The loyal hardcore players tried to tell them, many times. But apparently some marketing geek knew more than my consistent support for the game. Our guild had 400 players equating to probably 300 active accounts. SOE pissed it away for what?
Originally posted by Fivo The loyal hardcore players tried to tell them, many times. But apparently some marketing geek knew more than my consistent support for the game. Our guild had 400 players equating to probably 300 active accounts. SOE pissed it away for what? Fivo Asia
SWG was a failure from the start and it is because they could only attract the hardcore that it failed. The customers they lost were paltry considering the game barely made it over the 200,000 mark and so what? SOE and LA never wanted SWG to appeal only too such a small group. It is "because" they listened to the hardcore players in the beginning the game failed to attract broad appeal and they found out to late that hardcore have no clue as to what the general gaming community wants considering most gamers are not hardcore.
Again, in the beginning they did listen to hardcore players and it brought them nothing but failure, as it failed to achieve mass appeal as a result. As for the changes that hardcore players did not like that SOE and LA had hopes would attrack a broader base players?
It was too late for them to recover, other games filled the gap and so in the end there was nothing they could do to salvage the game. If SOE and LA would have ignored the hardcore from the beginning and researched what the general population of the gaming community wanted while creating the game (similar to what Blizzard did), they could have achieved better success. By the time the realized that the ideas of hardcore players that were implemented was a disaster, it was all over but the crying for SOE and LA.
For all of WoW failures (and there are many), it appeals to a wide range of players because levels 1 - 59 are fun and Blizzard did away with the hardcore view. It is the end-game that has become horrible, before that many players love the game.
Why are so many players now becoming upset with WoW? Because it is designing much of it's content around one group of players and a very small at that - Raiders and if they don't they don't change their ways, some other game will come along and push it aside. Any game that focuses too much on one small group, will inevitably fail if they don't realize the errors in their ways.
While I do agree that the game in the beginning was geared toward the hardcore crowd, many of the changes had broadened the games appeal to those who had only limited time to play, my proof, my guild was full of people who where full time parents and worked 40 plus hours a week, did this take away from there experience while they played not at all. SWG was all about doing what you wanted not just toward the hardcore crowd. Those people who played less often were still very much involved in our weekend guild events and what you fail to mention, and this is very important, combat level was just a suggestion of what you should fight. Many guild events involved two to three groups of members, many of which were low lvl characters, the great thing was they could still contribute in battles and the higher ups looked after the others, it was great. I challenge you to find any other mmo that allows a group up high levels to bring along a few low level entertainers with them and have success, it was all in how you played and the sky was truly the limit in how you played. I myself was a Commando/Combat Medic/Teras kasa artist, I usually tanked while healing the group as a whole and fighting at range and close up, no other MMO that I've ever played would allow such a combo but in SWG I had quite a bit of success with this model, and if I hadn't I could justs drop the skills that didn't work and try something else. If anything I thought that if someone was willing to be social and join a guild (it is a MMO after all) you could have fun no matter how much time you had to play. As far as your point that SWG was never successful it did have over 200k in customers at its peak and pre wow standards that was a huge user base playing in game. If anything WOW seems to have set back the development of new and different ideas in MMO's, developers seem to be aspiring to create there own little wow to rack in the cash. I've played wow, in no way is it a bad game but its not my cup of tea. That virtual world feel of SWG is not present in WOW, and many of the users in wow seem very rude and immature(I know every mmo has its group of players such as these but wow has quite a few of them due to the success.) I do agree with you on many of your points however, companies are here to make money and niche games don't generate the income. One last point however, do a search for wow hacks, there soooo many hacker programs out there to give players an unfair advantage, I'm not talking macro's and such I'm talking create items with stats that aren't anywhere within the boundries of the game. This type of thing leads to imbalances in game that can't simply be fixed with a patch, and before you point out the dupe wipes item deletion etc keep in mind that honest players frequently get con'ed into buying these great uber items not knowing anything of this type of practice, then when the dupe wipe/illegal item deletion happens the player is simply out all there hard earned gold. Success on the wow's scale breeds a very shady environment that Blizzard will be combating for the life of the game. I honestly wouldn't even mess with pvp in wow knowing that many players wiill go to any length to win. IF anyone wants to see the extreme of what I'm talking about check out the forums on various sites on a little game called knight online, of course that game is the extreme but it will give you a bit of insight into what is happening in many mmo's.
Thats just my two cents, I completely respect your opinions and agree on many points but SWG was not a failure at least not until NGE..........
When the game first started, it was the most casual friendly game I have seen. It was easy to level, and easy to contribute right from the first day.
Did it develop into a hardcore game? It did, and the CU only cemented the hardcore image. With levels, damage, and scaling metrics, it was all about the level, and grinding, because there was no way for anyone with basic skills to contribute. Even armor became level dependent.
NGE is just hardcore by design. Its all about pwnage and being ub0r, because there is no important things anyone of a lower level in their iconic professions can really do.
__________________________ "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
- Maxing a skill was easy - no UbeR-Loot - there wasn´t anything you NEEDED to do in order to be a successful player, no specific profession you had to choose, no camping, no whatever, atleast not until they issued these idiotic holocrons. - infact, back then the only crowd that was shouting was the hardcore crowd, they used to say the "Game is too easy, I can´t be better than everyone, make me a jedi".
-Which, eventually, they did.
