If you think the creature handler was broken and unbalanced then you don't understand how SWG was balanced. It wasn't balanced in the traditional sense where they make class A = class B = class C. SWG was balanced on idea that players would play all the classes and not just one. Besides a Jedi would destroy a creature handler even with 3 rancors. In order to play the Jedi you had to master all the classes first. This included playing both the weak classes and the strong classes. You couldn't just pick the strong classes, that was out of the question. This is where the balance came in, you had to play all the classes. The classes were only transient points on the way to becoming a Jedi. If all you did was play one class in SWG then you were doing it wrong.
Personally the class I am most nostalgic for is entertainers. I liked it because it played like no other class in any other MMO. Entertainers didn't even have combat moves. All they did is buff and restore the vitality of other classes and had the ability to own and operate inns and taverns. How do you balance a class that doesn't fight at all? You can't not in the traditional sense. But still they were part of the game and you had to make one and master it to become a Jedi. Everyone had to go through the weak points. This is what made SWG genuinely hard and complex in ways that no other MMO has been able to hold a candle too.
The original balance was only changed because whiny care bears couldn't figure out how to play the game and then upper management forced Ralph Koster's hand. I am here to say screw you care bears you ruined the best MMO ever made.
How long did it take you to switch classes? You make it sound like Rift and you could swap out you build in seconds. It took months to train up all the trees of a profession. That is assuming you're switching to a base class, it certainly didn't apply to the alpha class (a class Raph himself regrets including.). If you wanted to switch to a jedi to face that guy 'pwning' you yesterday you were in for a enough of an investment of time that the jedi you are seeking revenge against wouldn't even remember your name when you came back. The whole idea that you could switch classes in response to meeting a class that is more powerful than yours is spurious logic at best, and purposeful misinformation at worst.
How do you balance a class that doesn't fight at all? Are you grasping at straws? Making a player that enjoys action and combat sit silently in front of a social player is a terrible idea. The action gamer will sit there silently wishing he didn't have to waste time this way, and the social player will wish the other player would start or hold a conversation with them and fulfill their idea of fun. In the end you have two players dragged out of their idea of fun into an awkward and frustrating experience for both. That isn't good game design by any estimate. It certainly isn't used as an example of good game design by anyone who knows how to create good games.
The original balance was changed because it was BROKEN. The devs, the producers, and Raph himself have stated. As far as whining, PvEers don't whine about class balance. They are cooperating. So a powerful class helps them in their goal. They don't care if the classes are unbalanced as long as collectively they can achieve their goal. Here's a shocker for you, it's the PvPers that whine about each others classes. THEY are the ones that covet their neighbor and try to tear down the other guy. If PvEers are 'carebears' then the appropriate pejorative for PvPers is 'crybabies'. (I know this firsthand, I was a PvE stun mace rogue in vanilla wow. I read the river of tears threads from PvPers about the class I enjoyed, and not one PvEer had a problem with the build. but the crying PvPers ruined it for everyone, just like always.)
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
You know, at the time of release I was interested in SWG, being a big Star Wars fan. But I knew several folks who were devs on the project and they warned me away from it. Told me it was buggy, broken, and released way too early. Their tales of middle and upper management shenanigans were much more....visceral....than Koster's public version. They also felt it's overall vision wasn't very...Star Wars.
At least this interview backs up my view that designing and running a big open world is not easy and is fraught with danger at every developer turn. Even the Pied Piper of sandboxes seems to agree with me on that.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
You know, at the time of release I was interested in SWG, being a big Star Wars fan. But I knew several folks who were devs on the project and they warned me away from it. Told me it was buggy, broken, and released way too early. Their tales of middle and upper management shenanigans were much more....visceral....than Koster's public version. They also felt it's overall vision wasn't very...Star Wars.
At least this interview backs up my view that designing and running a big open world is not easy and is fraught with danger at every developer turn. Even the Pied Piper of sandboxes seems to agree with me on that.
