Another useless article. I had friends play the game and quit but because the game was not populated enough. The only reason was that. And some of these were MMO newbs. Another "I get to speak for my group and make it sound like everyone" articles.

You do realize that the people who play and enjoy SWG now can't read for very long.  At least that is what one of the people who changed the game said.  I believe they said something like , There is too much reading in SWG.  So I guess your editorial will not reach the people you are trying to impress.

Any way hindsight is 20/20.  So I am not impressed by your Editorial. 

The game could have worked but greed got in the way.

 

 

Originally posted by Robbgobb
Another useless article. I had friends play the game and quit but because the game was not populated enough. The only reason was that. And some of these were MMO newbs. Another "I get to speak for my group and make it sound like everyone" articles.

to be fair, sandboxes aren't for every one.  you DO need a decent population for a sandbox, and you can't be um, how do you say this in a delicate fashion...  if you NEED everything handed to you, constantly, all day long; then, sandboxes will never be for you.   your friends seem to be the type that realized it's just not very fun without a lot of people.   after all, isn't that why we don't play single player games?  we play mmos for the MM part?


added:  another point... not so much to the person quoted...this wasn't star wars the fps, this was supposed to be, correct me if i'm wrong, an mmoRPG.  in the star wars MOVIES, you pretty much had the fps; the books, comics, online community... yeah, not so much "fps"...

so i guess if you went with the original pre-cu swg and expected nothing but fps, well, you didn't get it.  but chin up, i hear there's a lot of fps star wars games out there... those disappointed with the original sandbox, will probably find these others  to their liking.

This article seems to display a lack of understanding as to why SWG players fell in love with their game. Grinding was a very slight aspect for some people, and this includes combat professions. SWG may have been the easiest game in which I ever max'd a character. Grinding only became an issue if you chose to make the dash for Jedi, or couldn't decide who you wanted your in game professions to be. Content was never a problem for me, I could do whatever I wished, and funny enough, AI and NPC's were intelligent and challenging enough in so many different places, that making an outing group was *very* easy. What he calls the contentless professions of Entertainer and Crafter, I consider to be the source of some of the best in game conversation and collaboration I have seen anywhere.

Once again, he also invoked the name of the mmo 800 pound gorilla, a game which has ZERO in common with prior SWG. The games, literally, once had nothing in common whatsoever. Comparing WoW to SWG from SWG's prior incarnation has very little comparison other than they are games. WoW is great for what it is, and SWG is great for what it was. Simply because you found the lack of preprogramming a negative, you seem to ignore those of us who found the place crawling with it.

Originally posted by Robbgobb
Another useless article. I had friends play the game and quit but because the game was not populated enough. The only reason was that. And some of these were MMO newbs. Another "I get to speak for my group and make it sound like everyone" articles.

Gee I wonder why the game wasn't populated enough....? Could it be because SWG sucked great green rocks through a dixie straw even when I was in pre-NGU format? Gosh, I bet so.

I played pre NGU SWG for as long as I could stand the choppy framerate, bugs, and general confusion at what, exactly, there was to do. I enjoyed exploring for as long as I didn't get bumped from the server, and as long as my poor Geforce FX5600 card at the time could handle it before some graphics glitch caused my program to croak.....later, when tne NGU edition came out I tried it on a newer rig where it ran much better, but I was still nonplussed at the gaemplay, although it was a far site better than it had been.

The elitist attitude of some of the posters on this site continues to amaze me. The persistent bitching about how all writers on the site should be canned because they dare to express opinions in what are clearly editorial commentaries never ceases to amaze me. Why I would want to see the author of this article banned when I find those who denigrate his perfectly valid issue with this game more offensive is beyond me. But then, I live in the US and am used to free speech rights, maybe you and these other yokels aren't. As such, I appreciate everyone's opinon on the matter, including my own

 

It sounds like some of you guys dont get the point of the article lol.

He is comparing the worldy dynamics with the gamish dynamics with a bit of pokes at the lack of actional gaming content like epic quests and that which would make it feel more "starwarsy".

