Going through the interwebs and many of the forums in MMORPG I see people state things about Old SWG as fact which are no more than Urban Legends. Here are a few that really bother me:

1) Old SWG was too complicated. This was simply an argument thrown out by SOE to justify the NGE. There was complexity, but it was not difficult. Anyone interested in a feature of the game had to learn the system, but it was fun to figure out and rewarding. A person getting into crafting and figuring out its nuiances was a better crafter than others. This permiated all features in the game.

2) There was too much reading in Old SWG. Hardly...On the contrary the game was a sandbox game with a minimal amount of dialog. A few of the theme parks had storyline..you had the tooltips and skill descriptions...you had the typical silly mission descriptions. 3rd grad level stuff...

3) Old SWG was not for casual gamers. This one always bugs me the most since I am a casual gamer and everyone I hang with is casual. The game was all about casual. It was designed with social classes, homesteading and no levels. You can't get more casual than logging into a game where you didn't have to fight to have a valid gameplay style.

4) Old SWG was not balanced. This was somewhat true if you PvPed. You could invent your own template from 30 diffent classes. Each character could basically use 2.5 of these classes in their template. So there were better templates for PvP...who could not see this happening? But the bottom line was...only a few really cared. PvPers who got beat down would complain, but they could easily move to a new template. Everyone else was just tickled to death with the system and it flexibilty.

5) The holocron grind sucked. Not an Urban Legand :P

Old SWG had its issues. Big Issue!. But the sandbox worked and I hope to see a game like it again.

6) The game fun to play now after the CUNGE that is

7) The bugs are fixed

It's true that the hologrind was, by its very nature, a grind but I did actually kind of get into it. I talked to other people as I was grinding, I kept a weather eye out for bounty hunters, I saw other Jedi off in the dustance, I prepped my safe houses, I constantly tested new fighting, food and spice combinations, and when it got too much, I went hunting for crystals with my doc/swordsman or sold foods with my merchant/chef. My 260,000 bols soon went by.

Originally posted by valkyrie36

But the sandbox worked and I hope to see a game like it again.

Someday...someday...

You're correct on all accounts.  Man I miss old SWG...

Originally posted by hubertgrove

It's true that the hologrind was, by its very nature, a grind but I did actually kind of get into it. I talked to other people as I was grinding, I kept a weather eye out for bounty hunters, I saw other Jedi off in the dustance, I prepped my safe houses, I constantly tested new fighting, food and spice combinations, and when it got too much, I went hunting for crystals with my doc/swordsman or sold foods with my merchant/chef. My 260,000 bols soon went by.

I did the hologrind, in the oldest days, because several friends of mine were very interested in doing it, and I figured, what the hell? It was also a lot easier when you had people work on the same classes at the same time, for training purposes and AP. I went out as a bodyguard when the first Jedi in our guild came into being, this was way before anyone knew how the BH system worked, really, and while there was saber tef. But group TEF, at the time, was a counter to saber TEF.

I unlocked on my 13th or 14th profession, which was ironic, because I never really was grinding with the purpose of getting it, and I never really wanted Jedi, except for the extra 10 building lots. Were my friends upset.... :)

 Alot of people hate the holo grind. But I liked it. I tried a LOT of proffessions I would have never tried before and actually found them fun to play. The only thing that sucked was asking someone to do something (needing a specific class) ...but there class had already changed from a few days earlier,lol.

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Originally posted by valkyrie36

1) Old SWG was too complicated. This was simply an argument thrown out by SOE to justify the NGE. There was complexity, but it was not difficult. Anyone interested in a feature of the game had to learn the system, but it was fun to figure out and rewarding.

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But the sandbox worked and I hope to see a game like it again.

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My prediction is that we won't see a major mass-market sandbox game for a very long time. Big budget games aren't going to take risks but emulate the DikuMUD approach of WoW, whereas a lot of smaller contenders will try lots of different things. EVE Online and Pirates of the Burning Sea are two that spring to mind, and even the latter has a class/level overlay.

although it was not too complicated i have to say it was very complicated (especially at the start).  however the community was great and helpful and once you found your way it was fine.

 have to agree with urban legend #3.  I would consider myself a casual gamer.  I play mostly FPS games and never cared for MMORPG games.  But when I heard about SWG I was kind excited to play.  I waited a year after the game came out to and boy I loved playing it.  After looking through the game guide I had a pretty good idea on what was going on.  Joining a guild really help me enjoy the game too.  But now those days are gone.  I

 Found No1 to be a plus,i figured it was  complicated enough i would have a year or more content in front of me just learning the ins and outs.

 I loved sitting in my camp reading the skill trees."YOU meen you just sat in your camp and had fun"
Yep of course there were other useful tasks to be prefomed while in camp.crafting.healing, enjoying the company of others and admiring the planet you were on.

 No power gamer here, i just took my time enjoying the ride,casually of course.


