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Was SWG "too good"
Zaush
Member Posts: 371
Over the past year or so I have talked occasionally with some Dev friends of mine at work who I get tidbits of inside info here and there about SWG and the gaming industry in general. I guess having frat brothers as game devs doesn't suck. One thing that had come up a while back was the notion that SWG was too good of a game concept. What I mean is that SWG was too complex of a game for $15 a month.
This conversation came up while talking about game design. I had come up with an almost pergect Star Wars virtual world sim (IMHO). When I showed my ideas to some of my firends they laughed at me and said it would not work from a business standpoint becuase the cost associated with developing and maintaining my game would far exceed what the playerbase would and could support financially.
I think this was a major issue with SWG. The overhead to maintain the original game was far greater than what SOE and LA had expetced, and greatly reduced their profits. SWG was forced to market 6-9 months early, and with out JTL, becuase of cost overruns and the need for SOE to start turing a profit on SWG. Most of the original devs left the project, or SOE, or were let go not long after launch to cut cost. I think Koster was moved just to get his salary off the SWG books.
This conversation came up while talking about game design. I had come up with an almost pergect Star Wars virtual world sim (IMHO). When I showed my ideas to some of my firends they laughed at me and said it would not work from a business standpoint becuase the cost associated with developing and maintaining my game would far exceed what the playerbase would and could support financially.
I think this was a major issue with SWG. The overhead to maintain the original game was far greater than what SOE and LA had expetced, and greatly reduced their profits. SWG was forced to market 6-9 months early, and with out JTL, becuase of cost overruns and the need for SOE to start turing a profit on SWG. Most of the original devs left the project, or SOE, or were let go not long after launch to cut cost. I think Koster was moved just to get his salary off the SWG books.
Comments
The bottom line is that in late `04 they basically had it all there and working, yes, there were bugs, and yes, it needed more polish and content, but the concept was there, it was working, and it had nearly 300K subs.
It would have been far cheaper to have fixed what was there and add content rather than to revamp it twice in the next year, especially when the revamps have left them with 1/3rd or less the subs they had when that game was live.
Weapons. Plenty, but on the same order as other games.
Bone, Ubese, Composite, Padded, BH, Mando, one or two more, I think. About 8 armor sets in game. Eight. Compare this to any other game out there. Count them here for example.
World. Procedurally generated. Quite small, unpolished (peaks flattening out for example), uninteresting, apart from a few POIs (not the badges).
World. Completely and entirely object oriented. Every single object
used and re-used all over the place. Once again, a very cheap and
useful design. Excludes polish.
Mobs. Quite a few. on par with other games. Some uniques, some retextures.
Player art. Element composition, procedural skeletal deformation. A quite powerful engine, but an engine in the end. Comparable to any other MMO out there.
Content. 2-5 instances, 3-5 different layouts of grind caves. The rest procedurally generated.
Combat balance. Any MMO out there has same number of skills, some even more.
Bottom line is, resource-wise, the game wasn't too expensive to either build or maintain. Not, if you look at specs.
But:
- Overengineered engine. The SWG server (and client) engines are severly overengineered. There's not a sane developer out there (engine developers excluded) that would design an engine that can go from RPG to FPS with a few minor UI changes.
This isn't bad as such, but learning curve on how to maintain and upgrade such an engine is too steep for most. Not due to incompetence, but there's simply so many other things to spend time on.
- Conflicting directions. There's not a single thing that can hamper a project more than internal struggles. The flak from this is seen in every aspect of the game.
- "If you build it, they will come" attitude. It's Star Wars after all. Money for nothing.
- Released in alpha state. Yep, alpha. Official statement.
- Revolving door employment policy
- Non-existant QA practices. In the development years, 2001-2003/4? most of the today's common practices were somewhat unknown. Not in some environments, but simple and accessible QA for every project didn't really start to gain momentum till after that time. Especially in gaming industry.
- Unfamiliar grounds. Most software *coders* know how to operate and design a quake-like FPS. Very few *designers* even today know how to operate and design a sandbox world. SWG went into it's own direction.
And more.
All things considered, SWG didn't do too badly for a direction it took and design it chose.
Curently there are less than 20 devs working on SWG, and less that 10 who are dedicted to SWG alone.
The problem with SWG was the only way they could turn the expected profit was to cut costs, make it cheaper to maintain, they could not raise subscription prices and did a piss poor job of marketing the game from the beginning.
What they should have done, and I think Smed would agree, is just sunset SWG, left alone with minimal staff and no more dev time, and went back to the drawing board.