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Star Wars and Raph Leave SOE? 105

Posted by Zonk from the confusing-day dept.
Gamespot reports that Raph Koster, chief creative officer for Sony Online Entertainment, has left the company. While Gamespot seems to confirm this news, there are a number of MMOG-related rumours swirling at GDC. Mythic may be in EA's sights for acquisition, and Sony Online may soon be losing the rights to the Star Wars license. IE: No more SWG. Grimwell online has a rundown on these virulent rumours. Chris Kramer (from SOE) said words to the effect of "We're in it together for the long haul." SWG will be staying with Sony Online for some time to come.
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Star Wars and Raph Leave SOE? More

Star Wars and Raph Leave SOE?

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  • It seems that SWG and The Matrix Online, which are the two major MMORPGS that were based on movie licenses, haven't done as well as anticipated. Hopefully Star Trek online and Lord of the Rings online will fair better.
    • I expect a wonderful reception by players for "Serenity Online", but due to a shortage of players it will shut down after a few months..
      • Wow! I'd play that!

        Of course, it'd lack the characters, and the dialog would be hard to enforce among the player base, which were two of the most interesting features. But a MMORPG based on smuggling and crime, ala Traveller but with no aliens I think could be real fun.

        What I've heard pointed out is that any game based on a license is doomed to fail, simply because the licensing itself costs money that takes away from otherwise building a superior development environment. While it builds in a player base

        • Is there ONE good game that was a license of a brand?

          While the Star Wars games are hit and miss, there are certainly hits in there.. XvT comes to mind, as does last year's Lego Star Wars.
          • X-Wing, Tie Fighter, and XvT are of course the best. They're also all the same damn game with different vehicles, but never mind that. The Rogue Squadron games are pretty good too, but nowhere near as good. I enjoyed KOTOR but I heard KOTOR 2 was lame, had nothing like the same quality of design, and even a less contiguous story. And a lot of people seemed to like that first FPS (and its sequel.) Everything else is probably crap :D
            • KOTOR II started off great, but fell apart somewhat towards the end. The game was obviously badly rushed, resulting in game-breaking bugs and an ending that made almost no sense. It's a shame, because it definitely would have been brilliant given more time.
        • There are great Star Wars games, good Marvel Comics games, good LOTR games, the classic TMNT game, etc.

          There are many licensed games that are genuinely good. The idea that licensed games are all bad comes from the fact that they (even the bad) tend to get heavy marketing support and when they flop everyone knows, and many have played. Usually, when a non-licensed game is bad fewer people play it and it never gets enough mindshare to be memorable...there are exceptions, of course, but the memorable non-
          • Nah, I'd have to disagree. This is not a new phenomenon.

            Brand X, er, that's generic X as in the unknown, not X-men, is a hot property.

            Company who owns Brand X wants to take advantage of new media market M

            Company doesn't make market M things, so licenses it off to someone who does

            Brand X is popular, so only large corporations can afford to license it

            Company in market M then has a brand they paid a ton for, and must sell it well to even dream of clearing a profit, much less a big one

            Company having spent so m

            • So, are you disagreeing with me by asserting that all licensed games are bad? They're not.

              Maybe you're disagreeing and asserting that all non-licensed games are good? That's not true, either.

              I don't think you understand what the words "I have to disagree" mean...
      • Well, yes, and we don't even have to leave the Star Wars franchise to find them - Knights of the Old Republic 2 was the best RPG ever released for the PC, if it wasn't Neverwinter Nights.

        I know, some people are going to mention Torment here - we'll just disagree on that point, shall we?

    • Yeah, it's suprising to see games based on movie licenses doing so badly.

      I expect next year's E.T. MMORPG to be a smashing success...
    • Hopefully Star Trek online and Lord of the Rings online will fair better.

      Hopefully Star Trek online and Lord of the Rings online won't be managed by SOE.
  • "One thing's for sure, we're all gonna be a lot thinner."

    "Who's scruffy-lookin'?"