SWG was released in a period of the history of MMO's where they were allowed to be far buggier than they are today. Today if you don't have a changeable UI from launch it creates a huge stink. Thinking SWTOR here, the game launched with a working UI but that was not good enough.
Bigger is always more risky; bigger world MMO's, bigger buildings, bigger oil tankers etc. But that's not an argument for us to stick with playing in midget game worlds, living in mud huts and only venturing to sea in sailing boats.
This is probably one of the best articles on MMORPG.com´s history. This puts Bill M to shame for his shallow non-interessting interviews; this is how a proper interview should be done! Excellent and interessting questions that Raph could answer with fantastic stories and twists.
Originally posted by Clattuc Raph is a legendary genius, but the gaming world has moved past his limitations. The next wave of revolutionary games will come from a different direction. I wish him all the best.
Raph Koster was a designer ahead of his time. The gaming world hasn't even match his genius yet, let alone moved past it.
"was" ... I'm still here, people!
Good!
Now, give Smed a call and tell him what to do with EQnext that will make that game GREAT!
"We were also supposed to have a lot more static quest content in the game than we managed to get." - Raph Koster on SWG
The sandbox paragon says it himself. A pure sandbox is not enough. Hybrid is the future and the all or nothing partisan proponents are all wrong on both sides of the argument.
SWG is not the sandbox fan's or even Raph Koster's Magnum Opus. It was a half finished bug fest that allowed people to find exploits easily and abuse them to the expense of other players.
THIS was the games appeal. Raph even states in other interviews that the ability to find a cheat in a game is a favorite draw to game players of all types. SWG allowed this by mistake, not by design and it was what kept a couple of hundred thousand of the millions that tried it.
When people talk about why they 'loved' SWG they can't express it eloquently. It usually boils down to anecdotes and stumbled explanations. They don't even know why they liked it. The truth is, they liked it because it was broken and they either enjoyed on the superficial level of 'pwning' others, or for those that evaluated it more fully they knew they were getting away with something the designers (Raph included) did not want.
And when the designers tried to balance the game and fix all of its broken and exploitable aspects, the playerbase was angered because they were losing their cheats.
The movie Blade Runner was an editors nightmare. there were tons of mistakes and plot holes and continuity gaffs. But it is recognized as a seminal story in the evolution of science fiction. Often quoted as a favorite by many fans. The moral is the same as SWG; broken may make enjoyable, but you can't plan it that way. As all pure sandboxes have since shown, pure sandboxes are boring. Don't design and deliver a broken, empty box.
So to summarize, it is the imperfections of SWG that people liked, and without the bugs the game was just boring because it was a sandbox?
I'm not sure how you even begin to attempt to argue convincingly that the entire population of SWG over the years experienced this same monolithic effect. It's far more likely that you are applying a personal bias, and attempting to explain it as a lack of eloquence and accuracy when the actual players give their account of their experience.
"We were also supposed to have a lot more static quest content in the game than we managed to get." - Raph Koster on SWG
The sandbox paragon says it himself. A pure sandbox is not enough. Hybrid is the future and the all or nothing partisan proponents are all wrong on both sides of the argument.
SWG is not the sandbox fan's or even Raph Koster's Magnum Opus. It was a half finished bug fest that allowed people to find exploits easily and abuse them to the expense of other players.
THIS was the games appeal. Raph even states in other interviews that the ability to find a cheat in a game is a favorite draw to game players of all types. SWG allowed this by mistake, not by design and it was what kept a couple of hundred thousand of the millions that tried it.
When people talk about why they 'loved' SWG they can't express it eloquently. It usually boils down to anecdotes and stumbled explanations. They don't even know why they liked it. The truth is, they liked it because it was broken and they either enjoyed on the superficial level of 'pwning' others, or for those that evaluated it more fully they knew they were getting away with something the designers (Raph included) did not want.