SWG was the first major publication that managed to recapture the feeling of late-90s UO. MMORPG with the "RPG" part wholly deserving. It was full of bugs but nobody seemed to care all that much, not even SOE I subscribed the day it hit the shelves and I played straight through to the CU. Then I quit and restarted 2 months before NGE. Now I quit forever, because "game experience may change during gameplay" was driven to an extreme by SOE. Infact, everybody quit. ...Except the hardcore-players, that is.
And concerning the article: Well written, but really, this (and more) had all been already said 12 hours after the NGE announcement.
Originally posted by kay226 Ok, enough is enough dont you think? How long are you guys going to go on and on about how bad these changes were? Seems to me you are actually trying to wage a war against Sony and the Star Wars Galaxies game, relentlessly bad mouthing the game anywhere you can and whenever you can. I understand your frustration caused by the dramatic changes, i would have been frustrated and angry too but hey its been so long the changes have been made and you guys still going on and on about it, maybe its time to let it go and maybe get a life in the process. Give it a rest guys, the game is still great after the changes and no matter how much you ramble its not going to be changed back to the original form. I respect your point of view and i admit you are right to be angry but enough is enough, im sick and tired of seeing this kind of posts everywhere all the time.
I'm with Kay226 & Squidi on this issue - to all you WHINERS! - BUILD A BRIDGE AND GET OVER IT! - you know what? there was a REAL IMPROVEMENT that those changes made to SWG it got RID of the majority of you WHINERS! from the game. Did you guys ever stop to think that maybe thats what SOE WANTED? - they realised THEIR game needed changes to draw more people to it and certain 'negative elements' currently playing the game were turning off new players with their rhetoric?.
SOE dont have to 'veto' their intentions to the likes of you guys and despite a previous post I noted I MOST CERTAINLY am not swayed by the opinions of others least of all you WHINERS! on my choice of purchases or game selection. SOE didnt ASK you guys to subscribe to THEIR game and NO-ONE said you had to keep subscribing when its direction took a path you didn't like - TOUGH! - vote with your feet and leave - which most of you did (GOOD ONYA) - just dont try to sway the choices or opinions of the 'unjaded' MAJORITY who should at least try the game as it stands TODAY - it MAY be what THEY like or perhaps not buts its THEIR choice - NOT YOURS..
ps. If you WHINERS! feel compelled to reply to this post PLEASE dont put too much effort into it - I won't be returning this thread to fully enjoy them.
I played SWG from launch for a little under 3 years. I tried to have the fun we all had in the beginning(pre-CU) and the game just became more and more unbareable for me. With most of the vets quitting and the one's left online less and less, harder missions became impossible tasks on deserted servers. After accepting the fact that the true idea of SWG had become lost in the neverending search to make the game a clone, I too added my signature to the long line of cancelled subscriptions.
Seeing websites like this, that agree SOE/LA went about this all wrong, makes us proud that some still believe in community ethics and not corporate "get rich quick" schemes. Your article was dead on and I haven't read an article about this subject that can be compared to how well you did yours.
SWG was my first MMO love and i played it for just over a year. I had 2 accounts and has just convinced my gf to start playing when the NGE hit. I still have her unused copy of swg total experiance sitting under a pile of disks on my desk.
the biggest problem i think was SOE, they got way to greedy when it came to SWG. they were hoping to cash in on star wars fans passion for Mr Lucas' wonderous story but what they fail to realise is that due to the depth and scope of star wars content created outside of the films they would have to adhere to the storyline, cannon and expanded universe, in order to keep people happy. The first big mistake was including jedi in a period of time where there should be none. endless grinding and lack of content was the second mistake and the NGE put the final nail in the coffin.
The really really sad thing is in a market that is currently over saturated by fantasy MMO's and bad sci-fi MMO's a game like SWG is very badly needed and should a company with a good reputation such as bioware create a new SWG based in the KOTOR time line or indeed even the post ROTJ time line I have no doubt that the game would be a true WoW beater.
Having read this review makes me feel a little better knowing there are others out there in the gaming industry who have a clue...
I played Star Wars Galaxies religiously for two and a half years. At one point we had a 125 member guild, active in meetings and hunts once a week and always willing to help one another. We were one of the longest running Jedi protectorate guilds on our server and I enjoyed playing on several others as well, until Sony started making changes for the "betterment of the gaming experience". The Combat Upgrade (lovingly referred to as the Combat Unbalance") saw the dwindling of players and, in the end, the decision to close the guild's doors forever. In the time that I revelled in SWG, I made not only a great many friends but a lot of them I call family now as we all know each other real life. I view it as the only reward to having played the game...
For the veterans it was a second home. It was the first MMORPG I had ever played, being a veteran of LARP and tabletop prior. Sony's systematic destruction of the game still makes my stomach flip. We had joked once of reinstalling the game to our computers just to see how much damage had been done; the thought of actually doing it made me physically nauscious and we gave up the idea. The only time we think of SWG is with remorse over "the loss of a fantastic game destroyed by a meddlesome deaf/blind caretaker". All three of us, and all of our friends, actively play other games now and gladly invest our money in them, but none could compare in our opinion to SWG in its glory days, previous to the Sony/LucasArts debaucle. We don't miss it the way it is now.
Thank you Kevin for posting your review. Doubt anyone at Sony will pay any attention to it, they didn't listen to us in-game, but your voice made me feel a little better. Thanks.