    "Where did you dig up that old fossil?"

    "And I thought they smelled bad on the outside"

    "It's not my fault!"

    "I've got a bad feeling about this"

    "Then I'll see you in hell"

    • By now I was expecting "Someone set us up the bomb"

      Seriously though, it's funny how none of us are thinking "Hey Sony must feel like they're taking a bath on this!"

      Worst yet, Sony's investors are probably thinking "Sony is successfully reducing costs by cutting online games that poor hopeful shmucks thought would be good. Good for them for treating customers like crap. Buy their stock."
    • > "One thing's for sure, we're all gonna be a lot thinner."
      >"Who's scruffy-lookin'?"
      > "Where did you dig up that old fossil?"
      > "And I thought they smelled bad on the outside"
      > "It's not my fault!"
      > "I've got a bad feeling about this"
      > "Then I'll see you in hell"

      You forgot the One True Line for SOE/SWG:

      "Pull out, Raph, you can't do any good back there."

  • No Suprise here (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Meest ( 714734 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @03:31PM (#14990026)
    I played Everquest 2 for a year and 2 months. With 3 large combat changes the game is not what it originaly was when it came out. Which caused me to leave.

    I believe the same thing happened to SWG where they changed the game a great deal too much.

    I don't know to many MMO players that are happy with the way SOE is doing business. It seems that in SOE's quest to gain more patronage, they fail to realize that the customers already in the game are playing it for the way it is. They don't want it to change drasticaly to gain other players that are looking for a more laid back game play.

    If i wanted to play a game for 30 minutes and acomplish something i would play WoW. If i want to play a game that i won't be able to do anything except travel across the map in 30 minutes I'll play EQ2. For me i loved the complexity of the game. They've done away with that. And in turn they have done away with my subscription.

    I see this as a signal that their are alot of troubles brewing within SOE.

    Just a gamers Opinion though :P

    • Opposite for me and EQ2 (Score:4, Informative)

      by sgant ( 178166 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @05:22PM (#14990878) Homepage Journal
      I was on the tail end of the EQ2 beta and also played for a little while before being lured away by WoW...which I played for over a year.

      Then I read a couple of reviews of the "revamp" of EQ2 and I went back to take a look. I was really impressed by how far it had come and decided to continue on with my character. There's a lot of depth there that was lacking when it first came out.

      Traveling around in EQ2 isn't bad...no worse than WoW. But then again, I'm one that thinks traveling around EQ1 is WAY too easy than it used to be. The "good ol days" for EQ1, to me, was only the original game and the first two expansions...Kunark and Velious. After that it was the vocal whiners that got the game to where it was almost "teleport directly to the mob, have the mobs line up, die automatically for you, you get the experience, you get whatever you needed. NEXT". It was fun when it was more of a free-wheeling place, where you had to sell your own stuff, where you had to get a port out of some place. The world of EQ seemed SO big back then. Taking a Barbarian from Halas to Freeport was a daunting task of running through the Karanas. It was great. It was an adventure right there. Now...meh...you're a barbarian in Halas just gate up to the Plane of Knowledge and go wherever you want. No biggy. And to me, no fun. Again, that's just me. I'm a little goofy.

      But I've been having a blast with EQ2. Well, not at the moment as all my attention is on Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

      • I understand exactly what you feel about EQ. I loved the 'Old World' game back when you had to get a Druid or a Wizard to port you. I liked that you lost experience when you died, that simply getting from A to B was dangerous, when the whole point of getting to B was that B was dangerous. I liked having to sit in East Commons with a hundred other people hocking my wares. It was fun and community. I miss that.

        • I wanted it even more severe than that. I wanted a "no trading" server where you earned your equipment in the field, or bought l4m3r stuff at the store for outrageous prices. No player-player trading.

          In this manner, there can be no "busted economy" because there is no economy. If you can never, ever get something to drop at your level that is better than what you can get for 5p at the bazaar, what's the point of going out to adventure? To grind? But people hate grinding. So what's the point?

