Another One Bites the Dust: SWG Edition!

[Raph]

This is a really well written article explaining the reasoning behind the decision to have TEFs. It also, in one sentence perfectly captures what ended up being my major issue with SWG and why I quit fairly early on.

But the core sticking point was “non-PvPers want to kill Stormtroopers and get faction perks.” It was part of the core fantasy for them.

This is why I hated TEFs but in general, was also a big issue with SWG in general. The game never felt like Star Wars and the few parts that did were gated behind things I didn't want to do (PVP or lots of grinding). Throw in HAM and I didn't last long despite the fact I can look back now and appreciate the player cities and the deep crafting system.

Many of the parts that never felt like Star Wars were the most Star Warsy, like TEFs, or not having Jedi :) (Creature handling, though, that's another story).

The issue is more around "whose Star Wars?" If you were wanting to be the hero of Star Wars, then yeah, we couldn't deliver that in an MMO. Eventually, SWTOR did, by simply having you do it on a 50 hour instanced adventure. :P

[Raph]

Reading about SWG game design is frightening. It's like it was deliberately designed to repel the mass market in every way.

It actually reached far MORE mass  market audience than people quite understand. That was part of the issue, actually; it most least satisfying to core gamers.

Among other things: It had shorter play sessions even than WoW. The resource harvesting system is what became Farmville and its ilk. The social architecture pieces most resemble stuff in Second Life -- or even in facebook and Twitter. The playerbase included groups which core games simply don't cater to.

Having all of them in one world, though, that's the sticking point. That's what makes it too complex.

WoW's audience wasn't "mass market" at first. It was "all the gamers," which is different.

[HaemishM]

Reading about SWG game design is frightening. It's like it was deliberately designed to repel the mass market in every way.

I honestly get the feeling that the design of SWG was more like "What we wanted to do with Ultima Online 2 before it got shitcanned crammed into a Star Wars setting."

[Raph]

People say that a lot, but actually, it was more based on the aborted Privateer Online game than on UO. It was supposed to have "the best from each of the MMOs until now" and completely failed at the themepark and content side of it.

[Ingmar]

Reading about SWG game design is frightening. It's like it was deliberately designed to repel the mass market in every way.

It actually reached far MORE mass  market audience than people quite understand. That was part of the issue, actually; it most least satisfying to core gamers.

Among other things: It had shorter play sessions even than WoW. The resource harvesting system is what became Farmville and its ilk. The social architecture pieces most resemble stuff in Second Life -- or even in facebook and Twitter. The playerbase included groups which core games simply don't cater to.

Having all of them in one world, though, that's the sticking point. That's what makes it too complex.

WoW's audience wasn't "mass market" at first. It was "all the gamers," which is different.

"Reached" is one thing. I mean, it "reached" me in that I tried it. But surely you lost more people with "wait, I can't be a Jedi?" than you gained with any of that other stuff. And then there was HAM...

[Raph]

Not being a Jedi didn't even register on exit surveys. Bugs, lack of content, those were the top exit reasons, and by a LOT. I want to say fully half of all exits were from people who had run out of things to do because there wasn't enough content.

[Ginaz]

Well I never played SWG but IIRC didn't they come out with a new expansion and then like a month later (or less) release NGE, which invalidated that expansion? I considered that unethical.

Closer to 15 days.

IIRC they announced the nge the day after the expansion was released.  And the only reason they offered refunds was because of legal threats and the overwhelming negative reaction, not out of the goodness of their hearts.  Normally I disregard any talk of legal action by players against a company but this might have been a different case considering the timing of it all.  It was a classic bait and switch.

[Surlyboi]

I wonder if the game had come out post-prequels where we saw things like Jango Fett fighting toe-to-toe with Obi-wan and surviving if that would have changed things in that it set up an expectation that a sufficiently powerful non-force user could actually stand a chance against a Jedi.

That happened in the game anyway. There were some badass bounty hunters that took down plenty of jedi fairly regularly.

