Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
star wars galaxies why its a good lesson
hercules
Member UncommonPosts: 4,925
Actually not here to talk about the NGE which many blame for the final demise of SWG(LA probably had more to do with it but thats a long debate).
Here to talk about why so many good elements of SWG remains unduplicated or enhanced.Most of my reference is before NGE.
I also acknowledge its many faults. such as high system requirement at launch.Poor performance.poor UI but was not bad for 2003.And of course been star wars which meant the creation of a alpha class eventually the jedi and finished off all the remaining sandbox combat mix.also lets not forget pre NGE hunting places were boring ,few and repeatitive(i think nge actually improved this)
1)The true sandbox feel.It had that and pre jedi there were so many interesting combat mixes
2)how much fun it was to be a non combat profession.I was a weaponsmith for 6 months+ exclusively and enjoyed it.I never before or after lasted long crafting anything for more then a few hours.Heck even a friend of mine was a dancer/musican and he recalls it been fun!also the variety was amazing .
3)the interaction.At launch EQ fans called it star wars cantina .But not only was the cantina lively so was everywhere in the world.I doubt the cap on server was more then 3k but due to the need to interact so much it made the game feel alive and i felt it was more of a mmorpg then those now claiming to have 10k on a server
4)the world.Enough said.it felt alive .amazing for 2003
5)the housing.No one even come close.open housing ,people say oh look at AA it has that and all the prime locations gone.Maybe if it had the size of SWG with all its planets that be a different story.It went further since you build your own cities had elections for mayor ,decorated the city,had a city hall became a market or research centre etc
6)trade.While i would have loved a better search on the trade market ,it still worked nicely and was fun building a name for yourself as a good shop for X
7)shifting resources.some hated it because if you missed out early good spawns you needed to pay for it but heck it was fun waiting for the next spawn of server best to then find a good concentration and put a harvestor there to build a better new server best weapon or food
8) vendors
9) the space expansion.you needed to play it to know what it felt like.
Comments
nothing about letting go about the past tbh.heck i quit swg prior to nge even and came back briefly only years later .
However,there are some features that made SWG great and developers seems not to pick this and progress on them.
I think reason most mmorpg are failing is they are using same formula over and over again which is why mmorpg is in such a demise now.
The EQ formula which WoW adopted and games are still been made almost to the letter now (look at SWTOR,TESO,wildstar) are getting very stale and maybe a different approach is needed?
#11. Best example what happens when you -Smedley- think your customers are dumb drones and what happens when you screw them over and say publically that they can fk off as the wow hordes will replace their ranks anyway.
Boom Headshot by customers.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
This.
2: Fun here is subjective.... Combat related Crafter had a pretty good time, Tailors did never get any real content updates... Not to mention the poor entertainers and image designers who got shat on for the entierty of the games existance up to the point where the devs them self just told people to get a ent-mule rather then trying to make entertainer a working prof. ID pers e was never a working prof. But....
3: We did the best we could out of it. And i agree sitting in the Cantina or later the ID tent talking and role-playing was very fun. But that was borne out of a desperate desire to have something.. ANYTHING... to do. Ofc if you went full ent or ID you could also spec as a subpar fighter that pretty much had to be carried by any group you ran with. And for a very long time it washit or miss if anyone actually would pay your for your services or just hurl insults at you... Insults does not pay the bill.
Yes SWG was something fairly special in the way it had a bunch of non-combat classes that was not crafters. But they never got it to work properly.
This have been a good conversation
Not nearly as much as people sometimes love to dismiss others experiences/memories as "nostalgia", simply because they don't share their feelings about it.
You phrased it a little bit differently, but the implication is the same.
I think it's time for people to come up with a new way to disagree with opinions they don't share. Simply saying "I don't agree with that, and here's why" would be a great start.
Its a bit like Woodstock, if you weren't there, then you probably have a hard time understanding what it was all about
lol.. I actually live near the town of Woodstock, and many of the people there seem to think they still are at Woodstock... even though the concert itself took place some distance away. Seems every other male over the age of 50 turns into Gandalf, long hair/beard and all. It's crazy.
Now, Woodstock '94 took place about 5 minutes down the road from me... but I don't think that's the one you're referring to
But that's a good analogy. It's like someone telling you "Woodstock wasn't that great. Being there with all those people couldn't have been fun. You're just seeing through nostalgia goggles". It's such an ignorant mentality.
Hasn't been a "full sandbox experience" since, because it doesn't sell.
Kind of hard to prove something wouldn't sell if there haven't been any actual good attempts at one, though, isn't it?
There's been some smaller, indie attempts at it, but they're usually poorly done or incomplete... and the execution of an idea is at least as important as the idea itself.
There haven't been any true, AAA attempts at creating a fully sandbox, open world MMO. So, it's really just conjecture to say it wouldn't work.
There are examples of successful sandboxy games out there already, so people are open to the concept. Just no one has managed to successfully capture it in a MMO setting that appeals to a large market, yet.
But then, MMORPGs were considered a very niche genre that big developers wouldn't go near, until WoW came along and broke it open. Then, suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of it. The same could very well happen for Sandbox MMOs, if someone managed to do the same for that niche.
Star Wars Galaxies has got to be the game that became progressively worse each month after launch. Because all of the genuinely good things in this list of 9 the OP made...they were really good. But at the end of pre-CU, nearly all of them degenerated into crap:
1) The true sand box feel degenerated into AFK loot whoring, and about four builds that could be considered workable in (Teras Kasi, 2-handed, rifle, combat medic).
2) Non-combat got outsourced to bots running scripts...it got so bad that dedicated buffbots got medals for 'most helpful player'.
3) The cantinas went from social hubs, to a pile of AFK musicians that played mismatched songs that were so discordant, you had to turn your speakers off and go AFK yourself just to keep from going dizzy.
4) The world was...filled up with a lot of tacky crap: old harvesters with 100K in the upkeep, mining resources that died out weeks before, cities nobody lived in anymore and AFK surveyors.
5) Housing was like suburbia in the 80s and 90s...bleak strip malls expanding ever-outward. And the placement system was so weird, you never could get things the way you needed them. Objects would disappear in walls, never to be seen again.
6) Trade was for n00bs and old salvaged crap too cheap to be worth it...good for clothes, maybe.
7) You had people putting down 200-lot harvester farms through server lot swaps. The whole desert looked like Texas during the oil boom, or like Minnesota along I-90 with the wind farms...nothing but fans as far as the eye can see.
8) Vendors...They were alright, I suppose. But soon enough, we had far more than we could handle...and the longer the game went on, the more of them were perpetually empty, or not carrying the things you went there to find.
9) The space expansion was, I admit, really good...but not enough, and not really supported all that well post-launch.
So yeah...I can agree with the OP about the state of the game...but as the game progressed, the good things about the game were less apparent, and the bad things started to become the norm. If SWG comes back, or if another game takes its cues from SWG, it needs to work on keeping the good for as long as passible, without it degenerating into the bad.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Isn't it also foolish to assume that, because you didn't like it, you must have not played it? -Or if you played it, you must have played it wrong? -Or, my favorite, maybe there's something wrong with you?
Those three are the go-to excuses from fanbois when someone says they don't like old-school games, but apparently it is OK not to like "new-school games". Is that fair?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
And that was the infinitely better behaved and community conscious MMO crowd of 2003... I wonder how that would work out today.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
It would probably turn into something more like TOR to fit today's gamers' taste.