Well i wasn't exactly a veteran of SWG but it was my favorite MMO i've ever played. I've mostly played Guild Wars, FFXI, Diablo/D2, CoH/CoV, and WoW. I also briefly tried Lineage 2 and DAOC but did'nt "spark" with them. I stopped playing MMO's for a while right before the Combat Uprgade (CU) came out. I liked SWG for basically 2 reasons. #1) it was the most social game ive ever played and #2) it wasnt the classic level system, it was skills/mix instead. This is what made it different and better. I liked having options to make a character and eventually work my way up to Jedi. About a week ago i decided to get back on to swg not knowing about the CU/NGE and i was shocked. I couldn't even move there was so much lag and the game was completely ruined.
I think the came bring most of the vets back as n most of the players that quit still periodically check for swg updates cuz im assumming we all love star wars universe. they should take the came back to pre-CU and work from there or scrap it and make SWG 2 based off pre-CU, then allow a free open beta for a while. Make players love it again. I heard somehwhere there is an swg 2 coming out in 08' not sure if its true but i would try it just cuz of one plain fact, i want a different mmo and i love star wars p.s. (the only game i would quit it for would be if they made a Mortal Kombat mmo <hehe i love that more>)
But seriously SOE just needs to admit that they f*** the game up and reverse it, if they admit they were wrong, then they would get players back
...currently playing wow.....level 40 horde......have to take periodic breaks because of boredom......
All so true, and I agree completely. Unfortunately for me I was one of the veterans Kevin mentions, who had been playing since a little after the release and up until the WOW closed beta began. It is true that the game had many bugs and holes all over, but at least in the early stages these were more or less being taken care of and devs listened even to silly little things the players wanted, like for example, a better way to move your furniture around the place. However, at some point, a grand line of new content kept comming in, and around and about the Corellian Corvette time i had seen two of my cities become ghost towns and me and a couple of other friends the remnants of those by then. And then the class 'revamps' started. I was one of the most sucessful entertainers on Infinity, I made a living of it and suddenly I was obsolete. The characters entire life was being an entertainer, and now I was more or less forced to abandon a character that I had been playing for more than a year, which is far more than most subscribers can claim. I was not a happy bunny I can tell you that. And so when the WOW open beta began I left. Why stay and pay a game that does not respect you as a payer and player?
But the thing is that SWG IS the best world there is with so many of its advantages being so major that they overwhelm every other mmorpg out there. Even on WOW, we were reminiscing of the 'good old days' and grieving the need to be in WOW and not in SWG. Needless to say, I left WOW a great deal sooner than SWG because of the boredom of the 'long distance runner'. And now the SWG emulator is about to get out. I hope it goes well because I am going to be stuck on it like glue! But a part of me still wants the 'real' Galaxies back. And I know I'm not the only one. Miss it? You're not alone. Tell THAT to SOE...
I feel for you, watching my friends class of Creature handler be destroyed was truly sad. Entertainer and crafter basically met the same end and I remember seeing dancers and crafters in our guild trying to adjust to a combat class and sayin this just isn't for me before leaving. I'm not sure SOE even knows that what the audience wants matters, they take that I know whats best attiutude toward their customers base as if we were a bunch of know nothing children, guess what SOE we did know something and the results of this whole fiasco shows that, well said with your post, and take solace in the fact that I bet we will have a true SWG, SOE free MMO within a couple years. I've looked at the emulater but I just don't feel like starting over from scratch but doesn't me I won't at least check it out.
Thanx, I know many people are like me out there, a real shame. I've been hearing that SWG2 has gone to the -so far- able hands of Bioware. We can but hope, but I have doubts it will be as good as SWG was before SOE decided to make it an open beta *irony* If the emulator is pre-CU as they claim, even if it's bugged to the brim I'll be on it. I know what I like, and after a trial from the open beta till recently I found out it wasn't WOW, no matter how well made the game is.
I too went to WoW but the more I play it, the more I miss what SWG was and wish WoW was more like that rather than SWG having become more like WoW. I don't see WoW having a very long lifespan for me because it is so quest based that, although a person can have many characters on the same account including up to 8 (I think that's the limit) on the same server, I don't see leveling up many characters all the way to 60 because it means doing those same quests over and over again. Another HUGE thing I miss about SWG that I haven't found in WoW is the socialization part of the game and the ease at which I found good guilds in SWG. Areas in WoW are so level based and it lacks the "common meeting grounds" that SWG cantinas and player cities provided. My first character in SWG was an entertainer/artisan. The guilds my characters joined were the results of cantina meetings (I played on 3 different servers during my time with SWG, only 1 out of 4 guilds that I joined was due to joining it because a "friend" had, the other 3 were because I met the leader of the guild while playing on one of my ent chars, on every server I played I ended up with at least 1 ent char and 1 CH char....yes, I was one of those multi-account, alt loving peeps that ended up with 3 accounts by the time I left the game). Another thing I got spoiled to on SWG that I realize the more I play WoW is something that would seem rather small but it was the huge amount of emotes. I still get the urge to /poke someone who is just standing there or /pet my animal (surprise, surprise, to have started copying WoW, SWG took away one thing that WoW does have--the ability to have a pet and use it in combat...although that was another area that SWG once excelled in...CH could have a lot more animals in inventory, hunters in WoW can only have 1 pet at a time and must pay to open a slot to "stable" others) and remember that I'm no longer playing SWG with all the emotes it had. I also with that WoW had more interacting ability between Alliance and Horde, I'm use to the ability for imps and rebs to interact and can think of some roleplaying value in being able to interact. I also miss the ability to create a story for my character and put it in the character page. I was hooked on /examine in SWG and reading what people had written. Performing in a cantina and reading people's stories..../sigh, I miss those days. So here I am, still looking for and waiting for some mmorpg that comes close to having what SWG once had...player cities, non-combat professions that are necessary, the ability to tailor make professions and change those skills with ease, the huge range of being able to customize the looks of one's character and change those looks as often as one wished, easy to use controls/communication systems, ability to customize HUD through changing color scheme and moving objects around your screen (although the screwed that one up with NGE, as I found out when I couldn't get my character to move and realized that it was because I was use to having a separate guildchat window, if I combined chat windows I could move, if I had 2 I couldn't move), etc.
