Part of me has to wonder what the game would be like now if it were redone .. better graphics, better engine, better programmers and development team that could make it the game it wanted to be.
It was supposed to be "a summary game" that had piles of quests and storyline stuff TOO.
Originally posted by eddieg50 I am glad the Dev admits the game was poorly made, when I played it seemed like a social gathering a large chat room so to speak, there were constant lag spikes, combat was clunky at best. what they did have was a great crafting system, and later a good space game, it is to bad they could not build on that
Well maybe at release there were lots of bugs, but within a year they had it running quite well. There were still bugs around, but they were quite minor and rarely effected gameplay. I don't remember any problems with lag spikes, but I always had a good connection.
Personally anyone who thinks they could have done a better job with Jedi has a screw loose. They were rather rare and that was the way it should be. I think the team made the right choice about the Jedi design. When they made Jedi accessible to anyone with NGE that basically destroyed the game. The Jedi class lost all it's luster.
The sad part, it was still a better designed MMO than any of the new MMO's out now or are up and coming, that was until they tried to fix it with NGE. I don't think there has ever been a worse decision made by a game developer ever.
Ok... i am going to link to that post everytime peopel try to tell me SWG was not a godawefull mess when it launched.... There you have... From the source.... Stick your rose-tinted specs up your posterior.
It unquestionably was.
In hindsight, though, it was also the most ambitious, rich, social, and complex virtual environment ever created, amking most MMO projects look like toys. :P And I say that without any false humility. A mess, in part because it broke ground most games are still catching up to. Today, parts of things like Twitter, Facebook, and consoles are inspired in part by things that were pioneered in Galaxies.
Although it was very clear that the game was unfinished, it was still one of the best MMO experiences I had untill 2005.
EVE Online ranks #1 with me, SWG a good #2. both sandboxes and I didnt want to be Luke or Han, or Boba, just wanted to play my role in Star Wars and have fun with friends. Would have played for many years to come if the holocraze grind wasn't pushed and ruined my guild, and ofc 'that 2005 thingy'.
Coming home from work, or on a saturday morning logging in to the character screen music and hearing the Star Wars episode 4 tune from Tatooine where Luke looks at the suns, epic. Group farming voritors (correct name?) and pikets + Bols on Dantooine. Going on hunts with my beloved rockbeetle. Not to mention the fun Correlian Corvette dungeons. Never had that much fun in any mmo after that, besides EVE ofc. :P
Shame that here aren't any games like that anymore, most MMOs today are only linear themeparks on rails, no freedom.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
Originally posted by eddieg50 I am glad the Dev admits the game was poorly made, when I played it seemed like a social gathering a large chat room so to speak, there were constant lag spikes, combat was clunky at best. what they did have was a great crafting system, and later a good space game, it is to bad they could not build on that
Personally anyone who thinks they could have done a better job with Jedi has a screw loose. They were rather rare and that was the way it should be. I think the team made the right choice about the Jedi design. When they made Jedi accessible to anyone with NGE that basically destroyed the game. The Jedi class lost all it's luster.
You mean, like Raph said they could have?
And no, the jedi weren't rare. It was long before the NGE that I couldn't stand near a major starport without hearing lightsabers opening and closing every 3 seconds. They were all over the place. I'm pretty sure we can take Raph's word on that, but I, at least, don't have to.
I thought his "crazy" idea would have been awesome. I'm not a big fan of permadeath, but if you're gonna do it, that's how you do it.
Originally posted by eddieg50 I am glad the Dev admits the game was poorly made, when I played it seemed like a social gathering a large chat room so to speak, there were constant lag spikes, combat was clunky at best. what they did have was a great crafting system, and later a good space game, it is to bad they could not build on that
Personally anyone who thinks they could have done a better job with Jedi has a screw loose. They were rather rare and that was the way it should be. I think the team made the right choice about the Jedi design. When they made Jedi accessible to anyone with NGE that basically destroyed the game. The Jedi class lost all it's luster.
