Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided Ships 502
TJPile writes "After months and months of beta testing and years of waiting, the Star Wars version of Ever-crack is now shipping. Order your copy today. There are already plans for an expansion pack in 2004 that will feature more character races, worlds, and even the ability to buy, fly, and fight in your own spaceship. The game will set you back $50, come on 3 CDs, require Internet access, and will cost around $10 a month (service subscription fee). Right now it's Windows only." Yep, I'm hoping to play as the Pit of Saarlac: The Ultimate Camper.
Pricing Inaccurate (Score:3, Insightful)
Varying rates plans apply depending on your subscription.
I've heard really mixed reviews of this
Personally, I'll play the "wait and see" game. With NWN SOU just being released, I have enough game content to fill up my spare time
you'd think sony would've learned by now... (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, cmon. -microsoft- of all game developers has done it right -twice- now with the Asheron's Call series, and hitherto unknown Mythic Entertainment pulled it off with Dark Age of Camelot.
in my unprofessional opinion - this game is not going to strike a fire in the casual gamer market like they hope. any casual gamer will immediately be turned off by having their wookie bounty hunter continually chased all over tatooine by some fscking crab smaller than his head. the casual gamer doesn't want to spend 100 hours getting to the point where he can hunt banthas or dewbacks or sandpeople. they want to do fun stuff now.
not to mention travel. everything was laid out assuming you'd be able to get your own speeder bike or landspeeder, or bum a ride from someone. but now player-vehicles are out until god-knows-when, and the result is that the town to town running makes EQ's seem reasonable.
if star wars was an action game like planetside, that could maybe catch on - if only sony wasn't pricing it out of the realm of reasonability. $12/mo for a FPS?
SWG looks like a market dissappointment in the same vein as Sims Online.
Re:Better work harder on your character name (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Already Bought (Score:1, Insightful)
One thing I never understood (Score:5, Insightful)
I was in Beta (Score:3, Insightful)
The engine/world is the best part. Wait for 3-6 months though for them to fix the thousands of bugs, put in the features they cut out to ship it early, and perhaps wait until the space expansion which will make it a full game instead of this hacked down overpriced one.
Also, like I said this game isn't like EQ where you could play it for a year and not see everything. I imagine that in 2-3 months you will see just about everything and have a complete character. So when you decide to buy try to think of how complete of a game do you want.
A purchase right now will get you a game that doesn't have a space, vehicles, player cities, some cut professions, less worlds, no space expansion, and THOUSANDS of bugs that you will be reporting left and right.
A purchase at Christmas should get you everything above.
Think about it.
Re:The StarWars Galaxys Experience, summed up (Score:2, Insightful)
EverQuest was great for the first year or so, until Sony started to "tweak" it. I'm afraid we expect the same fate with SWG.
Re:Erm... please do not believe the Hype. (Score:3, Insightful)
>Blizzard will treat its customers far better than Sony does.
Given that Blizzard sues its most devoted customers [chillingeffects.org], what do you think Sony are going to do?
Re:Agree 100% (Score:2, Insightful)
I got to play the beta for about the last month and for the most part was enjoying myself. Sure there were bugs, patches, glitches, servers going down, and the one crash to desktop, but it was beta and I expected those sorts of things. I will say that I agree with the people who feel the game is not ready for live release, but that decision was probably not under the control of the developers anymore. Personally, I'd wait to praise of condem this game until it's been out for a month or so and the initial launch problems that come with any game this large are taken care of. I'm sure some people will say that all problems should be taken care of by launch, but then the game would probably never launch at all. Look at EQ, it's been around for several years now, and they still have to patch to fix bugs and game balance issues.
That said, I did find myself getting a little bored doing the UPS routine to earn money to be able to take a shuttle to another planet, and waiting on the shuttles to arrive sucked, but overall I enjoyed playing this game. Like any new large scale game, there are good and bad things to say about it, but I think the game will balance out shortly after launch, and no, I'm not talking about the Force when I say balance.
