Originally posted by Reklaw

 

Originally posted by demalus

 

Originally posted by Reklaw

 

Originally posted by demalus

 

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Ermm sorry man but try and understand i aint a gamedeveloper I AM A GAMER and play for fun, i care if a game is fun for me or maybe isn't fun, if it is fun i play if it, if it isn't i don't play it, i really don't give a shit if game A copied something from game B, if it works and turns out to be fun i will enjoy it, if not i will leave it for what it is , again i will say it , i play games for fun. There for I DO NOT SEE WOW CLONES, like i said check other games and suddenly each and every other game besides WOW seems to be this WOW-Clone, as people do not seem to look at what a game offers, suddenly people look what game X has taken from game Y, i mean common guy's what happend to just trying to have some fun in these games.

 

Do hope that you get into the industry and make something some are waiting for, would i play it?, who knows....like i said if it's fun i probebly play it, if not then not. Also to be clear what you said is mainly logic and yes if i look at the games i play in that perspective, then yeah sure, but like i said i do not look at games that way

 

 

 I completely agree with you, playing games is suppose to be fun.  I just don't agree that SWG didn't rip-off WoW.  Using the same mechanic is one thing, but they totally copied WoW with the intent of getting more subscriptions.  I don't know why on Earth this strategy is still around.  This is what I was talking about when I said that the business people need to get OUT of gaming (they are ruining it).  If a developer makes there game to attract WoW players, why wouldn't they just play WoW?  These business people are going to make MMOs become WoW clones for a while :(

 Personally, I hate WoW fundamentally.  The game is essentially a collection game.  You PvP, level up, raid, etc. all to get better gear.  Getting better gear allows you to get even better gear.  There is no point other than to say, "I got x item!"  My personal philosophy on MMOs is that they create a virtual world.  There should be MANY PEOPLE and it should be IMMERSIVE.  I guess that line of thought is being phased out though :/

I FULLY AGREE on soooo many things you guy's say, but it seems many of you who reply to me do not see what i am saying unfortunaly, like i said when using logic and looking at the game like most of hte people do at this section then yes i fully agree, but what most of you do not seem to understand is that there are people like me who do not look at games like that ANYMORE....this is partial thanks to SOE in how they ruined pre-cu, i made me look different to these type of game, i stopped being involved in how a game was made i got involved with my own pleasure and fun, when game X stops being fun i quite, when things copied from others games and it seems to be working therefor given me pleasure from the game i play it. If game X copies something and it ruines a game i again quite. not directed directly to last reply here but general.

 

Like i said i look at games for what they are, not for what they should be or could be, if they not what i expect, if they not fun to play i DO NOT PLAY IT. Like i said before i don't give a shit if game A copied things from game B if it works it works, if not like i also said i don't play it.

Again to make it clear most things most of you said are true if people look at games the way most of you do ....but again like i said i do not sit myself in a developerchair i sit myself in a fun entertaining chair and if a game isn't entertaining i don't play it, it's soo very simple, but somehow seeing the reply's most don't seem willing to understand that...unfortunanly, and there is where i state that people are WOWEFIDE cause even if game X might or has proven to have stolen/copied/cloned things from other games, it's all about fun if it's not fun i don't play, reason why i stopped played when NGE fully hit us.

I think I understand what you're saying here Reklaw.  When I sit down and try to just put on my fun hat though, I can't help noticing things.  I try to suspend these observations, kind of like the "suspension of disbelief" that enables us to enjoy movies that are frankly unrealistic.  Honestly, when it comes to SWG I find this very challenging.  The long-standing serious bugs catch my attention, and I'm not able to mentally sweep them under the carpet so to speak.  The fact that so many features are directly copied from another game was a new first-hand observation for me.  Again this is so very evident and frankly disturbing that it interfere's with my "fun."

Honestly to be able to enjoy SWG at this point I'd have to put a lot of energy into:

-forgetting the old game,

-forgetting how SOE repeatedly treated its players,

-ignoring so many long-standing serious bugs,

-forgetting that the devs said they'd make fixing certain serious problems a high priority 2 years ago (collision detection),

-and ignoring or denying that they chucked out something I invested in for a poor copy of someone else's product.

I find myself unable to forget, ignore/deny to this extent. 

On your other point, I thought you were saying that SOE didn't intentionally copy WoW, and that this apparent cloning is happening only in the mind of some players.  I think there's enough observational data to support the claim that WoW was intentionally copied.  If that's not enough though, the article I quoted indicates SOE's intentions of making SWG more like WoW.  I also believe that statements from folks at SOE and LA have alluded to their intentions to make the game more like WoW in the hope of appealing to the huge WoW audience base.  So I think the intent to copy exists in reality, not just in some people's minds.

OP, just so you know, when it comes to copyright law - it is a federal issue, meaning that there is no state law that governs copyrights - so it doesn't matter what jurisdiction you are in - only the expression of ideas are copyrightable - never an idea itself.

