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What if......
jinxit
Member UncommonPosts: 854
Hi guys n gals,
For a long time now i've heard people raving on about the NGE ( including me) and how bad it is and how sony destroyed one of the top 5 games listed in mmorpg. ( yes kiddys for a very long time SWG pre-cu/cu dominated the charts until SWG NGE hit heh )
So i was just wondering what if...the NGE did hit only it left out the combat system rehash, left the profs alone but brought in the legacy quests, proffesion quests ( including jedi quests but integrated with the village, only unlockable) and made restus a pvp zone to name but a few.
Would you have stayed?
Would you have found your starwars experience more star warsy?
Would you still to this day be giving sony your hard earned cash?
I ask this because i personally never thought the content that was added with the NGE wasn't a bad thing, just the combat system and the completely ridiculous "iconic" professions. I have heard a lot of people say that the nge as a whole should never have happened , a lot of people even go a little overboard sometimes in expressing there view on the subject heh, anyway i never got up the guts to actually put this view of mine to the pre nge masses because i thought i'd get royally flammed :-P
So my reply to my own post would be yes, i would have stayed
Comments
You mean, if SOE had added content as requested , instead of creating a new game behind our backs?
A very strong "probably."
But let's not forget preCU had it's problems, too. So a content push alone would not have been enough to keep the game viable.
If the idiots had not destroyed the existing combat system (which was not as good as the original system in concept, putting aside execution for now), and had not destroyed the skill system, the NGE would have actually BEEN "enhancements", instead of a blatant attempt to turn SWG into World of Star Wars, I would have stayed and most of my guild would have stayed.
No one objected to the new "n00bie island" space station...it was an is a great way to get yourself introduced to the game and learn some basic skills, allbeit not nearly all of them. No one objected to linear content added with the NGE, except that it was frequently broken, which is typical shoddy SWG dev work. Hell, there are quests from the original launch that are still in game that do not work, apparently completely forgotten by the dev team. Mainly because the dev team has been replaced completely two or three times over the period of the game's life.
But, alas, the ambulatory sack of rancor poodoo that is Smedley instead chose to deliver a huge "frack you!" to his existing customers and drive them off in the hope that some of Blizzard's customers would like WoW with a Star Wars skin...but of course, it was so incompetently executed that there was no chance that would happen, even if the IP were that compelling.
The sad fact is, if it wasn't for the IP, SWG would have folded two years ago. The game was (and is) that lame compared to WoW, and compared to what it was before.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
"Questing" is not for me, but rather new places to explore.
Give me a new planet (and no I don't mean something like Kash which I found too linear) with a vast and open environment to explore - preferably with no vehichles allowed so people had to explore the old fashion way.
Is this the what if machine?
Seriously. Stop beating the dead horse..
Yeah, Kashyyyk was terrible.
A planet without vehicles...what a concept! It would have brought back the feel of the game at launch, which is when it was really fun. Heck, even with mounts, moving along at burst run for a toon speed, it would have been fun.
Vehicles really did alter the feel of the game something fierce. Travelling from Anchorhead or Bestine to Wayfar was transformed from something epic in nature to something trivial in nature. Dealing with aggro mobs as you moved along evoked the feeling of how DANGEROUS the Jundland Wastes could be, as Ben Kenobi told Luke in Ep IV.
But then, I was one of those stodgy "Uncle Owen" type explorers, and the money from my three accounts was obviously no good to Smed, "Reading" girl, and the rest of the morons in Austin.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Yeah, Kashyyyk was terrible.
A planet without vehicles...what a concept! It would have brought back the feel of the game at launch, which is when it was really fun. Heck, even with mounts, moving along at burst run for a toon speed, it would have been fun.
Vehicles really did alter the feel of the game something fierce. Travelling from Anchorhead or Bestine to Wayfar was transformed from something epic in nature to something trivial in nature. Dealing with aggro mobs as you moved along evoked the feeling of how DANGEROUS the Jundland Wastes could be, as Ben Kenobi told Luke in Ep IV.
But then, I was one of those stodgy "Uncle Owen" type explorers, and the money from my three accounts was obviously no good to Smed, "Reading" girl, and the rest of the morons in Austin.
/cheers to Uncle Owen!
: )
I think the game would still be doing incredibly well if they hadn't:
Changed the classes
Made Jedi from lvl 1
Altered the entire UI to "simple"
Raised the level cap (this caused way too many balance issues with the gear which is still unbalanced, quested and looted weapons are 3x better than crafted weapons still!!!)