You mean, like Raph said they could have?
And no, the jedi weren't rare. It was long before the NGE that I couldn't stand near a major starport without hearing lightsabers opening and closing every 3 seconds. They were all over the place. I'm pretty sure we can take Raph's word on that, but I, at least, don't have to.
I thought his "crazy" idea would have been awesome. I'm not a big fan of permadeath, but if you're gonna do it, that's how you do it.
I loved SWG for the simple fact that it is the only MMO that made you feel like you were part of an actual world.
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
Originally posted by Jyiiga Reading this just makes me more angry. It confirms everything I feared. It paints them as collectively clueless.
Of course they were clueless. It was a brand spankin' new genre back when SWG was conceived. Nothing but a small handful of successful MMO's with which to base realistic goals.
Having read this article, alot of the things I experienced in the game started making alot of sense. All those wonderful little details and experiences in the game, the crazy awesome crafting system, slapped together with absurd rubber banding, lag, and imbalance... an unfinished game, somehow glued, bondo'd, and binder-twined together with our own imaginations.
My very first MMO that I had a lot of good times with both pre and post NGE . SWG had the best player community of any MMO that I have ever played. Bar none hands down it simply was the best. Although the game at first when I played had no form of questing but instead relied on mission terminals or the players own imagination for content and to make a bit of change. I really miss the wide open areas that each planet had along with the varied uniqueness to them. No two planets were alike and some were more dangerous than others. The player cities, housing, markets along with a crafting system that was really out of this world .
City wide events were pretty fun like setting up a speeder course where the winners we given credits or items as a reward. PVP was rather enjoyable as well. I remember going on many a raid with about a 100 or more players racing on their speeders to raid a city control fort. Of course the game had it's some major cons. Some of which where broken classes or the dreaded " Flavor of the Month" classes .
I believe that the down fall of the game started when the players and devs switched their focus from the other 10 or so classes that the game had and started focusing more on the holocron grind to be Jedi. I only say that because SWG had a thriving forum community as well and the most popular topics and the most class support and suggestions section was the Jedi.
Originally posted by Jyiiga Reading this just makes me more angry. It confirms everything I feared. It paints them as collectively clueless.
Collectively clueless? I wouldn't say that. Most of that design is amazing and modern publisher driven devs haven't hit that level of understanding yet.
The only thing they were "clueless" about, was how much time and money an MMO like that would take, and the people funding it weren't willing to give it to them.
I thought his "crazy" idea would have been awesome. I'm not a big fan of permadeath, but if you're gonna do it, that's how you do it.
^This.
Today you can't do that anymore, Players wouldn't accept the fact that they could lose stuff -even a character- in a game.
Jedi were what ruined my guild experience in SWG. From Launch till the holocron craze start in december 2004 it was a blast. The game was very buggy and unfinished but it was fun.
When the holocron craze started our guild leader went awol and started THE profession grind. When he unlocked he decided that this grind was not good for the guild/community as a whole so he told us not to go on the grind or get kicked from the community. By then 90% of the players on the server were grinding professions like mad to unlock, no more group binding, nothing as all these players started to grind secretly.
Jedi in SWG without permadeath, beginning of the end.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
SOE kept nerfing my beloved Creature Hunter/Rifleman into oblivion. Curly, Moe and Larry when I could have three rancors out, Sulley and Tulley when I could have 2 Graul Maulers out....and then CH was to be no more, because the PVP carebears cried that using pets was an exploit...not like most of the more successful pvpers weren't temploiters. I actually shed a tear and had a sad little ceremony the night before CH was removed from the game at my computer killing/releasing my beloved pets into the wild, showered with lots of vodka, like that sad pathetic rancor trainer in jabba's dungeon. I tried solely PVP temploiting after that, but once you start down that dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. So I left SWG forever :'(
What SWG did right was immersion. Yeah, sure it had bugs and stuff but for the most part the only people who care about that sort of stuff are competitive perfectionists seeking power and to be the best. These are the same content locusts who today totally forego exploration and journey in a game in their lust to rush to top level in two days and be the best. And regardless of how beautiful the environment is, or how beautifully the majority of the functionality of the game integrates with each other, they will scream to high heaven because of a small glitch here and there.