Some say that WoW set some kind of standard just because it had a huge amount of players. I say SWG was the one setting a standard because of its uniqueness in gamestyle. To me, the true test for WoW will be in how long it can keep the players it has. I think if SWG had not messed up the game, it could have kept veterans for many years. Is it better in an mmo to have huge amounts of players for a short amount of time, or have players for a huge amount of time? I'm not an expert in the financial end of mmos so I don't know although I guess I can speculate based on a lack of taking care of the customers one has in order to grab new ones.
Also people say SWG was geared for the "hardcore" player. I'm not sure what people mean by "hardcore" but, if they mean someone who is an expert at playing games, I got into SWG rather easily, it pointed me in the direction to go, I could find missions close to a city and did not have very far to go when I cloned to get back to my missions, the learning curve for SWG in the pre-CU days was not that big and what questions I had, I found more experienced players willing to help me out. If by "hardcore" people mean someone who plays games a lot and can play/is will to play for long amounts of time versus the person who wants to play for 15-20 minute segments, then WoW is more "hardcore" than what SWG was...in SWG, one could get on and grab a mission or 2 close to town if the person played a combat prof and be done rather quickly or one could entertain/heal/craft within that 15-20 minutes...server cities usually had everything you needed fairly close by or you could find a player city that was well set up. In WoW, it is quest based and even doing one quest may take you more than the 15-20 minutes esp. if that quest takes place in instances or requires getting a group together to be successful (killing elites).
Amen! I think the best thing they could do if they want a shot at keeping this game alive is to put everything back to the old original system, the way it was when it was released. I loved the fact that not everyone could be a jedi. I love the fact that once you became a jedi you had to be careful or you suffer perma-death. It made the game feel MORE like the star wars universe. If I wanted to play a Jedi, I would have played KOTOR or Jedi Academy. I wanted to play as a person in the Star Wars Galaxy. This option was stolen from me. I want it back. Wipe the servers, put back SWG version 1.0 and set up an advertising campaign to let us know. If you did that... I'd be back at the drop of a hat. As the game sits now though... your better off just shutting it down and pretending it never happened.
Thank you for pointing this out, hopefully other devs. (developers for those who doent use acronyms) don't follow the same path as SOE did. I played for close to 3 years and the NGE destroyed my playing experience. Not only did the NGE destroy the comabat aspect, but it also destroy a major part of the story line. According to various sources the game is supposed to take place between Episodes 4 and 5. This is all fine and dandy but the devs. allowed thousands of people to become jedi instantly, where in the move there was Obi-wan, Luke and Yoda, ther could have possibly been a few jedi hiding but 300 jedi werent walking around Bestine on Tat. I was a master bounty hunter, I was of course extremely disappointed when the devs. announced that bounty hunters would no longer be able to hunt players because apparently a few 10 year olds whined when their jedi got killed. And of course the think that made me quit like so many other was the click and shoot aspect, I ordered a MMORPG and got a FPSORPG. Thanks for listening to me squabble and for pointing out SOE's flaw
This game I truly anticipated and played from the moment I could get my hands on it, with a broad range of proffessions, mild PvP for those who wanted it and a general this is Star Wars feeling. I always remember feeling it was more Pokemon than Star Wars as everyone pulling out Rancors from their pockets and that mild alteration where needed. Over time a community of players developed and a feeling of belonging in game that to date has never been matched. I looked forward to playing online with friends. Then came the jedi (yep I grinded one), and I had a bad feeling in my gut.... grind proffessions to get Jedi - a series of quests I felt at the time would be more in tune with the Star Wars I knew. Then came CU ..... what can I say madness ... the NGE ..... Subscription cancelled.
I do look in from time to time to see if the game has improved. See if the forums are favourable.
I am a Star Wars Fan and I wanted a Star Wars MMORPG I wanted to play in the Star Wars universe.
Lets hope they make another one without SOE and with a company that listen to the fans in general.
until then I will just bum around the mmorpg universe seeking what I once had but which was taken away from me.
I couldn't have summed it up better in any other choice of words. It would seem that they not only made these changes in total disregard of the community's bleeding hearts, they have also completely and utterly refused to go back on their "upgrade". Talk about ignorance.
I don't know what it's going to take to get SOE to wake up. Seriously.
Ive played SWG from the start, even assisted in Beta, after three months i gave up, with all the bugs and down time, i wanted to focus els where while they cleaned up there act (so much potential), reading the blergs, comments and all the bells and whistles they added,... three years later i finaly get the urge to reload the game, activate the account and and take a look see, Holy Crap!, its been watered down, some bugs still in place, less things to do, more player houses then players ( met 15 players of the 20 active accounts) a whole Galexie of no direction.