I managed to grind out a pre pub 9 jedi back in the day and it was probably the most fun I had in a MMO. From the initial transition of skills to the constant adrenaline rush of breaking out my lightsaber in the wilds of Dathomir or Yavin and hoping I didn't get spotted by random passers-by.

[Typhon]

Not being a Jedi didn't even register on exit surveys. Bugs, lack of content, those were the top exit reasons, and by a LOT. I want to say fully half of all exits were from people who had run out of things to do because there wasn't enough content.

I never played the game because I couldn't be a Sith/Jedi.  You didn't do exit surveys on people who didn't play the game, obviously, and some of those didn't play the game because they didn't like the sound of Sim Beru.  Are people like me a minority?  Don't know, I don't make games (or do business plans for games) for a living.

tldr; your survey didn't include people who really wanted to be Luke or Darth

[Threash]

Yeah, that's the reason i never picked up SWG.  Pretty much the only mmo i never played a single second of.

[Ginaz]

Not being a Jedi didn't even register on exit surveys. Bugs, lack of content, those were the top exit reasons, and by a LOT. I want to say fully half of all exits were from people who had run out of things to do because there wasn't enough content.

I never played the game because I couldn't be a Sith/Jedi.  You didn't do exit surveys on people who didn't play the game, obviously, and some of those didn't play the game because they didn't like the sound of Sim Beru.  Are people like me a minority?  Don't know, I don't make games (or do business plans for games) for a living.

tldr; your survey didn't include people who really wanted to be Luke or Darth

I think the holo grinding craze should have been an indicator on how much people wanted to be a Jedi.

[Raph]

There isn't any way to assess that, though. It was the fastest selling MMO ever at the time, so it didn't hurt take up in that sense. People came in expecting to be able to be Jedi; it was in the marketing materials and on the box. So we're talking about "earn Jedi" versus "start as Jedi."

Dunno, it probably had some impact but there's no way to quantify it. I am pretty positive it was less impact than "the game is a buggy mess, stay away."

[Rasix]

So, is there some sort of post-mortem on the whole droid fiasco?  My dosh DE was basically a maker of mobile furniture. 

[Draegan]

I never understood the design doc for SWG. Star Wars is all about chasing, sneaking, blowing things up, and war. Maybe some smuggling, trade and territory control throne in depending on the flavor of the movie.

The game I've always read about was something suited for another IP.

[sam, an eggplant]

That sums up a large proportion of the problem, yes. Or as we called it at the time, SWG was an "Aunt Beru simulator".

[Merusk]

Cue cries of, "Some of us just wanted to live in the world" as a weak defense when they really just wanted UO 2.0.

Old argument is old.

[Malakili]

When did the setting for Galaxies get locked in?  I know Raph said in his article that they tried to get it changed to a more Jedi-friendly time period, but I wonder how much of all this stems from trying to make a game that was consistent with its setting?  Again, reading the article it seems like those things - chasing, blowing things up, war - were definitely a part of the Rebels v Empire design they were going for as a way of reconciling the game with the setting. The Sim-Beru stuff was certainly a part of it too, but they don't seem totally incompatible to me.

[Venkman]

SWG is like SW Ep 1, proving there are certain wounds time cannot heal. 

For all the moaning, we all played the hell out of it. So it did what it was supposed to do.

Except feel like Star Wars. Was fine with me at the time. I loved the virtual lifestyle element. But I was seeking UO2 and found it quite happily in SWG, part of that small Venn overlap between wanting a virtual lifestyle MMO, having some experience to understand what I was getting into, a thick enough skin to deal with the janky elements, and a core group of like-minded folks to grow in the game with (some of whom are still here...)

In other words, not the mass market the brand and initiative should target

I'll take what I can get from SW Battlefront!

[Margalis]

It feels to me like the Jedi thing had a very obvious answer: just include Jedi and make them not stronger than other classes. But this was rejected for essentially "lore" reasons. It's one thing to reject it for a better idea, but the idea actually settled on was bizarre. I guess it's admirable to try to stay true to the spirit of the IP, but not at the cost of make crazy design decisions.