And when the designers tried to balance the game and fix all of its broken and exploitable aspects, the playerbase was angered because they were losing their cheats.
The movie Blade Runner was an editors nightmare. there were tons of mistakes and plot holes and continuity gaffs. But it is recognized as a seminal story in the evolution of science fiction. Often quoted as a favorite by many fans. The moral is the same as SWG; broken may make enjoyable, but you can't plan it that way. As all pure sandboxes have since shown, pure sandboxes are boring. Don't design and deliver a broken, empty box.
So to summarize, it is the imperfections of SWG that people liked, and without the bugs the game was just boring because it was a sandbox?
I'm not sure how you even begin to attempt to argue convincingly that the entire population of SWG over the years experienced this same monolithic effect. It's far more likely that you are applying a personal bias, and attempting to explain it as a lack of eloquence and accuracy when the actual players give their account of their experience.
Looking for a single cause is a fool's errand, but I would subscribe to your theory as a part of many dimensions of why the history of SWG is what it is.
This is probably one of the best articles on MMORPG.com´s history. This puts Bill M to shame for his shallow non-interessting interviews; this is how a proper interview should be done! Excellent and interessting questions that Raph could answer with fantastic stories and twists.
Hats off to Adam
It helps that:
Raph has such a deep background in the entire computer gaming industry.
He's not tied to a product and can say what he wants.
His philosophy is truly "something different".
He's a world builder as well as a game designer, wrapping the two together with intricacy.
"With SWG, there were tensions almost from the get-go, on things like whether to have Jedi in the game, whether to use procedural terrain, internal politics around the San Diego team versus the Austin team, and of course, the stuff associated with being a licensed title. With social games, you’re always engaged in the cultural conflict of creativity versus metrics. And we were in a run-up to selling the company too.
It isn’t really about making up rules. I mean, rules can chafe, no doubt about it. It’s more about working in synchrony."
I remember when you came on the boards during production and asked gamers what they thought about movement. In particular running up hill, if that should slow a character down. I knew then there was some conflict in design philosophy because you'd never have a doubt about something so basic as that.
So everything I saw that seemed "wrong" in a "worldly" build philosophy made me think of that.
I also remember once you telling the story of a developer who didn't build something according to plan because he didn't believe in it. I can see the problems of time once something like that is discovered. Too late, what can you do at that point.
It seems so important to have the right team. Blizzard shows this when they made WoW too, even though it's a different philosophy than yours they did work as a team and make a marvelous product for the time. Thinking about the stories from you and others about how the UO team was picked, and then about the corporate setting and it's tendency to faction up, I just think you will have the better situation to start from scratch. Especially since your thoughts on building worlds is different than the standard SPG style, as it should be for a massively interacting player base all running around in a fantasy world.
I liked the idea of Jedi being an alpha class and having perma death, it was interesting and it being a mystery just made it feel so magical.
The problem came when the developers listened to the whiners on the forums who wanted perma death to go and complained it was all too hard.
I don't know about the SWG system, but I liked the idea that the first version of Horizons (the original, before the takeover) had for playable Dragons. Perma-death, growth stages from "pups", demand for Dragon body parts making them hunted, Need to grow a hoard of treasure for power boosts, the constant goal of growth and survival with success leading to the uber powerful character (which still wasn't invincible). Only allowed 1 character slot used for such. The problem of guilds growing them in numbers was still an issue that needed to be solved, and player suggestions of diseases from Dragon association to hoard magical interruptions due to nearness might have worked.
I think there's something possible, at any rate, for a special class of character that's much more challenging for greater reward. But it can never be a give-me thing, always a risk and a challenge.
"I wish that the genre had kept building on what we did with UO and SWG instead."
You and me both, Raph.
You know, what's it say for the industry when the games have taken the turn that they have? I mean, they aren't even games, they are hand-outs. You pay something, you are given by design a constant stream of wins. This is little kid, blue ribbon stuff for all ages. It's really a sad thing, in my mind.
