SWG: The New Game Experience 31
There's been a lot of talk about the controversy surrounding the NGE changes to Star Wars Galaxies, but very little substantial analysis. Darniaq has commentary on the sweeping changes made to SWG, looking at how they've affected each system and what it means to the players. From the article: "Oh, hunting animals to sell their organic resources was a lucrative business, but that was combat as a means to an end. I didn't do it because fighting was fun. Even a number of attempts at combat revamps did not result in a markedly different game. They felt mostly like tweaks to a system most of the players had long since accepted. That it wasn't that fun for the average gamer didn't mean SWG wasn't fun for players. So why truly change a game when you're making money?"
Why does anyone care anymore? (Score:2, Insightful)
Okay, maybe that wasn't the most insightful observation ever. I was just in the mood to post a comment using "suckier" as a word.
P.S. WoW pwns, bee-otch.
SWG was different but good, with too many bugs (Score:2)
Ah. (Score:2)
Level problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Level problems (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Level problems (Score:1)
Pre-doc buff I was a dabller (Score:2)
This left me with enough points to be a bit of a scout, harvest, and a bit of crafting. Oh nothing major, just fireworks. I liked them and very few people seemed to want to bother making them but there was always a need for them.
I actually was rather good at it and I got fairly frequent requests for packages with some amazing money offers. 1
Re:Pre-doc buff I was a dabller (Score:2)
> RPG when I got the opportunity (No spirtual reason,
> I am just to cheap to buy armour and weapons).
I almost bust out laughing when I saw this. Never played FFXI, have you? Monks have some of the most expensive armor and weapons in the game in that one...
Chris Mattern
I have to ask? (Score:2)
Damn, isn't there anything he doesn't screw up? All I remember from early SWG was how many of the annoyances were UO early days like. It was like the ultimate expression of feature creep.
So basically NGE is admission the original system was unsustainable from both a monetary and coding basis. They overcomplexed themselves into a ditch. Changing the game isn't a bad idea. Actively deceiving your player base is. SOE should be required to pay back the subscription fees f
Re:Ultima Online (Score:2)
Feature creep is right!
I never played SWG, but I remember playing Ultima Online back in 1997 and said to myself, "If all they did was fix the bugs, lag, and keep the client and servers from crashing this would be the greatest game of all time!"
Of course they would fix the current bugs, but would keep adding more features that brought on more bugs... Some worse than the o
Re:Ultima Online (Score:1)
Re:I have to ask? (Score:2)
Re:I have to ask? (Score:1)
Re:I have to ask? (Score:2)
Not necessarily. SWG only started substantially losing its player base after they radically altered the game design.
I contend the system was sustainable and maintainable. However, for some reason or another, instead of tweaking things, subsequent patches started adding more "features" in areas where there weren't problems. I think you got that right. But I don't believe the original design was that
Re:I have to ask? (Score:1)
Erp! Formatting error. (Score:1)
Here's how it should have looked:
I take a slightly different view.
There's a difference between substantially losing players in a short period of time, as is happening now, versus steady decline of subscriptions over a much longer one. It's a Peak/Valley view versus a Slope one I'd guess. In any case, here's the problem:
Over a long period of time, SWG was probably losing more players than gaining. This is because the game had a fairly
I disliked SWG imensely (Score:2)
Can we all just drop Star Wars? (Score:1)
After Episode 3, I refuse to give George Lucas and all of his spinoff companies a dime after the years of wasted time hoping for and anticipating his next movies and games. The games are getting worse and derivative, much like the last 3 movies.
If we keep throwing him money, it will never change. He will keep coming out with crap because we all want to believe in the
Re:Can we all just drop Star Wars? (Score:2)
Whatever you think of Lucas's movies, I'm always going to give games from that company a close look.
Welcome Back? (Score:1)
While I'd like to see them back into UO, I doubt it'll ever happen, as MMOs are constantly getting EQ'd to death, or plagarized in different manners in attempts to capitallize on the success of whatever top multi-player RPG is the flavor of the day.
Diablo II got UO pretty bad, and it looks like EQ and its ilk are responsible for the retardation
Two different games with mass chaos in between (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I knew of the early, original developers of SWG, I believed what they were trying to do was truly innovative and original. The best and the brightest from Verant wanted to create an all new, much more dynamic world that turned traditional MMORPGs on its side. In the early game you can see their vision in the crafting system, unusual classes and an experience-based system that caused characters to "gravitate" towards specific classes rather than be pidgeonholed into a specific path. There were all sort of seemingly innocuous and peripheral activities one could engage in, that for no logical reason, attracted a lot of participants. The original game was most certainly not some haphazardly put together system. You can tell a lot of thought went into it and it was a lot more balanced than people give it credit. The big problem is that the game *required* a significant routine population of players in order to function properly. But knowing that the design was set with the immensly popular Star Wars universe, and produced by the most successful MMORPG developer, now in concert with SOE's resources, it makes sense that the developers could count on this.
