Originally posted by ArcAngel3

Responding to this comment: "Originally posted by kb056: Personally, I loved being a "moisture farmer", hell, I made my first million creds milking Pickets on Dantoine."

Exactly.  If you ask SWG players what one of the best features was, ever; probably many would say, "The skill system."  Even the guy who created the NGE said it was a big mistake to flush that down the toilet, and yet people still quote NGE press releases as a valid source of insight about SWG. 

Here's the quote from MMORPG.com staffer btw: "If the main Star Wars Galaxies complaint was "I wanted to be Luke or Han running around killing bad guys, not Uncle Owen farming moisture," they seem to have taken it to heart and all the classes we've seen seem to map to recognizable figures from the movies."

With respect, I don't think actual players of the game saw this as the main complaint.  I think this comes from some very bad marketting research conducted by LucasArts or SOE.  The very marketting research that suggested NGE was a good idea.

This is my take on the situation at any rate.  I'd like to hear what other actual players of SWG think.

I could not agree more, nor could I have said it so well. Great post ArcAngel3.

Originally posted by kb056

Personally, I loved being a "moisture farmer", hell, I made my first million creds milking Pickets on Dantoine.

 

Bugs and all, SWG, Pre-CU was 5 years ahaed of it's time.

 

Offer the same game today, bugs and all, and it could be a major contender. Not saying it's a WoW killer, but, it would do better then any game release since the NGE.

 

Fact!

I'm sorry but yes the game was fun and that has to be what you are confusing with ahead of it's time.  How can a game released with the number of bugs and lies this game has possibly be ahead of it's time.  Again there is nothing wrong with you thinking the game was loads of fun especially as one of the best AAA titles to offer a person freedom to actually engage fully in the game without combat but ahead of it's time?

yeah, the guy was obviously believing the lies that SOE and LA believed, that led to them killing the game we all loved.

This was part of Smed's "blame Koster" strategy. He couldn't accept that the blame rested on his bad managerial shoulders, so he needed a scapegoat. Koster was perfect for that purpose.

After they then tried the NGE, and it failed miserably, he shifted gears and blamed the "vocal minority." Then, when that failed, he blames "communication."

Smedley is VERY good at shifting blame and getting his cronies to repeat the memes he creates. None of them were true; however.

The initial game failed because it was released in a sorry state, core bugs were never fixed -- promised content never added. Then came WoW.

Sadly, the writer of the MMORPG article is obviously ignorant of what went down and is just repeating what he was told by the folks at LA.

asking  a  today  mmo  company   to  think of the depth  and complex  of pre-cu swg   would couse brain  melt down 

all we get is non depth games  I can  get these  mmo  games  on a xbox or  ps3   

Originally posted by Zorvan01

Originally posted by FikusOfAhazi

Im pretty sure Smed said it on the O-boards, and Nancy McInrinse said it to the NY friggin times. I wanna say ol Julio said it as well.

www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/arts/10star.html

Owned.

 

For Sony and LucasArts, the idea has been to make the game more "Star Wars-like," tying it more explicitly to the films.

"We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base," said Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director at LucasArts. "There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves."

 

 

And remember SOE swears the players asked for it, yet look at the highlights. Not one customer mentioned.

Bingo.  One of the lead devs on NGE said that SOE ran focus groups that involved no actual players of the game.  What kind of focus group is that?  Pretty skewed I'd say.

Also, someone posted on here saying he was in a focus group that was shown select portions of the NGE immediately before it went live.  He said they had major concerns, and that they liked some of what they were shown and told.

Apparently their major concerns were overlooked.  They certainly weren't mentioned.  Also, I don't know how much of the NGE they were actually shown.

On top of that, one of the lead devs said that he was playing around on his PC with the new combat system.  One of the suits saw it and made a happy noise.  That's the market research on that one.

Furthermore, when Helios pointed out that pets got in the way of the new targetting reticule, Rubenfield responded, "cut 'em."  Later we were told that these kinds of massive changes (delete creature handler) were in response to careful research and player feedback.

There ain't a shovel big enough for that load imo.  Judging from actual player responses so far, I think the moisture farmer explanation for SWG's poor performance belongs in the same pile.

Originally posted by FikusOfAhazi

Im pretty sure Smed said it on the O-boards, and Nancy McInrinse said it to the NY friggin times. I wanna say ol Julio said it as well.

www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/arts/10star.html

Owned.

 

For Sony and LucasArts, the idea has been to make the game more "Star Wars-like," tying it more explicitly to the films.

"We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base," said Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director at LucasArts. "There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves."

 

That quote is as depressing now as it was when she said it.