"I wish that the genre had kept building on what we did with UO and SWG instead."
You and me both, Raph.
You know, what's it say for the industry when the games have taken the turn that they have? I mean, they aren't even games, they are hand-outs. You pay something, you are given by design a constant stream of wins. This is little kid, blue ribbon stuff for all ages. It's really a sad thing, in my mind.
What I find particularly frustrating with the current batch of MMOs is all the emphasis is being placed on combat and making combat faster. Crafting is relegated to clicking a button and watching a progress bar. Non-combat professions aren't even a consideration. The further along we go the fewer features/systems are included and what is included lacks depth. It's hard to get immersed when a new game already feels old, like something I've played before. I feel like I get less for my money with each new MMO than I was getting 10 years ago. Ironically, single player open-world games are the ones now that seem more innovative and provide more value relative to their cost.
___________________________ Have flask; will travel.
"I wish that the genre had kept building on what we did with UO and SWG instead."
You and me both, Raph.
And if that would have happened people would be wishing for something else.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
You can not have a star wars MMO and have no jedi in it. The mistake of SWG was NOT in having jedi. That had to happen. The mistake was in having ONLY ONE alpha class. MMOs have to have character progression. What got people grinding and then quitting was that jedi was THE ONLY path to follow to continue character progression and follow content.
Simply put, if they would have added in Dark Troopers, Bounty Hunter Cyborgs, Republic Fleet Commandos, Elite Crafting and Entertainers needed to equip and support these top tier classes, etc. Jedi would not have been the only alpha class, instead there would have been several "alpha classes" to choose from as a way to progress your toon and a way to EARN a similar power level to what jedi were at. Since they gutted the class system eventually down to a handful of classes, having a handful (8 or so) Alpha classes should not have been a problem.
This was proposed to SOE repeatedly. The problem wasn't that people could unlock jedi and make their characters progress to something more powerful. Progression is what MMOs are all about. The problem was that jedi was the ONLY CHOICE available to them to do so...its an incredibly obvious problem, with an equally obvious solution. Raph has to realize that without jedi in the game and the chance to work towards jedi as a long term goal, its not a star wars MMO. Its like trying to cut out the heart of the IP. Its a non-starter.
You know, at the time of release I was interested in SWG, being a big Star Wars fan. But I knew several folks who were devs on the project and they warned me away from it. Told me it was buggy, broken, and released way too early. Their tales of middle and upper management shenanigans were much more....visceral....than Koster's public version. They also felt it's overall vision wasn't very...Star Wars.
At least this interview backs up my view that designing and running a big open world is not easy and is fraught with danger at every developer turn. Even the Pied Piper of sandboxes seems to agree with me on that.
SWG was released in a period of the history of MMO's where they were allowed to be far buggier than they are today. Today if you don't have a changeable UI from launch it creates a huge stink. Thinking SWTOR here, the game launched with a working MMO but that was not good enough.
Bigger is always more risky; bigger world MMO's, bigger buildings, bigger oil tankers etc. But that's not an argument for us to stick with playing in midget game worlds, living in mud huts and only venturing to sea in sailing boats.
SWG was released buggy and busted because a bunch of the higher ups were venial, money grubbing, egomaniacal or clueless yahoos. There were lots of bad decisions made, both technical and in design. The full story of this sort of thing usually doesn't come out until folks are no longer working in the industry.
It's best to set sail on a voyage of exploration on a boat that's not leaky and poorly organized.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
It isn't an assumption, it is my experience. What do you think is at their core? Why do MMOs typically raise level caps over time, for example? MMOs are about progression and long term relationships...progressing your guild, your character, your guild's city, whatever...even the progression of a community on a given server. That is what they offer, above and beyond the rigid themeparks and single player game experiences.
