Galaxies To Beat World of Warcraft? 164
We reported previously on an interview with John Smedley being run by Gamespot. They've put up the second part of the interview, and in the closing paragraph John takes the gloves off. From the article: "One thing that I love about our company is that there is no 'quit' in this company. It's about making sure that we have pride in what we do. People within the company feel so much pride in this game that they want it to beat the crap out of World of Warcraft. That's something we feel very passionate about. We know we are capable of making the best stuff out there, and I'm proud to say that with the changes we're making in Galaxies, I think we're headed in the right direction."
Aiming too high? (Score:2, Insightful)
Most eastern countries don't care about Star wars or western type MMORPGS. Blizzard has done the impossible with its World of Warcraft, and I doubt it could be achieved elsewhere.
Even if they could make SWG as interesting and accessible as WOW, it still wouldn't appeal to half the people that WOW appeals too.
SWG vs Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
This guy make think they are going in the right direction, but they have *so* far to go to catch up it would take a meltdown of Chernobyl proportions on blizzards part for SWG to even have a chance, and probably not even then....
The only MMORPG that I know of that might challenge the dominance of WoW is the new D&D game coming out.
Re:SWG vs Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Delusions of grandieur (Score:5, Insightful)
I have played WoW. It's an ok game, but I didn't like it all that much. It's not my style. I consider WoW to be a game that appeals to the lowest common denominator. It's pure hack and slash play with cartoony graphics and shallow, repetitive "kill foozle" gameplay. Star Wars never has been lowest common denominator, and neither should SWG be.
I have played SWG for a year and a half now. I have FOUR accounts. I have mastered almost every combat profession that the game ever had, including full template Jedi, which prior to the NGE, took months to do, and rewarded you with a character that, if played right was the most powerful in the game.
SWG is the only game that I have EVER played constantly for a very long period., mainly because there was always SOMETHING ELSE to go do!
And SWG never was a failure. We have (had) 200-300K subs, which made us a solid top 10 US MMO, a number 90% of the MMO's out there would die for.
Instead they chose to nuke the game, because they decided that those who made it what it was are now undesirable and they want the lowest common denominator crowd.
For the good of the industry, and for everyone who is a customer of MMO's, I hope SWG fails so horribly that it closes by Feb. For SOE/LA to do what they have done to everyone who ever gave them a red cent and get away with it, and to be REWARDED with larger sub numbers for it would be the doom of EVERYONE who is a customer of a MMO. They will ALL start doing the exact same thing TO YOU.
Even WoW...
Re:didn't he get the memo? (Score:5, Insightful)
Put a different way, I think what parent means is that in the land of MMOs, you're buying the expectation of content as well as what's currently there. WoW's strength, even despite the very long gap between the 1.1 and 1.2 patches, is that Blizzard has done "the little things" to keep the game at least somewhat fresh. They've made mistakes, sure - like ignoring midlevels and gearing too much new content to level 60 (maximum) - but they haven't actually done anything that could or would be perceived by the community as malicious.
SoE has. Time and time again. I think that speaks more toward the futures of the two MMOs than even the strengths of the games.
Re:didn't he get the memo? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you remain loyal to your customers, listen to them, make the game for them?
Or...
Do you commit yourself to those who ARENT your customers, listen to them, try to make a game for them, and ignore those who have paid for 2.5 years of development?
Most MMO's do not do radical change for fear of alienating their base and closing down.
If SOE gets away with what they have done to us, prepare to see EVERY MMO vendor, including Blizzard, walking all over their base.
Of course, I believe that SOE has no chance at all of making this a go. I lived through the original radical (it seemed so at the time) change, the Combat Upgrade of April `05, and that reaction was a mild protest compared to what I have seen with the NGE.
Fear and Loathing at SOE (Score:3, Insightful)
Smed is taking heat for all of them, so I guess it's understandable that he's taking serious amounts of Valium (or gin) to get him through interviews.
Re:Aiming too high? (Score:3, Insightful)
A TRUE sandbox game would enable both (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem with SWG was not that it never seemed able to make up its mind about what it wanted to be. In its attempt to be everything to everybody it ends up pissing off everyone. Instead of fixing the bugs they kept redesigning it and introducing even more bugs. I remember after the combat revamp (the first) that you would sometimes drive across places so fucking teeming with live that it was insane. Lairs with 30-40 critters around the entire horizon filled with prey. Granted it was amazing the game did not grind to a halt displaying it all but geez that bug should never have made it past testing.
This guy just doesn't seem to have a clue and if he thinks SWG can in this form compete with WoW he should have himself committed. This is no longer marketing speech this signals a severe mental disorder.
