Soe had something amazing. Yeah the game had bugs but, most of them were not game breaking if you did not ait there and whine about the few little broken things. I have played a lot of mmo's since galaxies and they all have bugs and they all have there issues but, the ones that survive look to the player base for answers.
That was Sony's greatest FUBAR ignoreing the player base. I knew a lot of people I had so many people I dealt with regualrly pre-cu that I had filled friends list on 4 charactors in an attempt to keep track of them all, each and everyday those list were showing ALL people on ALL 4 friends list online. then rumurs of the cu emerged, The combat upgrade that was billed as a fix all.
For months I talked to people, read forums, talked to people in game tring to get all the info I could and although Sony just kept saying it was what the players wanted I was unable to find a single person that wanted the CU, The forums were endless pages of objections to the CU, yet Sony kept insisting that the players wanted this. I never did find a post that said anything about these were the things wanted, even the most vocal whiners were suddenly defending the game and saing they did not want this, then the CU was pushed andyway despite the amazingly huge number of players that were opposed to it. with in a week or 2 my friends list all went dark and stayed that way, the remaining friends still logging in were easily sorted into one friends list on one toon with room to spare.
These days it is hard to find people who were actually there pre-cu most that claim they were are actually confusing the NGE with the CU I know this because they have no clue as to what the Holo grind was, they have no idea of what the massive base bust battles were, there idea of massive base bust is maybe 20-40 people in total, they say things like "pre-cu I pwned in restuss" even though restuss as a pvp zone pre-cu did not exsist.
Although I do agree with a earlier poster that most people reacted a bit to harshly after the CU the shear number of people that left speaks volumes as to the lvl of the mistake SOE made by ignoreing there player base.
All the game needed pre-cu was tuning and some balanceing issues and the rest of it would have sorted it self out, not a complete rewrite and definatly not a complete rewrite in objection to the majority of the player base.
No other game has the lvl of detailing in house decorateing or the ability to extensivly deversify your charactor not any where near pre-cu lvls. No other game has as good of a space flight sim. Was it perfect ? no. but, then I have found no game that is perfect and I doubt I ever will.
Actually restus did exist pre-nge and pre-cu. At that time it was a full city with a functioning space port. In fact On intrepid server there was a small town just outside restus that housed a community of crafters. Now I do agree that restuss was not the pvp thing it is now, and I never understood why they felt the need to destroy the city other than nobody ever went there unless you were looking for a certain specific weapons maker.
I remember the holo grind, and I remember the old bufs. One would go to coronet in the space port and get mind buffed by an entertainer, get doctor buffed by a doctor, then head out to my favorite grind spot the Tuscan bunker. Not many folks came over there, At that time it was a great spot to farm force crystals. I made a ton of cash sell them, and once in a while get a nice power crystall out of there. After the cu well with the levels that stopped, because they nerfed the tuscan bunker, and the tuscan fort. After the cu I could walk into the Tuscan fort unbuffed and clear the area and take out the executioner by myself.
Then the NGE hit, by that time I had 1 holo grind jedi, and droid smith one one account, one village jedi/bh on the other account and the wife got cheated out of her jedi title by 100k worth of village points. I watched as all my sliced lightning cannons turn to junk, my anti decay cut turned into a repec kit. I can go on and on.
I think so many folks now days have no clue how good the game was as. Yes it was full of bugs what game is not. But the cu nerfed things down, the nge just killed them.
only thing i can say is FINALY, i played the game from pre cu till nge and the game became wors with every update they never should off changed it but then again its both there fault, i hope LA doesnt BLEEP up TOR in that way
SWG is a game that should have never released. It was messed up before it was Launched, by Koster and his team. The game was a mess. Do people recall all of the database problems? Corrupted inventories, corrupted characters, daily 4am restarts to prevent database corruption and server crashes... as one later dev explained, the code was millions of lines of uncommented spaghetti, nothing made sense or was found where it was supposed to be. Space... JTL was hardcoded, with no management tools designed for it and until they hired in a wizard tools Dev... hm, I forget his name, but he created everything they're currently using to add content to the game, and made it possible for them to add some content to JTL. But overall, the game was a code nightmare and several devs have complained over the years about it.
