in the game market. There are plenty of games out there that have pretty unique and innovative features. My favorite was the crafting and resource system that Star Wars Galaxies has/had. Although its not the same as it used to be, the entire game has done an about-face though, the company designing it decided to essentially start from scratch, just using the same engine and some similar mechanics.
Installing linux, even different distros always has resulted in some problem occuring. Windows, when I reinstall, or reformat and reinstall, or even install clean, the problems are none to minimal. The worst is finding some error and having to google it. Googling errors for linux have a likelyhood of pulling up a solution as not pulling up a solution.
Because Linux isn't exactly known for being user friendly, especially in the desktop market.