Having said that, if you want to learn more about copyrights and star wars, you can look up a case where Star Wars sued Battlestar Gallactica for copyright infringement.  In the lower courts, BG won.  On appeal, SW won.  I think the case was eventually settled.  The point is that the interpretation of what is an idea and what is the expression of an idea is a very tricky thing.  There is no bright line test that can definitely seperate the two.  Furthermore, the interpretation of what constitutes expression of an idea is different depending on your geographic location.  In the wild wild west (9th circuit  - CA and a few other states) they are all over the place with caselaw - but they seem to be a little more lax on proving expressions of an idea than on the east coast (2nd circuit - NY and other states).

So, take a look at the SW v. BG case - let me know if you need the case citation - but read both opinions, not just the latest one.  I, personally, agree with the judge in the lower court - he lists all the similarities - but comes to the conclusion that BG did not infringe on SW because BG did not copy anthing that was copyrightable. 

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Originally posted by tzarny

OP, just so you know, when it comes to copyright law - it is a federal issue, meaning that there is no state law that governs copyrights - so it doesn't matter what jurisdiction you are in - only the expression of ideas are copyrightable - never an idea itself.

Having said that, if you want to learn more about copyrights and star wars, you can look up a case where Star Wars sued Battlestar Gallactica for copyright infringement.  In the lower courts, BG won.  On appeal, SW won.  I think the case was eventually settled.  The point is that the interpretation of what is an idea and what is the expression of an idea is a very tricky thing.  There is no bright line test that can definitely seperate the two.  Furthermore, the interpretation of what constitutes expression of an idea is different depending on your geographic location.  In the wild wild west (9th circuit  - CA and a few other states) they are all over the place with caselaw - but they seem to be a little more lax on proving expressions of an idea than on the east coast (2nd circuit - NY and other states).

So, take a look at the SW v. BG case - let me know if you need the case citation - but read both opinions, not just the latest one.  I, personally, agree with the judge in the lower court - he lists all the similarities - but comes to the conclusion that BG did not infringe on SW because BG did not copy anthing that was copyrightable. 

Take a look and let me know what you think.

The SW vs. BG is a good example of what I'm talking about.  I can see how difficult it is to define what is and what is not copyrightable in an instance like this.

Personally I don't see Galatica as copying the main plotline of StarWars, or any of the main characters for that matter.  They both have space ships, but none of them look the same, and none of them have the same name.  They both have cool looking badguys, but they're robots in one show and people in plastic armour in the other.  StarWars has the force, BG has the Lords of Cobal etc. 

If BG had a jedi knight flying around in an x-wing trying to redeem his father, I'd agree that they violated the StarWars copyright.   As it is though, the BG story appears completely different, and original, as do the characters.

Back to WoW and SWG though.  If they both had levels, ok..  If they both have loot, o.k..  If they both have professions and something like skill trees, o.k.  Similar UI's...o.k. again.  I may not be happy that the SWG game I enjoyed was dismantled and replaced with something else, but I'm not focused on this whole copying theme yet. 

What made me question the ethics wasn't just the similarity of form, but the exactness of it, it's timing, the duplication of things like the Beastmaster, and SOE/LA's outright statements of intent to make their game more like WoW.  I just didn't realize you could go that far in copying someone else's product and marketting it as your own.  I found it surprising.  I see that it may be legal, but I still find it surprising. 

I suppose I also don't want to focus too much on the legal aspect of the discussion.  I truly don't expect Blizzard to ever challenge SOE on this.  I mean, why would they?  They probably just chuckle at SOE's failed attempt to emulate their product.  They also probably gained thousands of SWG players through the whole deal.  Really it only seems to have helped WoW and hurt SWG...and its players unfortunately.

Originally posted by SioBabble

 

Originally posted by Sift

You guys are insane... SWG has more of a twitch FPS feel then it does a wow feel.... And every feature wow has is a ripoff so what are you trying to say?  I love wow but if your trying to argue that its original... its not. 

 

Who's saying that WoW is original?

My contention is that WoW is the ULTIMATE 2nd Generation MMO.  Blizzard took a look at everything that was out there, took from them what they thought was workable, playable, and cool, and then refined it, tested it, polished it, and presented it, with deliberate simplification to make it run smoothly. 

A good example of simplification is the graphics of the avatars.  Unlike in many MMOs, your avatar's customization is drasticly limited in WoW, and one of the effects of this is that rendering multiple avatars on your screen is a far less complex and lag-inducing process than it is in SWG.

WoW's success is a boon for Blizzard, but it's the bane of the MMO genre, in my opinion.  Because WoW has been so successful, the suits want to be like WoW.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and envy, and the MMO industry has become every bit as formulaic as it matures as the cinematic entertainment (movie and TV) industry is.  More and more games are put out that try to slavishly follow the WoW formula, just like you've got dozens of Law & Order/CSI type shows all over the tube, and there are formula films (slasher, teen sex comedy, baddass male action) that are pretty much the same and predictable on the big screen.

