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[Column] General: Star Wars Galaxies' Under-Performance
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
During the last few weeks, the most thought-provoking MMOG-related thing that came to my attention may have been this post by veteran developer Gordon Walton about the role he played in the memorable (for most, not in a good way) Star Wars Galaxies New Game Enhancements (NGE). What he wrote led me to think again about what I stated late last year when I listed the SOE / LucasArts title among 5 MMOGs That Seriously Disappointed Me.
Read more of Richard Aihoshi's The Free Zone: Star Wars Galaxies' Under-Performance.
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Comments
For me personally, I don't like themeparks, I like sandboxes wherer I can enjoy my own content instead of being on a gear treadmill.
That said: I liked SWG for the fact that I love Star Wars -the original saga-, I like playing my own role in that 'universe', I don't want the be THE hero the galaxy is waiting for, yes I liked to be that unknown moisture farmer trying to make a few bucks on Tatooine or be that new Bounty Hunter on the block. I didn't want to be Boba Fett.
So the NGE was a fatal killer for me.
Apart from that SWG lacked severely, unfinished content, massive lag, not enough new content released, poor customer support and blatant lies by management. You know the history.
SWG would have been a success for me if it had a Galactic Civil War that worked, and some dungeons and being a complete themepark on a full server. 500k subs or 500M, I don't care.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
This ought to be good.
Also in defense of the NGE: MMOs try new things all the time to gain a bigger audience, sometimes they work, sometimes they fail utterly. There's no way the devs could've known which way the NGE would turn out. And the fact that they had to resort to such an overhaul means the numbers probably weren't that great pre-NGE either.
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
This is the thing, UO & AC proved sandbox games weren't as popular as the themeparks, though even EQ lacked the structure of what came later. The NGE would never have existed without WoW.
I enjoyed SWG for the same reasons you did, but I also accept the fact that it was as big as it would ever be. I like a lot of types of games, even within the MMO genre and the reality is, the average or majority of the MMO market, prefers structured gameplay.
I don't know about general server population, but by the time the NGE hit, my friends/guild were down to about 10 people from the couple of hundred I knew. The server I was on was a ghost town most of the time.
You were either grinding to become a Jedi or were in the process of quitting the game, that was all that was left when the NGE hit, on my server anyways.
I think that SOE over-estimated the market size for their games. Let's not forget the negative stigma surrounding EQ, even though it did have the subscribers it did. So, basically, you end up with Everquest: Star Wars edition. I think that CU and NGE were just responses to WoW. Problem was that the games were so dramatically different. Essentially, they had a strong, niche game (which might have still been around today) that they tried to update and market to the masses which failed horribly and also alienated the people who were there from day one.
If they hadn't changed it, would it be around today? I think it COULD have been. It's even possible it could have co-existed with SWTOR, as long as they remained true to the niche they were initially, not trying to make it more appealing to the masses.
Crazkanuk
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Without "greed", there would be no SWG, or any other MMO, in the first place...
Went through nearly nine years of swg. Best mmo I've played. In the top ten video games I've ever played. But it was always a broken mess, in every iteration.
Lot of people blame nge, or cu for its downfall. But publish 9 killed that game. It started all of the crap that happened afterward.
SWG was a mess at launch. No vehicles, no player cities, no jump to light speed, no content.
The game launched too soon with too little testing and no directed content as opposed to WOW which was a theme park.
if SWG had launched with the combat upgrade in effect and some directed content like the rage of the wookies expansion added, and jump to light speed in place it may have surpassed WOW and stil be king.
It could have been the first blending of theme park and sandbox.
The problem is it launched as a sandbox with no content with a bigger learning curve at a time when content and ease of access was key.
SWG in its pre-NGE state was the MMO I've enjoyed most out of all those I've ever played.
But the original game was never going to keep the masses of subscribers that LucasArts/SOE expected from the franchise. It was too much sandbox and too little themepark. I loved it because of that, but it was ultimately what brought on the NGE.
Pre-made entertainment (i.e. themeparks) will always outsell anything where the player has to put in "effort" to be entertained. The average gamer wants to consume, not create.
Still have my SWG: An Empire Divided Collector's Edition box sitting on a shelf at my parent's house somewhere...
Game was very unpolished, very buggy, huge chunks of "release" content was not in at release.
Instead of cleaning the game up and making what they had actually work, they jammed in new stuff like mounts first and then speeders (kind of odd choice?) as well as a lot of the GCW stuff and housing and the horrible barely working "theme park" content i.e. Rebel/Imperial Bases and Jabba's Palace.