The actual final idea, to the players, was "randomly sometimes you become a Jedi for no discernible reason." That's if the system had been implemented as originally intended!

"Sometimes cool things happen to a select few players for reasons nobody can decipher" is crazy. Players who want to be Jedi are going to want to know how. That some people randomly become Jedi might be cool the first few times it happens, but after that it's just going to be tremendously frustrating to anyone who wants to become one.

I honestly can't believe that people agreed to move forward on it. It's a classic solution in search of problem - there's really no problem with just having Jedi as a class - the "problems" with it were inconsequential, and the solution has far worse problems. The permadeath idea for Jedi was also a better idea than what was landed on.
---

The classic MUD idea of having different spell words per person is silly and here's why: you just try everything. It's tedious work. It's fun if you have a very limited set of possibilities and iterating through them is exciting and rewarding, but if you have a large set it just becomes the equivalent of clicking on every pixel in an adventure game. "What if you just had to try every combination??" That sounds awful! and that's what the SWG system was.

Even in the original form people were going to eventually figure out all the possibilities, and then just try them all.  People would figure it out organically, or the dev team would start giving obvious hints because it seemed too arbitrary and players were revolting, or some code would leak. Or ever worse, people would think they figured it out and be a little off, and create a huge checklist of tedious tasks that were unfun to work though and in the end didn't end up with you being a Jedi. (It's like what happened with "Playable Trailer" for Silent Hills - except that's something you do in a few hours, not hundreds of hours.)

It seems like the biggest problem is that the people making SWG didn't want to make a game with Jedi in them - Jedi were a burden. But of course the playerbase and Lucas wanted Jedi. Honestly it seems like someone should have done the team a favor and moved them onto a project more suitable for them. "I'm working on a Star Wars game but the presence of Jedi is a real hassle and just gets in the way" is fundamentally incompatible with delivering what Sony/Lucas wanted. Even writing about it today Raph you bemoan that Jedi had to have custom animations and other resources applied to them, instead of "fuck yeah Jedi!"

People joke about "moisture farming" and such in SWG - that's the game you guys wanted to make. That's fine - that's not any less interesting than dumbshit Jedi antics. But what I don't get is how people at Sony thought it was a good idea to put people who wanted to make that sort of game on a game that wasn't supposed to be that sort of game. Ultimately it seems like the wrong people for the job - not bad people, just inappropriate ones. It's like getting Team Ninja to work on Metroid - that's not what Team Ninja is good at.

The people making what was supposed to be a huge mainstream Star Wars MMO fundamentally resented Jedi. I mean..what the hell? That's not a design problem, that's a management problem.

[Raph]

The setting was locked in before our team was even on board.

As far as it only being an Aunt Beru simulator, this was a game where you could build an Imperial base in the wilderness along with your military unit, outfit it with turrets and other passive defenses, and when Rebels tried to sneak in and blow it up, you could order your AT-STs to attack them while you called in a frickin' airstrike on them.

Was combat broken? Oh yeah. But don't fall for the "there was nothing to do but sip blue milk and farm moisture" image either, it's not accurate. Just ask anyone who was into the GCW PvP side of things.

[Raph]

Margalis, you're not entirely wrong.

I think you're glossing over "alpha classes and MMOs don't work together." So the pillar constreaints we were given just weren't satisfiable. The correct answer would be to remove a pillar. Making Jedi not special would be, as you correctly note, the pillar to remove. Whether or not players would feel that Mos Eisley full of Jedi was "more Star Warsy" than a Mos Eisley with none of them is sort of moot.

That said, one of the other constraints was that we were actually *under orders* to make a sandbox game. There was fear of cannibalizing Everquest.

So, the mandate, as a whole:

- Powerful Jedi
- Rare Jedi
- Anyone can be a Jedi
- Sandbox
- Ep IV-V time period

Most everyone's "easy answers" are to axe the first two. And that's fine. SWTOR axes the first two. Actually, it axed all of them except "Anyone can be a Jedi" and added in "Must be a story-driven game" in place of the Sandbox one. That changes everything. LOTRO solves it with wizards by axing power and rarity too.