          The point,
    • If i wanted to play a game for 30 minutes and acomplish something i would play WoW.

      No doubt this is true. But it is also true that WoW is the 800 pound gorilla in the MMOG industry, with somewhere between 5 and 10 times the customer base of any other MMOG. So if SOE decided to take SWG in a direction that made it more WoW-like, then I suppose it's easy to see why.
  • Raph Koster is excellent at designing unfun games. I'm not sure this is a bad thing for the company "losing" him...
    • Agreed, not sure how this is a troll? Many people are suspicious of MMOG-celebs such as Koster and McQuaid.

      SWG's current lead is actually doing pretty well with it(all things considered), so I hope SOE is able to retain the necessary licensings to run SWG.
    • I dunno... Ultima Online was fun or at least until they screwed it up with Trammel and all the ungodly changes. I don't know about SWG though.
    • I don't see how this is a troll. Many years ago I spent a lot of time reading Koster's writings as I found the workings of MMOs much more interesting than the games themselves.

      He impressed me as a guy with a hell of a lof knowledge who obviously spent a LOT of time thinking about how to make these games work but, was way too sure of himself. He wrote with the confidence of someone who truly believes he had it all figured out a long time ago.

      I could just picture him shooting down ideas left and right bec

    • Re:Raph Koster = Non-fun Games (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I agree with that statment, but it's only half true.

      One of Raph's "Laws" for Virtual Worlds reads

      "It is not a game, it is a service"

      Therefore, it is not a surprise that he fails at the game part. His games are virtual world experiments - they neglect the game part. The part that makes MMORPGs like World of Warcraft successful is that they are games. They don't try to be virtual world, society or government simulations. They embrace that they are games.

      And please spare me your personal opinion about WoW, it
      • From everything I know, people left UO in droves because of Trammel's safe zone, and only liked UO because of the unrestricted PVP. Then again, I, and the 10's of thousands of accounts on free shards with unrestricted PVP might be wrong.

        • Re:Raph Koster = Non-fun Games (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Yes you are.

          The number of people who left the game right after buying it because they were PKed over and over again greatly outnumbers the number of people who were left in the end.

          Its the same scenario as SWG. A simulationist minority was holding out for a game that failed to appeal to the masses. Now making a niche game, that is what you want. But SWG was never supposed to be a niche game, and therefore this is its greatest failure. Now the Avatar of the simulationists has been fired from a job he should
          • Don't pretend the original SWG didn't have its own problems similar to UO, though. Anchorhead being taken over by half a dozen Imperials who have all taken the stack-armor-class-to-infinity options of picking and choosing the starter bonus AC skills from a dozen different classes was very similar to UO's pk problem. What's the point of a gun if you can stand there and shoot such a person, point-blank, for ten minutes and not kill them? Meanwhile they hose you in 2 shots.

            Take the baddest ass human gunfigh

  • Maybe a purge is needed... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Churla ( 936633 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @03:41PM (#14990110)
    IMHO , SWG was doomed from the get go. The reason is that they had a great IP to develop a game off of. They had two options they could go for. Either make a game for star wars fans, or make a game for MMORPG players. They tried to straddle the fence and it cost them. The SW fans didn't feel that this game was any more SW than any other sci fi based MMORPG other than character references and some races. I mean really now, how many beast tamers did you see in the star wars movies? They got a similarly tepid response from MMORPG junkies because it really wasn't anything innovative to the genre and was cursed with some bottability issues. So they roll out NGE to try to fix this. Problem, the hardcore SW people have already left, and you remake the game to try to be more appeasing to what they're looking for. This annoys the MMORPG people because now it's even less of a game they can get into. In a perfect world it would have been "Hey, you got Star Wars in my MMORPG! No you got MMORPG in my Star Wars! Hey these are two great tastes that taste great together!!!" Instead we got "Hey, you got MMORPG in my star wars, and I seem to have gotten some Star wars in your MMORPG, how about we let this Sony person throw it on the ground and piss on it?"