Re:Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but I'm kinda afraid that some marketing hack
at SOE pushed that out the door as a bone to Mac
users and also in the hopes that it would fail so
they could say, "see? there's no money in Mac gaming"
The whole Mac-only server setup, stuff like that,
it doesn't bode well.
But hey, on the off chance it is a success, maybe
it won't take them four years to port SWG.
Re:Issues with Star Wars Galaxies (Score:4, Insightful)
That would be the deciding factor to me.
The fact is, that I'd play a Star Wars game because I want to be in the movies. I don't give a wamprats ass about building up my character, completing quests and so on. I want to be a Jedi, I want to fly spaceships, I want to travel to exotic planets and so on.
The game that defined the Star Wars experience for me was Jedi Knight Dark Forces. Despite being primarily a first person shooter, it had most of those ingredients. I could be a Jedi AND use the force powers. I could travel to exotic locations. It even had a plot with some (albiet weak) character development!
I last played it (completed it) years ago, but I still remember many of the missions, settings and atmosphere. It had a quality sound track, classic Star Wars style, with the tracks tailored to each level. When you were creeping about infiltrating an Imperial base and trying not to get spotted, it was quiet and spooky. When you were trying to escape a Rebel base under attack from legions of stormtroopers, it was fast and frentic.
Even though the gameplay was basically shooting things, the world was epic enough that I felt I was in the movies.
There was only two problems. It was single player, and it was focussed too much on blasting stuff (well, that was the genre).
What I want is not a MMORPG. They bore me. Real life is boring. A poor fake of real life on Tatooine even more so. I want you to sell me a game like Jedi Knight, with a plot, with vast levels and worlds with convincing characters, that I can play with a group of friends. Not a big group. A small one is fine. We can get together online and play it in sessions, like how we all go round to a friends flat on Sunday nights to watch TV.
I want to be able to fly in space, and I'd like a stronger focus on convincing worlds and missions, and less on shooting things (though it should still have fights), ie the balance should be more like in the movies. We should be able to work together or compete as major characters. It should be like going to the movies together, except that we're in the movies together.
It should have a clear beginning, middle and end. When it's over, then you can sell us sequels. Like the films.
That's all I want. It's not all that hard. Jedi Knight wasn't hugely far off, and that was years ago. Why does nobody do this?
Re:To cover the upfront development costs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe they want a nice big front load on their investment? The life of a game is maybe 3-4 years if they can keep up the interest with âaddedâ(TM) features and expansion packs. Yes at $15 a month for maybe 48 months times the average of however many players they get to play the game through its life. That is a lot of cash. The rub is that lot of cash just covers the server and bandwidth costs plus some to keep the updates for the content and code maintenance going with a sliver of profit left over.
You skipped Math 101 before you took your business courses. Sony makes most of their profit on Everquest from subscribers that stay for 6 months or more, which is roughly $110 on the older subscription plans and would be $140 on the worst-case SWG plan (ie someone paying monthly), nevermind the $75 deluxe edition (or whatever it's called). The profit on Everquest has been estimated at 40% for subscriptions, which wouldn't even count the initial purchase. The initial cost incurred by Sony before the game is released is a fixed amount, recovered by selling X number of boxes at $50 a pop (some of which goes to Lucas Arts in this case, some of which goes to the retailer, and so on). If they did their estimates properly and setup their servers (and tested them) to handle Y number of users * 1.5 (or 2) so that they had enough load to handle the number of boxes they expected to sell in the first month plus some overhead just in case their load estimates were off or more people bought in, then they wouldn't have increased costs in their first month to deal with the server load. More than likely with a game like SWG that has been long anticipated and has large numbers of pre-orders, they'll recover most of their initial costs in the first week, if not all of them. From that point on, their $50 sales are mostly profit, and some of it is going to cover the first month they gave everyone, plus the initial round of fixes that is always going to happen when the largest number of players you've ever had hits your servers.
Think about it. How much do you pay just for your internet connection? I pay $40 a month for my cable modem. The servers have to have a connection to the net too. They have to pay by the amount of bandwidth they use and pay at a lower rate than you or I could get.but they have to pay access fees for 30,000+ users at a time for years.