We didn't join SOE expecting to do Star Wars. We were expecting to make our own thing. We were talking about pirates, in fact. And when they offered Star Wars to us, we debated long and hard whether to do it at all, much as we loved SW, because of the timeframe, the constraints, etc. We ended up agreeing because, well, how do you say no to Star Wars?

As I said elsewhere, Secret Jedi Wars Online is totally a doable game. It's just probably not one with powerful Jedi, rare Jedi, or a sandbox. Jedi were a burden because of the constraints.

As far as mass market... I keep saying it, but I will say it again: moisture farming (not literally, but the mechanics) is MORE mass market than Jedi in a whole bunch of ways, and we actually demonstrated that. In the wrong game, the wrong universe, with the wrong audience. It took Facebook games and Harvest Moon to come along and do it in a way that actually proved the point.

[HaemishM]

People say that a lot, but actually, it was more based on the aborted Privateer Online game than on UO. It was supposed to have "the best from each of the MMOs until now" and completely failed at the themepark and content side of it.

I don't think you consciously tried to make UO2. It's just one of those things I've noticed with my own web design - sometimes you unconsciously design something different from the way you would have done or should have done based on the project because "let me try this thing I haven't done before to see if I can make it work." That "best from each of the MMOs until now" is a great indicator of that - it's not and wasn't "best Star Wars game we can make."

No Jedi and no space flight, along with complete disdain for the IP after the prequels made me shy away from the game at release. I never played it until the abortion that was NGE.

[Raph]

People say that a lot, but actually, it was more based on the aborted Privateer Online game than on UO. It was supposed to have "the best from each of the MMOs until now" and completely failed at the themepark and content side of it.

I don't think you consciously tried to make UO2. It's just one of those things I've noticed with my own web design - sometimes you unconsciously design something different from the way you would have done or should have done based on the project because "let me try this thing I haven't done before to see if I can make it work." That "best from each of the MMOs until now" is a great indicator of that - it's not and wasn't "best Star Wars game we can make."

The goal was "the best Star Wars MMO we can make." That said, there isn't one answer to that. Some of the answer was mandated. We have to work with elements in the mandate. So we landed at "live in the Star Wars Universe." That was the mission statement, and we stuck to it pretty tightly, in the end, I think. We had that broken down into I think five further pillar statements, and adventure and derring-do was one of them. "Retain users via a strong interdependent community" was another.

The best Star Wars MMO I can make in the OT period won't ever have Jedi in it. It automatically makes the game bad. Period. Players may want it, but players are wrong. Players may even LIKE IT BETTER, but that doesn't make the game better. A game is not better if players like it more. It's just more popular. I realize this may be a gap between us. :)

In the end, if you ask a given creator to make something, yeah, it's going to have their stamp on it, for sure. And I know damn well I have biases towards specific things and approaches, unquestionably. I'm not trying to duck that at all. But those biases cut both ways. A handcrafted SWG, for example, was originally going to have three planets with five zones each. Without the crazy simulationist and procedural stuff, you wouldn't even have had many planets.

There are other designs. There is no One True Best Star Wars MMO Design. The idea of doing a persistent battle world, focused much more on action, is totally doable. Today. It wasn't then. Remember, Planetside didn't yet exist. MMOFPS was pure experiment, and we had a tight deadline and couldn't screw around with something that hard to solve (believe it or not, the hard stuff we did tackle was much easier!).

No Jedi and no space flight, along with complete disdain for the IP after the prequels made me shy away from the game at release. I never played it until the abortion that was NGE.

See, the whole "complete disdain for the IP after the prequels" is projection on your part. No Jedi is based on RESPECT for the IP. Players who want Jedi are the ones who disdain its core tenets. Which is fine, it's not their job to care in the same way. But it rubs me the wrong way when people talk about disdain for the IP when I know very well just how many years of sweat we invested into getting every detail right. When people say this, they usually mean "I wanted to be a Jedi." Which puts us back at square one.