This was part of the genius that was SWG, IMO, that was never fully realized. You could progress in so many ways, across so many different types of endeavors. Socially, with dedicated social classes, through crafting, through guild and guild city development, through faction conflict, through more traditional combat classes, etc. And the interdependencies at times were brilliant - like everything involved in crafting a suit of mando armor, EARLY on. Or the turf wars that resulted over defending faction outpost in your city. Or guilds coming together to support their early jedi members. Or the informant bases in cantinas that bounty hunters would develop to spot those early jedi and get them unbuffed or trail them to their grinding spot and nail them, unsuspecting, while saber tef'd.
If you are not progressing, with new challenges to overcome, new relationships to form or new milestones to reach, then what is the point of the long term commitment/relationship to your characters and the game?
I am surprised you picked that part of my post to respond to...SWGs jedi problem started with the silly nature of how to unlock - random profession completion. Then, SOE fudged this to slow down the unlocks by requiring more and more hidden profession completions. This was a terrible system, probably first developed on the back of a pizza box, that did nothing to enhance the nature of the IP. But the game shipped early, without jedi even in it, so we get the rushed nature of the thing.
Later, when they developed an actual jedi unlocking system that began to do the IP justice, that was the VERY time that they needed to introduce the additional alpha classes, with similar progression systems/difficulty to give players choice as to how to advance their toon. As it was, there was no choice. It was jedi or nothing.
The fact that this is your experience is an indicator of how impoverished MMOs are these days...
MMOs sprang from MUDs. In MUDs, we had many games that were pure roleplay. We had classes ones. We had pure PvP ones. We had ones that were more like battle arenas. We had ones where people made a living in theater troupes. We had ones without levels. We had ones without classes. We had ones with fantasy or science fiction. There were MOOs and MUSHes and MUCKs and so on, and nobody assumed that individual character progression was the heart of virtual worlds.
Even after MMOs, we see plenty of non-game virtual worlds where progression is not central. There, Second Life, Furcadia, etc, I could go on.
Now, I am not trying to minimize the value of progression. It's a hell of a lot of fun. It's core to many games. But the fact that you place it as central indicates that you are coming at RPGing in general from a very specific tradition, the tradition that remade virtual worlds in the Diku model, itself a Monty Haul corruption of the D&D spirit.
The core of virtual worlds is a persistent place where you are represented by an avatar. That's pretty much it.
The spirit of progression in SWG was to say that there wasn't a single avenue of progression, because progression was less important than just being there.
As far as Jedi -- the system that launched wasn't even the intended unlock system, which was cut for time. :P I have written about it elsewhere. By a Jedi unlocking system that does the IP justice, I presume you mean something like the Jedi Village, by which 100% of the userbase would have been a Jedi over time. You propose that the devs could have then added other "alpha" professions to make up for the fact that this design would obsolesce the entire game, continuining to ratchet up power levels in the game (and thereby breaking any resemblance to canon whatsoever).
I can understand this... it's how all mudflationary power-mad levelling games have had to work. It's a pretty well-understood model. You might want to read this exchange of mine with Brad McQuaid, from when EQ was in beta:
Comments
How long did it take you to switch classes? You make it sound like Rift and you could swap out you build in seconds. It took months to train up all the trees of a profession. That is assuming you're switching to a base class, it certainly didn't apply to the alpha class (a class Raph himself regrets including.). If you wanted to switch to a jedi to face that guy 'pwning' you yesterday you were in for a enough of an investment of time that the jedi you are seeking revenge against wouldn't even remember your name when you came back. The whole idea that you could switch classes in response to meeting a class that is more powerful than yours is spurious logic at best, and purposeful misinformation at worst.
How do you balance a class that doesn't fight at all? Are you grasping at straws? Making a player that enjoys action and combat sit silently in front of a social player is a terrible idea. The action gamer will sit there silently wishing he didn't have to waste time this way, and the social player will wish the other player would start or hold a conversation with them and fulfill their idea of fun. In the end you have two players dragged out of their idea of fun into an awkward and frustrating experience for both. That isn't good game design by any estimate. It certainly isn't used as an example of good game design by anyone who knows how to create good games.
