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Role Playing (Games) PC Games (Games)

Star Wars Galaxies System Revamps 36

Posted by Zonk from the the-one-who-will-bring-balance-to-the-force dept.
Star Wars Galaxies has been out for over a year now, and Sony Online will be attempting one of the most ambitious moves in a MMOG to date. They're completely overhauling the combat and loot systems for their game. Now that Jump to Lightspeed is finally out, they've made available high level concepts for the combat revamp, concepts for the loot revamp, and actual data on the first loot revamp pass. From the combat revamp: "Star Wars Galaxies is making bold changes to its extensive in-game combat system. The goal of this all-encompassing set of changes is to make game play more strategic, more interactive and ultimately more engaging and fun for players of all levels."
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Star Wars Galaxies System Revamps More

Star Wars Galaxies System Revamps

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  • I'm glad to see Sony isn't just sitting back and letting their MMOG go down the drain. I haven't played it because I've heard nothing but bad/medicore reviews of the game. While it's not the safest thing (maybe they'll make the game worse!) but it's good to see that they are trying to make changes to a possibly great game. I hope others will follow suit and make major changes to games that are just total crap out of the box. Bug fixes can fix all the problems in a released game and I'm glad to see someone (
    • It might be too late, but I hope it's an idea that spreads otu over the MMORPG community. It's way too easy to turn a game into "level treadmill + loot hunt". I like the weird things that pop up, one of the reasons why Monkey Island will always be my favorite series. I'm all for this idea, and if implemented correctly I might even go pay for the privilage to play on it. It'd be interesting to find a data disk and pad, and end up with a wanted poster for Solo or Skywalker.

      • Re:hopefully others will follow suit. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I think it is too little too late. In SWG, SOE focused too much on creating a world, and completely and absolutely forgot it was a game.

        Add to that huge technical problems (a database system that still results it random missing items from time to time), many more major bugs that still have not been fixed, horrific managment (combat revamp should have been priority number 1, and should have been finished over a year ago --- not to mention a playable jedi class/hologrinding and the chaos that has caused),

  • Only one thing matters... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @10:28AM (#10986374) Homepage
    ...does Han still shoot first or not?

  • Jump To Better Gameplay (Score:4, Insightful)

    by blueZhift ( 652272 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @10:33AM (#10986448) Homepage Journal
    I too am glad that SOE hasn't given up on SWG. I last played it about a year ago and finally left for FFXI because there just didn't seem to be enough content or people around to play it with. With JTLS out and the announced improvements (plus an upgraded computer!) I'm tempted to dust off that old SWG box and jump back in.

    They also announced that they are doing a fully localized Japanese version. I wonder if they will follow the FFXI model and allow NA and Japanese players to play together on the same servers. I know that there are language and culture issues from the FFXI experience. But on the plus side, having players around the globe means that there is almost always someone to play with, which for SWG might mean fewer seemingly deserted cities.
  • behind the worst content filter ever, could anyone summarize the changes?

    --AC
    • As a result of this team meeting, we realized that to meet both our goals and the expectations of the community, just "balancing" the existing combat system wasn't enough. We have expanded the scope of development, with combat balance becoming just one part of the overall project that we're now calling the Combat Upgrade.

      The Combat Upgrade is our overall effort to improve our player combat experience, including:

      * Combat Balance - tuning all our numbers and the combat professions.
      * Core Combat Ch
    • That wouldn't happen to be WebSenseless would it? We have that POS at my work.
      • As a matter of fact, it would. The worst part is that it now blocks Google caches.

        --AC
        • Yeah, it started doing that about a month ago. The worst part is that our admin gets a kick out of watching where individual go. In fact, he's probably going to be reading this soon enough. If you want to know if yours does that, try to go to some place like www.WebsenseIsAToolOfUselessOppression.com or some other choice phrases and see if you get a nasty e-mail or if suddenly every place you want to go gets blocked the next day.