    • Re:Maybe a purge is needed... (Score:5, Funny)

      by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @04:44PM (#14990566)
      There was one beast tamer in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Remember the fat guy in Jaba's Palace that cries when he sees that the rancor has been killed? That's a beast tamer. He probably raised the rancor from a . . . rancorling or whatever you call the baby ones.
      • They had young rancors near the end of KOTOR, but no babies. The young ones look pretty much like the older ones but a bit smaller and with proportionally shorter limbs, IIRC. FWIW. Which ain't much.
        • > There was one beast tamer

          Because we all know that, in real life, seven people with rifles can stand there around a dog shooting at it, while an eigth stands there and hoses it with a flamethrower, and the dog not only doesn't die, but continues to fight back for 30 seconds or more before dying. Not screaming instantly and trying to flee.

          Hmmmm...let's go grind on llama-giraffes since they're the equivalent fighters to a stormtrooper with rifle. How utterly fun. How utterly Star-Warsy.

      • Re:Maybe a purge is needed... (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        There was one beast tamer in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Remember the fat guy in Jaba's Palace that cries when he sees that the rancor has been killed? That's a beast tamer. He probably raised the rancor from a . . . rancorling or whatever you call the baby ones.

        Actually, I *believe* that the Rancor was a gift to Jabba, not raised since he was a little "rancorling." And the "beast tamer" disapproved of Jabba's treatment of the rancor (ie, feeding him people now and then), and was actually pla

        • > I'm pretty sure all the info is in one of the short stories
          > in "Tales from Jabba's Palace."

          Writers fill in pap all the time. If it doesn't appear in the movies, it doesn't count. As far as I'm concerned, a lightsaber could still cut "The Mandalorian Armor". Lucas went through the neck simply because he didn't want to have to have it not be able to cut something. If push came to shove in a movie, down goes the armor.
        • I was told by a friend even geekier than I that Jabba's Rancor was found by two Twi'lek brothers aboard a crashed spaceship. They were planning to take it to Jabba as a gift to gain favor, but one of the brothers got greedy and killed the other brother so that he could receive all of the glory. Jabba was appreciative of the gift and gave the Twi'lek a high position in his court. This is the Twi'lek that presents young Skywalker to Jabba in the third movie.

          I was always under the impression that Rancors were
    • You said evrything i was thinking, but there was the one beast tamer with the rankor in ROTJ.
  • it is unfortunate that it's passing won't wake up anyone at SOE to the fact that they have lost focus... To me the danger is that the EAs SOEs and Vuvendi Universals of the world will smother what is left of creativity or at the vary least use there market share to undermine smaller and more inovative developers while cranking out "sure thing" sequals and sport sims.
    • I'm not so sure. It could be that they are headed in the right direction as well. I saw this comment on another board:
      I remember at CDGC, sitting next to one of the Dev's for WoW while it was under construction and listening to Raph talk. When he said that players WANT forced downtime in an MMO - whether they say they do or not - the Blizzard Dev got up and left.
      If that statement is true, Then I'm not sorry to see him go.

      • I remember at CDGC, sitting next to one of the Dev's for WoW while it was under construction and listening to Raph talk. When he said that players WANT forced downtime in an MMO - whether they say they do or not - the Blizzard Dev got up and left.

        If that statement is true, Then I'm not sorry to see him go.

        That from the same company that thought half the people playing the game should spend that downtime with a book in their face "meditating" for the joy of getting konked on the head by a wandering monster

  • SOE - so what, EA to buy Mythic!?!? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RingDev ( 879105 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @03:47PM (#14990153) Homepage Journal
    SOE has screwed up SWG long enough, if they loose the licensing, who really cares? The few remaining players will be bummed, and rumors will float about some other company trying to do SWG right.

    But having yet another solid and profitable independant developer like Mythic sucked up into the oppresive regime that is EA?!? I find that to be a much more disturbing thought.

