About a 270 million dollar budget and 3.5 more years of development time.

Whether or not anyone likes sony, I think had they had what bioware/ea had for money, we wouldn't have seen swg end up the way it did. What really did in swg was the lack of theme park elements such as raids, and quests.

Can you imagine if we had that budget, story driven quests and quest hubs per planet..? I think swg would be going strong today.

I think the 32+ profressions, the lack of levels and somewhat forced socializing were just amazing. Not to mention how the crafting and resource gathering all inter mingled together to drive an economy..  My goodness.. Why hasn't someone taken the awesome crafting and economy from swg and used it in another mmo? Why do they all seem to copy that shit system wow devised? And why is no other game using social profressions?

You wanna know what was also great about swg... You only had one character per server... If you were a jack-ass everyone knew who you were, you couldn't hide unless you made a new guy.. And that was a big decision cause Im pretty sure you had to delete the old character to make a new one on the server you were on..Man, all these great ideas need to be heavily promoted in other developing games.. where are the old sony developers now? They can't have coded all that genuis into swg and forgot about it? Who made the crafting and resource system and what game are they in now? Why has no one used these systems and mixed them up with some wow systems.. I detest wow.. but everything is so wow based these days you can't avoid it..

Originally posted by metatronic

About a 270 million dollar budget and 3.5 more years of development time.

Whether or not anyone likes sony, I think had they had what bioware/ea had for money, we wouldn't have seen swg end up the way it did. What really did in swg was the lack of theme park elements such as raids, and quests.

Uhhhhhhhhh......

What did SWG was revamping the game to have raids and quests and theme park elements. That killed it outright. There's absolutely no debating that.

What would have made SWG better is if it hadn't had such a horrible buggy laggy launch, and if the Jedi system wasn't total garbage (which it was).

"Whether or not anyone likes sony, I think had they had what bioware/ea had for money, we wouldn't have seen swg end up the way it did. What really did in swg was the lack of theme park elements such as raids, and quests."

I think the craziest part about your post is that you state this as fact, seemingly convinced that what you have formulated here makes the slightest bit of sense - reality, history and research be damned.

Originally posted by Metatronic

"Whether or not anyone likes sony, I think had they had what bioware/ea had for money, we wouldn't have seen swg end up the way it did. What really did in swg was the lack of theme park elements such as raids, and quests."

it had raids and quests...especially after the first combat upgrade. remember the corvette and that damn bunker on endor, not to mention the krayt dragons etc....it had plenty of that and some of it damn hard.

i agree alot of the quests were rather shallow but the overall game made up for those in raw diversity.

i think what killed the original was simply poor decision making from the people in charge. they failed to see the gem they had as a beutifull gem and instead of polishing their beautifull diamond they chose to replace it with a piece of glass and recut it into the shape of a diamond.

no one will ever know why they chose to do what they did. we can only speculate on the reasons why.  The sad part is that in the end one would have hoped the entire industry stood up and took notice but its not clear anyone really did except the passionate fans.

sure there were headlines here and there but in the end gaming companies stuck to their entrenched mindsets (read bioware / lucas arts) ans executed their vision to the dismay and bewilderment of alot of people. we all know now how this is turning out.

i dont really think the answer to great mmo's is a humongous $$$ budget and more time. i think its closer to assembling a great, talented, cohesive team thats respected and treated well. and i think this team has to have a visionary and passionate leader. someone who is a gamers gamer and truly understands what players really want in their mmo's and in the end has to be willing to listen and respond to feedback of these same players.

i think this is the formula to success in an mmo. not adding features x, y and z. it should be possible for so many mmo's to flourish, each with a completely different play style, setting, story etc.

its taken me 10 years of gaming to finally realize and accept, my perfect vision of an mmo is garbage and boring to the next guy.

SWToR could have and could still be a great mmo if the decision makers would simply listen to and try and understand what their fans truly want and try and deliver as much of that as possible. thats the reason the original SWG failed. they failed to listen to us and if the current SWToR devs do the same, i would wager money their MMO will also fail.

biggest difference.. SWG was profitable.. SW;TOR on the other hand..

SWG had one of worst pvp ever in history of mmo. Combat animation was bad and poorly created and that was the worst part of the game. Game was  crappy never finished and polished but i can understand that veteran nostalgia

Originally posted by Garvon3

Originally posted by metatronic

About a 270 million dollar budget and 3.5 more years of development time.

Whether or not anyone likes sony, I think had they had what bioware/ea had for money, we wouldn't have seen swg end up the way it did. What really did in swg was the lack of theme park elements such as raids, and quests.

