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what went wrong with SWG give me your opinion
devils_hymn
Member Posts: 322
okay i kinda missed out on what went wrong with the game ive never played it someone give me a report
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Playing: EVE Online
Favorite MMOs: WoW, SWG Pre-cu, Lineage 2, UO, EQ, EVE online
Looking forward to: Archeage, Kingdom Under Fire 2
KUF2's Official Website - http://www.kufii.com/ENG/ -
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
Well what went wrong is SOE checked the sales figures of WoW and had big huge $$ signs in their eyes... they then made drastic changes to SWG to try to make it more appealing for this crowd of gamers but instead of saying that.. they used the term "iconic" to justify their actions... it all went pear shaped after that with people thinking SOE have a huge consipiracy going and well, it's GREAT!
They dropped the ball big time with SWG. It had best MMorpg of show a few years in a roll at E3, one of the best franchise names you could possibly ask for, but yet launched a buggy ass game to the public. Plus it took so many years to bring space travel to star wars. Thats why I never played, when I found out there was no space travel, I just shrugged.
To me the thing that did it in was the bugs. Launching it buggy is standard, almost all mmorpgs do that but most other mmorpgs fix those bugs. SWG on the other hand basicly got buggier and buggier with each patch. When there are bugs left since launch 2-3 years later you know something is wrong.
"Memories are meant to fade. They're designed that way for a reason."
Originally posted by devils_hymn
okay i kinda missed out on what went wrong with the game ive never played it someone give me a report
As someone who never played SWG himself, but has followed the story somewhat, I believe that what happened was a game that was never properly managed imploded when clueless executives attempted to "fix" it.
When SWG came out, it was different--it had a truly player-run economy, and from everything I've heard, it was really something special. Unfortunately, SOE seemed to having problems with their development process: it was pretty buggy, and as time went on, the bugs weren't getting fixed. Also, there wasn't much "Star Wars" about it, meaning they weren't getting much of a subscriber base from the license.
What subscriber base they *did* get were the people who liked the economy, and were willing to put up with the bugs, because it was gameplay you really couldn't get anywhere else. SWG settled in as a mid-range MMO, with subscriber rates good enough to keep rolling, but nothing spectacular.
This didn't sit well with SOE's execs. They had a friggin' STAR WARS license, which they'd paid considerably for to LucasArts, and they expected something better than mid-range. Then WoW came out, and they freaked. WoW was breaking all records for subscribers--why weren't they? Dammit, a Star Wars license *had* to be better than a Warcraft license!
Not attempting to fix the development issues--which they probably didn't really understand anyways--they decided that they needed to make SWG more like WoW, and the Combat Upgrade was born. It was largely a disaster. No attempt was made to pay any attention to the existing player base. The CU hurt large segments of the player-run economy that had attracted their current players. And the large change in direction exploded the number of bugs in the system. The result was to chase away their current subscriber base while not pulling in new players--attempting to pull in large numbers of new players a couple of years after release was a lost cause, and the spate of new bugs didn't help at all.
As the subscriber base started to implode, the SOE execs completely panicked. At least that's the only explanation I can come up with. They decided that the only thing to do was to make the game fast and simple to grab the Star Wars fans that had eluded them. The NGE was...ugh. It simply destroyed the game as it was. The skill-based system was completely scrapped for "iconic classes". Existing player characters were essentially destroyed. The player-run economy ceased to exist altogether. To this day I can't imagine what SOE was trying to do; they seem to have lost all capability for rational thought. Once again, no attempt was made to communicate with the subscribers, which particularly pissed off those who had just bought an expansion for what was essentially an entirely different game, now gone, which expansion was released ONE DAY BEFORE the NGE was implemented. Once again, the complete rewrite brought a whole new slew of bugs, as well.
At this point, I don't see much hope for SWG. They've so completely alienated their old player base that some of them are homicidal at this point. They haven't pulled in the Star Wars fans they were trying to get. The game is basically dying at this point; I think it might not last out the year.
Chris Mattern
That's an excellent summary, very well written. Kudos to you.
I started playing SWG just after the Combat Upgrade, and people were pretty upset even then. I gave up for a few months due to lack of funds, and was just about to reactivate my subscription when the NGE hit. One look at the new game convinced me not to bother with it ever again. It's a real pity.
auryx
Seriously, because SOE was allowed to handle it.
I am not trying to be funny or just hate flaming SOE.