Spaceflight was *never* in the cards for initial launch. Ever. For purely practical reasons. Not because of disdain for the IP.

[Triforcer]

Thanks for the blog entries Raph, that is absolutely great stuff.

On Outcasting:

My memory has one major twist on what you said.  I thought it worked as follows:

1.  You could start out killing anyone, anywhere, at any time.

2.  If you killed someone, they could Outcast you.

3.  If you were Outcasted by someone, you could not initiate PvP anywhere in the entire game, unless
      (i)  The person you killed lifted the Outcasting (which gave you free global PvP again), or
      (ii) Individual governments could lift your Outcasting within their jurisdiction (but you still could not initiate PvP anywhere else).

I could be wrong, but I think I was vocally against the system for that reason (the system you describe in your blog post is considerably less punitive).


On Jedi:

Agree with you completely.  But I hope when you are approached to helm the Star Wars 7 era mmo, the lore allows for considerably more Jedi 

[tmp]

Reading about SWG game design is frightening. It's like it was deliberately designed to repel the mass market in every way.

It was a design for a more civilized age

[sam, an eggplant]

we were actually *under orders* to make a sandbox game. There was fear of cannibalizing Everquest.

Fascinating. This is one of the first truly new inside stories to come up in this thread's revival.

I never considered that. What an entirely archaic notion! It was truly a different era, where market leaders tried not to copy Everquest and strange mutant aberrations like Ultima Worlds Online: Origin were somehow birthed and then embarrassedly snuffed out. Looking back on these things now provides a very different perspective than living through them.

[Threash]

See, the whole "complete disdain for the IP after the prequels" is projection on your part.

I believe he was talking about his own disdain for the IP because of the prequels.

[Lantyssa]

Having all of them in one world, though, that's the sticking point. That's what makes it too complex.

I don't think it was too complex in general.  For the time frame the team was given, yes.  The freedom that allowed was something the players loved.

Some of the "time-saving" decision though were a definite problem.  As you said, being an Image Designer didn't need a full 16 skill boxes plus mastery.  Social players and merchants were charged as much as combat players when their areas of focus were completely different.  Balancing the points spent in combat professions made some sense, but even then there were probably cases where things could have been simplified without giving undue power.

[Morat20]

Reading about SWG game design is frightening. It's like it was deliberately designed to repel the mass market in every way.

I dunno. Mass Market then was a bit iffy, and it was holding 200k+ subs. It wasn't WoW, but we've had 10 years and NOBODY has been WoW. Not even close.

Thing is, what they did? Nobody had done and nobody really tried since. Big sandbox, deep crafting, interconnected professions -- EVE comes close (no surprise EVE sucked up a ton of leaving SWG folks).

One thing SWG had was a lot of sticky players -- that part of the design worked. People got invested in it, more than normal. Cities, houses, businesses, relationships -- SWG had a lot of mechanisms designed to grab hold of players and keep them there.

Plus, Mass Market is...well -- how do you define it? WoW? Farmville? Call of Duty? Different games appeal to different groups.

[sam, an eggplant]

The disconnect came in trying to fit non-"core" (hate that term, but it is handy shorthand) social entertainer/medic/dancer/image designer/etc players to an achiever/killer progression mechanism. They don't care about that stuff, by definition. If they cared, they wouldn't choose to roleplay a wookie stripper.

Obviously today's social/mobile/non-"core" games like candy crush, farmville, that kardasian celebrity game, etc, do have progression mechanisms, but they aren't actually games, those are cold-bloodedly intended to promote addiction and force monetization. Aside from that, they're simply diversions for people that don't like "core" gaming experiences, which tend to be less about socialization and more about killing stuff, getting lewt that is phat, and incrementing numbers. And that's fine, they have a place too, but they shouldn't be asked or expected to progress in the same way. They possess a different mindset.

[Raph]

Your bias is showing. Of COURSE those are games. They are just not games you like, and they are *especially* not business models you like.