What really made it worse, was Smed saying sandbox games don't work. Was more than the nge of swg, it was an Industry wide NGE.  They dont even view mmo's as games or worlds..just business models.  That business model failed. In reality, SoE killed it. Twice. each time was a surprise announcement, exactly when the game started getting fun and people started coming back. Makes sence huh?

Originally posted by Ragnaven

As far as I am concerned SWG failed cause the nerf bat running rampant while the economy went to hell. If you weren't farming something to make credits then you were never going to buy anything cause missions just didn't pay enough for them to be worth while as a money making function. The constant we will nerf everything so you don't see the bugs got out of hand as well, it took more than 3 months for nge but it was pretty much not the same swg by the third month

No. It wasn't. The NGE was still in full effect as of it's launch three months later. A few months after that you got your Jedi and BH expertise, *several* months after that you got a few others...

I hate to tell you this, they didnt even acknowledge that all weapons did the same damage given level until the February following the NGE. So, three months and it was the "same swg"!?

You played right?
 

I always liked the comment ripping on camps. It is funny how someone who is supposed to be close to the game they are developing didn't play their own games. They never seemed to realize that community building and immersion comes from players interacting in many different ways not just hunting together. Nothing better than having a stranger running into your camp for asylum because they were near dead....CAMPS EFFING RULED!

Originally posted by TUX426

Originally posted by ArcAngel3

Responding to this comment: "Originally posted by kb056: Personally, I loved being a "moisture farmer", hell, I made my first million creds milking Pickets on Dantoine."

Exactly.  If you ask SWG players what one of the best features was, ever; probably many would say, "The skill system."  Even the guy who created the NGE said it was a big mistake to flush that down the toilet, and yet people still quote NGE press releases as a valid source of insight about SWG. 

Here's the quote from MMORPG.com staffer btw: "If the main Star Wars Galaxies complaint was "I wanted to be Luke or Han running around killing bad guys, not Uncle Owen farming moisture," they seem to have taken it to heart and all the classes we've seen seem to map to recognizable figures from the movies."

With respect, I don't think actual players of the game saw this as the main complaint.  I think this comes from some very bad marketting research conducted by LucasArts or SOE.  The very marketting research that suggested NGE was a good idea.

This is my take on the situation at any rate.  I'd like to hear what other actual players of SWG think.

 

I could not agree more, nor could I have said it so well. Great post ArcAngel3.

Yeah, great post...the point being...I never, *ever* played a moisture farmer. I hated the crafting side of swg (tried as a doctor and just found better stuff was available on the market).

So, this was a reason to move to the NGE, accept...The crafters were the *leaders* of our great imperial guild. The crafters knew how to track the Hero of Tatooine badge and ring...The crafters led us through the Death Watch Bunker, the moisture farmers...

Good times...

Originally posted by Fishermage

The initial game failed because it was released in a sorry state, core bugs were never fixed -- promised content never added. Then came WoW.

 

This is what I believe.  While I had more fun in swg than in any other game, it was because I found my own little niche (playing my BH).  I was well aware of all the bugs and problems with the rest of the game but I put up with them because they rarely effected my narrow playstyle.  The same couldn't be said of others and I knew many people that left when WoW was released.  In fact, I was often on ventrilo with a few of them while they played the WoW beta and the almost constant "This is so much better than swg!"  made me give it a try as well.  So yeah, WoW was probably the biggest nail that was put into swg's coffin, with the nge being the final one.

Originally posted by PreCU

I'd have to agree with that quote in a way. An iconic/starwarsy swg (done right) would be more popular than an uncle owen swg (done right). That said, they didn't do the uncle owen version right in many ways, and they obviously couldn't copy wow's popularity with their attempt at the iconic/starwarsy version.

The thing that SOE didn't get was that their game started the player out as an 'Uncle Owen' but, through different experiences and environments, allowed them to turn themselves into 'Luke Skywalker'. My guy started off selling little bits of energy from his personal windfarm with a one bedroom house outside Bestine; by the end he was a Jedi Knight, an Imperial Colonel, an Inquisition fighter ace with a Jedi Starfight, a Greivous fighter and an Imperial multi-person ship, and a three guildhall compound outside a player city in the the north of Tattoine. He was 'iconic' and 'starwarsy' all right - but not in any way Nancy Macintyre could understand.

Originally posted by trophic

Originally posted by PreCU

I'd have to agree with that quote in a way. An iconic/starwarsy swg (done right) would be more popular than an uncle owen swg (done right). That said, they didn't do the uncle owen version right in many ways, and they obviously couldn't copy wow's popularity with their attempt at the iconic/starwarsy version.