The fact is, that they have no clear vision with any of their games. They constantly change the fundamentals after release and it pisses players off, and SOE doesn't give a crap about their existing customers if they believe the changes will produce more income.
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Although sophisticated and nicely done , please find your self another ocupation
"Before this battle is over all the world will know that few...stood against many." - King Leonidas
SOE is the EA of MMOs.
They tried to transform a good MMORPG into a console game, so the game would feel more "star warsy" (trademark of SOE).........
Except there are already 2.000 Star Wars based console and PC games on the market, we really didn't need another one.
SOE should be ashamed of the lack of business perspective.
Their strategy backfired right back into their arse.
You'll mostly get the quick answer here which is the whole nge thing. But that's not when it started. The problems with SWG started back in the early days when the devs did nothing about the many bugs in the game. Parts of trees for classes were completely unfinished. There had been little thought to giving players something to do other than fight each other, and once people realized that pets were overpowered, they immediately flocked to those classes and attributes, negating the ability of someone to run around fighting people with blasters, which would have made the fighting so much more fun. When you allow the lazy pvpers to roam supreme, which is what they did as one guy would stand at the bar with his two AT-STs and kill every rebel who tried to enter the area, doing it without any skill whatsoever other than a macro to order his big robot to kill.
SOE could have made the experience a lot different by realizing there was still something missing to the game, which by the way they still haven't fixed. You see, there's really nothing to actually do in the game. It's like playing Second Life but with better graphics. You influence nothing. You don't have an impact on anything that happens in the game. You have no goals to achieve other than very simplistic missions (like theme parks) or random "bring me this" or "go kill this guy" missions that even as I write this sound more exciting than they actually were. There was no thought to making your character have a purpose in the game after you figured out how to play it. There should have been dev designed (and ever changing) stories going through the game that would require a lot of actual interactivity, but everything was designed to be static. Sure, every now and then Darth Vader would show up and hang out in front of a space terminal, but that was it.
The recent change addressed some of the problem but, in my opinion, in the wrong way. They tried to make the game "appear" more star warsy, but at the same time they didn't offer you anything more to do. You're still stuck with the same crappy missions that have been a part of the game since day one. Even the expansions have crappy missions designed within them that are finished very fast. They needed to revamp the very reason why you play the game, but that would have taken a lot of work, so they let everyone become a jedi. So, now you can become a jedi and still have no purpose other than broken missions and missions that end because they haven't gotten around to completing them. Plus, they made it practically impossible to even find the missions in the first place, other than a few set ones that you'll discover if you restart the game from the get go and wander up the mission ladder until it phases out because they never got around to finishing it.
So much could have been done with this game, but they decided the interface was the problem. Their fix was actually what caused me to quit the final time. I can't stand the current interface and its stupidified feel that it has.
So, in a nutshell, those are some of the things that I felt went wrong with SWG. This game had so much promise and so much potential. It hurts even talking about it.
My blog:
http://www.littlesarbonn.com
Episode 4. Holocrons: A New Grind (aka "Here's a great afk macro to get your <insert skill> skill up.")
Episode 5. The Mobs Strike Back (aka corpses for crafters, or "oh boy, levels." Some also called it the combat upgrade.)
Episode 6. Return to the Drawing Board (aka "Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure," or the NGE..)
You don't even want to know about episodes 1-3.
Sarbonn is also right about the sandbox environment. I played the game for just over a year, and the people I met and the potential for improvment were the only things that kept me hanging on for more than 3 months. I'd travelled extensively, owned homes, dedicated myself to collecting rare animals, done every quest, found every point of interest, and ultimately done everything I cared to do very early in the game. What kept me in the game were the jam sessions we had every week in our player town cantina.
As players filtered out of the game due to one change or another (mostly the three above), the playerbase was no longer in large enough supply to adequately fill the role of "content creation." Worse for SOE, the players who left were not being replaced by newbies at anywhere near the same rate. Empty player cities stood everywhere a building could be placed, like testimonials of the game's problems. I still think there was a lot of potential in the game, and not just the license. I liked the skill system, I liked the initial push to make it a more social game, I liked the dynamic wildlife, I liked the player economy. Unfortunately, most of those things just kept getting buried under new directions, each one stranger than the last.
I think it's very important to not forget that SW:G was the first game made by the company that took over ownership of EverQuest. SW:G is the spiritual successor to EQ...far more so than EQ2 is, which attempted to take a "lessons learned" approach from the many mistakes SW:G made.