In SWG's case, they had an original, groundbreaking system that needed polishing, bug quashing, and more content, either directed, or tools for players to create content.  Instead of going forward with the foundation they had, they elected to trash a game that built player loyalty and community and replace it with Star Wars with as WoWized a skin as they could manage.

All because the "King of MMO's" (SOE) found themselves being pwned by the upstarts of Blizzard.  Who beat them at their own game by putting out a simpler game than they had, but one that was polished and worked practically from the instant they went live.  The aspect of WoW that has a great deal to do with its success, which SOE stubbornly refuses to imitate, because they just don't DO polish...they're allergic to it or something.

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Originally posted by Exupery

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Originally posted by SioBabble

It is indeed (launched late June 2003), but when WoW came out, and smashed all records of subscriptions, Smedley went insane with envy as his ass was so totally pwned by the upstarts of Blizzard, and the WoWification of SWG began. There's evidence that once WoW came out in 2004 and took the MMO market by storm, that's when the CURB was ditched and an attempt to slavishly copy WoW with the CU, which was furthered by the NGE, began.
The first obvious attempt to copy WoW was the new graphics of action icons in the UI that the CU introduced, which eliminated the elegant UI icons of pre CU with "cartoooney" icons very similar to WoW.

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Blizzard is older than SOE nubsauce. WoW did come out a year after SWG, but Blizzard is certainly no upstart.

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Think he meant Blizzard's FIRST MMO. NUbcake

I daresay if SOE could have done it cheaply, they would have replaced the SWG graphics/world engine with something like WoW's.  Just to be more like WoW, just as cartooney instead of a more realistic appearance, in slavish imitation of everything thing but (here I go again) the quality of WoW.  Lord knows they did it to the UI as much as they could, even having the "hop on mount" icon be a horse, a creature that doesn't exist in SWG as a mount.

It's been rumored that the SWG engine is known to have basic flaws (which result in the player experiencing mobs stuck in trees, mobs shooting through walls, and rubberbanding) and has been known to have these flaws for a very long time, but because the flaws are deep in the graphics/engine code, they're just not possible to fix without starting over from scratch, and when they were discovered, SWG was too far along in development on top of the engine for them to turn back.

I know that I bitched about mob pathing (particularly as it affected pets and players on autofollow) from the getgo and it seems that it has never been addressed...another aspect of the game that was too deep in the engine to be addressed, so they just ignored it.  So many fixes to bugs and exploits were improvised that inadvertently created new problems that it seems so many of SWG's performance problems are basically inherent and cannot be addressed, so surface solutions have to be found to address them.

One of the strengths of the game that SOE has pointed out is that SWG is modularized so that you can drop an entirely new combat system on top of the engine and it manages to mostly work, as they've done twice now.  Well, sorta...they have these "pay for it" beta periods that follow the changes.  In the CU you had graphics glitches that rendred peko peko albatrosses the same size as regular peko pekos, and of course in the NGE you have the intentional everything's on crack movement.

Originally posted by Joshyray

isnt SWG older then WoW?

Yes, sorry I should have been more clear in my first post.  I'm referring to the first and second complete overhauls of the game: the combat upgrade (CU) and the new game enhancements (NGE).  Both of these happened after WoW's release, and each added very WoW-like features, graphics, professions etc. to the game, while removing many of the features that made SWG unique.  CU started down the WoW path, and NGE went even further. 

Originally posted by SioBabble

The combat in WoW is "dumbed down" compared to preCU.

I too was utterly amazed by how SWG virtually copied quests and quest concepts directly from WoW without any embarassment or shame.

What about SWG's pre-CU combat was more interesting or complex than WoW?  I played both, and I didn't see this.

And by they way, WoW came out at the same time as EQ2, which was also made by Sony, and the quest in the NGE are no more like WoW than they are like EQ2.

Originally posted by rikilii

 

Originally posted by SioBabble

The combat in WoW is "dumbed down" compared to preCU.

I too was utterly amazed by how SWG virtually copied quests and quest concepts directly from WoW without any embarassment or shame.

 

What about SWG's pre-CU combat was more interesting or complex than WoW?  I played both, and I didn't see this.

And by they way, WoW came out at the same time as EQ2, which was also made by Sony, and the quest in the NGE are no more like WoW than they are like EQ2.

SWG preCU combat was predicated on three player resource pools to fuel it, and also had a wide variety of different combat effects that mobs were vulnerable to, or resistant to.  Much more so than CU combat.

You had your health, action, and mind pools to draw upon to use your weapons, and to target in your foes.  Your weapons had a wide variety of damage types that they could inflict on targets, and targets had a wide variety of vulnlerablities or immunities, and in varying degrees of same.