Uhhhhhhhhh......

 

What did SWG was revamping the game to have raids and quests and theme park elements. That killed it outright. There's absolutely no debating that.

 

What would have made SWG better is if it hadn't had such a horrible buggy laggy launch, and if the Jedi system wasn't total garbage (which it was).

This. The bugs were horrible and the Jedi system was the worse thing they could have ever done to the game. All they did after that was cater to the whiners who thought that once you become jedi you should never lose to anyone else. It created an elitist mentality and a lot of resentment from players who had their templates nerfed every month. Also the professions that were broken and never fixed didn't appreciate seeing one class get so much attention update after update.

While I agree that Questing(as well as more help tools) would have helped immensley, it wasn't the only reason the game didn't catch on. 

I do hope that a more competent developer comes along and implements some of the concepts that the old galaxies had  (open skill system, free world to roam, player economy, crafting system) in another MMORPG.

SWTOR is an awesome game. SWG wasnt.

depth

SWG was an awesome game. TOR isn't.

Originally posted by wrekognize

SWG was an awesome game. TOR isn't.

LucasArts didnt seem to share that opinion

Originally posted by mcburly

Originally posted by wrekognize

SWG was an awesome game. TOR isn't.

LucasArts didnt seem to share that opinion

So what is your point? LA signed off willingly on the NGE...And obviously they are a huge part of that steaming pile BioWare came up with...So who cares what LA thinks?...

And the fact that LA may have tried to prevent the extra small amount of SWG Players left from playing the Game they loved by raising the Licensing Fee...Well...If true, that would forever lose any remaining respect I had for LA...

LA has the License...That's it...

Originally posted by mcburly

SWTOR is an awesome game. SWG wasnt.

Really?

Merges and taken F2P in less than 8 months of live play?

Whereas SW:G didn't even consider server merges until 2009. And never even thought about F2P .

You could create your own content in SW:G.

You didn't have to do Legacy to level up...you could just wander around and shoot things for XP.

You were not gated from having Imp And Rebel Friends to chat with.

Just to mention a few things that made SW:G Great.

SWG:

1: You had Player housing

2: You can fly many diffrent types of ships

3: You can fly anyware

4: You can have people shoot from your turrets while you fly multi person ships 

5: You can play as a wookie

6: Felt more like a star wars world

7: Wait it had huge planets. That you needed a speeder to get from one city to another and would still take you some time to get there.

8: Had a ton of 1 and multi person speeders

9: I could go on

SWTOR

1: Better graphics only becouse it is newer

2: Better way of telling a story

3: Better combat system

4: Im having a hard time comming up with more

I did play SWG till sony messed it all up but came back to the game the last 3 years and really liked it. I know I never found everthing in SWG. There was sooo much to do even at launch compaired to SWTOR.

I did play SWTOR up untill 3 weeks ago. I am sooooooo board I have done everything in the game.

Does anybody else find that in older mmos you would play for their 1st month and not even be close to LVL Cap and only have seen a very small part of the game ?

Unlike MMos that are newer. You can get through 80-90% of their game if not get to LVL Cap.

Originally posted by hipiap

Originally posted by mcburly

SWTOR is an awesome game. SWG wasnt.

Really?

 

Merges and taken F2P in less than 8 months of live play?

 

Whereas SW:G didn't even consider server merges until 2009. And never even thought about F2P .

 

You could create your own content in SW:G.

You didn't have to do Legacy to level up...you could just wander around and shoot things for XP.

You were not gated from having Imp And Rebel Friends to chat with.

Just to mention a few things that made SW:G Great.

Umm...you don't "have to do Legacy to level up" in SWTOR.

And..."Imp and Rebel Friends to chat with" was just a game killer to me in SWG.

Other then that and the fact the game was starting to look "old" it was fine pre-NGE.

1. SWG needed another year to cook before it was released.
2. Jedi profession killed it.

Originally posted by bubaluba

SWG had one of worst pvp ever in history of mmo. Combat animation was bad and poorly created and that was the worst part of the game. Game was  crappy never finished and polished but i can understand that veteran nostalgia

I disagree.

SWG had some of the best open world PvP that you will ever see, both preNGE and afterwards.

It wasn't a numbers game, in that the larger force always won. It was quite possible to have battles lasting for hours if the smaller team could defend a choke point.

I urge people to look at some SWG PvP videos on Youtube.

PvP in SWG was frantic, fluid and fun!

Look at the numbers in this random video... ever tried that on Ilum?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_orWTVG1wo

Seriously? PvP was bad?

I would take this PvP over ANYTHING on offer today.

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