In a world you get great and awesome crafting systems and lots of player interaction, the soul dependance of the gameplay is on the players. Its great for roleplay, and imo embodies the mmorpg, but as he said it, doing the game that way lacked the star wars feel some people expected. I have to say as an artisan, architect, engineer then going on to a jedi later in the game, I almost felt like i lived something similar to anakins life through the game and to me that was VERY iconic. The problem was once I got to the action part of the game i didnt get the starwarsy feeling from being a jedi, a task bioware was able to capture with kotor, you know... the part that gives you the chills? People had to grind and were penalized for playing a jedi, and whats worse because of the timeline players agree'd with it, and i guess i cant blame them for it.

I think that( what was missing) had alot to do with yoda being gone, and other great jedi masters to handle a leadership type role for the players due to the timeline. I mean who didnt want to meet c3po,darth vader, r2d2. luke and all the other great characters. But our experience with star wars for most people i say my age, 20-30-40 know starwars by the original movie, thats home and not so much the sequels.

For instance as a jedi, i thought at some point Id have a bowl over my head deflecting blaster bolts, levitating objects with the force and that never happened, i thought at some point i would see and speak with the jedi council for epic jedi and force quests and other cool things you know, battling the darkside of the empire?, the sad part was it just wasnt that way. i was a jedi halfass trained in the force ( flawed) and pit against bounty hunters when even in the movies, the struggle for a jedi was against the dark side and not boba or whoever. That was a flaw in the gaming direction that many people disliked even though the pvp it brought was fun, it just wasnt right somehow.

Maybe they just ran out of room? who knows, I guess to try to put things in you have to take other things out which does mean you take hits in other aspects.

Quik note, I agree with the guy who said you wont find that type crafting in other games, i loved crafting in swg, its the rest that needed work and the devs are going the wrong way about it with the nge.

Originally posted by bugzonlsd

It sounds like some of you guys dont get the point of the article lol.

 

Did you even read the last one he wrote on the same subject? This is a continuation, a series of articles about a single subject. he made the actual point clear in article number one, this is just another dimension of it. Nobody has misunderstood what he is writing about, but if you only read this one, then you wont understand the discussion, so you will misunderstand the answers and.. with that.. the whole discussion. So laugh if you want, you dont even know what you laugh about.

 

And to the smartypants above that:

If you write somehting, or someone else write something you agree with, then its "Freedom of speech" If someone diasagree with you, or someone you agree with, and frankly think they are full of manure, then its "Against freedom of speech" or as you say "Its them darn foreigners again!!" Now put on your white little robe and hood if you want, I still think you need to read up on that "freedom of speech" thingy again. Disagreeing is kinda a big part of that too. If people have to agree to be valid, then its neither a democracy or freedom of speech. But then what do I know.... I am just a damn foreigner from a country with a democracy for more years than your country has existed... Looking at our history, you are just a bunch of european tourists that were too stupid to find your way back to the boats. A genepool built on the people that could not grow a potato or get enough crops to make a loaf of bread in the greenest, most fertile damn countries in the world.  So yeah... Start blaming it on the foreigners will ya.

SWG was a very good and fun to play game until they changed it to an actual "leveling" game, i feel they tried to copy off of WoW. Plus the fact that everyone could be a jedi was dumb imo. Remake it to the way it used to be.

yeah SOE screws every mmorpg over hahah eq1 -- 13 xpansions wtf lol -- eq2 - that was screwed from the start... like cmonnn soe pull it together

Here is were the SWG fanbois just miss the mark.  The issue with SWG wasn't the crafting system, or the entertainers or anything else implemented, it was that it didn't belong in SWG.  SWG was never about SW it was a generic Sci-Fi crafting/dancing/grindfest.  Was the crafting good, sure the best ever done.  Should it have been in a SW game.  Heck no.  That's not to say what they have replaced it with has hit the mark either, it sucks too.

Originally posted by Harafnir

Originally posted by bugzonlsd

It sounds like some of you guys dont get the point of the article lol.

 

Did you even read the last one he wrote on the same subject? This is a continuation, a series of articles about a single subject. he made the actual point clear in article number one, this is just another dimension of it. Nobody has misunderstood what he is writing about, but if you only read this one, then you wont understand the discussion, so you will misunderstand the answers and.. with that.. the whole discussion. So laugh if you want, you dont even know what you laugh about.