SWG was an immense, beautiful and immersive world to be appreciated. It was a fun, out of this world, experience that we could get lost in. Cantina's were always packed with varied activities and the social experience derived from them has yet to be matched in any game. It was always fun every time we stepped out of these noisy and lively cantinas into the vast quiet and unpredictable star-filled darkness and vice versa. And the music was spot on adding to the experience. I bet most of us can still hum to the tune of the familiar atmospheric star wars tunes and the music played by entertainers in the cantinas. I don't think most people derive fond memories from SWG because of the technical aspects of the game. We all know that left much to be desired. What most of us remember about SWG with rose tinted glasses is the immersive world and how it made us feel.
What SWG did right was immersion. Yeah, sure it had bugs and stuff but for the most part the only people who care about that sort of stuff are competitive perfectionists seeking power and to be the best. These are the same content locusts who today totally forego exploration and journey in a game in their lust to rush to top level in two days and be the best. And regardless of how beautiful the environment is, or how beautifully the majority of the functionality of the game integrates with each other, they will scream to high heaven because of a small glitch here and there.
SWG was an immense, beautiful and immersive world to be appreciated. It was a fun, out of this world, experience that we could get lost in. Cantina's were always packed with varied activities and the social experience derived from them has yet to be matched in any game. It was always fun every time we stepped out of these noisy and lively cantinas into the vast quiet and unpredictable star-filled darkness and vice versa. And the music was spot on adding to the experience. I bet most of us can still hum to the tune of the familiar atmospheric star wars tunes and the music played by entertainers in the cantinas. I don't think most people derive fond memories from SWG because of the technical aspects of the game. We all know that left much to be desired. What most of us remember about SWG with rose tinted glasses is the immersive world and how it made us feel.
Very well said. Those whining about the bugs basically wasted away their game play because they thought it was another fps.
And I too wept when they removed creature handler, another of the idiot changes made in NGE. When I went to play it after the change, it made me change my creature handler/rifleman into a healer????? Did not play the game ever again even though I had a 3 month subscription.....
Part of me has to wonder what the game would be like now if it were redone .. better graphics, better engine, better programmers and development team that could make it the game it wanted to be.
It was supposed to be "a summary game" that had piles of quests and storyline stuff TOO.
So... it redone today, it'd cost $250m?
You've said that there's no substitution for hand crafted content, but these days do you think the future is in dynamic and sophisticated AI providing most of the experiences, like what Daybreak is doing with the Storybricks infrastructure?
And if you were designing SWG again, would you use the same kind of skill web that you had in pre-launch SWG? Or have you found a better way to do skills since then? Because I don't think I've seen any game attempt what you described in your Jedi write up, and I think it'd be a lot of fun.
And this is why the Marketing Department should be fired / laid of after the game has been advertised prior to launch.
They're nothing more than a cancer after that point. Seriously, I'd wager 80% of all "making the game easier" changes are made at the behest of Marketing wanting to boost subs.
Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising everytime we fall.
Part of me has to wonder what the game would be like now if it were redone .. better graphics, better engine, better programmers and development team that could make it the game it wanted to be.
It was supposed to be "a summary game" that had piles of quests and storyline stuff TOO.
So... it redone today, it'd cost $250m?
You've said that there's no substitution for hand crafted content, but these days do you think the future is in dynamic and sophisticated AI providing most of the experiences, like what Daybreak is doing with the Storybricks infrastructure?
And if you were designing SWG again, would you use the same kind of skill web that you had in pre-launch SWG? Or have you found a better way to do skills since then? Because I don't think I've seen any game attempt what you described in your Jedi write up, and I think it'd be a lot of fun.