Always been a Star Wars fan, so im gonna have a ritual walk to the trash can and toss this game out, so as not to make the mistake of waisting another 13 bucks.
I played the right from release, watched as they reneged on several pre-launch promises, decided to have their clients pay for an expansion that was promised game content in the original game, bugs, lag and of course the wonderful customer service.
After about 4-5 months I gave up on the game. I have always been a star wars fan and have popped in from time to time to check the reviews, but it was always the same. I can honestly say I have never felt the urge to reload this game and nothing I have seen has encouraged me to do so up to now, even coming onto their third year.
This game left such a bad taste in my mouth, I have to say it is the worst MMORPG experience I have ever had.
What I think WoW showed the mmo industry is that to have real succes you must release a finished bugfree game and before you tamper with the game again you make 100% sure your expansion is also finished and bugfree. Its simple, really.
What I've seen in SWG is constant bugridden changes and no focus on fixing old bugs, making the game very annoying to play no matter how good the gameplay and content has been.
Btw, Mr. Smedley lost all credibilty with his ridiculous comments in SWG forums where he constantly ran away from the existing game and promised a grand future with new updates and expansions. Mr. Smedley is the main cause for the SWG disaster and also cost SoE a lot of potential customers for other SoE games. Time for Sony to wake up and sack this incompetent person.
I played SWG not long after it came out on a US server(i live in uk) as soon as the first eurpepean server was up i was there. first minute. it was great to be in a game you enjoyed playing so much from the scratch. I really loved all the crafting proffesions and the houses. the quests where great and as many have said in this thread it felt like a real living world. I played it for many months untill the CU and then the dreaded NGE came. they came was totalled changed, it just wanst the same, i left as it just wasnt the same. I have been back since, just to see if there is any improvement(there isnt).
Its sad to see a game i so enjoyed change so much. I know there is many like me that keep praying and hoping the SOE will just go back to the original design, but i dont think that will ever happen, they had a real good game there one that would of kept growing and growing in subscriptions, but now its dead.
Comments
The loyal hardcore players tried to tell them, many times. But apparently some marketing geek knew more than my consistent support for the game. Our guild had 400 players equating to probably 300 active accounts. SOE pissed it away for what?
Fivo Asia
Again, in the beginning they did listen to hardcore players and it brought them nothing but failure, as it failed to achieve mass appeal as a result. As for the changes that hardcore players did not like that SOE and LA had hopes would attrack a broader base players?
It was too late for them to recover, other games filled the gap and so in the end there was nothing they could do to salvage the game. If SOE and LA would have ignored the hardcore from the beginning and researched what the general population of the gaming community wanted while creating the game (similar to what Blizzard did), they could have achieved better success. By the time the realized that the ideas of hardcore players that were implemented was a disaster, it was all over but the crying for SOE and LA.
For all of WoW failures (and there are many), it appeals to a wide range of players because levels 1 - 59 are fun and Blizzard did away with the hardcore view. It is the end-game that has become horrible, before that many players love the game.
Why are so many players now becoming upset with WoW? Because it is designing much of it's content around one group of players and a very small at that - Raiders and if they don't they don't change their ways, some other game will come along and push it aside. Any game that focuses too much on one small group, will inevitably fail if they don't realize the errors in their ways.
While I do agree that the game in the beginning was geared toward the hardcore crowd, many of the changes had broadened the games appeal to those who had only limited time to play, my proof, my guild was full of people who where full time parents and worked 40 plus hours a week, did this take away from there experience while they played not at all. SWG was all about doing what you wanted not just toward the hardcore crowd. Those people who played less often were still very much involved in our weekend guild events and what you fail to mention, and this is very important, combat level was just a suggestion of what you should fight. Many guild events involved two to three groups of members, many of which were low lvl characters, the great thing was they could still contribute in battles and the higher ups looked after the others, it was great. I challenge you to find any other mmo that allows a group up high levels to bring along a few low level entertainers with them and have success, it was all in how you played and the sky was truly the limit in how you played. I myself was a Commando/Combat Medic/Teras kasa artist, I usually tanked while healing the group as a whole and fighting at range and close up, no other MMO that I've ever played would allow such a combo but in SWG I had quite a bit of success with this model, and if I hadn't I could justs drop the skills that didn't work and try something else. If anything I thought that if someone was willing to be social and join a guild (it is a MMO after all) you could have fun no matter how much time you had to play. As far as your point that SWG was never successful it did have over 200k in customers at its peak and pre wow standards that was a huge user base playing in game. If anything WOW seems to have set back the development of new and different ideas in MMO's, developers seem to be aspiring to create there own little wow to rack in the cash. I've played wow, in no way is it a bad game but its not my cup of tea. That virtual world feel of SWG is not present in WOW, and many of the users in wow seem very rude and immature(I know every mmo has its group of players such as these but wow has quite a few of them due to the success.) I do agree with you on many of your points however, companies are here to make money and niche games don't generate the income. One last point however, do a search for wow hacks, there soooo many hacker programs out there to give players an unfair advantage, I'm not talking macro's and such I'm talking create items with stats that aren't anywhere within the boundries of the game. This type of thing leads to imbalances in game that can't simply be fixed with a patch, and before you point out the dupe wipes item deletion etc keep in mind that honest players frequently get con'ed into buying these great uber items not knowing anything of this type of practice, then when the dupe wipe/illegal item deletion happens the player is simply out all there hard earned gold. Success on the wow's scale breeds a very shady environment that Blizzard will be combating for the life of the game. I honestly wouldn't even mess with pvp in wow knowing that many players wiill go to any length to win. IF anyone wants to see the extreme of what I'm talking about check out the forums on various sites on a little game called knight online, of course that game is the extreme but it will give you a bit of insight into what is happening in many mmo's.
