Green Grass and old MMOs

Namalex

I played SWG back in 2002 and quit it after about a year, roughly when the hologrind started to kick in. I stumble upon it stillo casionally, and I keep wondering how that game is doing. So I decided to log back in and see.

Honestly, it was not nearly half as bad as I thought it would be from all the things I read about NGE. One problem is so very few people play it.

It can be blmed on SOE, having alienated fanbase, bla bla... But honestly, I thought to myself, even if the game stayed the way it was, there would be barely anyone playing it today. Look back how many big MMOs were around 6 years ago - Asheron's Call, DaoC, Ultima and EQ. Back then SWG was great, it looked cool, it was new, fresh, huge...

But in the past six years the MMO market became flooded. Almost every year new MMO came out: EvE, AC 2, D&D Online, City of Heroes, and on and on and on. With each release a chunk of people abandoned their old games to jump to the new ones. Not many new and fresh players came in, since the games were marketed for the same audience. The only exception was World of Warcraft, that managed to appeal to a lot of people who never even played videogames before.

So at the end of these 6 years the community, that was once concentrated in 2 or 3 games, became spread thin over a dozen. This trend has largely affected the way the MMOs are designed: players are no longer expected to remain in game for a long time, because the next one is always coming right around the corner. Even the player does not want to invest a lot of time and effort into a game that he knows most people will simply abandon in a few months or so, going for the next big thing.

So the players move on, but the worlds linger, populated only by the most dedicated fans ranting about "good old days". Most don't realize, that no rollback and no "pre-NGE" patch will ever bring back the good old SWG, because the one thing that was making MMO game so good - the OTHER PEOPLE playing it - is long gone.