I was trying to do dynamic sophisticated AI back with UO (And the Storybricks guys are friends, and even hung out at my house while working with SOE). But even stuff like that works best when couched in the midst of nice handcrafted stuff.
As far as skill web,... it really depends on the game. Right system for the game, basically.
Originally posted by Jyiiga Reading this just makes me more angry. It confirms everything I feared. It paints them as collectively clueless.
I don't think that's necessarily fair.
Have you ever actually created something where you not only don't have final say but have to work with others and "have to" take into account their opinions?
Well, I have, and while I think the final product was a LOT better than the disaster it could have been, it wasn't what I wanted for a final product.
Collaboration can be messy and collaboration where you have others who have final say can be frustrating.This is not to say that things for Star Wars Galaxies couldn't have gone better but that's being a Monday morning quarterback or "hindsight is 20/20".
It's very easy to say "oh you should have done x, y and z" but when in the thick of it maybe the only choices that could have worked were a, b and c.
And again, in any development of any video game I bet one can stick their head in and say "what the heck are you doing" and maybe they would be right, bit it seems more often than not it's a miracle any of these things get to the finish line let alone be "awesome" bug free, feature complete, etc.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
I think the right decision would have been not to have playable Jedi, for the same reasons LOTRO does not have playable wizards. There were too few of them at the time and they were too powerful. And it turns out people play LOTRO and do not mind that they cannot play as Gandalf.
I think alpha classes do not belong in MMOs. The only way to do it is with a lobby game, the way DCUO handles playable Superman by confining him to Legends PvP.
Jedi Village was a joke, but the CU was the final nail in the coffin. Few days after CU, I walked away never to turn back, not just to SWG but to SOE as well. I think a majority of the players that weren't Jedi didn't even care that Jedi were OP in the beginning, till the game started with the "easy" button that has become so popular over the ages. It was everything else that made that game good. The player housing, the cities, the non-combatant classes, the fact that everyone could not be everything, the interdependencies.
Originally posted by Whiskey_Sam If this were up and running I would still be playing it. (That which shall not be named just isn't the same.) Haven't found a game yet with such diversity in things to do aside from combat and depth to get lost in something as simple yet enjoyable as laying out your own city/house/town hall/cantina. Everything since has felt like it was missing features in comparison.
10,000 times YES I played for nearly 8 years and up to 12 hours a day and never got bored with it. When you got tired of doing one thing like questing, you could go and craft or go into space and try to loot the one last piece you needed for you lvl 10 weapon. If that was not enough you could spend hours just decorating your house or city.
When sunset came I was standing above our guild, (Jedi Council), city, Crescent Canyon on Tatooine on the Chimaera sever and felt I had lost a long time friend as my screen went blank.
Give me back SWG at sunset and keep adding to it and I would pay twice what it was costing.
Part of me has to wonder what the game would be like now if it were redone .. better graphics, better engine, better programmers and development team that could make it the game it wanted to be.
It was supposed to be "a summary game" that had piles of quests and storyline stuff TOO.
So... it redone today, it'd cost $250m?
I'm surprised Raph. I've read your blog many times, and you've picked apart the aspects of what makes games fun with methodical brilliance. But surely you can see that SWG2, launched today, would fall flat on its face.
An entire thesis could be written on how the gamer himself has progressed to a very different headspace in 2015 than he/she was in 2003-2005. Dare I say it's almost akin to that biological scenario where one takes certain drugs and their brain structure is forever altered. I don't just speak of the innocence of the MMO experience itself, that is without question and easy, but so many other factors... Back then, nobody (or very few) were googling everything, they certainly weren't utilizing an entire monetized industry of "guides" who did their "work" on youtube, monetized blogs, etc, who exchanged their service (teaching you how to beat this next task in the game), for your ad hits or youtube hits.