Just adding the new Space Station and Restuss and Legacy quests, all that would have been greatly welcomed. It was destroying the core of the game and making all the other planets empty which is what destroyed it. Now they're trying to add stuff back to the game, but in a crappier version than it was pre-NGE.
Currently Playing: Tabula Rasa
Gaming History: EQ, EQ2, SWG, EVE, Anarchy Online, CoX, GW, SRO, Rakion, Ryzom, WoW, Rappelz, Shadowbane, 9Dragons, DAoC, Dungeon Runners, DnD Online, Space Cowboy, LotRO, Vanguard, Fury, Hellgate
Wanting to Play: WAR, TCoS, Darkfall, Aion
Hell, I think the game would be doing much better without levels.
New professions would have been nice for pre-CU too.
The CU imposed overt levels, and in doing so was a major contribution to destroying the original "feel" of SWG as a virtual world you could immerse yourself in. You had the ability to /consider a targeted mob, which would give you a good idea of how you'd fare in combat with the mob. The /consider system was not perfect by any means (it failed to take into account the damage absorbing ablities of both the mob and the player, only looking at damage dealing) but it worked well enough. The only players who could see the levels of mobs were master scouts, but /consider worked well enough that overt levels were not needed, and the added bonus that you could see exactly how grouping and switching weapons would change the relative dangerousness of mobs was terrific.
The devs admitted that the CU was an effort to dumb down the game to make "balancing" easier for them. An admission that they didn't have the intellects to deal with Koster's design. Probably also an admission that on the technical side the SWG team didn't bother to document what the heck they were doing, so that when the devs who worked on the system in beta left, the knowledge of what they did went with them, that lead directly to the bugginess seen in the game where you change something here...and something way over there breaks.
The project management of SWG always seemed to be woefully inadequate.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
The quests would have been content that I may or may not have elected to pursue. I'm fine with that. It was forcing me to lose my characters and accept an alteration of the game I (and 225K+ others) didn't want that made me mad.
And there was NOTHING in the CU system that would have precluded them from doing the legacy and other quest series.
Hell, I think the game would be doing much better without levels.
New professions would have been nice for pre-CU too.
Yep! The CU, which introduced the level system, is what really destroyed SWG! The NGE was just the deathblow to the game!
The list of if's that anyone could come up with is infinite when it concerns this game. There are so many things that should have been done better and differently from the time this game was designed never mind the NGE mess.
SWG started off as a mess of good ideas that were implemented poorly. The game never had any direction for the future and that became more and more clear as time went on. Jumping from one upgrade to the next.
The way Jedi was handled was a joke. More lack of planing. SOE / LA always having to react to situations instead of having the foresight to plan for them in advance. How anyone at LA / SOE did not know that a very large percentage of their player base wanted to be Jedi amazes me. This whole Jedi situation should have been thought out from the time of development instead we got the hologrind and then the village and now they just give it away. Not to mention that they dont even fit in to the time line. Lack of planning shines through yet again.
This game was never anything more than LA milking the SW fans yet again and giving nothing back for their devotion. If LA really gave a shit SWG would have never released in the state it was. People jump all over how VG launched and yet seem to forget that SWG was just as much of a mess. Could you imagine how people would bash SWG if it was released like that today.
The only ifs that I think matter are...
What if LA gave a shit and
What if SOE had actually hired people that knew how to code the game.
If those ifs had happened none of us would be here today. We would all be playing a quality MMO named SWG.
Pre -CU SWG was more of a player driven MMO. The players found great things to do by themselves or joining up in even greater communitys. There was always so many things to do. I remembered when crafters hired you to go and hunt special mobs, or to space mining. Or you got a /tell that there was a major PvP attack in Bespine.
That was the thing that was 100% killed of with the NGE. Now you have to follow the waypoint around the game, doing exactly as it want you to do.
If we got the player freedom back, maybe i would go back to SWG.
For that matter, there was nothing in the preCU game that prevented the Legacy Quest series from being added.
The only thing preventing it was the inattention of the developers to their own virtual world, that to this day obviously was designed for a variety of linear quest possiblities that have never been fullfilled. I mean, we didn't get any backstory, at all, on Rogue CorSec Island, present in the game since launch, until the second phase of the Legacy series came along in late 2006.
One of the nifty things for me about WoW is that it's possible to level your toon in multiple ways with their quest systems. On the Alliance side, you can do it all out of elf-land, or you can start out in the snow in Dun Morogh, or you can do it in the sylvan glades of the Elwynn. With BC another way to do your early grinding totally different in appearance is offered in Exodar. SWG NGE though has one way, and one way only, to quest your way up. For both factions! So even here, the SWG devs do not get WoW as much as they try to copy it.