    -Rick

  • Losing Rights to SW? Rumours++ (Score:3, Informative)

    by GabboFlabbo ( 595073 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @03:47PM (#14990156)
    Gotta love those rumours: "Sony Online may soon be losing the rights to the Star Wars license."
    2) No - in fact LucasArts isn't "pulling the Star Wars" license or anything of the kind. We have a very long term deal and things are fine between our companies. It's complete and utter fabrication. I feel like we need extra-special tin-foil hats in the shape of Darth Vader's mask or something. What happens is one website writes something - then 5 more link to it.. so it must all of a sudden be true. I wish it worked that way.

    Smed
    __________________
    John Smedley
    President, Sony Online Entertainment
    SWG may be doomed but they aren't losing the license.
    • Does anyone REALLY expect the President of a company to announce they will losing some asset/license/idea that WOULD cost shareholders to dump stock??? I cannot believe anyone would expect a confirmation that from him IF that was the truth.
      • ah I see, and some rumour started by some random person is more credible? right...
        I cannot believe anyone would expect a confirmation that from him IF that was the truth.
        Is a rumour truth? There is not one bit of evidence that SWG is losing the license. Not one. There's lots of evidence that suggests SWG is doomed, but that doesn't mean they are losing the license.
      • Not to mention Lucasarts is known to revoke licences. Decipher produced a fantastic collectible card game, SW:CCG, Lucasarts then decided to revoke their licence and gave it to Wizards of the Coast. In the process they killed one of the best CCGs.

        I wouldn't be suprised at all if this rumour was more than just a pigment of someone's imagination.
    • Given that one of the other rumors is:

      Smedley Getting the Axe at SOE. This is a bonus entry, not from GDC. Something I was actually told last week and wanted to sit on and fact gather. At this point with Raph gone and SWG in question... it's hard to think this wouldn't be on the table.

      I wouldn't expect Smedley to say anything else.

      Him leaving wouldn't change my opinion though: I will never play an SoE game again.
    • Given the fact that SOE's MMOs have been in a constant state of decline since Smedley took control (EQ2 being a flop, SWG's complete overhaul, EQ1 having virtually no growth sans expansion packs) hes just trying to cover his ass when his head is on fire.

      LucasArts isn't exactly Nintendo when it comes to protecting its brand names but they're not stupid enough to continue to let the Star Wars name be burned alive. (SWG is the laughingstock of MMOs these days.)

    • 2) No - in fact LucasArts isn't "pulling the Star Wars" license or anything of the kind. We have a very long term deal and things are fine between our companies. It's complete and utter fabrication. I feel like we need extra-special tin-foil hats in the shape of Darth Vader's mask or something. What happens is one website writes something - then 5 more link to it.. so it must all of a sudden be true. I wish it worked that way.

      Smed

      __________________

      John Smedley

      President, Sony Online Entertainment

      Me

    • What happens is one website writes something - then 5 more link to it.. so it must all of a sudden be true. I wish it worked that way.

      - Smed, Fearless Leader of EQ

      Believe me, buddy, we wished it worked that way, too.

      Then you wouldn't have been nerfing left and right. You'd have been fixing the problems instead. Boost the warrior instead of tearing down the necromancer, if the necro's pet can solo a warrior. Boost the magician's pet instead of tearing down the necromancer. Boost the monster AI instead of

  • I absolutely would fire the people involved for taking what should have been a slam-dunk title and turning it into a travesty. They played around with their ideas too much, and didn't attend to the business of making a solid game.

    Note that none of this means the game should be made "my way". With a title like that, they should have made an rpg with mass appeal.

    -Jeff
    • > I absolutely would fire the people involved for taking what
      > should have been a slam-dunk title

      I don't know. Sword games you can kind of get away with the idiocy of swords being weak. But a gun game? It may have been doomed from the start.

      Consider the next great thing after LoTR MMORPG, Star Trek MMORPG. Are you gonna tell me you're forbidden from setting your phaser on disintegrate until you're level 50 because Star Fleet Academy won't let you? And, of course, by that time every thief in an al
  • MMORPGs have become completly derivative of the genre as a whole. I can generically describe every MMORPG ever created as a game where you create a character, choose a class and then go out and complete missions. With the quests mostly consisting of killing monsters or some other NPC.

