Star Wars Galaxies

http://home.trollfjord.no/~frover15/swceleb2_swg.wmv

I just watched that and the game looked freaking amazing, graphics were sooo much better and they had Space in already. So how come in 2003 when it launched was Sapce not in and the graphics wern't as good?

Ok just saw the part where he said Space expansion to be launched in the game a year later, so that's why that wasn't in :D

It's pretty common practice in development to show a highly optimized version of their graphics during press time (to build hype ). If you look closely at a lot of development era screens for any game they usually are taken from builds running at a much higher resolution than what they release after compression takes place and other client optimizations.

What Mal said.

However, when the noob developers took over, they also did changes to gfx, to make the game available on lesser computers.

Like changing ground textures and how they worked.... This is especially visible in the later expansion maps, as the "chess'ed" terrain shows better.

You also can see that they had a noob dev try to upgrade the character textures, by making them all look like junkies. Heh, the noob dev didn't understand how the texture system worked, so he painted in colors on top of the existing character grayscale textures. grayscale because they were used with color templates, so that no matter skin color you chose, you wouldnt have "pink rosy" cheeks on for example a black character...

Not only that, but you can see that they used nooblet devs on new objects and armors/equipment too. If you compare the Stormtrooper or even Chitin armor to any of those released by the nooblet teams assembled after release, not only do they have less detailed textures, but they lack they advanced features that the "real" dev team was able to do.

So SWG's gfx, has actually "deterioated" since launch. One of the few..well, maybe the only game that has removed or lessened its gfx.

I remember in Planetside when they removed the high resolution textures and then eventually added them back in again. I don't get why you can't just make the game scale and have it looking really good for people with rigs that can handle it. They're doing the same thing with Crysis Warhead where they arn't making it look as good so more people can play it, why don't they just scale it back for them people instead of removing features for us higher end users.

...didn't Sony take over in 2003?

Its rumored that SOE completely scrapped the original version of Star Wars Galaxies. The version we got in 2003 was incomplete and launched early on purpose to pay development costs.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/20/tech/gamecore/main1146894_page5.shtml

"This type of business ethic continues at SOE because of their CEO, John Smedley. Little does the public know, that Star Wars Galaxies was scrapped in 2002 and redeveloped in 14 months from the ground up. In a meeting, they asked how they could get away with releasing such an unfinished product. John Smedley stated that people will buy it because it has a Star Wars name on it - and then laughed as they said they would complete the retail product (which consumers have already paid $49.99 for) with approximately 2 years of subscription revenue."

"Subscription revenue that was supposed to be going to improvements, additions, and access to the game itself, was being used to finish a game which a consumer already paid for. This happened with every EverQuest expansion after Velious, EverQuest 2, and Star Wars Galaxies. "
 

This is what I hate about SOES's Bull sh*t development ethics. SWg used to look amazing. Now it looks like crap. Since release it has been all down hill. Hell since open beta it has been all down hill.