On one hand I am sad to see almost a decade of Star Wars gaming come to an end. On the other, I hope that now that SOE no longer has the license and SWG is no longer a factor of competition for a new game, that LA will seek out another competent Dev shop to create another Galactic Civil War MMO. The Old Republic is nothing more than fan fiction and it will never replace gaming in the Galactic Civil War.
God...i hope everyone involved in SWG's (lets let everyone be jedi) and CU and NGE severance package includes a kick in the nuts.
Although, they did get one thing right...the fans were passionate....we all passionatly hated SOE with the burning hatred of a 1000 suns for ruining the game 3 fold.
I feel sorry for all the loyal SWG fans out there, cause I know there were still a good number of players. It's unfortunate they couldn't agree to keep the game running for them. it sucks to see all that time and work die off.
All of us who play any SOE games know fully well we'll be taking it up the butt at some point. SOE likes to screw their loyal subscribers.
Well, no rose colored glasses here though I will acknowledge that I did have great fun in SWG back in the day.
But my enjoyment really had nothing to do with combat, even though I WAS a combatant (smuggler). SWG combat pretty much sucked in all of it's iterations. But it was something to do. *shrug*
What made the game great were the crafting and social systems. In fact, I'm kind of surpirsed that no game since has even tried to mimic those features.
I've never ever seen another game with so much RP inside! What other game can you stroll in to a bar or cantina and have it be a happening place? With those party NPCs you could rent stuff like jukeboxes and andriods to run speeder races. We had some great parties and events. With fireworks too!
So, if you took those systems and layered a WoW clone on top, how would it do?
I might even play it.
Anyway, that's what I miss most. If they came out with a better game built around systems like that, I'd forget about SWG quickly.
In the end, SWG was a game for RPers in my opinion. The state of the rest of the game mattered, but not as much as a non-RPer would think.
players are starting to revolt over dumbed down gameplay and hack and slash repition
I'm not playing any MMO's right now,, not because i dont have the money but because there isnt any games that are interesting to to play
I thought conan was going to be a good game but it was another failure
and then there was STAR TREK ONLINE the only thing that riveled sony's NGE stupidity has been star trek online dumbing down to a pathetic joke of repetitive non-inspired overinstanced CRAP thats C-R-A-P
when will these game developers quit making games people dont want to play after even as little as a month.
I played star trek beta and it had 4 hour sessions and i couldnt even bear to play an entire session
Im looking for a deep interesting world and a variety of game play where otherplayers cant ruin your fun (casual vs pvp) I want a world that doesnt feel like an oversised arcade game.
in star wars you couldnt even smuggle cargo or passengers unless it was a misson
planet side was another epic failure going some crack warped alternate dimention instead of a star ship troopers direction when will sony ever learn and fire the idiots responcible for loosing so much money.
make a world, not a game, we dont want another game.
I am only surpised how long this abomination of a game lasted, it sucked from day one, and only got worse, and I played it for 4 years, only because of my love of star wars.. I shall dance in the streets on 12/15.. and sony does suck !!!!!
