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Role Playing (Games)

SWG: The New Game Experience 31

Posted by Zonk from the lots-of-little-things-add-up dept.
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?"
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SWG: The New Game Experience More

SWG: The New Game Experience

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  • From all accounts, it was a sucky MMORPG on release, was revamped into a suckier MMORPG, and is being revamped again into something even worse. Obviously anybody still playing doesn't give a crap about gameplay, and just wants to "be a jedi" or hang with on-line friends who haven't yet agreed on another game to migrate to.

    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.
    • I've been playing SWG since the early days, and it has always had way too many bugs in-game. Instead of focusing on fixing bugs, SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) has spent its efforts throwing out expansions and revamps. While these are good additions to the game, they come with their own new sets of bugs. NGE was the absolute worst. Setting aside whether or not the changes were good, the number of bugs is unbearable. For weeks after NGE was pushed live none of the basic quests worked properly. Hell, Jabba's
  • I was writing a post about how the guy didn't get it, but he does. Read the whole thing, kids.

  • Level problems (Score:3, Insightful)

    by notea42 ( 926633 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @01:15PM (#14310670)
    While I think the author writes a good and thorough review of the changes, He fails to recognize that the NGE removed some of the critical elements which made the game special. It's now just EQ-in-Space. For example, I used to greatly appreciate the ability to group with almost anyone, regardless of how far they had progressed in their combat abilities. We'd sometimes get our whole guild together for hunting trips, from the Master Bounty Hunters to the dancers who had just a little bit of rifle skill. We'd all go out hunting, and everyone would have fun, earn money, and gain experience. However, with the new system (and the previous Combat Upgrade) you had to face the same old problem of finding other players who were close enough to your level, then finding the monsters closer enough to your level, in order to actually do anything. My lvl 80 Doctor can no longer play with my wife's lvl 56 Spy, except to follow her around, fighting mobs that are gray to me, dropping the occasional heal on her. Another major problem is they've removed the ability to dabble. I used to love having just enough crafting skill to run my own harvesters and craft a few things, without forcing me to do nothing but that. My wife was a Master Image designer because she loved doing it, but can't do it all the time. Sometimes she'd like to grab her pistol and tour the Galaxy with me. Now, I can't craft, and she's had to give up Image Design, as it's been rolled into the Entertainer profession, which is strictly non-combat. Don't get me wrong, I like EQ-style games (we play EQ2 quite a bit as well) but SWG kept me playing because of it's unique features. Now, the lack of content and removal of unique features may drive us away entirely.

    • Re:Level problems (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Darniaq ( 738858 )
      To be honest, I actually get this is a big underlying problem with the changeover to a traditional Diku-inspired game. However, the reason I played this down here is because this transition has been happening for awhile. Becoming EQ-in-space is not really caused by the NGE. Rather, it was things like the contrived quest-based adventuring on Kashyyyk, the increase in quality of dropped items, the introduction of the Combat Level system at all. This is all critical to understanding what SWG is becoming; howev
      • Oh, I agree with you. I didn't mean to put it all on the NGE. I also admit that my opinions are biased by social considerations, not strict gameplay, as all my friends and guildies gave up and left long ago, so my memories of the "good old days" are naturally biased. Another major complaint about the new system you didn't touch on was the almost complete lack of documentation for the changes. They detailed the new professions and leveling system, but didn't publish manuals on how to play. For an existi
    • My char was a wookie TKA. I love monks and always play them in every RPG when I got the opportunity (No spirtual reason, I am just to cheap to buy armour and weapons).

      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

      • > I love monks and always play them in every
        > 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
  • Who died and made Raph Koster god?

    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
    • 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.

      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
      • Amen to that. UO is all but ruined by the semi-annual feature barrage. Sometimes it is worse than others, but it is almost never in the best interest of the game. If they offered a "clean" server, that was essentialy the same gameplay-wise as early UO, but patched the known bugs, it'd be a unique and incredibly appealing game to me again. I still play currently, but so much of the world either doesn't match itself, seems a pointless waste of coding time, is unbalanced or is just flat-out broken. I woul
    • Have you ever considered that maybe big game companies aren't out to screw the gamers? Yes, they're out for profit, but the best way to profit is to make fun games and cultivate a fanbase. Companies can't do that if they constantly, purposely screw gamers. Turbine, for instance, released an expansion pack for AC2. They knew that the game was failing, and that its numbers weren't as high as WoW, but they released an expansion anyway. It was, by all accounts, a solid expansion that many players enjoyed. It di
      • Of course they did this on purpose. The NGE was never and I mean never spoken about until after the expansion shipped. Every other change of this magnitude was trumpeted as being better than sliced bread, but this one wasn't. The expansion had rewards for professions that were going to be eliminated, not to mention all the time/money spent on revamps for the ranger and squad leader professions that were just shelfed for the NGE. If you think this wasn't planned to keep the players in the dark until afte
    • So basically NGE is admission the original system was unsustainable from both a monetary and coding basis.

      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
      • 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 niche appeal. 200k-300k is nothing to sneeze at, but while some companies only see those numbers as a f
        • Ugh, forgot I had 'HTML formatted' selected. Sorry for the illegible block!

          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'm a fan of RPGS and MMOGs, but SWG had nothing fun in it at all for me, except the fact you should shoot while running, and that was sorta fun.
  • I mean, isn't there another franchise us Geeks, Nerds, and Dweebs can obsess about that doesn't originate from a billionaire rip-off artist.

    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
    • "Outlaws" by LucasArts (once I applied the 3DFX patch) was far and away the most fun solo FPS I ever played. The various X-Wing games were also oodles of fun, especially deathmatching in LAN parties on X-Wing v.s. Tie Fighter.

      Whatever you think of Lucas's movies, I'm always going to give games from that company a close look.
  • Most of my Ultima Online guildies ran to SWG when it came out, having been long-time supporters of the franchise, and enjoying an open semi-sandbox style of gameplay.

    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)

    by mabu ( 178417 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @02:18PM (#14311158)
    I have played SWG since the beginning, in between taking breaks out of frustration as virtually all players have. I've watched with anticipation the original launch, and had fun exploring the early world, exploits, anomolies, class nuances, glass-eating trials-going-nowhere, and numerous bugs, as well as the later constant uncertainly which accompanied any proposed patch. I had a lot of fun, especially in the early days.

    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)

      by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @04:45PM (#14312400) Journal
      The sandbox people, who liked that they could make their own characters. Who revelled in the wide selection of clothing.

      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

      • 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 ask the korean games. They can easily fit 250 levels into a game. It is no suprise SOE and Lucasarts want to go that r
      • I do think the two (sandbox and levellers) can co-exist. Yes, they do love to hate each other, but the truth is they need each other. You can't implement a sandbox game without some sort of progressive path, at least as an option. GTA would not work without missions even if the majority of players don't follow the mission path. There has to be structure and there will always be some who exist only to excel at the structure, but most players fall in the middle, which is why I liked the original concept an
  • I don't play SWG, but I did try out the trial. I thought it was kind of goofy and buggy in places but not particularly horrible.
    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)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2005 @03:19PM (#14311709) Journal

    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

    • The HAM was in the top 10 of the stupid designs in SWG.
      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.
    • Hey, just wanted to say thanks for posting about SWG lately. I don't even play the game, but your stories are entertaining to read. It's pretty crazy that such a huge, anticipated game could screw up so badly.
  • The fact that people continue to play that trash is a testament to the power of the Star Wars franchise. I'm sure the game as some great features, but I think the problems and Sony's business practices far overshadow anything positive. Other games have failed for less. If Galaxies had been a generic fantasy game the servers would have already been shut down.

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