Combat upgrade and the terrible Jump to Lightspeed were so disappointing, not to mention the big "reveal" of how to become a Jedi - grind Holocrons i.e. random professions you really didn't want to level up.
Game was pretty much a piece of crap with a Star Wars skin.
Without the Star Wars skin, it would have had very few redeemable qualities.
They had some amazing ideas - the crafting, the profession system, the GCW, the JTL integration, Entertainer system, all kinds of stuff.
The execution was horrible... just awful.
But it was still fun and worth the cost of admission and many months of a sub for me just because it WAS Star Wars and an MMO.
Then WoW came out... and any chance of SWG being redeemed was trampled by the industry-crushing (and defining) juggernaut that was/is WoW.
I understand why they did the CU/NGE - but they should have stayed the course and solidified what they promised to deliver all along - the ultimate open world choose-your-own-destiny Star Wars online experience.
[mod edit]
If SWG originally launched as a polished NGE, it would do just what SWTOR did - bore people after a few months.
What SWG did right was actually design a MMO with loads of depth and complexity - something that has been completely missing from the genre for longer than I can remember. I felt like I was part of that world. I've never felt that way with any of the other "AAA" MMOs I've played.
Too much thought will never come up with solid answers,for me it is very easy to realize the why >>>SOE.
I have watched them over the years,products rushed way too early and full of bugs.Their follow up after launch is also VERY weak,it is like they have a couple guys handling code and bugs and not much else gets done.They have also shown over the years,they like to cut corners and eventually streamline ideas to make future content updates easier to handle.
I personally do not feel this game would have amounted to anything without the SW ip name behind it and that is perhaps why they figured on bigger numbers.
Blizzard is really the ONLY developer who can sell rubbish because rather than rely so much on a IP,although they have rehashed the Warcraft theme a lot,they rely MORE on the IP known as Blizzard.
SOE cannot do that.the market of MMO gamer's prior to 2005 was very small and many were into fps games already rather than MMORPG's.Epic games and Carmack were becoming legends in the gaming industry and neither has a rpg game under their wing.Then we all know how big epic is now a days,their game engines are world famous.
Point is that SOE could not simply cut corners or rush out bugs and rely on SOE to sell the game.Sure SW was a huge success in the theater's but there was not a market of millions of online gamer's chomping at the bit to play a game version of the movie.Instead people were like "When is the next movie coming out,online gaming was just too small a market at that point.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
[mod edit] It is what it is and playing "what ifs" with SWG has been done to death.
In defense of the Rage against SOE and the NGE, most companies would have the decency to back-pedal and remove the changes once they realized that they had just blown the airlocks and jettisoned all their customers into space.
What really enraged me, and to a point still does, is that they refused to change things back. It was blatantly apparent 24 hours after they brought the new system up that they had made a terrible decision.
I suppose they thought that if they weathered the storm of apoplectic fans, they would soon be swimming in millions of subs and mentions on popular TV shows.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. - Douglas Adams
Admittedly, the NGE killed the game but it was dying way before that. The first symptom was when people learned how to unlock a jedi. Once that happened, over half the server population started grinding professions which killed the economy as the AH was flooded with crap as people ground out each profession as fast as possible. It was all downhill from there. People got bored of grinding and left, people could not afford the high price of holocrons to tell them what to grind so they left. Guilds stopped doing things together as everyone was out grinding professions. Your favorite weaponsmith closed shop to grind doctor and your favorite doctor disappeared to grind scout.
Then they changed the whole Jedi thing, then they revamped combat and then they put the final nail in with the NGE. If they had simply never had jedi and focused on the war part, the game would have held on to many more people and might have actually grow instead of the steady decline after the jedi unlocks.
Couldn't say it any better myself. This is actually when I stopped playing too.
Instead of fixing Smuggler & Pistoleer, so I could live MY Star Wars story, I was told to go grind Doctor instead. No. Thanks.
Nothing generates clicks and comments quite like an SWG "What-if" article.
Am I the only one who remembers Pre-CU accurately? Having to *stand in line* for ten minutes to get doctor buffs, without which you couldn't put your *armor on*? Having three separate life bars, all of which got depleted when you used your abilities? Huge open worlds (yay!) with *nothing in them*?
Ugh. The problems with SWG 1.0 went on, and on, and on. Yet people still hail it as this great thing. I just don't get it.