As a product of the 70's I grew up with Star Wars, loved everything about it. When I first saw the ad for the free 14 day trial of SWG I signed up right away. After just a few days I began to tell my friends about it, they too began to play. I can be a Wookie? Cool! I remember "Hue" stepping out of the star port along with his friend "Yubin" in tow walking, yes walking everywhere, exploring the sands of Tat. We ventured across the player city of "Tirion" on the "Lowca" server and was greeted right away by one of the local town folk. He gave us a better gun a house and zoning rights in which to place a house. My own house? Nice!!! We wanted to be a part of this community so we started helping the town when the Imps would attack, gaining the trust of a city full of new friends. I remember barely being a CL 10 or so running out into the fight just to be one-shoted by the opposing faction but we did so faithfully because we had to earn the respect of the guild that we were trying to be apart of. We finally got vehicles and off exploring we went. I remember thinking, "Wow this planet is big, dusty but big" I was truly amazed at the fun I was having with this game. Before SWG I always had the mentality that I would never pay month to month to play any game but SWG changed my mind real quick. After me and Yubin actually discovered that Tat. was not the only planet in the galaxy, well off we go on some new adventures. We finally figured out that we had to choose and profession to better ourselves, mine was Rifleman and Creature Handler (CH being my favorite). I spent hours upon hours searching for that right pet. Most of the time my finger got numb from spamming my Tab button while driving across the planet but my over all experience with CH was GREAT. I remember discovering all the little nuances of the game like how to rid myself of this pesky battle fatigue, oh go to a cantina watch a Dancer, meet people. Off we go again, "Why all these people are standing in line outside all the major star ports?" To get a Dr. buff you say? How convenient, we meet more people. Standing in the star port waiting for a shuttle, meet yet more people. After a few weeks we finally get accepted to the guild the guild of the friend we met while walking through the deserts of Tat. One of the friends I might add that we met while interacting in game. O.K. how can we make our toons better? Hmmm we need new armor oh a new weapon would be nice too but where do we find some? Let me see I guess I can ask one of the MANY new guild mates we are now apart of. Oh talk to someone who makes it. TY: ) I guess some food and drink will help us too, O.K. oh what's that you say? They have vendors with just about everything you would ever need to better yourself in battle or to just decorate your house on your downtime on them...nice. Wow I am beginning to discover that there is a lot about this game you can do and a lot about this game that I still don't know about. <wooosh!, crack!, wooosh!> What the hell was that? A Jedi? I have been playing this game for awhile now and that's new, very cool. So I ask the inevitable question, I know you see it coming, "How can I become a Jedi?" Yes I said it. Really? How many professions do you have to Master? Aurilla? Where is that? How come I can't just go there? Really? I have to grind up how much? Holocrons? I can't just push a button and become a Jedi? NO! Well that's O.K, I still want to become one. So off we go on our path in search of the force. Yubin has progressed a lot faster than me on our path to the light side so off a grinding I go, mission terminals and PUG's oh my! And still meeting a lot of new people along the way. Everywhere I go Cantinas are full of people, player cities have citizens in them, people actually use Hospitals, Image Designer tents, City Halls, their house and Guild Halls for more than just a place to drop a vendor. Wow I am progressing nicely on my way to the force, I am excited. What? Jump To Lightspeed? Space, hence the title Star Wars duh. My very own space ship? OMG I can walk around in it too? Upgrade every aspect of it? I can paint it too? What can't you do in this game? Star Destroyers, Corvettes? Fighting Imps in space, cool! Just when I thought it couldn't get better! What's that? CU? What is that? Oh O.K. Combat Upgrade I see sorry this is my first MMORPG I am a newb. What? What is NGE? New Game Enhancements? What? No more Rifleman? No more Creature Handler? Wait, WHAT?! You can push a button and become a Jedi? That doesn't make any sense. O.K. this is not the game I fell in love with, O.K. I do like the colored icons better but other than that <sigh> O.K. I tell myself just give it a chance I say maybe this NGE is going to make it better. At least I have my friends to help me through this, together we can get through this....<looks around> where did everyone go? Maybe my friends list is bugged because nobody is showing up on it. I call my friend using a more conventional means of a telephone. "Oh yeah your doing fine? That's great. Hey I haven't seen you in SWG in awhile you been out of town? No? You cancelled your subscription? Oh I see NGE huh? Not the same game? Oh O.K. I understand. Nope nobody else been on either. Well what you playing now? Oh O.K. I am downloading it now." O.K. so this is my semi-condensed version of my first experience with SWG and after a few attempts among the years to regain that initial feeling I got when I first came out of the Mos Eisley Star port all those years ago, it has never been the same after the bomb of NGE hit. I am not a game developer and quit honestly never follow the blogs unless I am looking for a solution to a problem I am having. I play a game for the sake of the game. I enjoy it for what it is and I dislike it for what it is not. You will never have a game that is EVER going to satisfy the tastes of everyone, sorry but it is not going to happen. I have played SWG off and on since 2003 and two of the most common things I have heard have been:
1) SOE/LA does not listen to their customers.
O.K. well I'm going to have to agree with that one, if they had I don't think NGE would have never taken place.
2) NGE.
Enough said.
This is a genre I LOVE and me and my friend have recently found our way back to SWG, brought 2 or 3 people along for the ride...What? December 15th you say? FOREVER? Why not reduce the amount of servers or make it F2P or create a Pre-NGE/CU server, since that's what it sounds like the majority of actual players want to see anyways. Oh yeah that's right SOE/LA doesn't listen to their customers. Well I hope TOR doesn't suck.