And that point alone goes back to your theme of how everyone was "doing what they wanted" but when they then were enticed with the opportunity to rise above the pack, they ruined all the fun for themselves. I look at MMO's today and laugh, and because I'm in my 30's I relate it to me and my buddies playing console in the 90's, and we'd always have that one friend who bought those strategy guides that were like 600 page magazines with all of the cheat codes and walkthroughs, and me and my friends would all think "well, what's the point?".
We basically live in a world full of undisciplined children who want to eat a slice of their cake before the birthday party, and then complain to mom that they don't have a full cake at the party. Players are bored and hop from game to game today not because the games are all shit, but because they're treating video games the way a sexaholic roams from nightclub to nightclub with his pickup artist cheatcodes looking for the next outlet for his Coolidge Effect run amok, and after a while he'll become a misogynist, much like this place is toward MMO's. The sexaholic was the fool for thinking all of that effort would lead him to something rewarding, just like this current generation of MMO players thinking picking up the newest game and googling/youtubing to victory would leave them fulfilled.
Part of me has to wonder what the game would be like now if it were redone .. better graphics, better engine, better programmers and development team that could make it the game it wanted to be.
It was supposed to be "a summary game" that had piles of quests and storyline stuff TOO.
So... it redone today, it'd cost $250m?
I'm surprised Raph. I've read your blog many times, and you've picked apart the aspects of what makes games fun with methodical brilliance. But surely you can see that SWG2, launched today, would fall flat on its face.
An entire thesis could be written on how the gamer himself has progressed to a very different headspace in 2015 than he/she was in 2003-2005. Dare I say it's almost akin to that biological scenario where one takes certain drugs and their brain structure is forever altered. I don't just speak of the innocence of the MMO experience itself, that is without question and easy, but so many other factors... Back then, nobody (or very few) were googling everything, they certainly weren't utilizing an entire monetized industry of "guides" who did their "work" on youtube, monetized blogs, etc, who exchanged their service (teaching you how to beat this next task in the game), for your ad hits or youtube hits.
And that point alone goes back to your theme of how everyone was "doing what they wanted" but when they then were enticed with the opportunity to rise above the pack, they ruined all the fun for themselves. I look at MMO's today and laugh, and because I'm in my 30's I relate it to me and my buddies playing console in the 90's, and we'd always have that one friend who bought those strategy guides that were like 600 page magazines with all of the cheat codes and walkthroughs, and me and my friends would all think "well, what's the point?".
We basically live in a world full of undisciplined children who want to eat a slice of their cake before the birthday party, and then complain to mom that they don't have a full cake at the party. Players are bored and hop from game to game today not because the games are all shit, but because they're treating video games the way a sexaholic roams from nightclub to nightclub with his pickup artist cheatcodes looking for the next outlet for his Coolidge Effect run amok, and after a while he'll become a misogynist, much like this place is toward MMO's. The sexaholic was the fool for thinking all of that effort would lead him to something rewarding, just like this current generation of MMO players thinking picking up the newest game and googling/youtubing to victory would leave them fulfilled.
SWG was and always will be the best MMORPG of all time. It had probably the best crafting system and I loved all the professions, I tried all of them at least once to Master and unlocked my Jedi account. The whole game fell apart when the devs started making changed suggested by moron forum trolls and took a big hit with CU and then when they basically rewrote the whole game in the NGE version. I think if this game was brought back today it may not kill WoW as not everyone is a Star Wars or SciFi fan but it would certainly be a very close number two. Boohooo, lag spikes, they are and always will be in every online game until the end of this technology era. All games had bugs but they didn't need to be fixed in SWG with an entire game redesign! I would crowd fund a SWG to have the game the way it was before NGE and CU happened!
Well, you know, I have to say that candle was burnt at both ends. Yeah, there's always idiots in the community that use their mob leverage to help ruin games and "make it easier". I'd call this external pressure.
