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It's pretty sad that no MMO can even hold a candle to 2003.
Dauzqul
Member RarePosts: 1,982
It's pretty sad that there hasn't been a game since 2003 that has even come close to resembling the living / breathing virtual world of Star Wars Galaxies.
1) Extremely Deep Crafting / Harvesting / Mining / Surveying System.
2) Extremely Large Worlds
3) Extremely detailed and lengthy profession system.
4) Endless apparel and customizations.
5) True World Housing / Player Cities.
6) Completely unique expansion experience, e.g., Jump to Lightspeed.
7) Rich with Social Features and Classes. I've met people who've played for years and have never fired a blaster.
8) Countless "Raid Size" monsters that just roam the planet.
9) Ability to place virtually anything you find in your home.
10) True Player-Driven Economy / Ability to start player-malls, shops, etc.
lol. Seriously. No post-2003 MMO has come close to even offering an inkling of the above. I suppose ArcheAge has been the best attempt, but even that game is limited by countless "theme park" sanctions, e.g., seemingly huge world, yet much of it will be out-leveled and pointless to use outside of constant trade-walks.
What we've gotten since 2003 has been nothing more than a virtual "turn-the-page" story book. I want more living / breathing virtual worlds...
Comments
You want a living, breathing, virtual world? Find any mmo, make a character, and start living and breathing in it.
While I didn't play this title, from what I've read isn't there an equally long list of negatives that could be associated with this title, including many bugs, multiple missteps in delivery and direction, and a host of other issues?
While it did many things well and different from today's games, it also did enough wrong to see it become one of the few MMORPG's where the plug was pulled.
Don't get me wrong, I like the designs of the earlier games, probably why EVE remains my favorite to this day, but we're in a minority, most players today don't like those designs and they show it by voting with their wallets and buying just about every new title that is released in numbers far exceeding anything reached by SWG or other early title.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Modern MMORPG developers don't give us the same tools we had back then to make those living breathing worlds. Not even close... It is also something that can be said of other MMORPG titles back then, not just SWG.
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"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places..." ~ H.P.Lovecraft, "From Beyond"
Member Since March 2004
No, it isn't just nostalgia. I keep going back to old games and emulators and staying with them because they are objectively better experiences.
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"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places..." ~ H.P.Lovecraft, "From Beyond"
Member Since March 2004
No, it's purely subjective. You define the criteria you like and you pick games that meet that criteria. That's subjective. The overwhelming majority of people don't use that criteria, if they did, games like SWG wouldn't have failed in the first place because everyone would have been playing them pre-CU.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
Mmo's of that time, even the MUD's, were niche at best. Eventually as it grew, it had to change to allow more mainstream coverage.
Then as big money could be made from these games, everyone and their mothers got on the bandwagon and spewed forth a multitude of online games.
Time changes everything, even our perspective, and with each generation showing what it prefers(by playing them), the industry (just like any other industry out there) will change in accordance.
We can either adapt and enjoy what's new or remain recalcitrant and forever reliving the 'Glory days' in our minds, factual or not.
1) Imbalanced classes which led to
2) Min/Maxing and ideal class builds which cut down any real diversity
3) mind numbingly easy PVE once the buff train got rolling
4) the wholly broken jedi system
5) weapons which didn't so much act as sidegrades from one another (say the carbine = more DPS at short range while a rifle = long range but say half the DPS) but as direct upgrades to one another which led to samey item builds
6) borked economy once the first wave settled in making new crafters have to work insanely much by comparison to become competitive
7) Profession system was diverse but as far as depth goes... WoW had the same level of depth but not the same level of ease, Archeage has much more diversity with the same relative depth;
8) Bugs up the exhaust pipe
Nostalgia is a bitch to deal with dude but you should really not praise SWG in any other way than for its truly unique crafting as everything else it did has been done since and much better in quite a few cases.
+1000
This place really needs a "like" system.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
LOL @ the Rose-Colored Glasses of nostalgia
T
Darkhome is right it's not nostalgia.
I play emulators too of the real mmos and they are ten times better. It's all crap now, and it started around the time of Warhammer, and has been downhill form there !
Agreed.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Fully agree. People are shilling for shiny turd games like they're gold and you can easily tell they haven't played SWG or COH or Ryzom all of which stomp these cookie cutter cheapo shallow theme park games into the dirt. SWG still to this day has the best crafting and resource hunting system in any game I've played. You could name your own unique weapons... I don't think current game developers are old enough to remember good games.
2003 is just when internet became a common household item so the mass internet gaming wave had not yet begun.