 

The thing that SOE didn't get was that their game started the player out as an 'Uncle Owen' but, through different experiences and environments, allowed them to turn themselves into 'Luke Skywalker'. My guy started off selling little bits of energy from his personal windfarm with a one bedroom house outside Bestine; by the end he was a Jedi Knight, an Imperial Colonel, an Inquisition fighter ace with a Jedi Starfight, a Greivous fighter and an Imperial multi-person ship, and a three guildhall compound outside a player city in the the north of Tattoine. He was 'iconic' and 'starwarsy' all right - but not in any way Nancy Macintyre could understand.

This parallels my experience in SWG. However, I have to add that the devs at SWG never understood the Star Wars universe on fundamental levels, the vast military-industrial complex for one example. SWG also didn't provide enough toys for their sandbox at launch (part of being released too soon). The random mission generator was an adlibs failure. 

Ideally, if they had provided for that character experience many of us had in a world developed by BioWare (a company who 'gets' Star Wars), it might have been far more successful.  But, of course, that's an armchair developer perspective.

---

Originally posted by trophic

---

Originally posted by PreCU

I'd have to agree with that quote in a way. An iconic/starwarsy swg (done right) would be more popular than an uncle owen swg (done right). That said, they didn't do the uncle owen version right in many ways, and they obviously couldn't copy wow's popularity with their attempt at the iconic/starwarsy version.

---

The thing that SOE didn't get was that their game started the player out as an 'Uncle Owen' but, through different experiences and environments, allowed them to turn themselves into 'Luke Skywalker'. My guy started off selling little bits of energy from his personal windfarm with a one bedroom house outside Bestine; by the end he was a Jedi Knight, an Imperial Colonel, an Inquisition fighter ace with a Jedi Starfight, a Greivous fighter and an Imperial multi-person ship, and a three guildhall compound outside a player city in the the north of Tattoine. He was 'iconic' and 'starwarsy' all right - but not in any way Nancy Macintyre could understand.

---

that's true, but that is the gaming experience of a power gamer and most of the player base were just casual. And although they eventually mastered professions and became high ranking soldiers, they never attained a position that could be described as explicitly iconic. But the thing about the game was that it left that part up to your imagination. I'm sure many imagined their character on a path that was uniquely important to the good vs evil battles of the galaxy. That was the real gem of the game imo. It allowed you to make it what you wanted it to be. Others were perfectly comfortable in a permanent support role, but everyone was important. Not because the game told you so, but because you told the game so.

In that sense it was never really an uncle owen experience as that implies insignificance and everyone was important from their own perspective.

I laughed when I read that part of the review as well. Some people are just oblivious...

The simple fact is this: we will never ever play a game that allows us to truly feel part of the Star Wars realm again. I myself played as a Pistoleer. I enjoyed PvP, combat, decorating my home in the corner of Tatooine, and being part of one of our local malls. This will never happen again.

Originally posted by Ginaz

Originally posted by Fishermage

The initial game failed because it was released in a sorry state, core bugs were never fixed -- promised content never added. Then came WoW.

 

 

This is what I believe.  While I had more fun in swg than in any other game, it was because I found my own little niche (playing my BH).  I was well aware of all the bugs and problems with the rest of the game but I put up with them because they rarely effected my narrow playstyle.  The same couldn't be said of others and I knew many people that left when WoW was released.  In fact, I was often on ventrilo with a few of them while they played the WoW beta and the almost constant "This is so much better than swg!"  made me give it a try as well.  So yeah, WoW was probably the biggest nail that was put into swg's coffin, with the nge being the final one.

That's exactly what I experienced.  I was having fun just being in a StarWars cantina, but others who were trying to do more in the game were frustrated with the bugs and issues and the lack of actual content.  All of this speaks to the early release imo.  Then my friends would try WoW.

We were all on ventrilo as well, and people were like, "Hey this game actually works, and there's stuff to do!"  People started switching games in bunches at that point.  Not once did anyone on vent (anyone, ever, even one time) say, "Man I'm sick and tired of playing a moisture farmer."

What they said was, "Why should I pay to play a busted, unfinished game when I could be playing WoW?"  I think all Smed got from this was that he should copy their format; but man, he tried to do this in 3 months.  Totally impossible.  Wow spent years in development and probably more time in the polish shop than NGE spent from concept to implementation.

Imo, Nancy's stuff was just some crazy spin to try to get people to take another look at the game.  I think she was totally off the mark.

Originally posted by ArcAngel3

What they said was, "Why should I pay to play a busted, unfinished game when I could be playing WoW?"  I think all Smed got from this was that he should copy their format; but man, he tried to do this in 3 months.  Totally impossible.  Wow spent years in development and probably more time in the polish shop than NGE spent from concept to implementation.