Before WoW came along, EQ was the grandmaster of the MMOG environment. It had the largest subscriber base, at one point (by reports) holding over 500,000 subscirbers. At that time, that was considered a magnificent achievement. Of course, WoW has completely eclipsed that number by a factor of 10, making EQ's early successes seem quaint. But I digress.
When SW:G was announced, the only other Sci-Fi game on the market was Anarchy Online, which had a horrible release and was struggling to maintain subscribers. Most people looked at the following factors very favorably:
a) Star Wars licensed product
b) Lucas Arts involvement
c) Made by the makers of EverQuest (a dual-edged sword, but consider my notes above about their successes)
d) Very good looking game (at the time, best graphics in a MMOG hands down)
Other elements made SW:G attractive as well, such as a skill-tree approach to the character development, a strong player-run economy (well documented above), and so on.
SoE had everything going for them at the time...but they made a horrible error in judgement.
The critical strategic error made in this game's design concept is the target audience and the game's complexity. SW:G, at release was a relatively complex game. By any MMOG standard, for any MMOG veteran, it's probably of average-to-high complexity...nothing daunting. But remember, all those Star Wars fans that never played a MMOG and wanted to be the next Jedi Knight had no idea what to do with this vast world, a big sandbox with no absolute linear path of quests or accomplishments.
While this caters very well to veterans of MMOGs, or those with the patience and determination to learn, this falls like a lead stone in the sea with the average kid who's used to the complexity of a console game. On top of that, like insult to injury, you ask the kid to ask his mom to pop up $15 a month to keep playing a game that he doesn't really get and doesn't really like...there's no real tactical skill to a MMOG...it's all an intellectual game of character development, character planning, and sequencing combat/tradeskill combinations to win a few battles at a time.
The result, as has been well-said above, was a game that reached an average number of MMOG subscribers...and nothing even remotely close to the fanbase potential the game could have had if it had been engineered toward the target audience in the first place.
Blizzard made the right decision in making WoW a fairly simple game...they realized that their vast, rabid fanbase was not used to grinding out hour upon hour of research and farming in order to make moderate gains in character development. They made a game that catered to their audience, an audience they apparently understood far better than SoE did.
Re-engineering SW:G in a similar fashion is foolish. They never should have bothered...they should have left the old game intact and made SW:G2. That would have been a dramatically better approach. Instead, they have earmarked their product as a failure...and they have also made sure that every player who plays it knows they may very well be playing yet another version of the game in the near future. Hello nerf bat.
I can't blame SoE too much for their lack of vision in this. I think everyone was caught by surprise by the numbers WoW put up. Even with a rabid fanbase, 5 million subscribers at $15 a month is enough to make an investment banker weep for joy.
Bottom line is, SoE tried to make SW:G a StarWars version of EverQuest. What they should have been trying to do was make SW:G an entirely different kind of game.
In general, it would probably have been better if they simply released the "new" SWG as either a new game, or an alternate ruleset server.
It's been wrong since the game launched, everyone used to complain about it before and now since the NGE people forget how bad it was.
Tho PRe CU was a great game, because it's a licensed game SOE can't make changes very often and that really ruins it! If SOE had it on another game it would be soo much better.
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Don't click here...no2
well where to begin?....
If you played the game from day 1 (2 actually since the game was down the first day) then you know as I do that the first few months of the game were its absolute best. I realize the absence of mounts and vehicles was a pain but as far as grouping and character interaction were concerned it was the most fun I ever had in an MMO. With just a few tweaks and the addition of mounts and vehicles the game started to take on a fullness that I think has never been achieved in any other persistent online reality.
Now the bad.
The entrance of jedi alpha class along with doctor buffs that allowed people the ability to wear armor without any sort of detrimental effect to their character performance brought out the very worst kind of gameplay. From the infamous hologrind everyone abandoned their jobs as regular joes and chased after the elusive jedi slot. The solo group reigned supreme and the buff/defense stackers ruled the game.
I think SWG experienced the entire spectrum of what is possible in an MMO from the very best to the very worst.
Critical thinking is a desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and hatred for every kind of imposture.
I actually think SWG is better now than it was. What happened is alot of game features were missing at launch. SOE's hands were tied with what they could and couldn't do and what we were left with was a game that did'nt really have that star warsy feel.
All in the all the game at launch was pretty horrible.
So the changes came along and they were pretty major. This of coursed pissed of the current player base even though they were very supportive of the changes leading up until thier release.
Now I think the game is much better than it ever was. For me it's alot more fun.
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