 

And to the smartypants above that:

If you write somehting, or someone else write something you agree with, then its "Freedom of speech" If someone diasagree with you, or someone you agree with, and frankly think they are full of manure, then its "Against freedom of speech" or as you say "Its them darn foreigners again!!" Now put on your white little robe and hood if you want, I still think you need to read up on that "freedom of speech" thingy again. Disagreeing is kinda a big part of that too. If people have to agree to be valid, then its neither a democracy or freedom of speech. But then what do I know.... I am just a damn foreigner from a country with a democracy for more years than your country has existed... Looking at our history, you are just a bunch of european tourists that were too stupid to find your way back to the boats. A genepool built on the people that could not grow a potato or get enough crops to make a loaf of bread in the greenest, most fertile damn countries in the world.  So yeah... Start blaming it on the foreigners will ya.

You seem a little uptight there bud.

 Anyhow... no the first article i did not read your right, but i did read the title of this one and the accompanying article below it :)

So rather then get upset at everyone for having thier own opinions and snapping at everyone for posting them, maybe you should loosen up? :) maybe a quote from the stated article to help your points along would help or even a link as i didnt expect to have to read anymore when the statements say "read the whole column here" lol.

I think that SW was big enough IP to get a ton of players to try a game which basically was poorly designed for the mass market (as the editorial points out).  A small percentage of those actually liked the total sandbox "content is a crutch for the weak" style of the game and hung around, making SWG a modest success.  It may have only had a few hundred thousand players, but that is far more than is needed to be profitable, and made it the second or third most successful MMORPG of it's day. 

Honestly, by making the game so deep and non-linear, the devs did sort of shoot themselves in the foot in terms of true mass market appeal.  I'm not saying it was a bad idea, but that's just not how Joe Bagodonuts likes to roll.  But then, they shot themselves in the head.  Instead of being happy with modest success, they decided to set their existing fanbase on fire and hastilly convert the game into something that might have mass market appeal.  This pissed off their existing players enough that they screamed bloody murder, quite in droves, and generated enourmous negative word of mouth and press hype for the game. 

They also ended up with something that had little appeal to new players.  It takes years of development to craft a balanced and enjoyable RPG of any sort, linear or sandbox.  You don't spend years developing a sandbox style game and then spend 6 months trying to slap together a different style of game and just patch it in.  What you end up with is a buggy mess and scripted quests that seem amateurish.  Joe Bagaodonuts may like his games simple, but he also like them polished.  He doesn't have the patience to wade through a shitload of bugs, and he sure as hell isn't going to do it in a game that has an extremely dated graphics engine.  The only players that will put up with dated graphics are lyak long term fans.  Of course SWG currently doesn't have any of those becuase they basically told them all "f-off, we don't care about you."

If there is any point to this wall of text, it's that I believe the editorial was correct as far as it went.  But what the devs should have done  a  year in was say "Whoops...oh well, lets make damn sure that we keep the 400 K or so players that like this style of game, and polish it up until we can start slowly growing from that base of core players."  What they did instead was abysmally stupid.

This is my own overall verdit of why SWG has not been the success wanted:

SWG has never at any version (Pre-CU, CU, NGE) been polished, bug free, complete or stable to the general acceptance of the MMORPG market.

This is why they lost Japan and continue to loose subs today.  Changing philosphies only compounded the troubles that existed with implimenting an incomplete new system. 

JYCowboy, despite the psychedelic font sizing, has basically hit the nail on the head on why SWG failed.

I was prepared to write a big long speech on why, but it basically boils down to this...

SOE thought they had a license to make money with the Star Wars IP, so they treated it like they could do anything and the Star Wars nerds would still come.

It did not prove the failure of "Sandbox", it simply reinforced that to underestimate (and abuse) your customer is financial suicide.

Under more sane and capable hands, I am sure SWG would today be seen in a much more positive light.   Even as a sandbox.



BTW, I find two things funny about your article...

1.  Like someone mentioned above, you never mention that they tried to make the game like you say they should have and it was an even worse failure.

2.  You never mention by name the actual culprits behind this disaster, SOE.  Intentional or not?  I was kind of getting the impression as I read your article that you were wanting us to believe that SWG from the beginning was terrible, hence the utter stupidity that was the NGE implementation may have not been so stupid???

I'm sorry if I'm totally wrong about this, but I'm enjoying this site a lot less since I started getting impressions that SOE is placing some kind of leverage on you guys to not call them out on their fuckups.  Like I said maybe I'm totally wrong, but that's the vibe I'm getting.