  • How did they get it so wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Drunken_Jackass ( 325938 ) on Friday December 03, 2004 @10:49AM (#10986655) Homepage
    I played SWG for about 4 months in beta, and about 6 months after release. My questions is, how did they get this so wrong? I mean, combat and loot are two MAJOR gameplay components.

    This is a design flaw that was either overlooked or ignored because of the rush to release a product that wasn't ready for release. Either way, this is a project management issue, and should not be tolerated. Why should players wait 1.5 years after release for fundamental game systems to be fixed - especially while paying a monthly fee?

    • Re:How did they get it so wrong? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      My questions is, how did they get this so wrong? I mean, combat and loot are two MAJOR gameplay components.

      The game should have been called "Star Wars: Raph Koster's Player Run Economy Experiment". Loot was always shitty because it was a law that looted stuff could not be more desirable than a player made version. Combat was half finished because the economy and crafting professions were always priority number one.

      Yet we still have runaway inflation, some crafting professions going poor and the fuckin
  • "every player will have the freedom to re-allocate their character's skill points as they wish to take advantage of the new, enhanced combat system."
    That's nice, since I could only imagine what it would be like to have all of your hard earned and carefully researched character tweaks suddenly be a liability due to a change in the combat system. I don't play the game, but I think its a good thing they thought that far ahead.
  • I play SWG - the new dungeons and stuff are fun but the real game is the player economy. Its a blast trading and looting.
  • If they had fixed combat and instituted real loot a year ago, I probably would have stuck with the game and played many more months.

    As an old board wargamer, it strikes me that SOE's problems are the classic "nice design, poor development". They had lots of nifty ideas, a really well thought-out crafting system, but the game (not even talking about code right now) needed much more development time to flesh out the broken parts and to dump ideas that sounded great but didn't work well in practice.

    Oh, and
  • For me there's really only one Star Wars game I'm looking forward to [lucasarts.com].

    Now I know Bioware is no longer the developer, but I still have high hopes for Obsidian.
  • They're CONSTANTLY changing game dynamics. From one patch to the next, the entire game dynamic could change, depending on your profession. If you're one of the professions that was "revamped" then the entire game changes for you - you feel like you're playing a different star wars game with the same graphics. Its not fun.

    They're STILL changing the amount of experience you get for certain things, changing how groups work, changing tons of things that don't really need to be change.

    if youre game stunk th

    • Adapt or die (Score:3, Interesting)

      by kherr ( 602366 )
      SWG is not the same game it was a year ago, and I like the organic nature. I actually appreciate that SOE is willing to invest in rethinking major parts of the game, mostly driven by user feedback. Any good software evolves over its life cycle. And in an MMOG it's impossible to know what the in-game dynamics are going to be until you have an active population.

      I know a lot of people get frustrated when their chosen profession gets nerfed, but you should just roll with the punches and treat them as new chall
  • SWG is basically a long term paid Beta test. Players who love Star Wars are footing the bill for the development process. I played for a year, and the game felt like Beta the whole time. Constant changes, huge balance issues, rampant bugs, etc... The only thing that kept it from going the way of Motor City Online (Fast Crash), was the attached Star Wars license. The question isn't "will the masochists who still play SWG like it" but "will the hordes of veteran players who left(and may have moved onto n
  • From the loot concept page [sony.com]:

    Predictability: All NPC's should have loot and players should have a rough idea of what loot is available from which NPC and to some degree the lewt should be phat.

    Ugh...

  • This sounds nice, except for the fact that they've been promising revamps for since almost the launch, and nothing concrete nor definitive has been laid down in design or concepts forums.

    Another problem is fanbase--with so many leaving, what you have left are the real hardcore fans--which like some of the [cough boring] aspects--steering the game in an increasingly fringe direction. That attributed to Jump to Lightspeed turning into a Nursery School playground, where TIEs and X-Wings peacefully fly by eac

  • ....but are they taking out Jedi as a large-scale player class?

    If they keep Jedi in there, it will NEVER be a true post-ANH setting.

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