Fires of Heaven Guild Message Board - View Single Post - SOE loses Star Wars MMOG license and Chief Creative Officer. Allegedly.

Papillon · 03-23-2006, 07:55 PM

Star Wars Galaxies was a nice Sandbox type game.

You have to remember at what times SWG was planed. EQ, UO and Lineage (1) where the great names. SOE worked already on Planetside, even EQ2 was in their minds and they feared to make another EQ type of game.

So Brad McQuaid was looking at UO and the decision was made to develop a similar game. What would you do once this decision was made? First, lets see if we can get a big licence - Star Wars - and second, lets hire the people that made UO.

After all, there isn't anyone to blame for SWG. It was businesswise a logical decision to go that way. It wasn't known that you can make a similar game to one you have already, without stealing your own customers. Raph Koster was hired to go the UO way with SWG, and that's what he did. Under an extrem time pressure, as the team changed many of the main systems while in development.

There were tons of problems with the database and they had no time to finish any tools for content development.

So summing all up, SWG is garbage, but it wasn't realy anyone's fault. If anyone is to blame for it, then blame the time schedule. Which is a combined thing of SOE and Lucasarts business people. If it was just SOE, I'm sure SWG would not have been released as it was - but with two companies involved, there were lots of contracts to meet.

Koster wasn't promoted because of SWG being such an outstanding game, he was promoted because he managed to do what he was hired for, in a very difficult environment.

After all, neither SOE or Lucasarts, nor Brad or Raph would make that sum of mistakes again. Just let it rest in peace and file it under experience in a still very new market.

If Raph in fact left SOE, my best wishes to him. While I don't agree with many of his ideas, there are other players out there that love them. Even sandboxes. That's just not the type of game for star wars. We all know now.

03-23-2006, 07:55 PM	#45 (permalink)
Papillon Registered Butterfly Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cologne Posts: 81 +1 Internets	Star Wars Galaxies was a nice Sandbox type game. You have to remember at what times SWG was planed. EQ, UO and Lineage (1) where the great names. SOE worked already on Planetside, even EQ2 was in their minds and they feared to make another EQ type of game. So Brad McQuaid was looking at UO and the decision was made to develop a similar game. What would you do once this decision was made? First, lets see if we can get a big licence - Star Wars - and second, lets hire the people that made UO. After all, there isn't anyone to blame for SWG. It was businesswise a logical decision to go that way. It wasn't known that you can make a similar game to one you have already, without stealing your own customers. Raph Koster was hired to go the UO way with SWG, and that's what he did. Under an extrem time pressure, as the team changed many of the main systems while in development. There were tons of problems with the database and they had no time to finish any tools for content development. So summing all up, SWG is garbage, but it wasn't realy anyone's fault. If anyone is to blame for it, then blame the time schedule. Which is a combined thing of SOE and Lucasarts business people. If it was just SOE, I'm sure SWG would not have been released as it was - but with two companies involved, there were lots of contracts to meet. Koster wasn't promoted because of SWG being such an outstanding game, he was promoted because he managed to do what he was hired for, in a very difficult environment. After all, neither SOE or Lucasarts, nor Brad or Raph would make that sum of mistakes again. Just let it rest in peace and file it under experience in a still very new market. If Raph in fact left SOE, my best wishes to him. While I don't agree with many of his ideas, there are other players out there that love them. Even sandboxes. That's just not the type of game for star wars. We all know now.