This led to you being obliged to have a variety of weapons available for combat, and selection of the weapon that would do the most damage to your target was a key consideration in how you approached your target.

In combat, your weapons would have costs associated with mind and action pools, and one had to be careful not to run out of mind or action, or you'd incapacitate yourself.  Weapons (and attacks) could be directed at specific pools of your opponents to limit their options in combat.  The joke amongst carbine users was that they could probably kill themselves (by burning up their action bar to spam specials) before you could kill them.

Now of course in WoW have to mind your mana as a caster, or your rage as a warrior, or your action as a rogue, and furthermore, in the case of the latter two you need to take actions to build up your pools to give you access to special attacks.  Still, not as difficult to manage as three (or four, if you're a Jedi) pools that govern your abilities in preCU SWG combat.

SWG was trying to capture more of the complexity of combat, where a wide variety of factors can make or break you.   It was part of the entire "virtual world" feel that they were hoping to create, in part to give the world greater options for more player styles.  This is reflected in the complexity of the crafting system as well, where you'd often have to make tradeoffs in crafting in armor, weapons, food, and pharmaceuticals for specific advantages in the final product, such as damage dealt, or rate of fire, or duration of buff, or armor incumbrance vs. protection.

As for your question about quests, well, I've never played EQ or EQ2, so can't compare their questing systems to that of WoW, but some of the mechanics of the SWG NGE questing system appear to be directly derived from WoW's basic system...specifically, the kill x mobs, or find x drops, collect x widgets on the groud and the repetitive nature of the entire Legacy Quest series.

Originally posted by SioBabble

I daresay if SOE could have done it cheaply, they would have replaced the SWG graphics/world engine with something like WoW's.  Just to be more like WoW, just as cartooney instead of a more realistic appearance, in slavish imitation of everything thing but (here I go again) the quality of WoW.  Lord knows they did it to the UI as much as they could, even having the "hop on mount" icon be a horse, a creature that doesn't exist in SWG as a mount.

It's been rumored that the SWG engine is known to have basic flaws (which result in the player experiencing mobs stuck in trees, mobs shooting through walls, and rubberbanding) and has been known to have these flaws for a very long time, but because the flaws are deep in the graphics/engine code, they're just not possible to fix without starting over from scratch, and when they were discovered, SWG was too far along in development on top of the engine for them to turn back.

I know that I bitched about mob pathing (particularly as it affected pets and players on autofollow) from the getgo and it seems that it has never been addressed...another aspect of the game that was too deep in the engine to be addressed, so they just ignored it.  So many fixes to bugs and exploits were improvised that inadvertently created new problems that it seems so many of SWG's performance problems are basically inherent and cannot be addressed, so surface solutions have to be found to address them.

One of the strengths of the game that SOE has pointed out is that SWG is modularized so that you can drop an entirely new combat system on top of the engine and it manages to mostly work, as they've done twice now.  Well, sorta...they have these "pay for it" beta periods that follow the changes.  In the CU you had graphics glitches that rendred peko peko albatrosses the same size as regular peko pekos, and of course in the NGE you have the intentional everything's on crack movement.

As the rumor go's, and I heard this back around the start of 2002... When Koster and the other guys left/got fired from EA, most of them where working on the following MMO's. Koster and others where working on Ultima Online 2, or Ultima Worlds Online... Whatever it was the name changed like every other month. Other's worked on Wing Commander Online, and the other two games I believe was a Crusader:No Remorse MMO and an MMO based on Harry Potter.

Anyway EA in a stupid move killed all 4 of those games off. No one has really talked about why, EA claims UO2 was killed so they could do more with UO. Infact later on in 2002 the two 'other' Player Races in UO2 the Juka and Meer showed up in UO along with some of the other Monsters. Most of that was due to Todd "I make Spawn" Mcfarlane doing all the Artwork for UO2. And that year right before EA killed UO2 Mcfarlane Toys had some UO2 Action Figures come out... I think it was to hold off Todd taking EA to court, just me tho... And I still feel killing a Harry Potter MMO was just a flat out stupid move.

Still as the rumor go's...

When Koster left he was allowed to take the UO2 Engine with him. And after him and most of the UO2 and Wing Commander Online guys went over to SOE they just used the UO2 Engine for SWG... Now it sounds weird and the like, and I believe it to be true due to a few things.

The SWG engine just doesn't have other things we've seen in other SOE games. EQ2 has swimming and a full third axis for jumping and the like. Planetside has that in it as well... Also! EQ2 was a announced a few weeks before or after SWG. I know it was the same year, same with WoW... Remember we are talking 7 to 8 years ago. SWG came out a year before EQ2, the only thing I can really think at this point is SWG must have had some kinda head start.