    Sure, they have tried to throw in distractions such as housing, and guilds and different quest branches. (I.E. questing to gain a title or questing to gain an item, etc..)

    I purchased EQ2 recently, because a year or so ago it wa
    • The 'pick a class up front and stick with it' part is new in the past month or so. It used to be you picked a basic class, then that branched into two (sometimes one good, one evil) at 10th level, and then you each of those two split again at 20th.

      It was pretty neat, and gave you a sense of progress. Unfortunately, they decided that it was too confusing for newbies and scrapped it in February.
    • You may be able to describe them that way, but it wouldn't be an accurate description of the entire field. Eve doesn't fit that description, neither does A Tale in the Desert, and I'm reasonably sure there are others as well. But even two is more than enough to disprove your claim.

      OTOH, advancing a character through quests is a gamestyle that has a long pedigree...going all the way back to the original D&D. Plenty of people seem to like it, so it's not too surprising that plenty of games will pro

  • EVE vs SWG (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sugarman ( 33437 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @04:22PM (#14990414)
    As it stands right now, SWG is in a tough spot. Those who want a space-based persistent world, with bounty-hunting, smuggling, and space combat have a great alternative in Eve.

    Those who want sword fights, magic powers, alien landscapes, weird creatures and chainmail bikinis have pretty much every Fantasy RPG to play.

    Those that want wear funky armor, control an army of robots, and use a blaster that allows you to shoot first can play City of Heroes.

    Aside from Branding, exactly who is SWG trying to appeal to? Everything they might have is being done better by other games.
    • people who want a space-based persistent world, with bounty-hunting, smuggling, space combat,sword fights, magic powers, alien landscapes, weird creatures, chainmail bikinis,funky armor, control an army of robots, and use a blaster that allows you to shoot first?
    • Eh? Space combat in Eve is utter crap. SWG has its problems, but JTL owns anything Eve has ever done with respect to space combat, and JTL isn't even that good! It's gotten better though. A bit.
      • EVE is unlike like the Jedi powers of suggestion: it doesn't work on the weak minded.

  • How to ruin a sure thing (Score:5, Informative)

    by cpu_fusion ( 705735 ) on Friday March 24, 2006 @04:36PM (#14990498)
    While I wish no ill will on Raph, Star Wars Galaxies is a textbook example of a misguided project.

    Star Wars is one of the most regonized and highly regarded franchises among video game consumers. Players have high expectations, and why shouldn't they? There's enough material there for an engaging and interesting MMO. One has to wonder, how could you mess up a Star Wars MMO?

    Well, here's how:

    1. Launch a buggy game your beta testers tell you is nowhere near ready.
    2. Have no player-controlled starships. Space is just like "zoning" in EQ.
    3. Have no class balance, and then screw up class balance. Make sure your producer's favorite class (pet handler) is insanely powerful at launch.
    4. Make sure entire classes, (droid manufacturer), are completely foobar.
    5. Totally mismanage player relations, eventually cutting off public access to the forums to hide discontentment. Be sure to have a privately run, but public web site up for the producer where he talks about how players are sheep, more or less.
    6. Planets aren't even frickin' round, and they have edges which are just high mountains.
    7. Make sure questing is so stupid players don't even bother to read the templated instructions for what you are doing, and instead focus on the one or two variables per template. (Go here, blow up nest, run back.)
    8. Make sure PvP is totally hosed at launch.
    9. Don't bother to react to major economy-ruining bugs for days, even after reports flood forums, so that money is completely devalued.
    10. Make the #1 fantasy of every player, becoming a Jedi, completely out of reach to smart players who maybe, like, have a job, and within the reach of mindless drones who play your game 24/7.

    Anyways, the game was fscked all along, and the final news that the combat/professions system needed another overhaul was just the coup-de-grace.