It may amaze some people but in MMO land some people LIKE being an entertainer, yes even a hairdresser. Some people really do enjoy being a cheff or general crafter. Other enjoy going out hunting not for money or xp or leet loot but to find the supplies that the crafters need.
But such a game is not for everybody and would need to be very clearly targetted. An open sandbox style game simply requires a different kind of player then well a fps linear story game.
You know what is odd? The game Guild Wars is advertised as a PvP game yet its quests are actually bloody intresting, with some nice stories and scripted quests that actually are a lot better then the typical EQ2 "go kill ten bears for the next page in a book" quests. GW has NPC's fighting along side you, a central story that actually advances, and in general is very suprising especialy when you consider that it is not a quest game at its heart.
Worse GW is better then EQ2 because you can far more create your own character, you have a maximum of 8 spells from a wide section and while there are only 5 jobs available they have a massive spell selection and 3 specilisations and you have to select a second job as well giving you a huge amount of choice as to how to build your character. Compared to EQ2 where everyone uses the same spells it is a breath of fresh air.
In fact it is a bit like SWG. Well SWG BEFORE Sony made it clear that anyone not adopting the one template to rule them all would just not be able to play with the higher level content. When Sony's idea of a good high level dungeon is filling it with critters that all but the most specced out combat classes can't handle then it becomes clear that Sony decided that the sandbox was not what they wanted.
Remember KOTOR? Nice game but hardly "open". Just try to make all your characters ranged weapon fighters. It was suicide. Jedi was you path and you would damn well take it.
SWG slowly rotted, partly because of bugs, partly because sony either encouraged or failed to discourage the use of quick paths to victory and partly because to many of the players allowed themselves to be drawn in by the lure of the xp grind.
In a recent /. article I put up a post about how SWG was fun before the doc buff and I describe a hunt on dathomir. Perhaps I should also write about how live was AFTER the doc buff became wide spread.
My Sabrak(?) was now an elite TKM/Sword Specialist. Sword being used to do the big damage, TKM for its fantastic healing and for the cheap damage that vibro knuckles give (top sword cost a million, top vibro knuckle a few thousand, your choice). The day would start with unloading your inventory of the previous day loot and checking your armour. Depending on how much you cared about looks your outfit would be the select pieces of armour that critters actually hit with the non-hitted parts of your body wrapped in clothes. If you could be bothered, many couldn't and fighting in your undies was perfectly acceptedle in the SWG universe.
Weapon check to see it had not deterioted to far. Then
Re:SWG vs Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
It hooked me for a month or two, mainly due to the worlds being so well made. Honestly, I had an awesome time just wandering around, seeing all there was to see and enjoying the environments.
The reason I quit was that most of the content to be played was given by NPC's. NPC's would ask me to collect 100 bear asses, and I'd farm 100 bear asses...then turn them in...yay 10 silver. Or, I would go into a X place and kill Y evil gay. Those were more fun, but they got repetative after a while. Or, I could go into one of the many lower level instance dungeons. Unfortuniatly the lower level dungeons very rarely had decent groups going through them, getting into a group was hard enough, and the people who played in them were usually pretty terrible because of the negligable penalty for death. Also, because they were instanced, you couldn't wander into a dungeon and randomly meet another group going through the same one. PvP was battlegrounds and random ganking only, and the way it was divided meant that you could almost predict who won every battle based on what level and what gear they had. Were you level 24? Good luck doing anything but sucking in a battleground.
However, WoW did entice me enough to want to try other MMO's. I tried a few Everquest knockoffs, but I quickly found that level treadmilling was not what I was looking for. So I went in the other direction. Currently, my favorites are Eve Online and Ultima Online Pre-Rennisance freeshards...their lack of reliance on questing was a refreshing change of pace. Unfortuniatly, EVE Online has the personality of a spreadsheet, and UO's interface is very archaic, plus UO's skill grind, while managable due to macros, is still what I feel is an unnecissary pain in the butt.
What would be my ideal MMO? World of Warcraft with Ultima Online's gameplay and EVE's economy and skill gain.
Re:Fear and Loathing at SOE (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean it. Just have the game that had content for the original game, and the first two expansions and THAT'S IT! No moon, no portals. Yes, have it still be a pain in the ass to get anywhere in the game. Have people in the tunnel in East Commonlands doing auctions. Have people gathered around the druid ring in West Commonlands looking for ports out of there.
I know, it was a huge pain in the ass...but you know what? It was fun! It was a huge community that totally died away when the portal stones came into being. The old world of EQ became a total ghost town.
It was an adventure if you were a barbarian in Halas having to fight and run your way to Freeport. I mean, the world of EQ seemed so much bigger back then! If you were in Qeynos, Freeport seemed to be SO far away and the only way of really getting there is to either find a kind Wizard to port you, or just run it.
