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Will SOE release another game using the SWG engine?
GreenHell
Member UncommonPosts: 1,323
All they would have to do is reskin some things and change some names. How much in SWG was so deeply star wars that it couldnt be easily changed? Get rid of Jedi and the rest of the classes were pretty generic. I don't remember seeing or reading about chuba's or gnorts in any star wars movie or book.
I started thinking about this when I read that Smed is excited about the future of sandbox gaming. The only thing that excites Smed is money. If SOE did not have to pay for the SW license this would be a minimal amount of work for some easy money.
To SOE's credit they have done a lot of work to SWG since the NGE. It was actually a pretty solid game (with horrible combat). Upgrade the graphics a tad, change the races and you are pretty much off and running.
Just a thought.
Comments
Just curious what do you know what old and current developers of SWG do'nt know?
Minimal amount of work? man they should have hired you..........
Who owns the rights to the engine would be the question....I bet if LA has a piece of it they will not allow crap to happen with it.
LA owns the IP, they have nothing to do with the engine.
I do not know about the creation of the game, but if LA put money into it they probably wanted to own a part of it. If they just rented the IP out then no.
I am not saying fix the entire game and all of the bugs. I am saying simply make a few new skins and rename and remove some items. That is really all you would have to do to get rid of the actual Star Wars content that already exsists in the game.
Even the instances other than Hoth are pretty generic. The only real problems I see would be the TCG would have to be removed or completely redone and if they wanted to update the graphics. They have already shown that reskining, renaming, and removeing is not all that difficult for them.
Even aside from combat, I always thought it was a terrible engine. (not that I ever read about the mechanics of it) but I had the worst pop-up scenery lag and house item lag constantly, despite a very low ping and despite the fact my computer runs AoC etc. with high settings and no lag.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
On the otherhand, this might be just hte opportunity they've wanted to disassociate with the SWG game engine altogether. I mean, would you want something that was built one way, patched, patched again, and. while functional, would probably still require a reasonable amount of effort to bring up to the standards current gamers expect? Or would you use an egine from one of your more recent games and tweak that as needed?
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
jesus i ihope not the swg engine is clunky and never looked good.
I don't see why not. A lil' DX11 graphics update, give a few races changed. The space combat engine alone is pretty nice.
I'd just like it to be an original IP.
Let's see
Re-skin all the mobs
Re-model more than half of the mobs
Re-model all the weapons
Make 8 new races for players to choose
Re-skin all the armors
Make new models to replace the Iconic star wars one
Design a new class to replace the jedi
re-design and re-name all the planets to no longer contain any star wras lore.
Re-do all the quests to not mention Star wars lore...
Sure pice a cake... done in a afternoon.
Just to put things in perspective... It took Blizzard two years to do half of that when they revamped Azeroth.
Also.. This will not bring back pre-cu/NGE gameplay unless they remove combat all together... If somone was hoping that.
This have been a good conversation
The point is SWG is already made and while the engine may be flawed it would be easy to make another game out of what you already have in place. Programming another sandbox from the ground up would be more difficult than just making the changes you would have to make in order to distance it from the SW IP.
SWG wasnt a huge money making game but since this engine is already bought and paid for Im sure if they did use their own IP profit would come a lot faster than building a whole new game.
i dought it when tor releases makes no sence O_O...
.....
While I have not played SWG for a couple of years (actually maybe close to three now), I have to agree that the game play within SWG is not bad. However, two things went south for SWG. Obviously, NGE and that cannot be over emphasised. The other, the game was not really Star Wars. It was already (in the NGE form) a reskinned [name your MMO here]. So to suggested reskinning it and making a different game? Well, it could be done but not easily. Lots of art assets. And frankly, the engine, while updated, is getting a bit old.
My opinion for what it is worth.....let it die.
Let's party like it is 1863!
The SWG engine as you put it is the same one used in Everquest 2. Both games play pretty much the same. If you like SWG then you should love Everquest 2. Just my opinion
I bet SOE lost their collective asses with the Star Wars MMO. SOE has had nothing but bad publicity with it from the begining. With the hacking of the playstation and now their MMO servers, Sony has nothing but egg on their face. Sony has cancelled a bunch of games this year. I see a company that has lost it's way.
