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Role Playing (Games)

Star Wars Galaxies Overhaul Continues 41

Posted by Zonk from the there's-a-noise-under-the-hood dept.
With the combat update to Star Wars Galaxies coming up soon, you would have thought the design changes to the game would have slowed. Instead, the development team is making major changes to just about every system, with looting changes, a complete revamp of the PVP system, the addition of a Planetary Control Meta Game to the design, and for good measure a well thought out Veteran Rewards program is going to be added to the game. Criticism of the game's real or percieved flaws aside, you have to be impressed with the team's dedication to the virtual world.
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Star Wars Galaxies Overhaul Continues More

Star Wars Galaxies Overhaul Continues

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  • Seems familiar (Score:3, Funny)

    by ummcdou4 ( 469863 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @02:31PM (#11565248)

    Who wants to bet the developers have been playing World of Warcraft and have discovered things that work?

    "Hey Bob! Check out this looting system!"

    Now get to work!
    • I thought of WoW when I saw this article too.

      Galaxies is so enormously unfun to play that I honestly wonder if they wouldn't be better served to close shop for a while and come back with a fresh offering in a year or year and a half.
      • What? A major publisher loose a year and a half of income simply to make a batter game? In the words of The Princess Bride 'Inconceivable!'
        • By "Inconcievable" you must mean "Delay"

          See also: "Valve", "3DRealms", "Starcraft:Ghost", "Games Industry"
          • By "Inconcievable" you must mean "Delay" . . . See also: "Valve", "3DRealms", "Starcraft:Ghost", "Games Industry"
            While its not unheard of to delay a game as you point out, why should Sony take SWG offline and sacrifice 18 months of subscriber fees?
    • I'm pretty sure that loot system in at least a dozen MUDs (and FFXI), as it was a somewhat common loot method in tabletop RPGs.

    • Re:Seems familiar (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The game actually had loot options when it launched, but they didn't work so Sony turned them off.

    • If they are smart business people, this is exactly what they have been doing. WoW is superior to their product in every way shape and form and the market shares show it... they need to fire the people who led them astray, can the devs who still cant fox the simple annoying bugs that drive people to quite, and re-adjust the game so that it is FUN.

      They had the vehicle to make a smash hit of a game (Star Wars) and they blew it.... big time.

  • "Greifers always blast meesa ears!"

  • Bad design decisions (Score:3, Insightful)

    by servognome ( 738846 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @02:43PM (#11565380)
    Shouldn't these issues have been caught during the design aspect of the game. Some of these things are so stupid, it shouldn't have taken a year and a half after launch to fix.
    - Separate special action costs from damage - no more dying from using your special actions!
    - Tough NPCs and creatures will require groups to take them down.
    - Counter-move and Recovery effects - You now have ways to recover from attacks - no more one sided combat!

    • Shouldn't these issues have been caught during the design aspect of the game. Some of these things are so stupid, it shouldn't have taken a year and a half after launch to fix.

      Maybe, but I've worked around software quality control people. I've seen plenty of times when a bug has been found, they guess its likelihood or its impact wrong ("Even if someone does find it, it won't do much damage."), and then mere days after the release scramble to come up with a rational plan to correct or patch what is now

      • I agree there are bugs that aren't properly risk assessed, but these are game designs. It's not that the program was acting in a way that was undesired, these are intentional designs that were bad.
        One of the designers really needed to step up and say the HAM system sucked. You shoot somebody with a rifle and it causes "Mind damage" (so in starwars apparently rifles give you a bad headache, they don't actually injure your health). What's worse you take the same sort of damage when you use a special attack
        • "One of the designers really needed to step up and say the HAM system sucked."

          Yes yes yes! And when buffs came along that made your secondary stats so strong that special moves cost nothing, you could spam them forever and be a godly fighter.

          There were literally lines in major cities for people waiting to get buffed by master doctors.

          I can remember before I knew about buffs how challenging and fun fighting was. Things were fairly decently balanced. Then I got buffed once, and kind of felt like it was

    • Re:Bad design decisions (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The problem was the people designing SWG envisioned creating a "world" the way they wanted it, rather than the way the customers wanted it... oops. The forgot they were making a game, not a world.... call it the wanna-be-god syndrome...

      Most of the developers ideas were indeed idiotic. They also focused their energies in the wrong areas. They are now essentially completely redeveloping the game since their original designs have been proven to be flawed and unpopular. The subscriber base of SWG is about

  • Desperate times call for desperate measures (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mabu ( 178417 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @03:35PM (#11565992)
    I hadn't logged in to SWG in many months. I let my house and factories rot after I got frustrated because I'd worked so hard to craft unique and high quality items, and couldn't sell any of them, and many times there were bugs with the vending systems that made matters worse. On top of that, I was generally frustrated with the design of the skill point system. It's all too easy to max-out points and then have nowhere to go, and this can be especially bad if you're pursuing a dicipline that isn't in high demand. All that work for nothing.