Also there was what was going to be in UO2 as well... The skill system was said to be 'better' then what UO had in it. The Crafting system was said to be better then UO's as well. Also and I remember this as it was joked about by some of us, there was going to be an 'Entertainer' skill in UO2 as well.

The story is so insane that I believe it to be true... Besides that many have claimed Jump to Lightspeed plays more like Wing Commander then the old X-Wing/TIE Fighter games. I wouldn't put it past the Wing Commander Online guys working on that...

Still if this rumor is true, that means the SWG Engine is now 8 years old. As the UO2 Engine was worked on back in 2000. Infact the word was UO2 was for the most part about to go into Beta when EA killed it off back in 2001. Again stupid move on EA's part as believe it or not, even after UO's bad rep due to the Pk's and the Trammel, UO2 was one of PC Gamers readers picks for "Game we are all waiting for." along with Shadowbane...

Really I believe the Engine was one of the big faults with SWG from the start. It just never felt right and even today it's not 'done' as remember things like the Gungan City on Naboo 'are' in the game. And I recall Koster talking about Players being able to Swim down to it.

Dare I say, if the NGE was worked on for another year. And the old Engine was thrown out for a new one, the game may have been in better shape.

Originally posted by MikeMB

 

Originally posted by SioBabble

I daresay if SOE could have done it cheaply, they would have replaced the SWG graphics/world engine with something like WoW's.  Just to be more like WoW, just as cartooney instead of a more realistic appearance, in slavish imitation of everything thing but (here I go again) the quality of WoW.  Lord knows they did it to the UI as much as they could, even having the "hop on mount" icon be a horse, a creature that doesn't exist in SWG as a mount.

It's been rumored that the SWG engine is known to have basic flaws (which result in the player experiencing mobs stuck in trees, mobs shooting through walls, and rubberbanding) and has been known to have these flaws for a very long time, but because the flaws are deep in the graphics/engine code, they're just not possible to fix without starting over from scratch, and when they were discovered, SWG was too far along in development on top of the engine for them to turn back.

I know that I bitched about mob pathing (particularly as it affected pets and players on autofollow) from the getgo and it seems that it has never been addressed...another aspect of the game that was too deep in the engine to be addressed, so they just ignored it.  So many fixes to bugs and exploits were improvised that inadvertently created new problems that it seems so many of SWG's performance problems are basically inherent and cannot be addressed, so surface solutions have to be found to address them.

One of the strengths of the game that SOE has pointed out is that SWG is modularized so that you can drop an entirely new combat system on top of the engine and it manages to mostly work, as they've done twice now.  Well, sorta...they have these "pay for it" beta periods that follow the changes.  In the CU you had graphics glitches that rendred peko peko albatrosses the same size as regular peko pekos, and of course in the NGE you have the intentional everything's on crack movement.

There was a rumor I heard, and did post before on the other forum... But I'll post it here as well....

 

As the rumor go's, and I heard this back around the start of 2002... When Koster and the other guys left/got fired from EA, most of them where working on the following MMO's. Koster and others where working on Ultima Online 2, or Ultima Worlds Online... Whatever it was the name changed like every other month. Other's worked on Wing Commander Online, and the other two games I believe was a Crusader:No Remorse MMO and an MMO based on Harry Potter.

Anyway EA in a stupid move killed all 4 of those games off. No one has really talked about why, EA claims UO2 was killed so they could do more with UO. Infact later on in 2002 the two 'other' Player Races in UO2 the Juka and Meer showed up in UO along with some of the other Monsters. Most of that was due to Todd "I make Spawn" Mcfarlane doing all the Artwork for UO2. And that year right before EA killed UO2 Mcfarlane Toys had some UO2 Action Figures come out... I think it was to hold off Todd taking EA to court, just me tho... And I still feel killing a Harry Potter MMO was just a flat out stupid move.

Still as the rumor go's...

When Koster left he was allowed to take the UO2 Engine with him. And after him and most of the UO2 and Wing Commander Online guys went over to SOE they just used the UO2 Engine for SWG... Now it sounds weird and the like, and I believe it to be true due to a few things.

The SWG engine just doesn't have other things we've seen in other SOE games. EQ2 has swimming and a full third axis for jumping and the like. Planetside has that in it as well... Also! EQ2 was a announced a few weeks before or after SWG. I know it was the same year, same with WoW... Remember we are talking 7 to 8 years ago. SWG came out a year before EQ2, the only thing I can really think at this point is SWG must have had some kinda head start.

Also there was what was going to be in UO2 as well... The skill system was said to be 'better' then what UO had in it. The Crafting system was said to be better then UO's as well. Also and I remember this as it was joked about by some of us, there was going to be an 'Entertainer' skill in UO2 as well.

The story is so insane that I believe it to be true... Besides that many have claimed Jump to Lightspeed plays more like Wing Commander then the old X-Wing/TIE Fighter games. I wouldn't put it past the Wing Commander Online guys working on that...