Thats just my two cents, I completely respect your opinions and agree on many points but SWG was not a failure at least not until NGE..........
I don't know about this "hardcore" thing.
When the game first started, it was the most casual friendly game I have seen. It was easy to level, and easy to contribute right from the first day.
Did it develop into a hardcore game? It did, and the CU only cemented the hardcore image. With levels, damage, and scaling metrics, it was all about the level, and grinding, because there was no way for anyone with basic skills to contribute. Even armor became level dependent.
NGE is just hardcore by design. Its all about pwnage and being ub0r, because there is no important things anyone of a lower level in their iconic professions can really do.
__________________________
"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
In what way was SWG hardcore ?
- Maxing a skill was easy
- no UbeR-Loot
- there wasn´t anything you NEEDED to do in order to be a successful player, no specific profession you had to choose, no camping, no whatever, atleast not until they issued these idiotic holocrons.
- infact, back then the only crowd that was shouting was the hardcore crowd, they used to say the "Game is too easy, I can´t be better than everyone, make me a jedi".
-Which, eventually, they did.
SWG was the first major publication that managed to recapture the feeling of late-90s UO. MMORPG with the "RPG" part wholly deserving. It was full of bugs but nobody seemed to care all that much, not even SOE
I subscribed the day it hit the shelves and I played straight through to the CU. Then I quit and restarted 2 months before NGE. Now I quit forever, because "game experience may change during gameplay" was driven to an extreme by SOE. Infact, everybody quit. ...Except the hardcore-players, that is.
And concerning the article: Well written, but really, this (and more) had all been already said 12 hours after the NGE announcement.
- to all you WHINERS! - BUILD A BRIDGE AND GET OVER IT! - you know
what? there was a REAL IMPROVEMENT that those changes made to SWG it
got RID of the majority of you WHINERS! from the game. Did you guys
ever stop to think that maybe thats what SOE WANTED? - they realised
THEIR game needed changes to draw more people to it and certain 'negative
elements' currently playing the game were turning off new players with
their rhetoric?.
SOE dont have to 'veto' their intentions to the likes of you guys and
despite a previous post I noted I MOST CERTAINLY am not swayed by the
opinions of others least of all you WHINERS! on my choice of purchases
or game selection. SOE didnt ASK you guys to subscribe to THEIR game
and NO-ONE said you had to keep subscribing when its direction took a
path you didn't like - TOUGH! - vote with your feet and leave - which
most of you did (GOOD ONYA) - just dont try to sway the choices or opinions of the
'unjaded' MAJORITY who should at least try the game as it stands TODAY
- it MAY be what THEY like or perhaps not buts its THEIR choice
- NOT YOURS..
ps. If you WHINERS! feel compelled to reply to this post PLEASE dont
put too much effort into it - I won't be returning this thread to fully
enjoy them.
<ding ding> <round 1>
I played SWG from launch for a little under 3 years. I tried to have the fun we all had in the beginning(pre-CU) and the game just became more and more unbareable for me. With most of the vets quitting and the one's left online less and less, harder missions became impossible tasks on deserted servers. After accepting the fact that the true idea of SWG had become lost in the neverending search to make the game a clone, I too added my signature to the long line of cancelled subscriptions.
Seeing websites like this, that agree SOE/LA went about this all wrong, makes us proud that some still believe in community ethics and not corporate "get rich quick" schemes. Your article was dead on and I haven't read an article about this subject that can be compared to how well you did yours.
----
Very well written article.
SWG was my first MMO love and i played it for just over a year. I had 2 accounts and has just convinced my gf to start playing when the NGE hit. I still have her unused copy of swg total experiance sitting under a pile of disks on my desk.
the biggest problem i think was SOE, they got way to greedy when it came to SWG. they were hoping to cash in on star wars fans passion for Mr Lucas' wonderous story but what they fail to realise is that due to the depth and scope of star wars content created outside of the films they would have to adhere to the storyline, cannon and expanded universe, in order to keep people happy. The first big mistake was including jedi in a period of time where there should be none. endless grinding and lack of content was the second mistake and the NGE put the final nail in the coffin.
The really really sad thing is in a market that is currently over saturated by fantasy MMO's and bad sci-fi MMO's a game like SWG is very badly needed and should a company with a good reputation such as bioware create a new SWG based in the KOTOR time line or indeed even the post ROTJ time line I have no doubt that the game would be a true WoW beater.
RIP SWG. WoW is now my home
And Whinners I Never Complained About The Game Till The NGE. I Started Playing 1 1/2 Months After Launch
If SOE Did Not Go And Screw Up SWG Me My Brother And My Dad Would All Be Playing Still lol.
Even If They Would Some How Change It Back To Normal Im Willing to Be Most Would Come Back :P
Having read this review makes me feel a little better knowing there are
others out there in the gaming industry who have a clue...