Anyway, that's my take on it. Those days are gone forever and they will never ever return and now it's just not the game I remember at all. I haven't played EQ in about a year and a half now. It's dead as far as I'm concerned.
Re:Anti-Sanbox MMO? (Score:3, Insightful)
I want to play a MMORPG with my wife, and that means someone needs to offer a game with interesting combat for me, and a complex crafting system for my wife - one where she can get ingredients by exploring the massive world without needing to kill mobs in the process.
WoW was great fun for me until I quit at 60, 3-5 hour raids are not my idea of a good time, and the crafting in WoW stinks which means my wife never became interested in playing with me.
There is a huge mature market out there for a MMORPG that appeals to both men and women. Basically WoW with a better more open end game and a more complex and more player valuable crafting system, perhaps even with a crafting class, that can explore but is immune to mob attacks.
Development Schizophrenia (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, someone correct me if I'm wrong on my facts here.
Item 1: They release the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion. A full, buy-it-at-the-store update to the game, so it took a while to ship. Available in boxes, which take a while to print. Containing loads of new content for a number of classes, and that couldn't have been quick to develop.
Item 2: Two days after its release, they implement NGE. Entire thrust of the game changes. Over half the character classes evaporate into the ether. Some of those classes were the same ones for which new content were created for under Trials of Obi-Wan.
Hopefully NGE, which affected the entire game, took more time and sweat to implement than Trials of Obi-Wan, which was a standard new content expansion, did.
So logically, BOTH projects must have been in development at the same time. Logically people on the Obi-Wan team must have known what was coming down the pike. And they had to have been super demoralized to see what was coming, right? Or maybe they didn't believe it would really happen?
But working on two wide-ranging, world-changing events at once? That's a lot of wasted developer muscle and energy, and I don't think that a sane development process can account for it. I think, more likely, that some schizophrenia was involved, so I present these two possible scenarios:
1. NGE was slapped together at the last second, as a result of some unseen-from-outside pressure, either from Sony or Lucasarts. Someone didn't meet a quota, and judging from Smedley's comments it must be a damn big quota, so someone panicked. A bad, bad situation.
2. There was some kind of internal upheaval at Sony, or Dilbertesque maneuverings prevented communication between teams, or a power struggle between old guard and rising stars took place resulting in a fulcrum shift in the teetertotter of SOE office politics. One power bloc was responsible for Obi-Wan, the other, NGE. An even worse situation than scenario 1.
Either way, something is happening there that is causing them to make drastic, ill-considered changes in their game. And any smart player should be able to see that the risk that it'll happen again is exceedingly great.
Even if the NGE produced the Metaverse, I would think that Sony has now destroyed the customer base of Star Wars Galaxies completely. And such is the depth of the incompetence displayed here that I would be surprised it if didn't wash over into their other online properties.
This is SOE's Edsel.
It's a real pity... (Score:3, Insightful)
No shock there though, that's been the story with eq1, eq2, swg, planetside...
Sandboxes (Score:3, Insightful)
In an ideal world this concept just carries over to online play and scales indefinitely, and hundreds of thousands of players all get along even if one is a Sith and the other a rebel leader. Unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world.
EQ et al. have their roots in MUDding. I wasn't involved with that; while MUDs were on the rise I was engaged in online air combat; but the experiences are similar.
While the bond of physical proximity was cut in these early games, the community was still small, which meant it was self-policing. If your online game regularly has 100 people on, you get to know those guys quite well. If Lord Doofus shows up and disrupts the game, everyone else does something about it; and if Doofus disappears but re-emerges as Dink, nobody is fooled. So it was still safe to have a sandbox. In air combat games occasionally a bug would crop up which could be exploited; but since the community was small it was agreed not to use 'cheap' tactics and any player who did was generally hounded until they stopped.
When the idea was scaled up to the MMOG level, with many thousands playing at once, both the safeguards of proximity and community were lost, replaced by anonymity and indifference. When that happened the thinking "because I should" is lost on many and in its place "because I can" comes in.
Now it becomes problematic to be open-ended, because for every player who wants to do something unique in a good way, there are several whose thoughts revolve around finding ways to abuse the game system. Here's an Uncle Owen, who wants to be a moisture farmer, but right behind him is Uncle Pwn, who is busy pharming instead and selling money on the 'secondary market.' Now the good player is ruined, because the market is pooched.