Back then, there were two ways to think about "mass market":

One, you make a game that only had broad appeal but will not appeal to the core gamer. This was generally thought to be impossible to do on purpose. The core gamer *was all there was*. The overall gaming audience wasn't that big -- only a handful of games *ever* had sold over a million copies.

Two, you make a game that has something for each of several different demographics. Not everyone -- that's not possible -- but try to get multiple different groups into one game. Some of these groups might be perceived as too small for a publisher to justify making a game for. Let's say, farmers, or econ players, or house decorators. Today we know that farming and house decorating is actually ten times the size of the entire "core gamer" market, but we didn't know that then.

In this sense, SWG tried #2, and actually kind of succeeded. It didn't satisfy the core gamers nearly enough though.

When WoW took off, it did so by making a game for gamers. It marketed direct to the built-in fanbase of a series that WAS a million-seller *in games alone*. No external IP crutches (which have historically not actually given a big boost. Think intersection of a Venn diagramn, not a union). It got more lookyloos on the first day than EQ did in its first couple of YEARS. And it reached "more mass market" by going through the hardcore and out the other side thanks to a very very streamlined and casual-friendly design. In the process, it did alienate some of the most core players, including a bunch of you here. But those were always a tiny minority. What WoW did is what Blizzard does: find a game that is good but too core-centric, and turn it into a pop song. They did it really really well, and it's catchy as hell.

[sam, an eggplant]

They're business models cleverly disguised as games.

Obviously there is a game underneath somewhere, or the disguise wouldn't  hold up. Thing is, after you sweep the monetization and calculated addictive mechanics away from something like candy crush, there's not much gameplay left.

That doesn't mean farming and decorating gameplay isn't incredibly attractive to many people. But The Sims did so more to prove that than Farmville.

[Morat20]

*shrug*. I spent most of my time in SWG wandering around, collecting stuff for my shop. I sold energy, metals, furniture, paintings -- and I also hawked wares from my friends (the biggest one dedicated Master Scout whose primary living was collecting large batches of rare spawns for crafters -- I had tons of low, middle, and at times almost-top quality stuff on sale. The very best went to people doing custom orders of course).

Some days I'd just log on and check harvesters. Some days I'd go hunting for high quality materials to make some money, or go explore a planet, or complete a quest chain for a schematic. Sometimes I'd just decide "Hey, what's Creature Handler like" and drop off some of the merchant line I wasn't really using and play with that.

It kept my attention. I didn't burn out like I did in every other game. I could be casual or not depending on my time and mood.

And Raph's right on one thing -- the game has some serious mechanics designed to put the hooks into your brain and make it hard to leave. Not as blatant as Candy Crush (which, as you're showing, DOES turn off potential players. It's one reason i've never touched it) but quite effectively.

Then again, I'm not a hardcore gamer. I prefer RPG's and turn-based games and MMORPG's are a very rare side-hobby. I skip 90% of them. I'm not the usual MMORPG fan.

I really think WoW coming out was the death blow. All the issues with design, the tradeoffs that were really, really bad in hindsight -- those were huge problems, that probably would have slowly strangled the game (although sometimes things seemed to get better), but WoW....

Back then, when it was new -- it was such a juggernaut. Everyone wanted their share of that. I don't think there's many upper-level management that could say "We'd rather have 100k or 200k people that won't ever fully quit than try for those millions...."

[Hutch]

The best Star Wars MMO I can make in the OT period won't ever have Jedi in it. It automatically makes the game bad. Period. Players may want it, but players are wrong. Players may even LIKE IT BETTER, but that doesn't make the game better. A game is not better if players like it more. It's just more popular. I realize this may be a gap between us. :)

[tmp]

They're business models cleverly disguised as games.

Obviously there is a game underneath somewhere, or the disguise wouldn't  hold up. Thing is, after you sweep the monetization and calculated addictive mechanics away from something like candy crush, there's not much gameplay left.

To be fair, you could say the exact same thing about MMOs.