The original balance was changed because it was BROKEN. The devs, the producers, and Raph himself have stated. As far as whining, PvEers don't whine about class balance. They are cooperating. So a powerful class helps them in their goal. They don't care if the classes are unbalanced as long as collectively they can achieve their goal. Here's a shocker for you, it's the PvPers that whine about each others classes. THEY are the ones that covet their neighbor and try to tear down the other guy. If PvEers are 'carebears' then the appropriate pejorative for PvPers is 'crybabies'. (I know this firsthand, I was a PvE stun mace rogue in vanilla wow. I read the river of tears threads from PvPers about the class I enjoyed, and not one PvEer had a problem with the build. but the crying PvPers ruined it for everyone, just like always.)
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
You know, at the time of release I was interested in SWG, being a big Star Wars fan. But I knew several folks who were devs on the project and they warned me away from it. Told me it was buggy, broken, and released way too early. Their tales of middle and upper management shenanigans were much more....visceral....than Koster's public version. They also felt it's overall vision wasn't very...Star Wars.
At least this interview backs up my view that designing and running a big open world is not easy and is fraught with danger at every developer turn. Even the Pied Piper of sandboxes seems to agree with me on that.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
SWG was released in a period of the history of MMO's where they were allowed to be far buggier than they are today. Today if you don't have a changeable UI from launch it creates a huge stink. Thinking SWTOR here, the game launched with a working UI but that was not good enough.
Bigger is always more risky; bigger world MMO's, bigger buildings, bigger oil tankers etc. But that's not an argument for us to stick with playing in midget game worlds, living in mud huts and only venturing to sea in sailing boats.
This is probably one of the best articles on MMORPG.com´s history. This puts Bill M to shame for his shallow non-interessting interviews; this is how a proper interview should be done! Excellent and interessting questions that Raph could answer with fantastic stories and twists.
Hats off to Adam
Thumbs up for this interview.
Raph, there's no MMORPG visionary like you, we need you "back in the trenches".
NEW IDEAS that can refresh the STALE state of MMORPGs
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Good!
Now, give Smed a call and tell him what to do with EQnext that will make that game GREAT!
hehe...
So to summarize, it is the imperfections of SWG that people liked, and without the bugs the game was just boring because it was a sandbox?
I'm not sure how you even begin to attempt to argue convincingly that the entire population of SWG over the years experienced this same monolithic effect. It's far more likely that you are applying a personal bias, and attempting to explain it as a lack of eloquence and accuracy when the actual players give their account of their experience.
Looking for a single cause is a fool's errand.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
I agree with you Storm,
Minecraft + SWG+ EQLore+ ActionCombat+ Today's HardwarePower + Sync=
EQNext ... Back to the future!
P.S: Call Dave too.
It helps that:
Once upon a time....
"With SWG, there were tensions almost from the get-go, on things like whether to have Jedi in the game, whether to use procedural terrain, internal politics around the San Diego team versus the Austin team, and of course, the stuff associated with being a licensed title. With social games, you’re always engaged in the cultural conflict of creativity versus metrics. And we were in a run-up to selling the company too.
It isn’t really about making up rules. I mean, rules can chafe, no doubt about it. It’s more about working in synchrony."
I remember when you came on the boards during production and asked gamers what they thought about movement. In particular running up hill, if that should slow a character down. I knew then there was some conflict in design philosophy because you'd never have a doubt about something so basic as that.
So everything I saw that seemed "wrong" in a "worldly" build philosophy made me think of that.
I also remember once you telling the story of a developer who didn't build something according to plan because he didn't believe in it. I can see the problems of time once something like that is discovered. Too late, what can you do at that point.