Likewise SWG may have had 37(?) classes but really if you wanted to win you found a min/max combination, of which I'm quite certain there were far fewer than 37. Same thing happened in EQ; there are 10 expansions and I-don't-know-how-many zones but in practice all new characters go to zone A then B then C then D and 40 other alternative places to adventure sit empty. Similarly, in DAOC, theoretically you have the choice to specialize in several different areas but forget that, you'd better be specced exactly the same as everyone else or you're done for when you reach the top levels.
What looks like open-ended, when subjected to exploiters and abusers and not tamed by community, becomes only an exercise in min/max and is in fact far more restrictive than an apparently closed-ended class system.
In short, any game system open-ended enough to allow free-form roleplay is also open-ended enough to abuse, because the number of permutations becomes too high to test. Further, any game large enough to qualify as a MMOG doesn't have a self-policing nature.
That was one of SWG's design problems, and the only way out was to tear up the old system or make a SWG2. I don't know why they didn't make a SWG2 and let the people who liked the game as is remain. Maybe they looked at the EQ2 vs. EQ1 numbers and decided it was a poor investment. Maybe Lucas leaned on them and said that there will be only one Star Wars MMOG, not two. Who knows?
What I do know is that I had no interest in joining the old SWG, either in its original incarnation or in the 'CU' phase, because of this.
Dumbed down versus mass market (Score:2, Insightful)
SWG will never come close to WoW (Score:2, Insightful)
Second, there is no way SWG will more than likely ever be able to compete with even 2 WoW servers much less the game and I'll tell you why...2 things.
1. Word of mouth
2. Corporate idiots getting in the way.
On word of mouth. Folks the reason WoW is such a juggernaut is not necessarily because of ease of leveling, better graphics, or even gameplay. As mentioned here before, Blizzard has borrowed heavily from other games for all the above. The main reason for their success, IMO, is word of mouth.
The buzz in the circles these games float in is that WoW is the game to buy. You have friends telling friends telling friends telling co-workers telling grandparents, etc. They did put out a solid game that doesn't try to corner the 16-25 male demographic exclusively. There's some saying that always floats around discussions about word of mouth being something like its 10x harder to acquire new customers than keep old customers. Don't know if it's true but heaven help SOE if it is.
Which makes the NGE decision so incomprehensible. Somebody somewhere had to actually think that people would forget 2.5 years of incompentence and rush out and buy SWG based on what? I don't know. The flashy commercials that have no relevance to actual gameplay whatsoever? The bugged quest following LA's Julio Torres on G4TV? Some marketing idiot (or CEO) probably was using the phrase "finger on the pulse of something" when they presented this tripe to whoever was dumb enough to digest it. Killing off 200,000 subscribers so you can appeal to a 13 year old who already has much better games to play and only has to bug mom and dad once a year for 50 bucks for xbox live? Hoping the same 13 year old will stay seeing that there allowance money is being wasted on something that is not even half as good? Right, that's gonna work.
Which brings up my second point, corporate idiots. If Roger Ebert wants any more proof that games are art then SOE is giving him proof by the shovelfuls. For they are a shiny beacon on what happens when you replace ingenuity, imagination, and artistic integrity with memos, meetings, and morons in marketing telling you to swing the game the direction of the pre-pube set.
Can you imagine Leonardo da Vinci working for SOE? The memo from marketing might look something like this...
Leo,
About the Mona Lisa project. We feel that our target audience would like to see maybe a lower cut blouse and we've also included some pictures of our favorite hooter's girls to take care of the face problem.
By the way, we realize that you have a few more months to complete but with the holiday season coming up do you think you could get us a product on oh, let's say, 3 days? Thanks I knew you could.
Regards,
Raymond Babbitt
Marketing
P.S. We're putting new coversheets on the TPS reports. Did you get the memo?
Just in case you may not know. SOE has failed to retain an amount of customers that would even warrant an itch in the jockstrap of WoW. Technically none of their products could be deemed long term successes. EQ was not their baby from the beginning and anyone will tell you that was around that it seriously went downhill after they took full control. Wanna know why? They injected into the whole creation process a plethora of yes men, middle managers, buck passers, meeting whores, and marketing morons. For some reason (hmm maybe greed) they weren't content with publishing EQ and leaving the creative side alone. As a result...
EQ------Former she
Re:Wizkids did the same with Mechwarrior (Score:3, Insightful)
Games Workshop are probably the worst for this, but because their games are generally played by children nobody seems to notice/care (truth be told: the kids grow out of it at around the time they revise everything, it just kills the second hand market and means new customers must always buy new).
That said: Needless to say, I boxed it all up in the garage and haven't played since.
Why is it needless to say? You are going to stop playing a game you enjoy because somewhere in the world someone changed some rules and figures? If only every consumer was like you... Want to stick it to the man, keep playing with what you've got you fool!