I
played Star Wars Galaxies religiously for two and a half years. At one
point we had a 125 member guild, active in meetings and hunts once a
week and always willing to help one another. We were one of the longest
running Jedi protectorate guilds on our server and I enjoyed
playing on several others as well, until Sony started making changes for the "betterment of the gaming experience". The Combat Upgrade (lovingly referred to as the Combat Unbalance") saw the dwindling of players and, in the end, the decision to close the guild's doors forever. In the time that I revelled in SWG, I made not only a great
many friends but a lot of them I call family now as we all know each
other real life. I view it as the only reward to having played the
game...
For the veterans it was a second home. It was the first
MMORPG I had ever played, being a veteran of LARP and tabletop prior.
Sony's systematic destruction of the game still makes my stomach flip.
We had joked once of reinstalling the game to our computers just to see
how much damage had been done; the thought of actually doing it made me
physically nauscious and we gave up the idea. The only time we think of SWG is with remorse over "the
loss of a fantastic game destroyed by a meddlesome deaf/blind
caretaker". All three of us, and all of our friends, actively play other games now and gladly invest our money in them, but none could compare in our opinion to SWG in its glory days, previous to the Sony/LucasArts debaucle. We don't miss it the way it is now.
Thank you Kevin for posting your review. Doubt
anyone at Sony will pay any attention to it, they didn't listen to us
in-game, but your voice made me feel a little better. Thanks.
The Renaissance Chameleon
Renmeleon.com
Well i wasn't exactly a veteran of SWG but it was my favorite MMO i've ever played. I've mostly played Guild Wars, FFXI, Diablo/D2, CoH/CoV, and WoW. I also briefly tried Lineage 2 and DAOC but did'nt "spark" with them. I stopped playing MMO's for a while right before the Combat Uprgade (CU) came out. I liked SWG for basically 2 reasons. #1) it was the most social game ive ever played and #2) it wasnt the classic level system, it was skills/mix instead. This is what made it different and better. I liked having options to make a character and eventually work my way up to Jedi. About a week ago i decided to get back on to swg not knowing about the CU/NGE and i was shocked. I couldn't even move there was so much lag and the game was completely ruined.
I think the came bring most of the vets back as n most of the players that quit still periodically check for swg updates cuz im assumming we all love star wars universe. they should take the came back to pre-CU and work from there or scrap it and make SWG 2 based off pre-CU, then allow a free open beta for a while. Make players love it again. I heard somehwhere there is an swg 2 coming out in 08' not sure if its true but i would try it just cuz of one plain fact, i want a different mmo and i love star wars p.s. (the only game i would quit it for would be if they made a Mortal Kombat mmo <hehe i love that more>)
But seriously SOE just needs to admit that they f*** the game up and reverse it, if they admit they were wrong, then they would get players back
...currently playing wow.....level 40 horde......have to take periodic breaks because of boredom......
All so true, and I agree completely. Unfortunately for me I was one of the veterans Kevin mentions, who had been playing since a little after the release and up until the WOW closed beta began. It is true that the game had many bugs and holes all over, but at least in the early stages these were more or less being taken care of and devs listened even to silly little things the players wanted, like for example, a better way to move your furniture around the place. However, at some point, a grand line of new content kept comming in, and around and about the Corellian Corvette time i had seen two of my cities become ghost towns and me and a couple of other friends the remnants of those by then. And then the class 'revamps' started. I was one of the most sucessful entertainers on Infinity, I made a living of it and suddenly I was obsolete. The characters entire life was being an entertainer, and now I was more or less forced to abandon a character that I had been playing for more than a year, which is far more than most subscribers can claim. I was not a happy bunny I can tell you that. And so when the WOW open beta began I left. Why stay and pay a game that does not respect you as a payer and player?
But the thing is that SWG IS the best world there is with so many of its advantages being so major that they overwhelm every other mmorpg out there. Even on WOW, we were reminiscing of the 'good old days' and grieving the need to be in WOW and not in SWG. Needless to say, I left WOW a great deal sooner than SWG because of the boredom of the 'long distance runner'. And now the SWG emulator is about to get out. I hope it goes well because I am going to be stuck on it like glue! But a part of me still wants the 'real' Galaxies back. And I know I'm not the only one. Miss it? You're not alone. Tell THAT to SOE...
I feel for you, watching my friends class of Creature handler be destroyed was truly sad. Entertainer and crafter basically met the same end and I remember seeing dancers and crafters in our guild trying to adjust to a combat class and sayin this just isn't for me before leaving. I'm not sure SOE even knows that what the audience wants matters, they take that I know whats best attiutude toward their customers base as if we were a bunch of know nothing children, guess what SOE we did know something and the results of this whole fiasco shows that, well said with your post, and take solace in the fact that I bet we will have a true SWG, SOE free MMO within a couple years. I've looked at the emulater but I just don't feel like starting over from scratch but doesn't me I won't at least check it out.
Peace
Trey
Ever hopeful
Lil
Some say that WoW set some kind of standard just because it had a huge amount of players. I say SWG was the one setting a standard because of its uniqueness in gamestyle. To me, the true test for WoW will be in how long it can keep the players it has. I think if SWG had not messed up the game, it could have kept veterans for many years. Is it better in an mmo to have huge amounts of players for a short amount of time, or have players for a huge amount of time? I'm not an expert in the financial end of mmos so I don't know although I guess I can speculate based on a lack of taking care of the customers one has in order to grab new ones.