It seems so important to have the right team. Blizzard shows this when they made WoW too, even though it's a different philosophy than yours they did work as a team and make a marvelous product for the time. Thinking about the stories from you and others about how the UO team was picked, and then about the corporate setting and it's tendency to faction up, I just think you will have the better situation to start from scratch. Especially since your thoughts on building worlds is different than the standard SPG style, as it should be for a massively interacting player base all running around in a fantasy world.
Once upon a time....
What Carl Sagan is to Flatlanders is just the same as what Raph is when compared to todays MMORPG developers.
These flatland devs dont have any clue what is apple (MMO).Not to mention 4th dimension
.
So, did ESO have a successful launch? Yes, yes it did.By Ryan Getchell on April 02, 2014.
**On the radar: http://www.cyberpunk.net/ **
I liked the idea of Jedi being an alpha class and having perma death, it was interesting and it being a mystery just made it feel so magical.
The problem came when the developers listened to the whiners on the forums who wanted perma death to go and complained it was all too hard.
"I wish that the genre had kept building on what we did with UO and SWG instead."
You and me both, Raph.
___________________________
Have flask; will travel.
I don't know about the SWG system, but I liked the idea that the first version of Horizons (the original, before the takeover) had for playable Dragons. Perma-death, growth stages from "pups", demand for Dragon body parts making them hunted, Need to grow a hoard of treasure for power boosts, the constant goal of growth and survival with success leading to the uber powerful character (which still wasn't invincible). Only allowed 1 character slot used for such. The problem of guilds growing them in numbers was still an issue that needed to be solved, and player suggestions of diseases from Dragon association to hoard magical interruptions due to nearness might have worked.
I think there's something possible, at any rate, for a special class of character that's much more challenging for greater reward. But it can never be a give-me thing, always a risk and a challenge.
Once upon a time....
You know, what's it say for the industry when the games have taken the turn that they have? I mean, they aren't even games, they are hand-outs. You pay something, you are given by design a constant stream of wins. This is little kid, blue ribbon stuff for all ages. It's really a sad thing, in my mind.
Once upon a time....
What I find particularly frustrating with the current batch of MMOs is all the emphasis is being placed on combat and making combat faster. Crafting is relegated to clicking a button and watching a progress bar. Non-combat professions aren't even a consideration. The further along we go the fewer features/systems are included and what is included lacks depth. It's hard to get immersed when a new game already feels old, like something I've played before. I feel like I get less for my money with each new MMO than I was getting 10 years ago. Ironically, single player open-world games are the ones now that seem more innovative and provide more value relative to their cost.
___________________________
Have flask; will travel.
And if that would have happened people would be wishing for something else.
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
You can not have a star wars MMO and have no jedi in it. The mistake of SWG was NOT in having jedi. That had to happen. The mistake was in having ONLY ONE alpha class. MMOs have to have character progression. What got people grinding and then quitting was that jedi was THE ONLY path to follow to continue character progression and follow content.
Simply put, if they would have added in Dark Troopers, Bounty Hunter Cyborgs, Republic Fleet Commandos, Elite Crafting and Entertainers needed to equip and support these top tier classes, etc. Jedi would not have been the only alpha class, instead there would have been several "alpha classes" to choose from as a way to progress your toon and a way to EARN a similar power level to what jedi were at. Since they gutted the class system eventually down to a handful of classes, having a handful (8 or so) Alpha classes should not have been a problem.
This was proposed to SOE repeatedly. The problem wasn't that people could unlock jedi and make their characters progress to something more powerful. Progression is what MMOs are all about. The problem was that jedi was the ONLY CHOICE available to them to do so...its an incredibly obvious problem, with an equally obvious solution. Raph has to realize that without jedi in the game and the chance to work towards jedi as a long term goal, its not a star wars MMO. Its like trying to cut out the heart of the IP. Its a non-starter.