    I recently logged back into the game to check things out. It was a ghost town. No wonder they're scrambling to fix things. Based on the absence of players in game, I'd say SWG is hemmoraging revenue at this point. They need to do something fast to keep the game from sliding into the void.

    I always felt that SWG had potential, but the implementation of this universe is profoundly flawed. This MMORPG suffers from many of the same ailments the worst MMORPGs have, specifically an advancement system that becomes redundant and boring very quickly, high end gameplay that becomes tedious and time-consuming to organize if it's even remotely interesting, a market system which is terminally broken, and a universe that is so heavily based on preset corporate or mythological constructs that exploration isn't as exciting because you know what to expect, and last but by no means least, a tremendous disparity between new and veteran players that serves to intimidate new players and frustrate old ones.

  • Despite the changes... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheOnlyJuztyn ( 813918 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:16PM (#11566435)
    ... Star Wars Galaxies is still just a bunch of boring planets with boring professions and no real reason to advance at all. I played the game for nine months of beta and three months of retail and all I really got was twelve months older. I've been following it for ages and I'm still not sure what the real purpose of the game is. I know MMORPGs are suppose to be less linear then they're single player counterparts, but SWG takes it to the extreme. They plop you down in an empty, boring, EMPTY landscape and say "Go!" and then expect you to have fun.

    Faction bases? They're exactly the same as before except some of them will have defenders! Looting changes? What loot? Crap you sell at vendor for 5 credits in a world where a new shirt will cost you 1000? PvP changes? Isn't that how covert and overt factions worked before, just without the ability to accidentally become overt? Veteran Rewards? .. okay, I can't really complain about free stuff. But geez, none of this stuff really excites me, and I was hardcore into Star Wars Galaxies before beta.

    If it weren't for the Star Wars licence, I don't think SWG ever would have made it out of the starting gate. It's just not a fun game.

    Now, World of Warcraft... Blizzard did it right.
    • Now, World of Warcraft... Blizzard did it right.

      Well except in character creation. One word "boring". SWG raised the bar very high and this is where WoW falls flat on it's face. Very little differences between characters of the same race. It reminded me of those free to play MMORPGs that have been slowly rising up. I expect that from them not from Blizzard.

      I was at a convention once and found that a guild mate from SWG was there. Over the phone we decided which area to meet in. Got there and walke
      • Well except in character creation. One word "boring".

        I partially agree. Yes, the options in WoW are limited. But then you have to think about the processor power required to morph some guy's nose 1 pixel larger and multiply that by 100 guys all standing in the same area. What a waste of my precious processor cycles. Besides, there's an actual GAME to play in WoW, so you're never really standing around staring at eachother's avatars for hours on end. In SWG's favour it's a cool feature, yeah, but so what?

  • My Grief with SWG (Score:4, Informative)

    by Krizhek ( 624833 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:26PM (#11566552)
    Was that I constantly felt like I had to log on
    -I needed to get on to check my factory
    -I have to go one and check to see which of my items were sold
    -Have I collected my resources from my farms?

    Then a shared multi-guild base was razed by a bunch of 12 year olds when no one else was on.
    I ended up quitting since it was affecting my relationship with my wife.
    Then right after I had quit, the game ,the weight of the world felt like it was gone.
    • Then right after I had quit, the game ,the weight of the world felt like it was gone.

      I've had that happen in MMOGs twice. The first time was when I quit the EQ Guide Program in disgust at what SOE was starting to do to it back in 2000. The second time was when retired as an officer of my EQ guild, quit playing EQ altogether, and went to WoW.

      When I played SWG when it first went live, I never got very far in the game, but the pressures to check on crap like you mentioned were still already very strong, w
      • WoW's nice because there's no penalty for not playing for a while - in fact, you get an XP bonus for "resting" that helps you to catch up a bit when you do return.

        The only reason you come back to play WoW is because it's fun, not because if you don't it could hurt your experience later on.

  • Sony had a slam dunk (Score:2, Insightful)

    by HycoWhit ( 833923 )
    How could Sony mess up SWG as badly as they did? Out of the gate SWG was supposed to be the most successful MMOG ever. To bad the designers forgot to make the game fun! The only thing SWG has going for it is the Star Wars license. SOE has always ignored their player community when it mattered. At least now SOE doesn't have to the throngs of players screaming SWG isn't fun--they have all moved to World of Warcraft.
  • Looks like Sony finally realized that you can't just limp on by with a strong franchise as your crutch. Thanks to WoW, MMORPGs now need to compete on gameplay, and aside from Skinner Box models for their games, Sony doesn't know jack about that.

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