Let us just hope that BioWare/EA learn from SOE's mistakes. Subscriptions will always drop months after a release... no matter how good a game. There is no need to 'throw in the towel' on your game's design...tweak it a bit here and there, but don't just scrap it. If it was good enough to go to production, then roll with it. Add to it with advanced options and such...but do not just scrap it and expect the community to swallow it and buy into it as a new game set in the same world.
I have a lot of great memories from SWG. My real life friends and I did a ton of stuff in this game. But...yes the CU and NGE were the downfall. Most can toss in the 'I told you so' grenades.... but it no longer matters. An ERA has died within the gaming industry.
SWG had so much potential, but was sorely mis-developed and mis-managed. I am a gamer. And, in the end...and this is finally the end of SWG...an endless world of enjoyment, captivation, and immersion was bottled up and tossed into the void.
*plops down and stares at the vacant spot in the cantina where, seemingly just a few moments ago, that entertainer that was dancing to the electronic horns and the flashing strobes is no longer to be found....*
*he begins humming that jazzy music that is now dimming into a faint echo.........*
The thing everyone needs to remember is that the NGE was demanded of SOE by LucasArts.
SOE never really called the shots on SWG. The CU was requested by SOE to solve many problems with the original game. The exodus of the childish players over change paniced LA who insisted on SOE working on what would become the NGE long before giving the CU a chance. One interesting note is that from game shutdown announcement to the shutdown is longer than the CU.
The early NGE was plagued by all the bugs and incomplete implementation of the NGE. It took nearly a year and a half for all of that to be resolved and the NGE to actually have in place what was intended for November 2005.
Mistakes were made during and after that. Most of the lead developers before the current one were way too busy with CYA to actually look at what needed fixing. The decision for many years that PvP would be the end game drove many more players away from SWG.
Another example that the developers regret is how BeastMaster was implemented and the split of Jedi into two professions. Many of the developers feel that the best solution would have been to make all of this based on seperate selectable professions and not through expertise. But it seems that LA would not approve adding new seperate professions.
The thing that all of the SWG haters and SW:TOR fans need to remember is that all of the changes in SWG that they hate were demanded and approved by LucasArts and LucasArts controls all of SW:TOR development just as they did the SWG development. SOE was the top MMORPG development company before the SWG contract and being forced to be the fall guy for the bad decisions that LucasArts made. One can only hope that Bioware does not suffer the same fate.
I did not start the game at the beginning but I did love the fixes in the CU. Some of the NGE was to be expected like Jedi as a starter profession. But much of it was not needed. I did leave for a bit while they fixed the NGE bugs but then returned and found a very enjoyable game. Right now I will be there when the game shuts down.
I feel that LucasArts is making a bad decision, but they have made it clear that they do not want anyone to be confused and sign up for SWG after they have sunk an estimated $150m+ into SW:TOR. From a business development standpoint to recover that investment LucasArts needs the players to have only one choise. The fear that players would start flocking to SWG tells me that both games co-existing is a real possibility and a real fear. I understand the anti-TOR smear campain far more than the anti-SWG one.
Well, I kept hoping, beyond hope, that eventually we would be going back to Pre-Cu, but if nothing else you could have atleast made SWG Free To Play. I still have characters I don't want to give up. If I can't have Pre-Cu atleast I could play them on FTP. That would have been something. Why not atleast TRY FTP before completely dumping it. Maybe listen one time to your players? This really just makes me sick. The one game with soooo much potential--gone. Nice.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Now can the swg vets get over it? Please!
... you mean now that you brought it up?
"If you just step away for a sec you will clearly see all the pot holes in the road, and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
" One Galaxies player even said that he had been marked as a “ringleader” and told that he could be banned permanently from all SOE services. "
I found this line in an article, about the shut down. First thought that went through my mind was . Dam that's no punishment, it's a gift. LMAO ! The next thought was. This game is still running, I thought they shut it down with the NGE. I'm actually surprised it lasted this long. It had potential , problem has always been with SOE. It's the elephant graveyard of games.