SWG was released buggy and busted because a bunch of the higher ups were venial, money grubbing, egomaniacal or clueless yahoos. There were lots of bad decisions made, both technical and in design. The full story of this sort of thing usually doesn't come out until folks are no longer working in the industry.
It's best to set sail on a voyage of exploration on a boat that's not leaky and poorly organized.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
I believe this to be false, but a very understandable assumption.
It isn't an assumption, it is my experience. What do you think is at their core? Why do MMOs typically raise level caps over time, for example? MMOs are about progression and long term relationships...progressing your guild, your character, your guild's city, whatever...even the progression of a community on a given server. That is what they offer, above and beyond the rigid themeparks and single player game experiences.
This was part of the genius that was SWG, IMO, that was never fully realized. You could progress in so many ways, across so many different types of endeavors. Socially, with dedicated social classes, through crafting, through guild and guild city development, through faction conflict, through more traditional combat classes, etc. And the interdependencies at times were brilliant - like everything involved in crafting a suit of mando armor, EARLY on. Or the turf wars that resulted over defending faction outpost in your city. Or guilds coming together to support their early jedi members. Or the informant bases in cantinas that bounty hunters would develop to spot those early jedi and get them unbuffed or trail them to their grinding spot and nail them, unsuspecting, while saber tef'd.
If you are not progressing, with new challenges to overcome, new relationships to form or new milestones to reach, then what is the point of the long term commitment/relationship to your characters and the game?
I am surprised you picked that part of my post to respond to...SWGs jedi problem started with the silly nature of how to unlock - random profession completion. Then, SOE fudged this to slow down the unlocks by requiring more and more hidden profession completions. This was a terrible system, probably first developed on the back of a pizza box, that did nothing to enhance the nature of the IP. But the game shipped early, without jedi even in it, so we get the rushed nature of the thing.
Later, when they developed an actual jedi unlocking system that began to do the IP justice, that was the VERY time that they needed to introduce the additional alpha classes, with similar progression systems/difficulty to give players choice as to how to advance their toon. As it was, there was no choice. It was jedi or nothing.
The fact that this is your experience is an indicator of how impoverished MMOs are these days...
MMOs sprang from MUDs. In MUDs, we had many games that were pure roleplay. We had classes ones. We had pure PvP ones. We had ones that were more like battle arenas. We had ones where people made a living in theater troupes. We had ones without levels. We had ones without classes. We had ones with fantasy or science fiction. There were MOOs and MUSHes and MUCKs and so on, and nobody assumed that individual character progression was the heart of virtual worlds.
Even after MMOs, we see plenty of non-game virtual worlds where progression is not central. There, Second Life, Furcadia, etc, I could go on.
Now, I am not trying to minimize the value of progression. It's a hell of a lot of fun. It's core to many games. But the fact that you place it as central indicates that you are coming at RPGing in general from a very specific tradition, the tradition that remade virtual worlds in the Diku model, itself a Monty Haul corruption of the D&D spirit.
The core of virtual worlds is a persistent place where you are represented by an avatar. That's pretty much it.
The spirit of progression in SWG was to say that there wasn't a single avenue of progression, because progression was less important than just being there.
As far as Jedi -- the system that launched wasn't even the intended unlock system, which was cut for time. :P I have written about it elsewhere. By a Jedi unlocking system that does the IP justice, I presume you mean something like the Jedi Village, by which 100% of the userbase would have been a Jedi over time. You propose that the devs could have then added other "alpha" professions to make up for the fact that this design would obsolesce the entire game, continuining to ratchet up power levels in the game (and thereby breaking any resemblance to canon whatsoever).
I can understand this... it's how all mudflationary power-mad levelling games have had to work.
It's a pretty well-understood model. You might want to read this exchange of mine with Brad McQuaid, from when EQ was in beta:
http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/databasedeflation.shtml
Or this, on the costs on ongoing content creation:
http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/contentcreation.shtml