But there was also undoubtedly internal pressure that was negative. Anyone who was paying attention saw that idiot Julio Torres on Attack of the Show and various other places blatantly as some mindless mouthpiece pushing toward how they need to make SWG more like WoW; and the community all hated his guts for it.
It reminded me of how a few years later when they were promoting SWTOR, more heavy-on-the-marketing light-on-the-pragmatism mouthpieces were dismissing the fans appeals toward a space game in SWTOR (because they remembered how much they loved JTL in SWG), and one of the devs set off the SWTOR community pre-launch by saying "you didn't see Han and Chewie say let's go off and blast that rock over there!"; he said that to dismiss the fact that the space game was basically a tacked-on rail shooter, and the whole community knew this and really got upset.
Comments
Well maybe at release there were lots of bugs, but within a year they had it running quite well. There were still bugs around, but they were quite minor and rarely effected gameplay. I don't remember any problems with lag spikes, but I always had a good connection.
Personally anyone who thinks they could have done a better job with Jedi has a screw loose. They were rather rare and that was the way it should be. I think the team made the right choice about the Jedi design. When they made Jedi accessible to anyone with NGE that basically destroyed the game. The Jedi class lost all it's luster.
The sad part, it was still a better designed MMO than any of the new MMO's out now or are up and coming, that was until they tried to fix it with NGE. I don't think there has ever been a worse decision made by a game developer ever.
Although it was very clear that the game was unfinished, it was still one of the best MMO experiences I had untill 2005.
EVE Online ranks #1 with me, SWG a good #2. both sandboxes and I didnt want to be Luke or Han, or Boba, just wanted to play my role in Star Wars and have fun with friends. Would have played for many years to come if the holocraze grind wasn't pushed and ruined my guild, and ofc 'that 2005 thingy'.
Coming home from work, or on a saturday morning logging in to the character screen music and hearing the Star Wars episode 4 tune from Tatooine where Luke looks at the suns, epic. Group farming voritors (correct name?) and pikets + Bols on Dantooine. Going on hunts with my beloved rockbeetle. Not to mention the fun Correlian Corvette dungeons. Never had that much fun in any mmo after that, besides EVE ofc. :P
Shame that here aren't any games like that anymore, most MMOs today are only linear themeparks on rails, no freedom.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
You mean, like Raph said they could have?
And no, the jedi weren't rare. It was long before the NGE that I couldn't stand near a major starport without hearing lightsabers opening and closing every 3 seconds. They were all over the place. I'm pretty sure we can take Raph's word on that, but I, at least, don't have to.
I thought his "crazy" idea would have been awesome. I'm not a big fan of permadeath, but if you're gonna do it, that's how you do it.
I loved SWG for the simple fact that it is the only MMO that made you feel like you were part of an actual world.
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
Of course they were clueless. It was a brand spankin' new genre back when SWG was conceived. Nothing but a small handful of successful MMO's with which to base realistic goals.
Having read this article, alot of the things I experienced in the game started making alot of sense. All those wonderful little details and experiences in the game, the crazy awesome crafting system, slapped together with absurd rubber banding, lag, and imbalance... an unfinished game, somehow glued, bondo'd, and binder-twined together with our own imaginations.
My very first MMO that I had a lot of good times with both pre and post NGE . SWG had the best player community of any MMO that I have ever played. Bar none hands down it simply was the best. Although the game at first when I played had no form of questing but instead relied on mission terminals or the players own imagination for content and to make a bit of change. I really miss the wide open areas that each planet had along with the varied uniqueness to them. No two planets were alike and some were more dangerous than others. The player cities, housing, markets along with a crafting system that was really out of this world .
City wide events were pretty fun like setting up a speeder course where the winners we given credits or items as a reward. PVP was rather enjoyable as well. I remember going on many a raid with about a 100 or more players racing on their speeders to raid a city control fort. Of course the game had it's some major cons. Some of which where broken classes or the dreaded " Flavor of the Month" classes .