 Balance=boring  PVP in Guild Wars for months on end and you will find that out. I want to be scared of someone, and make others scared, more realistic that way.  

 i missed the hologrind, i was a newbie back then so i don't know if it sucked or not,by the time i understood a fair portion the game, we had the village, meh content for the future if or when i wanted it.

 SWG has bigger issues nowdays then PreCu, i wonder if they regret it yet?

Originally posted by valkyrie36

Going through the interwebs and many of the forums in MMORPG I see people state things about Old SWG as fact which are no more than Urban Legends. Here are a few that really bother me:

1) Old SWG was too complicated.= TRUE, not for me, not for many people in our guild or other people regardless who they where at the time, but it was definitly complicated for many others who tried the game. But overall the game was indeed complicated for allot of players and i bet it was even to complicated to the development team that was left around the time of the CU/NGE, so i don't feel it's a simple argument trown out by SOE as i myself have experiance'd atleast from players who felt it was to complicated, for me it was like another poster said something that gave me prospec into how long i would be able to play and enjoy the game and was in no way or form complicated for ME. This was simply an argument thrown out by SOE to justify the NGE. There was complexity, but it was not difficult. Anyone interested in a feature of the game had to learn the system, but it was fun to figure out and rewarding. A person getting into crafting and figuring out its nuiances was a better crafter than others. This permiated all features in the game.

2) There was too much reading in Old = TRUE aswell, not based solely on ingame reading, what was meant at the time was people (somehow"needed internet to figure out how to play or use skills/weapons/grindspots ect...ect, meaning the info given by ingame wasn't sufficient to enjoy the game for some people as they needed to find all sorts of info true website's/forums, again it did not effect me as i truly enjoyed the sandbox aspect of hte game and i was never in need to search for info regarding the game as with each and every game i have played i can find all the info i need from the game itself, nowaday's and even back then many unfortunaly can't do so and need for example "official forums" again that would involve more reading. SWG. Hardly...On the contrary the game was a sandbox game with a minimal amount of dialog. A few of the theme parks had storyline..you had the tooltips and skill descriptions...you had the typical silly mission descriptions. 3rd grad level stuff...

3) Old SWG was not for casual gamers. With this i fully agree with OP > even tho it's again just a opinion and not a fact. This one always bugs me the most since I am a casual gamer and everyone I hang with is casual. The game was all about casual. It was designed with social classes, homesteading and no levels. You can't get more casual than logging into a game where you didn't have to fight to have a valid gameplay style.

4) Old SWG was not balanced. Agree again, as that what ....atleast for me personaly...made me enjoy pre-cu due to not predicting what kind of build the person infront of you had in pvp, made you more carefull and made you think about what your next step would be. But with this keep in mind that unfortuanly the masses have shown not to except such playstyle and people simply want to know what they have infront of them, many even seem to enjoy the predicting aspect, which for me loses all challenge towards a decent pvp fight, might be why i kinda dislike pvp in MMORPG as they are far to predicteble. This was somewhat true if you PvPed. You could invent your own template from 30 diffent classes. Each character could basically use 2.5 of these classes in their template. So there were better templates for PvP...who could not see this happening? But the bottom line was...only a few really cared. PvPers who got beat down would complain, but they could easily move to a new template. Everyone else was just tickled to death with the system and it flexibilty.

5) The holocron grind sucked. Not an Urban Legand :P

Old SWG had its issues. Big Issue!. But the sandbox worked and I hope to see a game like it again. Agree...but hope they freeze the sandbox within MMORPG untill tech is really capable of producing the depth we really want to see from a sandboxgame in the mmorpg genre. Tech aint ready yet, i mean Singleplayer games just are starting to grasp it and i keep saying the mmo scene is behind about 2/3 years from being able to reproduce things we now see in singleplayer games before it could be used into a MMORPG, so a safe bet from my point of view would be that it could/should take another 3/5 years before we see such a game. I'm sure some will TRY, but not many would succeed into producing what many VETS wants, sure small pieces might be in such game but overall we just need to be patient.........

Cut down in it's prime...

Star Wars Galaxies WAS the best game EVER made. The fact is, it was so advanced and innovative it will most likely be years before we even see a game like this announced again. It was really ahead of it's time and perhaps that's what contributed to the downfall

Originally posted by Exar_Kun

Cut down in it's prime...

Star Wars Galaxies WAS the best game EVER made. The fact is, it was so advanced and innovative it will most likely be years before we even see a game like this announced again. It was really ahead of it's time and perhaps that's what contributed to the downfall

Just to bad that the pea-brains at SOE and LucasArts failed to understand what the old game of SWG really was and what it stood for!

Thank you for your responses both supporting and countering my opinions. Of course they are my opinions, but I see these statements given as fact without debate in many cases.

