The crafting was awesome; the best I have ever experienced in any MMO. Why a game publisher has never recognized the popularity of SWG crafting and tried to replicate it within a different license is a mystery to me.
The crafting was awesome; the best I have ever experienced in any MMO. Why a game publisher has never recognized the popularity of SWG crafting and tried to replicate it within a different license is a mystery to me.
As an MBE I fully agree with you. The number of resources alone was overwhelming, when you add in the qualities it's astronomical.
The crafting was awesome; the best I have ever experienced in any MMO. Why a game publisher has never recognized the popularity of SWG crafting and tried to replicate it within a different license is a mystery to me.
There's been some games who have focused on crafting. Vanguard for example. Also Age of conan planned to introduce a new crafting system inspired by SWG. I can only find this video of it now:
since all info seems to have been deleted from official forums, or I'm terrible at searching.
If I remeber correctly though, what really made a difference in SWG crafting was the materials, materials had different percentage of quality, and it could be years between a high quality lvl would spawn on a server.
So basicly a crafter had to mine high quality ores, save them, and a few years down the line, anoher high quality ore would spawn and now the crafter could make the best pistol in the game.
Still looking for anything that comes near that experience.
Have fun
PS:
Yo to all smugglers of the YCS Yazuka Crime Syndicate on Naritus server !
Best greetings to all citizens of the city of LoknLoad on the planet Lok from your favorite architect.
Thank you to all loyal customers of Aratech Enterprises - the best droids and spaceships in the galaxy !
Ahh Naritus. My first server and where my first Smuggler was made. I made quite a living with Dwozzle's (my character's name) Chop Shop just outside of Bespin. Purveyor of clamp and knife crates for every Smuggler's grinding needs. I actually ended up putting a large home in LoknLoad too just before the Trials of Obi Wan. /tipshat
+1 for Naritus Love! Odlema Ob'I <RAID> City of Mos Quito
The crafting was awesome; the best I have ever experienced in any MMO. Why a game publisher has never recognized the popularity of SWG crafting and tried to replicate it within a different license is a mystery to me.
As an MBE I fully agree with you. The number of resources alone was overwhelming, when you add in the qualities it's astronomical.
It was the gathering, resource system that made crafting in SWG remarkable. You could make the same axe 20 different ways because there were 20 versions of material.
Ironically it was the thing we hate now but didn't in the day because it was universal. Stats on everything was done with an RnG system but in SWG it didn't feel personal. If a copper had a cap conductivity of 700 that was true for everyone.
Thanks for that vid, OP! I'd go over the litany of technical issues the game had, but... I really do miss it. Or maybe that's my "MMO's were new!" goggles.
I do wish that the game in its somewhat original form still existed... just before CU, perhaps? It scratches an itch that pretty much 0 MMO's scratch, these days.
It wouldn't be popular by a long shot, which is the problem. If you make a game in an IP so beloved as SW, and it's a niche game, ya get dumped. May as well make, "Star Wars: Russian Roulette"...
Here's where a good restructuring could actually happen. You build a creative team that can support thousands of players on one server. You renegotiate your rights to create a SW MMO to simply have the right to exist. Let the SW IP create whatever MMO's they want.
And if unicorns existed, they'd poop glittery ice cream...
Oh my yes! I still love and miss the old SWG. Played as a dancer out of Theed making friends and chatting as I danced and buffed them on the Lowca server. I remember the big 4th of July party we had outside the Theed spaceport. Later on joining a guild and building mines to place all around our rebal base and in the streets of our town to stop all the other side PvPers who enjoyed attacking us. Searching for how the game worked and what was needed to unlocked the jedi slot at start of game was a I think on everyone's mind. The many hours of playing looking for things that might lead us to the unlock, such as the red lights in areas where npc combat took place. Finding tables with food and other items that changed as you did things. Posting what we found on the web site where we could compare notes and ideas. To me the current EA Star Wars game is a very pale railroad game using a very poor engine that should have never been made, but that is just my feelings about it.
That freedom is precisely what eventually made it unpopular.
I think in many ways you are right.
I love having freedom and "less rails". A friend of mine who does play video games can't stand it. He wants to play "a game". He wants to have all the challenges laid out, where to go, etc.
Probably one of the reasons I loved Morrowind so much. I was greeted by a "well there's a tavern up ahead otherwise good luck!".
To me those words (paraphrased) were the most compelling words I ever read in a video game.
I can remember entire play sessions that just consisted of staring at the professions screens deciding how to progress my character (carbine/pistol/medic/dancer). Deciding what I wanted my role to be in the game.
Heck even it's start where YOU decided which planet you wanted to start on could effect how you played the game.
SWG was not just something you mindlessly played (although you could), you had to think about what you wanted to achieve and I think that left a lot of potential customers of the younger set out in the cold. Hence the NGE where less planning / thinking was involved.
Even with the bugs etc... I still have great memories of playing on Kettemoor.
Signed Nebless-Clen Brown ... The Bothan that walked everywhere.