Still if this rumor is true, that means the SWG Engine is now 8 years old. As the UO2 Engine was worked on back in 2000. Infact the word was UO2 was for the most part about to go into Beta when EA killed it off back in 2001. Again stupid move on EA's part as believe it or not, even after UO's bad rep due to the Pk's and the Trammel, UO2 was one of PC Gamers readers picks for "Game we are all waiting for." along with Shadowbane...

Really I believe the Engine was one of the big faults with SWG from the start. It just never felt right and even today it's not 'done' as remember things like the Gungan City on Naboo 'are' in the game. And I recall Koster talking about Players being able to Swim down to it.

Dare I say, if the NGE was worked on for another year. And the old Engine was thrown out for a new one, the game may have been in better shape.

Raph Koster was working on Wing Commander Online and left Origin/EA when the project was canceled.  He didn't take anything with him, aside from some design ideas (a number of things Mr. Koster hinted at being in the project he was working on before it was known that the project was Wing Commander Online were found in SWG), when he was hired by SOE.  The SWG engine was built from scratch by the SWG team at SOE Austin.

UO2 was scrapped because Richard Garriott wanted to restart development of the game from scratch, and the folks at EA realized the game would never make back its costs.  UO2's development was mirroring Ultima IX's (which was again mirrored by Tabula Rasa's), which was both a creative and financial disaster.  The Todd McFarlane designed critters made their way into a UO expansion as a way to recoup some of the cost of hiring Mr. McFarlane.  UO was still making EA a ton of money at that point, so incorporating the ditched UO2 critters was an easy decision.

I do agree that the SWG engine was poorly conceived.  The developers never took into consideration of some of the things that a Star Wars based game should contain, such as vehicle combat.  I very much disagree that the NGE would have been at all well received had a new engine been developed for it, or even if it launched in a better state.  Even as the NGE is today, it is complete excrement.  The combat mechanics are horrible, removing most of the professions was asinine, the single path quest line is not only poorly conceived, but also poorly implemented, and the entire idea of completely revamping a live game displays a complete lack of understanding an ethics with regards to the company's customers.  Would an engine designed for the way the game currently plays make the game better?  Definitely.  Would it make the game fun?  Not a chance.  The game, as it stands now, is a poorly designed, buggy, unfun mess.

Even the current direction of development shows the folks at SOE have no clue as to what makes games fun.  'Content', from now until the game ceases to exist, is going to be comprised of collections (scavenger hunts and killing hundreds of the same foozles over and over) and 'heroic' encounters (instances with MOBs that have a million hit points).  Sadly, after two years of eratic development, focused on trying to find the one big thing that might make the game recover from the NGE (even though the only thing that had a chance to work was obvious to everyone, but the folks at SOE were steadfastly against it), they have now decided to be content to adding busywork and calling it 'content'.

Yes, we all know SWG is a direct ripoff of Blizzards IP. Funny thing is i find a new ripoff everyday...like today i was bored in wow and decided to make a night elf druid... and i got a quest to kill webweavers in the night elf starting area. why didn't SOE just call them kashyykian spiders or something else? This is stuff i have caught so far. shards, glowy crap, the whole medic proffessions animations are ripoffs of various games.. mostly wow,  interface, icons, buffs, xp bar, beast master bar,  ferals (why not call  feral wookiees crazed or wild?), pvp vendors, and the biggest of all a linear level based treadmill based on 9 classess and talent point level progression with no multiclassing. wow and now swg are the only mmo's i've ever played that don't allow multiclassing even though multiclassing in most mmo's break your character. but w/e Soe dug their own hole and now they have to lie in it.

Sometimes i wonder if SOE just left the combat system alone and just fixed bugs and added content and fixes what swg would be like today. i bet it would be huge, most mmo players are sick of the wow model now and are looking for a more complex gaming experience and i think SWG could have provided that.

and WOW is still the best WOW model game.

Originally posted by the_lizard

Sometimes i wonder if SOE just left the combat system alone and just fixed bugs and added content and fixes what swg would be like today. i bet it would be huge, most mmo players are sick of the wow model now and are looking for a more complex gaming experience and i think SWG could have provided that.

and WOW is still the best WOW model game.

The entire evolution of the NGE baffles me in many ways.  I previously (on another thread) speculated that SOE just went into the panic mode when WoW came out and started doing so well.  They (rightly) saw this as a threat to their market share, when in fact what WoW did was make the pie larger.  It's just that from SOE's point of view, profits were the same (or perhaps even better) but their market share was smaller, and that terrified them, particularly Smed, who had this nice gig going that Blizzard was endangering because he looked bad due to market share percentage decline.  Even though the market was now larger than it was before.

