SOE loses Star Wars MMOG license and Chief Creative Officer. Allegedly.

[Smed]

Originally Posted by Northerner

Right. But, we get that and new people often don't.

If your background is watching Star Wars and pehaps playing FF whatever, I can't blame you for expecting that you *can* be the hero. I've seen it a ton in WoW already. The MMO model just isn't like that though and not everyone gets off of the team thing or the 'best guild' thing, especially in an instanced environment.

I believe what we're actually talking about here is being Heroic. Or THE hero of your own "story". A great example of this IMO can be seen in just about every MMO out there. How heroic does it feel early on to kill small rats? Make the rats bigger and all of a sudden you feel more powerful... if you die at least whatever killed you looks like it could have. I think perhaps the word Hero may be the wrong one to get across what we are trying to communicate. Not sure exactly what the right one would be though.


Smed

[Digo]

I believe the word you're looking for is 'significant'.

Cleaning up the bat shit problem at the city gates is not significant.
Purging a den of goblins that steal children from a village is significant.

Diablo 2 did a pretty good job with this concept. You may still be a pissant level 2 paladin, but they send you right into the den of evil at a low level and have you exterminate the place. That's bad ass. Cleaning up rat shit and snakes at the city gates is not.

[Reolien01]

Originally Posted by Smed

I believe what we're actually talking about here is being Heroic. Or THE hero of your own "story". A great example of this IMO can be seen in just about every MMO out there. How heroic does it feel early on to kill small rats? Make the rats bigger and all of a sudden you feel more powerful... if you die at least whatever killed you looks like it could have. I think perhaps the word Hero may be the wrong one to get across what we are trying to communicate. Not sure exactly what the right one would be though.


Smed

Do you poop your pants?

I always wanted to say that

[BanquozGhost]

Originally Posted by Digo

I believe the word you're looking for is 'significant'.

That is exactly what it is. To take Smed's point on crafting, people who adore the tradeskill aspects of games aren't looking to be heroic. They want to be significant to the larger picture.

[Digo]

Yep, and the way to do that is make crafted items more desirable than world drops, which in itself is problematic because it a) discourages farming instances and PVE content for items, and b) encourages gold sellers like IGE. Or give crafters the ability to construct buildings and landscape-altering products, which in itself opens up a whole other slew of design issues. For instance, I seriously doubt WoW will ever introduce player housing. Can you imagine the data intensity and network support required for 6 million people with houses? You think the item database lag is bad now...

[ketsui]

Which did worse SWG or the three new star wars movies? If I could go back in time I'd buy a taco bell meal over buying my ticket to any of those movies.

[True Love]

[Kolle]

One thing I like about tradeskills is that they have the opportunity to help people catch up. From update to udate and expansion to expansion players upgrade their gear. If you're trying to lvl up and join a raiding guild it's much easier to have the option of buying some decent gear that will let you raid with them and not be dead weight instead of being 5 expansions behind because of no-drop gear.

[Rythonn]

SWG had amazing tradeskills, I love that koster brought the idea of housing and vendors from UO. The ability to change your enviroment, even if it is only in your house, is a great addition to any game. Specially if others can see it ala SWG and UO ( not instance house like eq2 bleh) you get a greater community feel when you can build cities and design what you and your house look like. Now take the combat and gameplay from KOTOR and mix the community and tradeskills from SWG and you have a solid Star Wars game.

Also drop the damn time line. KOTOR had a much better time line, if nothing else but to keep people from comparing it to the damn movies. People don't want to be pilot 25Alpha they want to be jedi and master bounty hunters and such.

I was in beta from phase 2 on and I know for a fact many people where asking for a different timeline that trying to create a world with very few jedi was a mistake.

That said I agree with what Smedley said about sitting. I remember when the 1st introduced it sitting would crash the server and then you would slide off your chair and keep going for miles. They must have spent hours and hours trying to get sitting to work right and in the end it still didn't work right all the time. Too much focus on non-important gameplay issues.

[Zarcath]

Originally Posted by Smed

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.

Couches were broken the first 5-6 months, maybe longer. They only had one sit spot, so if multiple people tried to sit on it, they would dog-pile on top of each other.

You could not lie down in your bed.

SWG Crafting was great, until Devs didn't know what to do with it and just let it rot away. Housing had some amazing potential and it was flushed down the toilet. How long did it take just to get vertical item placement? 1 year into the game? Devs didn't know what they wanted SWG to be and for that it suffered. The NGE changes just shows how unstable development of this game is.

[Lyrical]

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.

[Zaniel]

Well you may not have been able to jump over a 1 inch tall wall of stones (or swim or falll) but you could sit on a chair!!!! Good thing Raph was on the job making sure the mangina wookie dancers had an audience at the expense of realistic terrain.

[Cantatus]

Originally Posted by Rythonn

SWG had amazing tradeskills, I love that koster brought the idea of housing and vendors from UO. The ability to change your enviroment, even if it is only in your house, is a great addition to any game.

I agree with that, which is why I think Koster will do well in the future. Currently, he's just wanting too much for what can be done in a timeline of a MMOG development cycle, as well as financially.

I'd love to have a MMOG with housing and venders and such, but it appears that things like combat and space took a big hit initially in SWG. When you're building a game based on Star Wars, combat should always be priority as it's one of the big draws to the series. No one says, "Oh boy, a new Star Wars movie? I hope this one revolves around the moisture farmers!" That's not to say I don't like tradeskills. I do. I love them. I just understand that certain genres aren't conducive to them. Raph was a good choice to develop a MMOG for SOE; he just wasn't a good choice to develop one based on Star Wars.

Also drop the damn time line. KOTOR had a much better time line, if nothing else but to keep people from comparing it to the damn movies. People don't want to be pilot 25Alpha they want to be jedi and master bounty hunters and such.

Yeah, that's one of the worst things about SWG in my opinion. You have a time period when there are only supposed to be two Jedis and made it so everyone can be one. They're trying to use the best of both - popularity of timeline and popularity of archetypes - which are very contradictive to each other. Bioware and KoTOR really did this right. Rather than trying to bend and shatter the story, they built a story that allowed for them to have much more freedom in design. Unfortunately, considering how much of the NGE seems to revolve around the Star Wars' trilogies iconic characters (I guess that makes it more "Star Wars-y"), I doubt it's something SOE and LA would even consider.

[Linus]

Originally Posted by Zaniel

Well you may not have been able to jump over a 1 inch tall wall of stones (or swim or falll) but you could sit on a chair!!!! Good thing Raph was on the job making sure the mangina wookie dancers had an audience at the expense of realistic terrain.

Yah, seriously. Talk about immersion killing. First thing I noticed about SWG and something I never really heard a good excuse for. I'm can be a jedi, master the force, wield all sorts of weapons, see Darth Vader(!), but this 3-inch bit of rock stops me dead in my tracks!

[Szlia]

Not sure how deep it was since I never played SWG, but the political aspect of player run cities sounded pretty neat even if rudimentary. But again my dream MMORPG is a urban med-fan game centered on complex social structure and social interactions (politics/diplomacy/secret societies/thieves guilds/merchands guilds/mercenary guilds/etc).