That's a good point I haven't thought about before. I started playing on Talus, which ended up being like a backwater planet basically but of course I didn't know that at the time. But the community there was awesome, everyone knew everyone else. I didn't even leave Talus until I had been playing for like a month, and then I got into Coronet and was like 'woah' lots of people. It literally felt like being a country boy going to the city for the first time.
And that I think kind of sums up why I identified with SWG so much, it was a perfect balance of a wild west with a science fiction universe, which is one of the reasons the orignal Star Wars A New Hope was so appealing. And it perfectly fit the source material because it was meant to be in a time period directly after ANH. Before Lucas went all 'Okay guyz this is like supposed to be a space opera about one family, kk thnx my dudes'
What a lot of people forget is that in 2003, 500k players was a great success, today 1m players is a conplete failure. The newer SW mmorpg went F2P when they only had 1m players left.
ESO who have sold 10m copies struggle to create new content. 4 new dungeons in 3 years...
not really the problem with bioware SW was they spending over 200M on VA and forgetting the whole gameplay, then go f2p and make you pay for hotbars unlocks (btw not even chinese games did this u.u)
In ESO case, since there is no modders for teh game Bethesda/zyomax can't really do much, they are not used to it, they are so used to toss the game out and wait for modders to fix it then anything other then that is kinda over they head, plus the lack of criativity, skyrim had ideas taken from fallout they can't really think over new things they just take the old and try to simplify.
plus 10M? i'm betting pretty hard its over the real numbers or its the total of games people bough together with china, then its really not much if less then 10% of this still plays
What a lot of people forget is that in 2003, 500k players was a great success, today 1m players is a conplete failure. The newer SW mmorpg went F2P when they only had 1m players left.
ESO who have sold 10m copies struggle to create new content. 4 new dungeons in 3 years...
not really the problem with bioware SW was they spending over 200M on VA and forgetting the whole gameplay, then go f2p and make you pay for hotbars unlocks (btw not even chinese games did this u.u)
In ESO case, since there is no modders for teh game Bethesda/zyomax can't really do much, they are not used to it, they are so used to toss the game out and wait for modders to fix it then anything other then that is kinda over they head, plus the lack of criativity, skyrim had ideas taken from fallout they can't really think over new things they just take the old and try to simplify.
plus 10M? i'm betting pretty hard its over the real numbers or its the total of games people bough together with china, then its really not much if less then 10% of this still plays
that is such horseshit.
'no creativity'
basically your saying that Skyrim was released as a buggy messed and lacked any creativity.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Themeparks are for kids. I would never go to another actual themepark, like Disneyland or Six Flags, for the rest of my life unless I was forced to for some reason. Rollercoasters became boring to me after I raced around in my stick-shift Toyota Camry on the freeways in southern California when I was younger.
Sandbox is one essential element in any MMORPG that ever hopes to be a true role-playing game online. Anything less, and we may as well just play single player Final Fantasy games.
What a lot of people forget is that in 2003, 500k players was a great success, today 1m players is a conplete failure. The newer SW mmorpg went F2P when they only had 1m players left.
ESO who have sold 10m copies struggle to create new content. 4 new dungeons in 3 years...
Ok so mainstream MMORPGs might have millions of players, so they're forced to find common denominators with an ever growing audience. This doesn't preclude indies from forming to meet a desire in the community for these types of games. That's part of the reason Kickstarter formed, to fudn these smaller enterprises. And with Steam we have a common place to organize all of these efforts.
And what I've noticed is while there's no exact replacement for SWG, there're still many more sandbox MMO's now than there were when SWG was released. There're dozens, probably hundreds of them. Just to name a few: Wurm Online, Mortal Online, Xsyon, Eve-Online, Life is Fuedal and so on. There're so many more, some being more casual or less PvP-oriented, like Villagers and Heroes. Some are still being developed, like Albion Online and Wild Terra Online and Tree of Life.
The trouble is SWG did so many things so well, it's hard to find its next of kin. The real issue is this playstyle on the whole is not as popular because it's focused on sandbox freedom and in some cases open world PvP. The on-rails amusement park adventure is hugely more popular. Even with sandboxes it's more common to see them add restrictive rules and to prohibit PvP to smaller areas. It's all an attempt to guarantee enjoyment and counter to what SWG was in tis heyday.
There're also some action-based sandboxes. While they're not in any way heirs to the throne, I still respec them. Tehy're numerous. Some examples might be Rust or H1Z1 or Ark: Survival Evolved or Reign of Kings or 7 Days to Die.
Comments
As an MBE I fully agree with you. The number of resources alone was overwhelming, when you add in the qualities it's astronomical.
There's been some games who have focused on crafting. Vanguard for example. Also Age of conan planned to introduce a new crafting system inspired by SWG. I can only find this video of it now:
since all info seems to have been deleted from official forums, or I'm terrible at searching.
If I remeber correctly though, what really made a difference in SWG crafting was the materials, materials had different percentage of quality, and it could be years between a high quality lvl would spawn on a server.
So basicly a crafter had to mine high quality ores, save them, and a few years down the line, anoher high quality ore would spawn and now the crafter could make the best pistol in the game.
That's what I remember atleast.
+1 for Naritus Love! Odlema Ob'I <RAID> City of Mos Quito
It was the gathering, resource system that made crafting in SWG remarkable. You could make the same axe 20 different ways because there were 20 versions of material.