    RIP; lesson learned for Lucusfilm.

    • You left out:

      Make sure to have one sign-in / credit card / account server for opening day. Have thousands of people, who took the day off from work to get their account signed up and the player name they wanted on day one, scream in agony as the system wouldn't let them in.

      SWG broke my heart. I waited for that game for years. I played UO, which was fun, but wanted SWG. When they announced it, the screenshots started coming out, I got more excited. When I found out that you could set up equipment to min
    • While I agree with many of your points, problems similar to the ones you cited have existed in successful MMORPGs like Everquest and World of Warcraft as well.

      I think, when it gets right down to it, the current MMOG player base responds more positively to a traditional level-based grind system than the skill-based craziness they had in the original incarnation of SWG.

      FWIW, they fixed the problem you listed in item #2 when they added Jump To Lightspeed some time ago. JTL is a lot of fun, if a bit repetitive
  • I loved Dark Age of Camelot, played it about 3 years religiously till time constraints kicked in. Hate work interfering with fun, but hey that's life. Anyway I feel Mythic will lose its identity of making quality games, and well we all know what happens when EA (Assimilate Everything) gets a hold of something :(
    • just thought I'd add that I have to agree with you...

      I still play DAOC a lot and I cant wait for mythic to bring out Warhammer also... first time I've heard of the rumours but if so it will seriously put that purchase into question :-\
  • ok, Raph had one sucess: UO. UO was fun, but that was also Garriots brain child and i would believe Raph had limited control over the game.

    In SWG, well that was what i believe to be his first major project, and it showed at release. The game was a hack job that they spent months more fixing and duct taping. It took months to get to a working state and a year after the game was going great. THen they decided to change directions. A year later after everyone got used to it, they changed directions again.

    I'm s
  • The Star Wars Devs (and Raph the supposed 'Genius of MMOGs'in particular) should have realized that in a genre selling 'you are the hero' that everyone wants to be the hero, aka a JEDI. They should have therefore made the game with the design that the players WERE the jedi in the game, would be the jedi class at start for the most part and the world based around that concept kind of like a massively-multiplayer KOTOR. Had they realized that other classes would be the exception to the rule, included spacef
    • The Star Wars Devs (and Raph the supposed 'Genius of MMOGs'in particular) should have realized that in a genre selling 'you are the hero' that everyone wants to be the hero, aka a JEDI.

      Everyone wants to kill the hero.... And take his things and send him nasty /tells saying how he 'pnwed' him and his mother. The only reason people play nice in MMOGs is because of PvP limitations.
  • Subject was a direct quote from the article, move along.
  • Well, it's a start. I started hating Sony when the released the piece of garbage that 'was' SWG. They should have gotten rid of Koster, and all the other lead developers for SWG, before launch.

    Now, if they get rid of some of the other mentally handicapped execs at Sony, I might stop boycotting their products.

    For instance, they could get rid of whoever greenlighted that whole rootkit fiasco. I haven't heard of any firings related to that nightmare.

    Leave it to Sony to start making me think Microsoft

  • At least half true (Score:2, Informative)

    by kafka47 ( 801886 )
    Courtesy of his website [raphkoster.com], Raph explains :

    So, by now people have seen the news. Yes, it is true I am leaving SOE.

    Why? Well, I've been here for gosh, almost six years maybe? It's been a good ride, and I think we've gotten to do some really fun and interesting work. But I am getting interested in doing some stuff that is a bit off the beaten path -- really, anyone who has been reading the blog can see that! -- and while SOE feels it's really cool stuff, it's just not where they are at right now. My contract

    • Personally, I think he is one talented individual who would absolutely shine in a less, shall we say, strangling environment?

      I think this is largely true. I think that Koster is a very gifted and visionary designer who's talents and interests make him terribly unsuited to be the lead designer on 'the Star Wars MMORPG'. SoE made a terrible error in employing him in this capacity, and I suppose he made a terrible mistake in accepting the job (though I can understand why he might).

      I've long said that the gam

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