Just a quick note on the emulator for anyone thinking of trying it. A) The game is being set up as it was when SWG launched back in 2005. Everything is very different from the current NGE. It is a work in progress so if you are going in expecting a finished game and then complain on the forums when you hit a bug or incomplete content, don't.
This is not a title to hop into expecting all the bells and whistles you have gotten used to. It is a project of the heart run by some very hard working individuals that would like nothing more than to see a fully running Pre-CU SWG server up. Odds are that this will not be a complete reality for another good year.
With that said, if you would like to come help and test out the client and server, work with them with full understanding that the game is currently in basicly an alpha stage of development and that you WILL run into bugs and missing elements... then we would love to have you.
If you are just looking to move to a F2P game and then spam the dev forums with complaints and, "you all shud do this" posts perhaps wait a while until the 1.0 version launches. Thank you.
Comments
Actually restus did exist pre-nge and pre-cu. At that time it was a full city with a functioning space port. In fact On intrepid server there was a small town just outside restus that housed a community of crafters. Now I do agree that restuss was not the pvp thing it is now, and I never understood why they felt the need to destroy the city other than nobody ever went there unless you were looking for a certain specific weapons maker.
I remember the holo grind, and I remember the old bufs. One would go to coronet in the space port and get mind buffed by an entertainer, get doctor buffed by a doctor, then head out to my favorite grind spot the Tuscan bunker. Not many folks came over there, At that time it was a great spot to farm force crystals. I made a ton of cash sell them, and once in a while get a nice power crystall out of there. After the cu well with the levels that stopped, because they nerfed the tuscan bunker, and the tuscan fort. After the cu I could walk into the Tuscan fort unbuffed and clear the area and take out the executioner by myself.
Then the NGE hit, by that time I had 1 holo grind jedi, and droid smith one one account, one village jedi/bh on the other account and the wife got cheated out of her jedi title by 100k worth of village points. I watched as all my sliced lightning cannons turn to junk, my anti decay cut turned into a repec kit. I can go on and on.
I think so many folks now days have no clue how good the game was as. Yes it was full of bugs what game is not. But the cu nerfed things down, the nge just killed them.
only thing i can say is FINALY, i played the game from pre cu till nge and the game became wors with every update they never should off changed it but then again its both there fault, i hope LA doesnt BLEEP up TOR in that way
SWG is a game that should have never released. It was messed up before it was Launched, by Koster and his team. The game was a mess. Do people recall all of the database problems? Corrupted inventories, corrupted characters, daily 4am restarts to prevent database corruption and server crashes... as one later dev explained, the code was millions of lines of uncommented spaghetti, nothing made sense or was found where it was supposed to be. Space... JTL was hardcoded, with no management tools designed for it and until they hired in a wizard tools Dev... hm, I forget his name, but he created everything they're currently using to add content to the game, and made it possible for them to add some content to JTL. But overall, the game was a code nightmare and several devs have complained over the years about it.
On one hand I am sad to see almost a decade of Star Wars gaming come to an end. On the other, I hope that now that SOE no longer has the license and SWG is no longer a factor of competition for a new game, that LA will seek out another competent Dev shop to create another Galactic Civil War MMO. The Old Republic is nothing more than fan fiction and it will never replace gaming in the Galactic Civil War.
That is what I will miss the most.
It was only a matter of time before this happened. SOE killed the game years earlier and it is has just been scraping by since.
The really stupid thing is, they could have saved the game by backing out NGE, but they had to be stubborn idiots and let the game self destruct.
God...i hope everyone involved in SWG's (lets let everyone be jedi) and CU and NGE severance package includes a kick in the nuts.
Although, they did get one thing right...the fans were passionate....we all passionatly hated SOE with the burning hatred of a 1000 suns for ruining the game 3 fold.
This isn't a tragedy...its a mercy killing.
RIP SWG...they....can't hurt you anymore now...
~I am Many~
All of us who play any SOE games know fully well we'll be taking it up the butt at some point. SOE likes to screw their loyal subscribers.
Well, no rose colored glasses here though I will acknowledge that I did have great fun in SWG back in the day.
But my enjoyment really had nothing to do with combat, even though I WAS a combatant (smuggler). SWG combat pretty much sucked in all of it's iterations. But it was something to do. *shrug*
What made the game great were the crafting and social systems. In fact, I'm kind of surpirsed that no game since has even tried to mimic those features.