Couple this with Smed's obvious lack of solid gaming interest, only financial interest (the man is obsessed with finding new ways to get his mitts on your money as a gamer) and you've got a receipie for disaster as SOE goes into the desperation mode, and the only solution seems to be "be more like WoW, that's what the kids want."

Notice those last few words: an indication of SOE's fundamental misunderstanding of who their audience was.

Of course the other thing SOE missed was what it was about WoW that made it successful; SOE's corporate culture seems to be utterly adverse to fixing and refining what it has, instead going for for massive, plagiaristic change that ignores the very qualities that are required to take on Blizzard head to head.

So SOE committed to the CU/NGE path, misunderstanding SWG's relative failure as having to do with their game's design, not the lack of polish, or the bugs, or the dearth of content.  The very things that WoW brought to the table with a much less complex and indeed somewhat retro game design.  WoW has a rich lore that the Star Wars property exceeds, but WoW presented it so much better in terms of content than SWG did, mainly because SWG was rushed onto the market in a half-baked SOE way that Blizzard had NOTED and set out to avoid.

The proof of Blizzard's more studied approach is in the numbers.  Spectacular.  But the industry as a whole still does not get what this means.  Koster understands a lot of this, but despite his obvious chops as a designer and a "student of fun" it's simply too expensive for most publishers to heed his wisdom.  The guys running the show are risk takers, but only to a certain point...then they get cold feet.  The Blizz team seems to be much more confident of their business model than other publshers are.

Originally posted by the_lizard

Yes, we all know SWG is a direct ripoff of Blizzards IP. Funny thing is i find a new ripoff everyday...like today i was bored in wow and decided to make a night elf druid... and i got a quest to kill webweavers in the night elf starting area. why didn't SOE just call them kashyykian spiders or something else? This is stuff i have caught so far. shards, glowy crap, the whole medic proffessions animations are ripoffs of various games.. mostly wow,  interface, icons, buffs, xp bar, beast master bar,  ferals (why not call  feral wookiees crazed or wild?), pvp vendors, and the biggest of all a linear level based treadmill based on 9 classess and talent point level progression with no multiclassing. wow and now swg are the only mmo's i've ever played that don't allow multiclassing even though multiclassing in most mmo's break your character. but w/e Soe dug their own hole and now they have to lie in it.

Sometimes i wonder if SOE just left the combat system alone and just fixed bugs and added content and fixes what swg would be like today. i bet it would be huge, most mmo players are sick of the wow model now and are looking for a more complex gaming experience and i think SWG could have provided that.

and WOW is still the best WOW model game.

Ok while I hate SOE and certainly detest the NGE version of SWG, I have to speak up on this point.  People are saying that SWG is now just a bad clone of WoW, etc.  This may be true but let's not forget that a lot of WoW's foundation was built on features found in earlier games such as EQ.  Gaming companies tend to go with what works and there's little doubt that, in its day, the EQ model worked as a standard for MMORPGs.  All Blizzard did was take that standard and add it's own unique twist.  So please keep this in mind and realize that if it were not for games such as EQ, the WoW model might not even exist in its current form.

Originally posted by jaxscorpio34

Originally posted by the_lizard

Yes, we all know SWG is a direct ripoff of Blizzards IP. Funny thing is i find a new ripoff everyday...like today i was bored in wow and decided to make a night elf druid... and i got a quest to kill webweavers in the night elf starting area. why didn't SOE just call them kashyykian spiders or something else? This is stuff i have caught so far. shards, glowy crap, the whole medic proffessions animations are ripoffs of various games.. mostly wow,  interface, icons, buffs, xp bar, beast master bar,  ferals (why not call  feral wookiees crazed or wild?), pvp vendors, and the biggest of all a linear level based treadmill based on 9 classess and talent point level progression with no multiclassing. wow and now swg are the only mmo's i've ever played that don't allow multiclassing even though multiclassing in most mmo's break your character. but w/e Soe dug their own hole and now they have to lie in it.

Sometimes i wonder if SOE just left the combat system alone and just fixed bugs and added content and fixes what swg would be like today. i bet it would be huge, most mmo players are sick of the wow model now and are looking for a more complex gaming experience and i think SWG could have provided that.

and WOW is still the best WOW model game.

Ok while I hate SOE and certainly detest the NGE version of SWG, I have to speak up on this point.  People are saying that SWG is now just a bad clone of WoW, etc.  This may be true but let's not forget that a lot of WoW's foundation was built on features found in earlier games such as EQ.  Gaming companies tend to go with what works and there's little doubt that, in its day, the EQ model worked as a standard for MMORPGs.  All Blizzard did was take that standard and add it's own unique twist.  So please keep this in mind and realize that if it were not for games such as EQ, the WoW model might not even exist in its current form.