Then came the chaos.
The game started to change. Rather than patch minor glitches, updates started to alter the fundamental aspects of the gameplay.
When I think of SWG, it reminds me of the movie A.I. - you can see Kubrick's vision in the first half of the movie, then somewhere along the way Spielberg steps in and proceeds to turn the whole movie into a worthless pile of shit that makes you embarassed to admit you paid money for this trash.
Looking at things from the outside, it seems obvious to me that SWG was killed by having two groups, with two different visions, fight over the nature of the game. In reality there were probably three: the developers (Verant/SOE), Sony corporate, and Lucas and his minions. My opinion is that the Lucas people, with the support of SOE corporate (who probably didn't want to trash their rep with Lucas because of other areas of collusion) pushed the development team around and forced them to implement this haphazard mess of patches and redesigns, which of course, completely alienated the original player base.
I think what killed SWG was Star Wars; was Lucas and their people. If they had launched this game without Lucas and their meddling people, it probably would have had a much better chance. Instead, there were too many cooks in the kitchen and they fought over how the game was supposed to work and they killed it. And now, I suspect the redesign is merely an attempt to save face in one form or another due to some contractual obligations. At least, this is my opinion, FWIW.
I think it's obvious though, from even examining the game in its early stages, that there were at least two distinct factions pushing and pulling the game in different directions. The original developers wanted to create a more free form world where players weren't primarily directed by missions or levelling, and then others seemed to want to alter the game so that player success could be more easily qualified and quantified -- at the expense of the game's core design. This is a shame because SWG in its early stages was like GTA in that it presented a wide variety of options besides going on missions -- and this model has subsequently proven to be very appealing and lucrative, but someone (IMO the Lucas team) kept whining about this or that and eventually got their way and ruined the game in some kind of effort to reinforce brand identity.
So now SWG has been turned into a ki
Two groups (Score:5, Interesting)
Easy way to spot them? They are the ones not dancing with a weapon equipped.
The levellers. Levelling up is the name of the game and XP is your e-penis. They want fights, they want fights that give max xp and they want to get a character that is super powerfull.
Easy way to spot them? They are the ones in horribly mismatched outfits or even underwear. Just the stats matter nothing else.
Of course almost nobody is 100% one or the other. That would be too easy for game developers BUT nobody is 50-50 either. The two sides really are each other opposites.
The sandbox people do not care if their character is less powerfull then another character. They at most care wether they can be the character they want (for instance a death dealing dancer was not possible, should all SWG proffesions cost the same amount of skill points). That their ranger/medic does a fraction of the damage of a combat character is not important. Their choice.
The levellers DO care. OMG GOD, sword can do 10% more damage per second then fencer? NERF THEM. They like competition but also want it to be fair. To them the mix and match is about getting the best results. PvP players are even worse, have to be, because what is the point of a duel if the winner is already known?
Perhaps the biggest difference is that levellers dream of being able to solo X while sandboxers can't see the point of soloing in an mmo.
Worse is that both groups do not like each other much. The Levellers see the Sandboxers as a bunch of low level roleplaying freaks, the Sandbox people see the levellers as ill mannered script kiddies always looking for the latest exploit.
Obvious example? Image designer. Now if there ever was a profession were a player should not care about maxing XP results it was image designer. Boy were they screwed. This meant that only hardcore sandboxers did it. Levellers had a use for them because even the most hardcore leveller wants to change their looks sometimes BUT there was a mismatch. Levellers would ask for an image desinger to change them, the nicer levellers would come to the ID but many seemed to think that the ID should come to them and just cough up the travel costs. Paying for the ID session? Why? The ID gets XP for it so why should I pay for it? That master image designers have no need for XP seems something a leveller cannot understand.
Same with other "helper" jobs like entertainers. Levellers are lousy tippers. To them XP is the name of the game and they cannot understand that the best entertainers can only get money from tips.
Medics? Just as bad. Healing costs resources yet levellers will not help medics who kept them alive either by donating resources (if they even have the skills in aquiring them) or paying for the job. Hell I seen levellers who had to be constantly healed and then try to sell medic loot to the healer that saved their skin. No wonder medics died out.
With NGE sony seems to have decided to aim for the leveller crowd. An intresting move since there seem to a be a lot of them. Small problem? The levellers left and went to WoW. It is the Sandbox people that have stuck with SWG through thick and thin and it is them that are most badly screwed with this update.