Imo, Nancy's stuff was just some crazy spin to try to get people to take another look at the game.  I think she was totally off the mark.

Well, what was offered by the NGE was a busted, unfinished Star Wars skinned knockoff of WoW with 1/100th of the content, pathetic combat play, broken animations, and instead of doing a flip when you jump, it screwed up your chat.

Besides, Smedley's crew doesn't do polish or relatively bug-free.  It gets in the way of profit.

Originally posted by Ginaz

Originally posted by Fishermage

The initial game failed because it was released in a sorry state, core bugs were never fixed -- promised content never added. Then came WoW.

 

 

This is what I believe.  While I had more fun in swg than in any other game, it was because I found my own little niche (playing my BH).  I was well aware of all the bugs and problems with the rest of the game but I put up with them because they rarely effected my narrow playstyle.  The same couldn't be said of others and I knew many people that left when WoW was released.  In fact, I was often on ventrilo with a few of them while they played the WoW beta and the almost constant "This is so much better than swg!"  made me give it a try as well.  So yeah, WoW was probably the biggest nail that was put into swg's coffin, with the nge being the final one.

I was in beta3, and the testers, almost without exception, told the developers that the game was NOT ready to be released, there the entire high end of the professions had not been tested adequately yet, and the game still needed a lot of polish.

But SOE and LA don't do polish, they don't do relatively bug free.  Blizzard does.  So WoW, the game that works, is the one that broke the million mark, and went beyond.  Which drove LA and Smedley absolutely insane with envy that the greatest IP in the known universe got beaten by something that didn't have a movie franchise and mass marketed toys, and furthermore the King of MMOs had been dethroned unceremoniously by an upstart gaming outfit publishing their very first MMO.

Originally posted by SioBabble

Originally posted by Ginaz

Originally posted by Fishermage

The initial game failed because it was released in a sorry state, core bugs were never fixed -- promised content never added. Then came WoW.

 

 

This is what I believe.  While I had more fun in swg than in any other game, it was because I found my own little niche (playing my BH).  I was well aware of all the bugs and problems with the rest of the game but I put up with them because they rarely effected my narrow playstyle.  The same couldn't be said of others and I knew many people that left when WoW was released.  In fact, I was often on ventrilo with a few of them while they played the WoW beta and the almost constant "This is so much better than swg!"  made me give it a try as well.  So yeah, WoW was probably the biggest nail that was put into swg's coffin, with the nge being the final one.

 

I was in beta3, and the testers, almost without exception, told the developers that the game was NOT ready to be released, there the entire high end of the professions had not been tested adequately yet, and the game still needed a lot of polish.

But SOE and LA don't do polish, they don't do relatively bug free.  Blizzard does.  So WoW, the game that works, is the one that broke the million mark, and went beyond.  Which drove LA and Smedley absolutely insane with envy that the greatest IP in the known universe got beaten by something that didn't have a movie franchise and mass marketed toys, and furthermore the King of MMOs had been dethroned unceremoniously by an upstart gaming outfit publishing their very first MMO.

To give Blizzard credit before WoW, they DID have a great reputation among the PC gaming community even before WoW.  Blizzard essentially has 3 franchise universes:  Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft, all of which still carry weight in their names, especially among longtime PC gamers.

Blizzard wasn't necessarily known to release a polished, relatively stable product.  Diablo II was horribly bugged on release.  I never dived into WoW, but I recall the early problems it had.

But one of the things Blizzard IS known for among longtime gamers is that they patch, patch, and patch like motherf**kers.  Even long after a product was past it's "glory days."  I recall that when Diablo II, which came out 1999/2000, was finally stable and making a killing, Blizzard still kept on patching the first Diablo game... which came out in 1996!

They have had projects set in the Starcraft and Warcraft universes before WoW came out, but they got canned when they weren't turning out right, and didn't shovel it out for release.  Quality.

There was a time when Diablo II was still in the works that people were complaining about how long Blizzard took to release games.  After Diablo II, nobody ever made that complaint again about them.  They don't frequently put out games, but whatever they do is usually pretty good.

When Blizzard put word out that they were doing a Warcraft MMO, I was surprised.  The fact that they beat "the best" in the MMO business when WoW came out didn't surprise me.  They are one of only 2 developers out there that I still have blind loyalty to, the other being BioWare.  But they earned it over the course of years as good developers... even though I never tried WoW.

By the time WoW was released SWG already in the toilet. The fact it was as popular as it was with so many horrible bugs, missing content, broken content, and no customer support what so ever is mind boggling. The the few months after launch just were filled with so many great gameplay ideas. From factions, to missions, to crafting, to skills, I could go on of course. The sad thing is how much better it could have been.