Wow was the beneficiary of a massive onslaught of brand new gamer's.
The trend even to this day is that new gamer's or gamer's in general don't look for old games they are always watching the "new kid" on the block.
SOE saw the player base start to grow and wanted some of it so they thought by making change they could get a lot more players.It backfired because not only did they not get many new players they outraged a high % of their core player base.
IMO there was nothing SOE could do because gaming at that point was starting to look better and SWG looked awful,the graphics were too outdated.
There is nothing to scoff at anyhow,a VERY high % of modern games are not holding onto their player base,that is why they need lame gimmicks like f2p to encourage players to even try their game.So SWG fans should not feel too slighted since nobody else is doing any better all the games lose a very high % of their starting player base.The difference is SOME try to improve the game to keep players and others don't simply close the doors as fast as SOE does.
IMO the problem is SOE not the games,SOE has a VERY bad image among the gaming community.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
yeah that...
I played the hell out of swg and had fun at the time but I don't remember it ever being better than sex like some of you people seem to....maybe I just do both differently.
SWG was the first , but not last, MMO I bought that bored me to tears in the first 30 min.
I think the first two things that ruined the experience were the action queue combat and quest terminals.
That being said, many of my friends loved it and played it to death before it was re-worked. They still rave about it.
-WL
Werewolf Online(R) - Lead Developer
Not exactly sure who you're referring to but I can certainly agree sex was always infinitely better than any game I've ever played. Even after many years of marriage, it's still better.
i played swg for four years, i played vanilla wow for a month came to the conclusion it was crap and went back to swg, but when the NGE hit and they made swg into wow, i jumped over to wow cause why stay in a swg version of wow when i could play wow, it just dident make sense to me back then, and it still does not make sense to me.
for me personally UO pre tremmel and SWG pre NGE are the best online experiences i'v had.
Herald of innovation, Vanquisher of the old! - Awake a few hours almost everyday!
I played for 2 years. It was a lot of fun. There were bugs but not out the ordinary for an MMO and we're talking 2003 hardware and 56k dialup. I played before people knew what to do with Jedi or the crystals or any of that. Guilds were true Guilds and people were loyal to the guild and interested in shared fun instead of personal gain. People would hunt together for materials and drops or organize raids and all kinds of role playing experiences. Weapons were not the carbon copies you're implying for a lot of people. You could build your weapons and armor around all kinds of stats like heat or physical etc. Buffs destroyed the game. I personally stopped playing because of the ridiculous Buffs. Right around that time the game began to tank from incredibly bad decisions. The point is for the first couple years the game was an amazing experience full of real discoveries and exploration of all kinds. It took work and time to evolve your character from a bumbling fool with simple tools to a commando or bounty hunter. Above all it was uniquely entertaining and for the most part people looked forward to logging in every day.
I've been playing since UO, only thing that got really better has been the graphics.
Fluidity of animation hit a peak with WoW and not sure why, maybe it's design philosophy, but no other recent games has been able to reproduce such fluid combats.
We went from the epic, hardcore quests of Everquest to the mindless yellow-(?) jumping quest hubs, from a few core abilities to streamlined mechanics across multiple classes. Everyone does the same thing but the particles have different colors.
The social aspect changed to automatic hand-holding features such as LFR, no wonder *single-player mmo* is now a term made to mock some of the recent games.
The Sandbox games never thrive because a Themepark styled game became a giant and it was the go to system when you had to present the concept to investors (Believing Sandbox has more potential, personal opinion).
No major incentive in recent games other than gearing up your characters.
The trinity has never really been expanded more than Tank-healing-damage dealers with mostly the same philosophy applied to each role within each games, bar a few ones (Disciple of Kaine healing from Warhammer online comes to mind).
What about classes specialized in crowd or area control and buffers-debuffers? Nowaday hybrids absolutely need to be able to top the dps meter because everyone forgot whatever else they used to bring to a raid.
Classes having tradeskill specialisation would be fun to see, need enchanting? Well you need to befriend a mage for it and so on(bad idea to some, it's ok)
Heh and despite all that rant, I've been having fun in games that have all these *flaws*, I'm just sad to see that there hasnt been a real architect-artist-visionary step up and bring the MMO genre to the real next level in these past 10years.
If you want a "living/ breathing world" get up, walk out of your basement/bedroom and go experience the living breathing world outside. And always remember that the "G" in MMORPG stands for game.
Sure. You can list games that might have a few of the options above...
I want it all. Moreover, most of your examples re so far from the mark.