I believe that the down fall of the game started when the players and devs switched their focus from the other 10 or so classes that the game had and started focusing more on the holocron grind to be Jedi. I only say that because SWG had a thriving forum community as well and the most popular topics and the most class support and suggestions section was the Jedi.
Collectively clueless? I wouldn't say that. Most of that design is amazing and modern publisher driven devs haven't hit that level of understanding yet.
The only thing they were "clueless" about, was how much time and money an MMO like that would take, and the people funding it weren't willing to give it to them.
^This.
Today you can't do that anymore, Players wouldn't accept the fact that they could lose stuff -even a character- in a game.
Jedi were what ruined my guild experience in SWG. From Launch till the holocron craze start in december 2004 it was a blast. The game was very buggy and unfinished but it was fun.
When the holocron craze started our guild leader went awol and started THE profession grind. When he unlocked he decided that this grind was not good for the guild/community as a whole so he told us not to go on the grind or get kicked from the community. By then 90% of the players on the server were grinding professions like mad to unlock, no more group binding, nothing as all these players started to grind secretly.
Jedi in SWG without permadeath, beginning of the end.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
What SWG did right was immersion. Yeah, sure it had bugs and stuff but for the most part the only people who care about that sort of stuff are competitive perfectionists seeking power and to be the best. These are the same content locusts who today totally forego exploration and journey in a game in their lust to rush to top level in two days and be the best. And regardless of how beautiful the environment is, or how beautifully the majority of the functionality of the game integrates with each other, they will scream to high heaven because of a small glitch here and there.
SWG was an immense, beautiful and immersive world to be appreciated. It was a fun, out of this world, experience that we could get lost in. Cantina's were always packed with varied activities and the social experience derived from them has yet to be matched in any game. It was always fun every time we stepped out of these noisy and lively cantinas into the vast quiet and unpredictable star-filled darkness and vice versa. And the music was spot on adding to the experience. I bet most of us can still hum to the tune of the familiar atmospheric star wars tunes and the music played by entertainers in the cantinas. I don't think most people derive fond memories from SWG because of the technical aspects of the game. We all know that left much to be desired. What most of us remember about SWG with rose tinted glasses is the immersive world and how it made us feel.
Very well said. Those whining about the bugs basically wasted away their game play because they thought it was another fps.
And I too wept when they removed creature handler, another of the idiot changes made in NGE. When I went to play it after the change, it made me change my creature handler/rifleman into a healer????? Did not play the game ever again even though I had a 3 month subscription.....
You've said that there's no substitution for hand crafted content, but these days do you think the future is in dynamic and sophisticated AI providing most of the experiences, like what Daybreak is doing with the Storybricks infrastructure?
And if you were designing SWG again, would you use the same kind of skill web that you had in pre-launch SWG? Or have you found a better way to do skills since then? Because I don't think I've seen any game attempt what you described in your Jedi write up, and I think it'd be a lot of fun.
And this is why the Marketing Department should be fired / laid of after the game has been advertised prior to launch.
They're nothing more than a cancer after that point. Seriously, I'd wager 80% of all "making the game easier" changes are made at the behest of Marketing wanting to boost subs.
Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising everytime we fall.
I was trying to do dynamic sophisticated AI back with UO
(And the Storybricks guys are friends, and even hung out at my house while working with SOE). But even stuff like that works best when couched in the midst of nice handcrafted stuff.
As far as skill web,... it really depends on the game. Right system for the game, basically.
I don't think that's necessarily fair.
Have you ever actually created something where you not only don't have final say but have to work with others and "have to" take into account their opinions?
Well, I have, and while I think the final product was a LOT better than the disaster it could have been, it wasn't what I wanted for a final product.
Collaboration can be messy and collaboration where you have others who have final say can be frustrating.This is not to say that things for Star Wars Galaxies couldn't have gone better but that's being a Monday morning quarterback or "hindsight is 20/20".
It's very easy to say "oh you should have done x, y and z" but when in the thick of it maybe the only choices that could have worked were a, b and c.