Its good to see the debate as I don't want people to believe these statements are consensus amoung those of use who played Old SWG. Otherwise they will remain Urban Legends.

Originally posted by Curate

 

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Originally posted by valkyrie36

 

1) Old SWG was too complicated. This was simply an argument thrown out by SOE to justify the NGE. There was complexity, but it was not difficult. Anyone interested in a feature of the game had to learn the system, but it was fun to figure out and rewarding.

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To be somewhat fair, this is not a legend debunking but an opinion. I know that pre-CU SWG would be too complicated for my wife (who had/has no interest in the game), while my sister-in-law did just fine with it, as did I. I have no clue what the majority opinion was of people who didn't like the pre-CU game.

To be fair, it really doesn't sound like it would be too difficult for your wife, more like she just doesn't care.

RE number three..for my wife who'd never played an MMO tried it out on my account and frankly couldnt get her head round it,much later she tried WOW and bingo she played it solid for 2 years till she moved to EQ2

In my mind the game was not "casual freindly" in anyway shape or form,now for me and others i'm sure thats what made the game,you had to go looking for stuff and sometimes get your arse kicked doing it,but for the new people to the gaming genre they need some sort of direction.

In this regard the game utterly failed.

The thing I find funny (ironic) about #1 is that, while that was given as one of the reasons NGE was "needed," the game seems more complicated now days.  When someone post how something in the game doesn't work right, how many times has Obraik or one of the other current players responded with "if you would....that wouldn't be a problem" type posts?

Let me see:

-- if you would read forums....

-- if you would use mods.....

-- if you would change your key mapping....

-- if you would use expertise points....

-- if you would play until your character was higher level.... (gotta love that one....if you will pay to play a game you do not like long enough the game will eventually become enjoyable once your character is maxed out? what kind of game is that? "don't take time to enjoy the game (being as it isn't enjoyable anyway) but rush to the end of the game and then it will be fun" )

Odd, I hopped onto SWG in 2004 after waiting to get a graphics card that the game would work with (another funny thing about SOE...it was on the list of exceptable graphic cards and about a year later it was listed as one the game was known to have bugs with) spending that time determining what species I wanted to play and where I wanted to live (noobie me, I wanted to live on Endor with the Ewoks) and I was able to play the game with little knowledge more than what the noobie droid taught me and a few abbreviations I'd learned playing TSO (such as LOL, AFK, ....basic chat talk).  Did I get the maximum experience out of it during those first few weeks or during the entire time I played it? No, but I was able to play the game and enjoy it....and I did become a little more "hardcore" as time passed.

Now it seems that in order to enjoy the game you'd better be able to figure out how to force the game to be enjoyable in a hurry.  Don't even bother logging in for the first time until you've researched every aspect of the game and downloaded all the needed mods.

Originally posted by rashhero

Originally posted by Curate

 

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Originally posted by valkyrie36

 

1) Old SWG was too complicated. This was simply an argument thrown out by SOE to justify the NGE. There was complexity, but it was not difficult. Anyone interested in a feature of the game had to learn the system, but it was fun to figure out and rewarding.

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To be somewhat fair, this is not a legend debunking but an opinion. I know that pre-CU SWG would be too complicated for my wife (who had/has no interest in the game), while my sister-in-law did just fine with it, as did I. I have no clue what the majority opinion was of people who didn't like the pre-CU game.

To be fair, it really doesn't sound like it would be too difficult for your wife, more like she just doesn't care.

 

Weird quoting -- hrm. Anyhow:

I hesitate to say "too difficult" insomuch as she's quite smart. I just know what she likes and doesn't like. She tried Pirates of the Burning Sea, for example, and declared it too complicated for her enjoyment. On the other hand she's playing and enjoying WoW. Knowing her tastes, I'm pretty sure she'd find the original design of SWG too complicated. I have years and years of RPG experience under my belt compared to her, from GURPS to Wizardry, so open-ended systems don't bother me.

My point's that you can't simply wave a hand and say that SWG being "too complicated" was merely an urban legend, unless you have exit polls from all people who left pre-CU that stated that found the complexity just fine, they actually left because of the UI (or something else).

Complicated?!

A friend of mine had a 11 year old daughter.

He used to let her run his character on his harvester run... He took over during combat, and did the harvester thing.

One day he came home from work, and found the daughter sitting by his computer playing SWG. Not only had she created her own character, but she had gotten several marksman boxes, gained some crafting skills(including dropping a selfmade harvester) and had found her way to the RP city.

He ended up buying a new box and paying for another account, just so his daughter could play.

Complicated my arse....

I also knew someones grandfather(age 73 I think), who'd never touched a computer before, but was very much a Star Wars fan, who bought himself a computer and played it easily after seeing his grandson play it.... The father also found the game, so 3 generations were playing the game..2 of wich were computer illiterates.

Complicated like learning to put a spoon in yer mouth!