I've never ever seen another game with so much RP inside! What other game can you stroll in to a bar or cantina and have it be a happening place? With those party NPCs you could rent stuff like jukeboxes and andriods to run speeder races. We had some great parties and events. With fireworks too!
So, if you took those systems and layered a WoW clone on top, how would it do?
I might even play it.
Anyway, that's what I miss most. If they came out with a better game built around systems like that, I'd forget about SWG quickly.
In the end, SWG was a game for RPers in my opinion. The state of the rest of the game mattered, but not as much as a non-RPer would think.
SWG has been on life support since the NGE time.
players are starting to revolt over dumbed down gameplay and hack and slash repition
I'm not playing any MMO's right now,, not because i dont have the money but because there isnt any games that are interesting to to play
I thought conan was going to be a good game but it was another failure
and then there was STAR TREK ONLINE the only thing that riveled sony's NGE stupidity has been star trek online dumbing down to a pathetic joke of repetitive non-inspired overinstanced CRAP thats C-R-A-P
when will these game developers quit making games people dont want to play after even as little as a month.
I played star trek beta and it had 4 hour sessions and i couldnt even bear to play an entire session
Im looking for a deep interesting world and a variety of game play where otherplayers cant ruin your fun (casual vs pvp) I want a world that doesnt feel like an oversised arcade game.
in star wars you couldnt even smuggle cargo or passengers unless it was a misson
planet side was another epic failure going some crack warped alternate dimention instead of a star ship troopers direction when will sony ever learn and fire the idiots responcible for loosing so much money.
make a world, not a game, we dont want another game.
I am only surpised how long this abomination of a game lasted, it sucked from day one, and only got worse, and I played it for 4 years, only because of my love of star wars.. I shall dance in the streets on 12/15.. and sony does suck !!!!!
As a product of the 70's I grew up with Star Wars, loved everything about it. When I first saw the ad for the free 14 day trial of SWG I signed up right away. After just a few days I began to tell my friends about it, they too began to play. I can be a Wookie? Cool! I remember "Hue" stepping out of the star port along with his friend "Yubin" in tow walking, yes walking everywhere, exploring the sands of Tat. We ventured across the player city of "Tirion" on the "Lowca" server and was greeted right away by one of the local town folk. He gave us a better gun a house and zoning rights in which to place a house. My own house? Nice!!! We wanted to be a part of this community so we started helping the town when the Imps would attack, gaining the trust of a city full of new friends. I remember barely being a CL 10 or so running out into the fight just to be one-shoted by the opposing faction but we did so faithfully because we had to earn the respect of the guild that we were trying to be apart of. We finally got vehicles and off exploring we went. I remember thinking, "Wow this planet is big, dusty but big" I was truly amazed at the fun I was having with this game. Before SWG I always had the mentality that I would never pay month to month to play any game but SWG changed my mind real quick. After me and Yubin actually discovered that Tat. was not the only planet in the galaxy, well off we go on some new adventures. We finally figured out that we had to choose and profession to better ourselves, mine was Rifleman and Creature Handler (CH being my favorite). I spent hours upon hours searching for that right pet. Most of the time my finger got numb from spamming my Tab button while driving across the planet but my over all experience with CH was GREAT. I remember discovering all the little nuances of the game like how to rid myself of this pesky battle fatigue, oh go to a cantina watch a Dancer, meet people. Off we go again, "Why all these people are standing in line outside all the major star ports?" To get a Dr. buff you say? How convenient, we meet more people. Standing in the star port waiting for a shuttle, meet yet more people. After a few weeks we finally get accepted to the guild the guild of the friend we met while walking through the deserts of Tat. One of the friends I might add that we met while interacting in game. O.K. how can we make our toons better? Hmmm we need new armor oh a new weapon would be nice too but where do we find some? Let me see I guess I can ask one of the MANY new guild mates we are now apart of. Oh talk to someone who makes it. TY: ) I guess some food and drink will help us too, O.K. oh what's that you say? They have vendors with just about everything you would ever need to better yourself in battle or to just decorate your house on your downtime on them...nice. Wow I am beginning to discover that there is a lot about this game you can do and a lot about this game that I still don't know about. <wooosh!, crack!, wooosh!