You have no idea how much bandwidth costs when you're getting into the realm of needing to connect 30,000+ users with 5-10K/sec streams, do you? At the lowest, they'll need a 150,000K/sec connection for each server (assuming individual servers with individual connections, which isn't the case, but would actually cost more than having small load-balanced servers with multiple connections through the same provider). For that kind of bandwidth you'd probably be looking at $100-200K/year, give or take depending on the kind of deals you strike up with the provider and who your provider is (and what kind of bandwidth they have to give you). 30,000 users at $15/month is $450,000/month, subtract 5-10% at the most for the credit card authorization/collection (in fact it's usually more like 2%). Even if they're paying $1-1.2M/year for bandwidth for 30,000 users they still recover the money with 2 months of subscription revenue (but none of that revenue starts coming in until one month after launch), and most of that bandwidth cost is actually going to be factored into your initial costs, because a good amount of that payment will be up front, especially in setup fees. You could even increase your bandwidth in the second year at the same price under many circumstances, because bandwidth costs go down over time, as do hardware costs for the servers that all of this crap runs on, and your support costs also decrease over time as more users know what they're doing and actually help each other instead of forcing every user to come to you for every little problem.
SOE spent a couple of years developing the game engin
Re:Agree 100% (Score:1, Insightful)
>I'm sure they were holding back content and other things waiting for the live release
Say, I hadn't thought of that. It makes sense that they'd make it suck during beta in order to get really bad previews, because, uh... I forget. Also, I always thought beta was used to find and fix flaws in new content rather than just dumping it untested on paying customers, but I can see now that I was wrong, because, er, well, I'm sure I am.
Dark Age of Camelot shipped with very few flaws. Half of the SWG developers worked on Evercrack. There is no excuse for this game sucking at launch.
If it sucks, it deserves to die. We deserve a decent SW MMORPG, and it looks like this isn't it.
Re:I see the Beta posting trolls have migrated (Score:3, Insightful)
Star Wars Galaxies is shipping beta.
Star Wars Galaxies doesn't have classes that are finished, let alone balanced.
Star Wars Galaxies doesn't have...
- Player Vehicles
- Jedi (yeah, sure they have Jedi...of course you can only be one after a year or so of playing...they've got that done...sure...)
- Dark Jedi
- Space flight/combat/interaction
You have to chase down rats/bugs/spiders and kill them incessantly for hours upon end just to get up enough experience to carry a rifle.
Where is the excitement, the intrigue? Running around killing baddies based on your best attack? What about this MMORPG is anything different than EQ with new clothes?
This was the best part:
How can you form an opinion of a game thats not finished ?
Because betas are meant to give you the basic gist of a game. I was in The Frozen Throne beta, and while there was a lot of it that was broken, that needed work, that needed tweaking, it wasn't a miserable experience. It was fun and I had a good time.
Oh, wait. Did I just form an opinion on a game that wasn't even finished?
Re:Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
With that as a given #1, writing good maintainable multiplatform software is going to add at least 25% to 50% more effort to a large real-world project and double the testing requirements, especially in games where you have to deal with proprietary graphics and music subsystems like DirectX. Yes, OpenGL and similar technologies can alleviate some of this, but it is still a lot more work to make things run on multiple platforms. And no, Java would not solve this problem yet.
Adding this extra work onto your development team means they're spending less time fixing problems and improving the product for the initial platform's customers - so you really have to think you're going to do a lot more than just recoup your losses when adding support for another platform - you also have to think you are adding enough customers that you can pay less attention to the initial customer base or hire a larger team.
Right now, Macintosh has a pretty small market share, and I have yet to see a lot of shrink-wrapped Linux software really selling in computer stores outside of the distros like RedHat and SuSE. I've seen some games that tested the waters, but if they had sold really well I'd expect to see a Linux Games section at my local computer dealer...
At any rate, once Star Wars Galaxies has proven itself on the first platform, if they hear enough requests for other platforms that it looks more profitable to add in multiplatform support than to jump onto the next product, they'll likely do it.