And again, in any development of any video game I bet one can stick their head in and say "what the heck are you doing" and maybe they would be right, bit it seems more often than not it's a miracle any of these things get to the finish line let alone be "awesome" bug free, feature complete, etc.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I think the right decision would have been not to have playable Jedi, for the same reasons LOTRO does not have playable wizards. There were too few of them at the time and they were too powerful. And it turns out people play LOTRO and do not mind that they cannot play as Gandalf.
I think alpha classes do not belong in MMOs. The only way to do it is with a lobby game, the way DCUO handles playable Superman by confining him to Legends PvP.
~I am Many~
10,000 times YES I played for nearly 8 years and up to 12 hours a day and never got bored with it. When you got tired of doing one thing like questing, you could go and craft or go into space and try to loot the one last piece you needed for you lvl 10 weapon. If that was not enough you could spend hours just decorating your house or city.
When sunset came I was standing above our guild, (Jedi Council), city, Crescent Canyon on Tatooine on the Chimaera sever and felt I had lost a long time friend as my screen went blank.
Give me back SWG at sunset and keep adding to it and I would pay twice what it was costing.
I'm surprised Raph. I've read your blog many times, and you've picked apart the aspects of what makes games fun with methodical brilliance. But surely you can see that SWG2, launched today, would fall flat on its face.
An entire thesis could be written on how the gamer himself has progressed to a very different headspace in 2015 than he/she was in 2003-2005. Dare I say it's almost akin to that biological scenario where one takes certain drugs and their brain structure is forever altered. I don't just speak of the innocence of the MMO experience itself, that is without question and easy, but so many other factors... Back then, nobody (or very few) were googling everything, they certainly weren't utilizing an entire monetized industry of "guides" who did their "work" on youtube, monetized blogs, etc, who exchanged their service (teaching you how to beat this next task in the game), for your ad hits or youtube hits.
And that point alone goes back to your theme of how everyone was "doing what they wanted" but when they then were enticed with the opportunity to rise above the pack, they ruined all the fun for themselves. I look at MMO's today and laugh, and because I'm in my 30's I relate it to me and my buddies playing console in the 90's, and we'd always have that one friend who bought those strategy guides that were like 600 page magazines with all of the cheat codes and walkthroughs, and me and my friends would all think "well, what's the point?".
We basically live in a world full of undisciplined children who want to eat a slice of their cake before the birthday party, and then complain to mom that they don't have a full cake at the party. Players are bored and hop from game to game today not because the games are all shit, but because they're treating video games the way a sexaholic roams from nightclub to nightclub with his pickup artist cheatcodes looking for the next outlet for his Coolidge Effect run amok, and after a while he'll become a misogynist, much like this place is toward MMO's. The sexaholic was the fool for thinking all of that effort would lead him to something rewarding, just like this current generation of MMO players thinking picking up the newest game and googling/youtubing to victory would leave them fulfilled.
Man is his own worst enemy.
Hmm..thoughts to ponder...
Well, you know, I have to say that candle was burnt at both ends. Yeah, there's always idiots in the community that use their mob leverage to help ruin games and "make it easier". I'd call this external pressure.
But there was also undoubtedly internal pressure that was negative. Anyone who was paying attention saw that idiot Julio Torres on Attack of the Show and various other places blatantly as some mindless mouthpiece pushing toward how they need to make SWG more like WoW; and the community all hated his guts for it.
It reminded me of how a few years later when they were promoting SWTOR, more heavy-on-the-marketing light-on-the-pragmatism mouthpieces were dismissing the fans appeals toward a space game in SWTOR (because they remembered how much they loved JTL in SWG), and one of the devs set off the SWTOR community pre-launch by saying "you didn't see Han and Chewie say let's go off and blast that rock over there!"; he said that to dismiss the fact that the space game was basically a tacked-on rail shooter, and the whole community knew this and really got upset.