Ironically it was the thing we hate now but didn't in the day because it was universal. Stats on everything was done with an RnG system but in SWG it didn't feel personal. If a copper had a cap conductivity of 700 that was true for everyone.
I do wish that the game in its somewhat original form still existed... just before CU, perhaps? It scratches an itch that pretty much 0 MMO's scratch, these days.
It wouldn't be popular by a long shot, which is the problem. If you make a game in an IP so beloved as SW, and it's a niche game, ya get dumped. May as well make, "Star Wars: Russian Roulette"...
Here's where a good restructuring could actually happen. You build a creative team that can support thousands of players on one server. You renegotiate your rights to create a SW MMO to simply have the right to exist. Let the SW IP create whatever MMO's they want.
And if unicorns existed, they'd poop glittery ice cream...
So, they ended a Star Wars sandbox MMORPG, and gave us a Star Wars themepark MMORPG. It's a sad, sad world.
Later on joining a guild and building mines to place all around our rebal base and in the streets of our town to stop all the other side PvPers who enjoyed attacking us.
Searching for how the game worked and what was needed to unlocked the jedi slot at start of game was a I think on everyone's mind. The many hours of playing looking for things that might lead us to the unlock, such as the red lights in areas where npc combat took place. Finding tables with food and other items that changed as you did things. Posting what we found on the web site where we could compare notes and ideas.
To me the current EA Star Wars game is a very pale railroad game using a very poor engine that should have never been made, but that is just my feelings about it.
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
That's a good point I haven't thought about before. I started playing on Talus, which ended up being like a backwater planet basically but of course I didn't know that at the time. But the community there was awesome, everyone knew everyone else. I didn't even leave Talus until I had been playing for like a month, and then I got into Coronet and was like 'woah' lots of people. It literally felt like being a country boy going to the city for the first time.
And that I think kind of sums up why I identified with SWG so much, it was a perfect balance of a wild west with a science fiction universe, which is one of the reasons the orignal Star Wars A New Hope was so appealing. And it perfectly fit the source material because it was meant to be in a time period directly after ANH. Before Lucas went all 'Okay guyz this is like supposed to be a space opera about one family, kk thnx my dudes'
Same here ... did not leave Tatooine for 6 weeks .... ;-)
There was a TON to explore on a single planet alone. (On foot - no speeders back then ;-) )
Running for your life, chased by Krayt dragons. Getting infected by the Sarlacc vapors. etc.
Have fun
not really the problem with bioware SW was they spending over 200M on VA and forgetting the whole gameplay, then go f2p and make you pay for hotbars unlocks (btw not even chinese games did this u.u)
In ESO case, since there is no modders for teh game Bethesda/zyomax can't really do much, they are not used to it, they are so used to toss the game out and wait for modders to fix it then anything other then that is kinda over they head, plus the lack of criativity, skyrim had ideas taken from fallout they can't really think over new things they just take the old and try to simplify.
plus 10M? i'm betting pretty hard its over the real numbers or its the total of games people bough together with china, then its really not much if less then 10% of this still plays
that is such horseshit.
'no creativity'
basically your saying that Skyrim was released as a buggy messed and lacked any creativity.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Oh man... right in the nostalgiafeels...
Sandbox is one essential element in any MMORPG that ever hopes to be a true role-playing game online. Anything less, and we may as well just play single player Final Fantasy games.
And what I've noticed is while there's no exact replacement for SWG, there're still many more sandbox MMO's now than there were when SWG was released. There're dozens, probably hundreds of them. Just to name a few: Wurm Online, Mortal Online, Xsyon, Eve-Online, Life is Fuedal and so on. There're so many more, some being more casual or less PvP-oriented, like Villagers and Heroes. Some are still being developed, like Albion Online and Wild Terra Online and Tree of Life.
The trouble is SWG did so many things so well, it's hard to find its next of kin. The real issue is this playstyle on the whole is not as popular because it's focused on sandbox freedom and in some cases open world PvP. The on-rails amusement park adventure is hugely more popular. Even with sandboxes it's more common to see them add restrictive rules and to prohibit PvP to smaller areas. It's all an attempt to guarantee enjoyment and counter to what SWG was in tis heyday.
There're also some action-based sandboxes. While they're not in any way heirs to the throne, I still respec them. Tehy're numerous. Some examples might be Rust or H1Z1 or Ark: Survival Evolved or Reign of Kings or 7 Days to Die.
Want to be a farmer? Go ahead.
Jedi? Sure.
Bounty Hunter? Absolutely.
Smuggler? Duh!
Hell you could even be a walking carpet with a bowcaster.
The death of SWG was the attempt by Cao and Smedley to turn it into another run of the mill crap game. Congratulations SOE, you were successful.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/7300033012
Housing
JTL
Resource spawn rotations
Deep crafting systems
Entertainers
Buff queues
Player run Vendors
Guild Wars
Faction Wars
Bounty Hunting
Reverse Engineering
Taming
things that made swg fail;
NGE.
Herald of innovation, Vanquisher of the old! - Awake a few hours almost everyday!