I've met one of the lead coders on the project, and I can definitely say they've got more than enough talent and skill to go there, and the majority of the code was probably designed to be platform-neutral and easily portable from the beginning. But unless it looks profitable to spend the extra money to do a port, it ain't gonna happen. That's called business.
Re:Agree 100% (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Issues with Star Wars Galaxies (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Agree 100% (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be kidding, are you saying that someone who likes SWG wouldn't TURN THE GAME OFF at any point and post on a message board after the NDA was lifted. Give us a break, those guys were probably writing their reviews for months. I guess you think all of the beta testers were playing SWG 15 hours a day and not doing any else. Right. Like they wouldn't take 15 minutes out of their day to talk about a game they "love" for a bunch of people online. Have you ever tried getting a gamer to SHUT UP about a game they like when they start talking about it? It's not easy.
Re:Agree 100% (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget as well the people who were in the beta test and honestly tried to learn to like SWG, only to finally quit in disgust or boredom. There are probably a great many people out there who had this happen, only they now have a lot of apathy toward the game and don't even care enough to post negatively against it.
Myself, I already commented [slashdot.org] on how my biggest beef with SWG is the fact that they are trying to sell a game that isn't remotely retail-ready.
I also found it interesting that even near the very end of beta, there were rarely more than a couple hundred players (out of several thousand beta testers) on the server during prime time. Such a highly anticipated game, with the free time running out soon, wouldn't you think the beta testers would be anxious to make good use of the limited free time they had left?
Re : Downfall of SOE (Score:2, Insightful)
Along come the clones, some from Magic's maker Wizards of the Coast. There were some very interesting games early on - Spellfire (an AD&D game from TSR who was bought later by WOTC), Middle Earth-the Wizards from ICE, ShadowFist, NetRunner (an excellent 2 player game) and many, many more suddenly appeared on store shelves. The only problem is that many people who play these games are on a limited budget. Hmmm, I have boxes of MtG cards and people to play with, do I buy ShadowFist cards and try to get my friends to play that game too? Well, some of these people bought the cards, but found that their friends were unwilling to shell out the cash to join them. Result, boxes of never-used cards from games that will never see the light of day again. There must have been 30-40 games out between 1994-1998. How many are still around? Magic is, can you name another?
The same thing is happening to MMORPGs. The success of Everquest has deluded executives and others into believing that there is a vast untapped legion of people waiting to play these games. The reality is that most of the people out there are already playing EQ and have invested heavily in it over the past 4 years. It took me a year and a half to convince my friends to try EQ. Then they were hooked, some even getting two computers and accounts. Think these people are going to be easily swayed into starting a new game where they can only have one character on a server when they have 12 on one now and a very mature game to boot? Just to kill rats for another 20-40 hours, I don't think so.
So where is your player base going to come from? I think the average gamer has a budget and way too many choices. And what is Sony thinking anyway releasing PlanetSide and SWG so close together? It seems like bad, bad marketing. And in a couple of months they will have EQ2 on the shelves. Do you really think all those EQ players are going to play SWG while they are waiting for that? Get real.
There will be an extreme shakeout of these games very soon, just like there was in the CCG market. Only companies with a lot of cash will be able to put out a game, and there will only be a few left standing. EQ will remain. They are adding some new content that sounds fantastic. But will any of the others? They will have to appeal to a whole new market because there is only so much time and money a person has to spend on these things. It will have to be something like SEX - THE MMORPG. Now you would get people crawling out of the woodwork for something like that I bet.
Re:Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
LucasArts has made a bunch of good games. My kids even enjoyed Yoda Stories, so you know that I have to like the company.
Re:Agree 100% (Score:3, Insightful)
ok, so you're skeptical because it's a star wars product and people are going to buy it no matter what. that is actually a good attitude to have....but you're still going on others' opinions instead of your own. how about you decide if the game is "leveraging happy childhood memories to cover up a fundamental lack of gameplay" instead of taking p0w3r64m3r1337's opinion off of the forums. Don't like the idea? Keep your 50 bucks. Think it might be a good game? Then spend that
That is the point I was trying to make originally, nothing more.