No more mix and matching your own job. Clothes and armour are given not bought from crafters. Less of a crafter run economy. The whole combat level crap. No, SWG went from a sandbox/leveller hybrid wich was bad enough to a leveller game. All very nice but WoW does it better.
I don't know if there is room for a sandbox only game. Compared to the standard leveller games that are EQ and WoW. The sims is a sandbox game and it sold amazingly well. Its online version did not. Can a mmo "the sims" work. I think so but you need to design a true sandbox game and not some weird hybrid. A true sandbox game is not about levelling up. This is hard as levelling is easy. Just as
Re:Two groups (Score:2)
Re:Two groups (Score:2)
Not everyone hates the NGE (Score:2)
A friend of mine who I played World of Warcraft with was an ex-SWG player, so I mentioned to him that Sony had totally changed the game around. He tried the trial and then shortly after - reactivated his SWG account and quit playing WoW.
He had played SWG back at launch time, leaving just before Jump to Lightspeed came out. His opinion on NGE seems to be primarily that they streamli
SWG NGE A userbase divided (the HAM debacle) (Score:5, Informative)
Almost every RPG like game gives you a health bar. As you take damage it lowers. To counter that you usually are given some way to heal yourself (or get members of your party to do it for you) as well as way to temporarily or permantly increase it. Improve the self-healing/regeneration capability and of course ways to prevent getting damaged in the first place like armour or agility.
Next you get an action bar or mana bar or whatever from you pay your special attacks. The heavier the attack the more action points taken. Drain them all and you depend on your basic usually weak attack. Mana bars usually have mana potions to refill it. Basically the action/mana bar is a tool I think to prevent players from just spamming their most powerfull attacks constantly.
In MMO's it seems extremely important to limit the players power. I hit the "not enough energy/action/mana" limit far more often then in any single player RPG. Most often it seems to be method used to limit wich levels of enemies you can fight and wich level of enemies you can fight with.
Let me explain. You make a group with a fighter a healer and a heavy hitter (mage). You can then take on enemies that are a lot tougher then any of you could take on solo. Why? Well the fighter will be the one taking all the damage, this is called tanking, but that doesn't matter because the healer will just spam his heal spells. As long as the enemy isn't so hard they kill the fighter between heals you can then just wait for the mage to do his work.
So most game limit the healer. This doesn't just prevent you from taking on enemies that the designers have deemed to though for you. It also prevents grouping outside your level range.
A low level healer just can't cast his weak healing spells fast enough to be in a high level group.
I don't know why MMORPG designers desire this. Lord of the Rings has noobs and maxed specced characters going on an adventure together but this is a NO-NO in MMORPG land for some reason. I think the logic goes along these lines, well everybody else does it so we should as well.
Why is it so bad? MMORPG's survive or not because of their ability to give a social game. Artifically limiting who can group with whom divides up your player base. Or put it another way. You run the risk of alienating new players because they can't find anyone to group with.
Anyway, I was talking about the Health/Action bar.
SWG did this a little different. It gave you 3 primary bars, Health Action and Mind (HAM) each with 2 subbars.
Now unusual for most RPG games an enemy could damage each one of the HAM bars. So you could be killed if either reached 0. Or rather you were knocked out and then killed by the more lethal critters. This is a HUGE difference from other MMO's. Remember special actions take away from your action bar in every RPG BUT you do not then also have to worry about dying if it goes empty. Even if it is drained completly you still can keep on fighting.
In SWG you could easily kill yourselve in a fight by using up your HAM points doing special attacks only then to suffer one enemy hit and bam you were down. Depleting the ham bars was a typical newbie mistake.
The two subbars to each HAM bar dictated how much points a special move cost and how fast you recovered. Most players maxed these at the cost of their total HAM points. Faster recovery was better then having more points and obviously special actions costing less was a boon as well.
SWG was also unique in another aspect. You did not gain extra HAM points as you levelled up. You could redistribute them within certain limits set by your species but the total remained the same throughout the game.
The experienced RPG players will spot the problem. What about about later enemies, do they do increased damage. Why yes they do. So while in the beginning an enemy needs to land a dozen or more hits to deplete your bars a later enemy can do it in one hit.
Yeah well but you gain better armour and skills to reduce the
Re:SWG NGE A userbase divided (the HAM debacle) (Score:2)
While other game have had multiple bars of various types SWG just was poorly designed and implemented.
Without going into a long discussion with all its faults one of the main ones was that different weapons damaged different bars. So if you were in group with various people some would be damaging health another group mind and some more taking out the third. So battles became a race to see which of the 3 bars of the enemy would be depleted first.
Re:SWG NGE A userbase divided (the HAM debacle) (Score:1)
The power of Star Wars. (Score:1)