Nobody is making a WoW knock off to attempt to duplicate EQ's success.  They are doing it because WoW is the 10,000 pound gorilla and they want a piece of the WoW playerbase.  If WoW and another game share a feature, and a new game comes along and has that feature too, it is because WoW hast that feature, not the other game.  Even SOE is trying to copy WoW with the changes they have made to EQ, EQ2, and SWG since WoW became a mega-hit.  Hell, all the praise SOE gets for making EQ2 a decent game is due to it being made more like WoW.

Blizzard took what worked from several existing MMOs and adapted the design to be more casual friendly.  They polished the package up and built it to run on low end systems.  That was the secret of Blizzard's success with WoW.  Unfortunately, most developers think they can siphon off WoW's subscribers by copying WoW's mechanics, but releasing their game unoptimized, riddled with bugs, and requiring top of the line hardware to run their mess of a game.

Originally posted by Obee

 

Nobody is making a WoW knock off to attempt to duplicate EQ's success.  They are doing it because WoW is the 10,000 pound gorilla and they want a piece of the WoW playerbase.  If WoW and another game share a feature, and a new game comes along and has that feature too, it is because WoW hast that feature, not the other game.  Even SOE is trying to copy WoW with the changes they have made to EQ, EQ2, and SWG since WoW became a mega-hit.  Hell, all the praise SOE gets for making EQ2 a decent game is due to it being made more like WoW.

Blizzard took what worked from several existing MMOs and adapted the design to be more casual friendly.  They polished the package up and built it to run on low end systems.  That was the secret of Blizzard's success with WoW.  Unfortunately, most developers think they can siphon off WoW's subscribers by copying WoW's mechanics, but releasing their game unoptimized, riddled with bugs, and requiring top of the line hardware to run their mess of a game.

You have some valid points and I am not debating that newer games are not copying the "WoW model".  All I am saying is that Blizzard took some of it's basic ideas from the games that came before it, polished them up a bit and put together a new game.  If not for those earlier games, we might not even have a "WoW model" today.  That said, if it's ok for WoW to borrow ideas from other games then I fail to see how it suddenly becomes bad or evil when other games do the same thing.  In SWG's case, I simply wish they had done a better job at copying WoW instead of releasing the garbage they called the NGE.

Originally posted by jaxscorpio34

Originally posted by Obee

 

Nobody is making a WoW knock off to attempt to duplicate EQ's success.  They are doing it because WoW is the 10,000 pound gorilla and they want a piece of the WoW playerbase.  If WoW and another game share a feature, and a new game comes along and has that feature too, it is because WoW hast that feature, not the other game.  Even SOE is trying to copy WoW with the changes they have made to EQ, EQ2, and SWG since WoW became a mega-hit.  Hell, all the praise SOE gets for making EQ2 a decent game is due to it being made more like WoW.

Blizzard took what worked from several existing MMOs and adapted the design to be more casual friendly.  They polished the package up and built it to run on low end systems.  That was the secret of Blizzard's success with WoW.  Unfortunately, most developers think they can siphon off WoW's subscribers by copying WoW's mechanics, but releasing their game unoptimized, riddled with bugs, and requiring top of the line hardware to run their mess of a game.

You have some valid points and I am not debating that newer games are not copying the "WoW model".  All I am saying is that Blizzard took some of it's basic ideas from the games that came before it, polished them up a bit and put together a new game.  If not for those earlier games, we might not even have a "WoW model" today.  That said, if it's ok for WoW to borrow ideas from other games then I fail to see how it suddenly becomes bad or evil when other games do the same thing.  In SWG's case, I simply wish they had done a better job at copying WoW instead of releasing the garbage they called the NGE.

I wish they had never bothered in the first place...and I have an intelligent reason why.  SWG stood to be the BEST combination of Sandbox and Classic MMO ever imagined.  They had the most perfect foundation for it, and it needed little more than some polish and additional content to make it work.  Sandbox MMOs tend to have poor subs due to the strangeness of its appeal, but THAT was before MMO's were even a thing to be considered when discussing a major market standard in gaming.

What COULD have happened was this:  WoW releases and gets a massive sub base.  SOE goes into overdrive optimizing the system and adding content while still LEAVING IN PLACE all of the wonderful customization tools already in place.  A simple refining (READ - picking up the pace) of combat and the whole game would have been perfect.  Once WoW gave life to the MMO market, it set up the pieces for other games to get noticed. 

See...here is the catch.  WoW is a purely Classic MMO.  All Classic MMO's give players burnout after the first year...give or take some months.  Once burnout happens people start looking at other games to see whats available.  Their subs would have actually probably doubled as a result of this.  But they chose instead to destroy everything about the game which made it unique and desirable...opting instead to try and make a frankenstein monster out of it by blending in WoW to the theme already in place.  It didn't work at all.

For that, I hate them.  I would still be playing if they hadn't destroyed my game.  I hate WoW, and wish to god I could go back to the old SWG.  I loath the fact I must now spend my days playing 5000 clones of yet another Classic MMO.