> What the hell was that? A Jedi? I have been playing this game for awhile now and that's new, very cool. So I ask the inevitable question, I know you see it coming, "How can I become a Jedi?" Yes I said it. Really? How many professions do you have to Master? Aurilla? Where is that? How come I can't just go there? Really? I have to grind up how much? Holocrons? I can't just push a button and become a Jedi? NO! Well that's O.K, I still want to become one. So off we go on our path in search of the force. Yubin has progressed a lot faster than me on our path to the light side so off a grinding I go, mission terminals and PUG's oh my! And still meeting a lot of new people along the way. Everywhere I go Cantinas are full of people, player cities have citizens in them, people actually use Hospitals, Image Designer tents, City Halls, their house and Guild Halls for more than just a place to drop a vendor. Wow I am progressing nicely on my way to the force, I am excited. What? Jump To Lightspeed? Space, hence the title Star Wars duh. My very own space ship? OMG I can walk around in it too? Upgrade every aspect of it? I can paint it too? What can't you do in this game? Star Destroyers, Corvettes? Fighting Imps in space, cool! Just when I thought it couldn't get better! What's that? CU? What is that? Oh O.K. Combat Upgrade I see sorry this is my first MMORPG I am a newb. What? What is NGE? New Game Enhancements? What? No more Rifleman? No more Creature Handler? Wait, WHAT?! You can push a button and become a Jedi? That doesn't make any sense. O.K. this is not the game I fell in love with, O.K. I do like the colored icons better but other than that <sigh> O.K. I tell myself just give it a chance I say maybe this NGE is going to make it better. At least I have my friends to help me through this, together we can get through this....<looks around> where did everyone go? Maybe my friends list is bugged because nobody is showing up on it. I call my friend using a more conventional means of a telephone. "Oh yeah your doing fine? That's great. Hey I haven't seen you in SWG in awhile you been out of town? No? You cancelled your subscription? Oh I see NGE huh? Not the same game? Oh O.K. I understand. Nope nobody else been on either. Well what you playing now? Oh O.K. I am downloading it now." O.K. so this is my semi-condensed version of my first experience with SWG and after a few attempts among the years to regain that initial feeling I got when I first came out of the Mos Eisley Star port all those years ago, it has never been the same after the bomb of NGE hit. I am not a game developer and quit honestly never follow the blogs unless I am looking for a solution to a problem I am having. I play a game for the sake of the game. I enjoy it for what it is and I dislike it for what it is not. You will never have a game that is EVER going to satisfy the tastes of everyone, sorry but it is not going to happen. I have played SWG off and on since 2003 and two of the most common things I have heard have been:
1) SOE/LA does not listen to their customers.
O.K. well I'm going to have to agree with that one, if they had I don't think NGE would have never taken place.
2) NGE.
Enough said.
This is a genre I LOVE and me and my friend have recently found our way back to SWG, brought 2 or 3 people along for the ride...What? December 15th you say? FOREVER? Why not reduce the amount of servers or make it F2P or create a Pre-NGE/CU server, since that's what it sounds like the majority of actual players want to see anyways. Oh yeah that's right SOE/LA doesn't listen to their customers. Well I hope TOR doesn't suck.
They should, except for one glaring flaw: they never, ever learn from their mistakes.
What goes around comes around.
Let us just hope that BioWare/EA learn from SOE's mistakes. Subscriptions will always drop months after a release... no matter how good a game. There is no need to 'throw in the towel' on your game's design...tweak it a bit here and there, but don't just scrap it. If it was good enough to go to production, then roll with it. Add to it with advanced options and such...but do not just scrap it and expect the community to swallow it and buy into it as a new game set in the same world.
I have a lot of great memories from SWG. My real life friends and I did a ton of stuff in this game. But...yes the CU and NGE were the downfall. Most can toss in the 'I told you so' grenades.... but it no longer matters. An ERA has died within the gaming industry.
SWG had so much potential, but was sorely mis-developed and mis-managed. I am a gamer. And, in the end...and this is finally the end of SWG...an endless world of enjoyment, captivation, and immersion was bottled up and tossed into the void.