Which is pretty much par for the course, as even the expertise system is pretty pathetic stacked up against WoW's skill system, both in gameplay and graphics terms.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
After experiencing the deep, complex skill system of EVE, the Pre-CU skills system looks like NGE expertise in comparison
I dream of a SWG using the EVE engine with a ground combat game with a similar skill system..
Crafting killed SWG. Without exceptional crafters there wouldn't have been the problem with Doctor Buffs and Armor resists which led to the CU which led to the NGE.
At least that's what SOE would have you believe. Their inability to balance the game, or put in meangingful PvP meant the Hologrind then later the village grind was what most of the player base was playing for on face value.
But hey, they never could get dungeons right, or the Jedi/Bounty Hunter balance right, or stick with the decay idea for even epic loot, or anything in the end.
All I have to say is this! If they had just added new content, new open planets like the original ones, new proffs, more craftable Stuff and fixed the bugs and broken content that was already there I'd still be playing! hell I could even have waited this long for some of the older bugs to get fixed if they had just left the game in Pre-CU. The NGE sucks but I gutted it out for like 8 or 9 moths, What really drove me away was the fact that they nerfed some class with every new chapter/publish and the final straw was when they nerfed the spy cloak ability and put a timer on the only thing that made that class fun to play and viable in combat.
I'm not much of a pilot, but perhaps our only hope of seeing a really good sci-fi MMO is for EVE to expand into being a ground/planet based game as well?
I'm not much of a pilot, but perhaps our only hope of seeing a really good sci-fi MMO is for EVE to expand into being a ground/planet based game as well?
This is coming starting this year. First they will have station interiors, player corp offices, player owned businesses (such as bars). They have mentioned also planet colonization as a future application of the Abulation system.
Any system that not required a change of any of my chars skills/professions AND their use and not implied any change in use and behavior of the items in my ownership i would welcome.
If the game dind change ( pre-CU ) and they fix it and add new content i would not be reding the forum, i would be playing SWG .... now i just wish some company make an SandBox as it was the golden SWG ( pre-CU ), even an elf orc sandbox game i would play it, im tired to see many WoW games on the market ....
Tbh though there were so many things to do with all the skill boxes and profession options, I didn't really need more "travel to wp and shoot 30 dudes" quests added.
I liked hunting, playing in the cantina band, and taking on the Empire, PVE and PVP. Fun times.
I did, however, like some of the content added in the Trials of ObiWan expansion, when/if it worked. Some of those quests were actually creative and interesting. I didn't like how the NGE screwed up the dynamics of that new content and made a lot of the cool rewards totally useless though; that was insane. Give us new and interesting content, and then break it or make it useless. Nice move.
I would have looked for another thread because this one is played out.....just saying....
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
To the OP, I think it's an interesting question. I think it seeks to seperate people's feelings about newer content versus their feelings about changes to core game mechanics.
The newer content, even more WoW like questing, isn't a problem for me. I'd play with or without it. It was the changes to the core game, and how they were implemented that lead me to leave a bad situation.
Questing could have been added without breaking things or taking anything away from the players, and without misleading them.
Add quests, fix bugs, why not?
Still, if SOE had stuck with the CU and it wasn't a bad system it just needed some more work here and there. And if SOE had put more time into working on Classes that should have been worked on, and I'm looking right at Smuggler. Along with starting to work with the canon and the timeline that was already there, and putting a little more 'Star Wars' into a Star Wars game. Things would have been better off...
If they really wanted to just ditch the whole 'Skill Based' system, I think they would have been better off going with a system more like Final Fantasy 11. Namely have the 7 'core' Classes to start out with, and around level 20 allow the Player to pick a Combat Class, along with a 'Weapon' Class. Crafting as much as I hate to say it should have been anyone could pick one main crafting class... Just my views on the whole thing...
Really over all, my vote was for the CU system... It was 'dumbed down' so anyone could really understand it that's better for the long term. Fixing it and getting content in, both Solo and Group would have been fine by me as well. Keeping up with both Ground and Space should have been done as well. I still see ToOW a slap in the face to the Pilots. Doing a 'better' revamp of the GCW system wouldn't have hurt as well... And lastly lowing the level cap down to 60 or 70 would have been better too... Dare I say but I think the whole 1 to 80 and later on 1 to 90 grind just over welmed some.