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Originally Posted by Smed Interesting comment. It's closer to what actually happened.
I have one comment I did want to make - I really like the sandbox style of gameplay that Raph is known for. I enjoyed UO. I liked that aspect of what SWG was. Where I have a problem with this (and I suspect Raph would pretty strongly agree here) style of gameplay is that it needs to be the background of the world, not the whole ballgame. . Assuming everything worked as intended at launch SWG still wasn't good enough IMO because it lacked directed content. I think we emphasized the mission style of gameplay rather than setting up areas in the world that were well known for Krayt Dragons for example.
I also think not having loot drops was a pretty big problem. Yes, crafting was a good thing.. but it should have been augmented by loot drops for people that don't want to buy stuff from crafters. Does that immediately make crafters worthless? Absolutely not. It's got to be balanced. I for one really believe SWG has a whole lot of really cool things in it. Simple stuff - sitting in chairs. Seems like it's nothing, but you really could get that feeling in the cantina that it WAS a cantina.
If we had only worked on that after the directed content I think we would have been on target. Remember, it's easy to look at this in 20/20 hindsight. One of our goals was NOT to make this game EverQuest in the Star Wars Universe. It had to have it's own flavor. |
I will play the contrarian here and say that I liked the tradeskilling in SWG. I was doing the holo-grind to jedi (where you had to master professions to get jedi), and I really liked some of the classes (especially chef). I liked the idea that even though I was a master chef, in order for me to get the best food buffs, I had to scour the galaxy and check the resources. Then you put your harvestors down, and pump out as much as you possible can before the resources shifted. I knew chefs that were making 2 million credits a day (in comparions, if you ran missions that gave combat xp, you might make 250k in a full night of hunting). Some people really enjoyed the whole merchant/tradeskilling thing to the point that they never ground out traditional xp, and found a certain type of zen in being a farmer that I have found in no other MMO. This aspect of the game was great, but like Smed said, it should have been in the background.
That being said, at some point, farming/tradeskilling/merchanting became the focal point of the game. I would have liked to see more combat options in the game. Other than the loooong grind to jedi or the bounty hunters that only logged on for the thrill of hunting jedi, there weren't enough combat options.
Mr. Koster would be great at the cantina type stuff and tradeskilling, but this game did need to have some aspects of Eq. The combat was woefully inedaquate (hence the 3 or 4 rewrites that mainly addressed combat).
I have said it for years, the combat in SWG is what needed addressed, not the tradeskilling. There were very few instances, dungeons or raids in SWG. And you could master a profession in a week, and after that, there was no further progression. We were supposed to generate content after the week of grinding xp, and it just didn't work.
In hindsight, this should have been in Eq in space.