*plops down and stares at the vacant spot in the cantina where, seemingly just a few moments ago, that entertainer that was dancing to the electronic horns and the flashing strobes is no longer to be found....*
*he begins humming that jazzy music that is now dimming into a faint echo.........*
Rest In Peace, Star Wars Galaxies
The thing everyone needs to remember is that the NGE was demanded of SOE by LucasArts.
SOE never really called the shots on SWG. The CU was requested by SOE to solve many problems with the original game. The exodus of the childish players over change paniced LA who insisted on SOE working on what would become the NGE long before giving the CU a chance. One interesting note is that from game shutdown announcement to the shutdown is longer than the CU.
The early NGE was plagued by all the bugs and incomplete implementation of the NGE. It took nearly a year and a half for all of that to be resolved and the NGE to actually have in place what was intended for November 2005.
Mistakes were made during and after that. Most of the lead developers before the current one were way too busy with CYA to actually look at what needed fixing. The decision for many years that PvP would be the end game drove many more players away from SWG.
Another example that the developers regret is how BeastMaster was implemented and the split of Jedi into two professions. Many of the developers feel that the best solution would have been to make all of this based on seperate selectable professions and not through expertise. But it seems that LA would not approve adding new seperate professions.
The thing that all of the SWG haters and SW:TOR fans need to remember is that all of the changes in SWG that they hate were demanded and approved by LucasArts and LucasArts controls all of SW:TOR development just as they did the SWG development. SOE was the top MMORPG development company before the SWG contract and being forced to be the fall guy for the bad decisions that LucasArts made. One can only hope that Bioware does not suffer the same fate.
I did not start the game at the beginning but I did love the fixes in the CU. Some of the NGE was to be expected like Jedi as a starter profession. But much of it was not needed. I did leave for a bit while they fixed the NGE bugs but then returned and found a very enjoyable game. Right now I will be there when the game shuts down.
I feel that LucasArts is making a bad decision, but they have made it clear that they do not want anyone to be confused and sign up for SWG after they have sunk an estimated $150m+ into SW:TOR. From a business development standpoint to recover that investment LucasArts needs the players to have only one choise. The fear that players would start flocking to SWG tells me that both games co-existing is a real possibility and a real fear. I understand the anti-TOR smear campain far more than the anti-SWG one.
Well, I kept hoping, beyond hope, that eventually we would be going back to Pre-Cu, but if nothing else you could have atleast made SWG Free To Play. I still have characters I don't want to give up. If I can't have Pre-Cu atleast I could play them on FTP. That would have been something. Why not atleast TRY FTP before completely dumping it. Maybe listen one time to your players? This really just makes me sick. The one game with soooo much potential--gone. Nice.
Oh Solo boy, the blasters, the blasters are calling
From YT series to YT series, and down the Kashyyyk side
The summer's gone, and all the servers are closing
'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer's in the meadow
Or when the Old Republic launchs and white with snow
'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow
Oh Solo boy, oh Solo boy, I love you so.
"Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my onl.........................................................................."
... you mean now that you brought it up?
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
" One Galaxies player even said that he had been marked as a “ringleader” and told that he could be banned permanently from all SOE services. "
I found this line in an article, about the shut down. First thought that went through my mind was . Dam that's no punishment, it's a gift. LMAO ! The next thought was. This game is still running, I thought they shut it down with the NGE. I'm actually surprised it lasted this long. It had potential , problem has always been with SOE. It's the elephant graveyard of games.
Well theres still the SWG Emulator, its not too bad.
Just a quick note on the emulator for anyone thinking of trying it. A) The game is being set up as it was when SWG launched back in 2005. Everything is very different from the current NGE.
It is a work in progress so if you are going in expecting a finished game and then complain on the forums when you hit a bug or incomplete content, don't.
This is not a title to hop into expecting all the bells and whistles you have gotten used to. It is a project of the heart run by some very hard working individuals that would like nothing more than to see a fully running Pre-CU SWG server up. Odds are that this will not be a complete reality for another good year.
With that said, if you would like to come help and test out the client and server, work with them with full understanding that the game is currently in basicly an alpha stage of development and that you WILL run into bugs and missing elements... then we would love to have you.
If you are just looking to move to a F2P game and then spam the dev forums with complaints and, "you all shud do this" posts perhaps wait a while until the 1.0 version launches. Thank you.