Also people say SWG was geared for the "hardcore" player. I'm not sure what people mean by "hardcore" but, if they mean someone who is an expert at playing games, I got into SWG rather easily, it pointed me in the direction to go, I could find missions close to a city and did not have very far to go when I cloned to get back to my missions, the learning curve for SWG in the pre-CU days was not that big and what questions I had, I found more experienced players willing to help me out. If by "hardcore" people mean someone who plays games a lot and can play/is will to play for long amounts of time versus the person who wants to play for 15-20 minute segments, then WoW is more "hardcore" than what SWG was...in SWG, one could get on and grab a mission or 2 close to town if the person played a combat prof and be done rather quickly or one could entertain/heal/craft within that 15-20 minutes...server cities usually had everything you needed fairly close by or you could find a player city that was well set up. In WoW, it is quest based and even doing one quest may take you more than the 15-20 minutes esp. if that quest takes place in instances or requires getting a group together to be successful (killing elites).
Thank you for pointing this out, hopefully other devs. (developers for those who doent use acronyms) don't follow the same path as SOE did. I played for close to 3 years and the NGE destroyed my playing experience. Not only did the NGE destroy the comabat aspect, but it also destroy a major part of the story line. According to various sources the game is supposed to take place between Episodes 4 and 5. This is all fine and dandy but the devs. allowed thousands of people to become jedi instantly, where in the move there was Obi-wan, Luke and Yoda, ther could have possibly been a few jedi hiding but 300 jedi werent walking around Bestine on Tat. I was a master bounty hunter, I was of course extremely disappointed when the devs. announced that bounty hunters would no longer be able to hunt players because apparently a few 10 year olds whined when their jedi got killed. And of course the think that made me quit like so many other was the click and shoot aspect, I ordered a MMORPG and got a FPSORPG. Thanks for listening to me squabble and for pointing out SOE's flaw
Reddrako
This game I truly anticipated and played from the moment I could get my hands on it, with a broad range of proffessions, mild PvP for those who wanted it and a general this is Star Wars feeling. I always remember feeling it was more Pokemon than Star Wars as everyone pulling out Rancors from their pockets and that mild alteration where needed. Over time a community of players developed and a feeling of belonging in game that to date has never been matched. I looked forward to playing online with friends. Then came the jedi (yep I grinded one), and I had a bad feeling in my gut.... grind proffessions to get Jedi - a series of quests I felt at the time would be more in tune with the Star Wars I knew. Then came CU ..... what can I say madness ... the NGE ..... Subscription cancelled.
I do look in from time to time to see if the game has improved. See if the forums are favourable.
I am a Star Wars Fan and I wanted a Star Wars MMORPG I wanted to play in the Star Wars universe.
Lets hope they make another one without SOE and with a company that listen to the fans in general.
I don't know what it's going to take to get SOE to wake up. Seriously.
Ive played SWG from the start, even assisted in Beta, after three months i gave up, with all the bugs and down time, i wanted to focus els where while they cleaned up there act (so much potential), reading the blergs, comments and all the bells and whistles they added,... three years later i finaly get the urge to reload the game, activate the account and and take a look see, Holy Crap!, its been watered down, some bugs still in place, less things to do, more player houses then players ( met 15 players of the 20 active accounts) a whole Galexie of no direction.
Always been a Star Wars fan, so im gonna have a ritual walk to the trash can and toss this game out, so as not to make the mistake of waisting another 13 bucks.
Where to begin
I played the right from release, watched as they reneged on several pre-launch promises, decided to have their clients pay for an expansion that was promised game content in the original game, bugs, lag and of course the wonderful customer service.
After about 4-5 months I gave up on the game. I have always been a star wars fan and have popped in from time to time to check the reviews, but it was always the same. I can honestly say I have never felt the urge to reload this game and nothing I have seen has encouraged me to do so up to now, even coming onto their third year.
This game left such a bad taste in my mouth, I have to say it is the worst MMORPG experience I have ever had.
thewrestlinggame
What I think WoW showed the mmo industry is that to have real succes you must release a finished bugfree game and before you tamper with the game again you make 100% sure your expansion is also finished and bugfree. Its simple, really.
What I've seen in SWG is constant bugridden changes and no focus on fixing old bugs, making the game very annoying to play no matter how good the gameplay and content has been.
Btw, Mr. Smedley lost all credibilty with his ridiculous comments in SWG forums where he constantly ran away from the existing game and promised a grand future with new updates and expansions. Mr. Smedley is the main cause for the SWG disaster and also cost SoE a lot of potential customers for other SoE games. Time for Sony to wake up and sack this incompetent person.
I played SWG not long after it came out on a US server(i live in uk) as soon as the first eurpepean server was up i was there. first minute. it was great to be in a game you enjoyed playing so much from the scratch. I really loved all the crafting proffesions and the houses. the quests where great and as many have said in this thread it felt like a real living world. I played it for many months untill the CU and then the dreaded NGE came. they came was totalled changed, it just wanst the same, i left as it just wasnt the same. I have been back since, just to see if there is any improvement(there isnt).
Its sad to see a game i so enjoyed change so much. I know there is many like me that keep praying and hoping the SOE will just go back to the original design, but i dont think that will ever happen, they had a real good game there one that would of kept growing and growing in subscriptions, but now its dead.
RIP SWG