I think SWG would have been better off being a sci-fi mmo. I'm not sure you can make a good mmo based on SW, mostly because of Jedi.  If you have Jedi as npcs people will whine to play one and will loose people because they can't be one. Having an alpha class in a game doesn't work and the lore doesn't support it anyway. You could make Jedi playable, but you need to move the time line, which will lose people because they want Luke and Han, etc. You could keep the time line and have Jedi, but then you lose people because they hate seeing so many Jedi around. SWG can be a nitch. It can be solid, but it can't have mass appeal, because of Jedi. Jedi will always be a catch 22, if you are shooting for Wow numbers.

SWG failed cause of bugs, lack of vision on the dev's part, lack of content, SOE, LA, constant grind, nerf's, bad customer service, listening to crybaby customers, Jedi,  basically one of the worst teams to put a game together in MMO history. Played it for 3 years and have to say the only reason i log in is I have a couple of friends there. Fact is most players of SWG could've made a better game

Although I agree that SWG lacked content, using lack of content to explain SWG's failure is incredibly simplistic. There were TONS of problems in SWG, nearly every class had multiple broken abilities, combat was unbalanced, the game was incredibly buggy, continued nerf cycles, JEDI, etc. To top it all off SOE is a horrible company. All that and it still had 300k subscribers at it's peak.

I didnt even bother reading the article after that Part I of this article. I'd advise you guys the same- it'll save ya some stress

Originally posted by Chessack
What the editorial does not adequately address, however, is that his own premise has proven to be false. After the SWG genius developers reached the same conclusion in 2005 as the OP, that players needed pre-packaged content to make the game more "casual friendly", they ripped out 90% of the skill system, and replaced it directly with a quest-driven tutorial, a quest-driven game, levels, WOW-style buttons, etc. And you know what happened? The lost all the old players, and gained hardly any new ones.

I don’t think the premise is false. Yeebo’s post above really spells out exactly why.

The only people that didn’t need content in the beginning were the players that were already fans of MMOs. Just making a game multiplayer doesn’t negate the need to have some handholding for those that don’t get it. And since Star Wars had a much broader appeal than EQ it was absolutely foolhardy not to take into consideration that many new players wouldn’t quite get the sandbox concept.

Like television shows MMOs really only get one shot to impress their audience, typically that's at launch. Once players have tested the waters and found them not to their liking they're probably never coming back. If 24 were to suddenly have sappy romantic interludes on every show it wouldn't suddenly change its demographic to include Lifetime channel watchers, it would only alienate the existing loyal fan base. And that exactly what SWG did by forcing content onto a player base that had stuck it out in the sandbox they liked for several years.

While hearty MMO fans will go on at length about what a great game Star Wars was at launch in regards to the open skills system, experimental crafting, and player housing, they almost never say that the theme of the game is what kept them there. KOTOR on the other hand captured that essence. Galaxies could have been a great game, if only it had a compelling story to it from the beginning, which incidentally WoW did six times over at each starting zone.

In response to Steve Wilson:
First the vast majority of players of World of Warcraft are from asia... over 6million of the 8 million or so.  And with the popularity of mmo's in general in asia I doubt very many of those 6+ million are new to mmos... What was it Richard Garriott said, 1 in 10 people in korea have a lineage account?

Secondly, when SWG was at its most popular there were no jedi, there were random events across the servers hosted by GM's that provided players with a good amount of content.  What killed swg wasn't so much the lack of "quest driven things to do" but first the bugs that went ignored, followed closely with the lack of a focus on the dev team to provide players with new challenges.

Let's be honest here, you can talk about the "game" in these mmo's all you want however, it is nothing more than a grind.  Whether you go to some static npc with a freaking symbol over his head or you go to a terminal you get one of two types of quests:  Go kill x amount of mob a, or go deliver this doodad to that person over there somewhere. 

Actually the only first gen game to really provide a game I think was SWG... after they removed permadeath and saber TEF from jedi they were an unstoppable character.  Like what just about every rpg gamer develops thier single player characters to be.  Whether it be BG, Morrowind, Oblivion, Icewind Dale, any of the gold box games, whatever.  You become near to god like in your power and you walk around killing anything and everything.  Precisely what a fully templated and exceptionally geared jedi could do.