Everyone wants to blame SOE for the changes and down fall of Star War Galaxies. I say it is Lucas Arts. I bet that LA was involved in every aspect of the development in SWG and had the final say on what could or couldn't be put in the game. The fickle temperment of Geroge Lucas and other executives, I believe caused the Cu and Nge. In the end LA has found a bigger cash cow with the developers of KOTOR. I'm sure Bioware doesn't want any Star Wars competition from anyone. The first paragraph of my contract as a Bioware executive would have LA pull any license and forbid any new license to be given for at least 10 years. If you were spending over 100 million to license and develop a game would you want any competition?
Are you referring to the graphics engine? That thing dates back to 1998 when they started on development of SWG. Don't you mean the mechanics (sandbox) of the game?
If you take the client from pre-cu, 2005, and run with high graphichs settings in 60hz you have a pretty good engine. And that's with the directX support from early 2005.
I guess my question at the moment is how much of what was is SWG does LA own? Do they own the things that were not in any movies or books just because it was used in a product that used their IP? Im not really sure how that works TBH. If SOE created the Chuba LA then owns it because it was used in their game?
They own everything related to Star Wars... Everything down to the tinest little insect. So yeah they own the chuuba as it is part of Star wars lore.
They most likley also own all the assets of the game such as texture, models and so forth to prevent SoE to profit from the affair later on.
This have been a good conversation
You have to re-populate the entire world.
mm!they could but it all depend on what software they were using back then ,the trouble is smed had a suicidal tendency to use cheapest open sourced software avail back then and it tended to make it hard on everybody afterword.so i highly doubt it would be a good move these days.they would be better served to stop fighting ms and work with ms instead just donnybrook alone would make it worth their while.i am not even talking about all the cool tool ms has that the vast majority of programer ignore because it is called or made by ms.now that c++ 2010 (10 year in the making>is finalised and all their other cool techno i dont see any gain by soe by going the freeware route .they tend to be 10 year too late anyway .unless soe decide to use opencl,opengl,webgl?there might be potential there!who knows but last i checked there arent a lot of opencl,opengl,webgl dev,even ms sidestepped away from webgl because of security issue.and has we know w7 is back on top(yes even more popular then xp!)so if i was soe i would use ie9 compliant,w7 compliant software and ignore the rest(it would still give soe a 80% or so market share that ms own (not to shabby in my view)
If you assume you have the source code for the client, it would be possible to make new tools that delivers data compatible with the client.
I have a private server running at home, where I can take the shuttle to Taanab. It's not THAT hard to get stuff into the engine.
Greenhell is right that it would be significantly easier to rework an existing mmo than it would be to create one from the ground up. SOE could slap a new coat of paint on all the models, rip out the references to Star Wars and rework some things and make it into a new game.
I don't think it would work or that SOE would do it, but SOE seems to be the one company that defies logic when creating and running mmos.
This game only survived, because it was a Star Wars game. The "engine" and all of the game systems forcable bolted on top of it are fucking awful. There are almost no redeeming qualities of the game engine. Trying to revive this game without the Star Wars IP to power it would most likely be one of the dumbest ideas ever attempted.
Starting from scratch would be so much better, because it could attempt to address all of the problems that heavily contributed to the downfall of the game in its current shape. Take the concepts that work and put them in a game engine that can support it.
NGE was ALL SOE, not Lucas Arts.
Smed said it was HIM, not LA, that decided to go ahead with the NGE. For all the bashing you guys do of Lucas Arts, everything I've heard runs contradictory to that. Lucas Arts ok'd the goofiest of crap because SOE wanted to add it - everything from the NGE (SOE's idea) to flying pink Ewoks with purple hearts (SOE's idea).
Just like the NGE, closing the game down is SOEs decission, not Lucas Arts. BioWare doesn't care about a handful of SWG players - heck, 90% of them would have gone to TOR anyway - SWG was a non factor.
And to the topic...
The engine needs to be scrapped. The flaws and bugs with it were numerous. Some of the better ideas from the engine should be duplicated...but not by using the same engine...that would be a mistake.
Are you aware of the wast amount of work, or money, needed to get a new modern engine suitable for an MMO?
I think the OP was going after the idea of reusing stuff, and thus cut the development time and cost.