Another One Bites the Dust: SWG Edition!

[Murgos]

I hear it was really hard to become a Jedi in this game. 

I left long before the first Jedi ever appeared.  For a Star Wars game to have neither Jedi nor space ships was a pretty clear indicator that things weren't quite kosher.

[Amaron]

I didn't even buy the box because of the Jedi thing.

[Raph]

I didn't even buy the box because of the Jedi thing.

And yet Jedi appearing is what started the downward spiral. I wish we'd kept them out altogether! 

[Samprimary]

Out with the new, in with the old.

God I am so clever, etc etc

[Crumbs]

Imagine SWG never existed.  Now imagine that this announcement is made tomorrow:

DEVELOPMENT NEWS:  A Star Wars MMO currently in development, targeted for release in 2013.  

--Set in the context of episodes 4-6.  
--Fully customizable player housing on multiple planets with dozens of building styles to choose from.  
--Fully customizable character appearance.  
--Wookiees playable as a race.  
--Bounty Hunter profession with actual PVP bounty missions
--Complex crafting system, unlike any other game to date.
--Build your own spaceships, with dozens of models and countless customizable components to choose from
--Fly said ships in space and engage in pve and pvp (in space)(did I mention you could take your ship into outer space)
--Entertainer professions to provide player healing and enhancements
--Unprecedented freedom to choose your path and change it at any time
--Player cities, designed and built by players, complete with your own shuttle port, cantina and guild halls.
--Attackable faction bases that can be placed in your cities
--Faction pets, including AT-ST for Imperials, to be used in combat
--Fully customizable player vendors (machine, droid or humanoid)
--Diverse combat system that can be set up and changed at will
--Explore and visit several points of interest from episodes 4-6, such as Jabba's Palace
--Create your own endgame.  The tools are there, you just have to use them.  Help your city's crafters gain the best resources from challenging planets so that you can have the best gear and food.  Engage in open world Imperial vs Rebel PVP.  Relax and in your city's Cantina and plan your next group event, and more.
--Three character slots:  One for Jedi (that you can play from day one), and two for all other professions (for example, one for crafting and one for combat).
--NO RAIDING


The character slot thing was my own idea but the rest was in SWG vanila and combat revamp.  Don't get me wrong, the game needs to die.  As it stands it's like the final fusion of brundlefly and teleporter.  But it was a legendary endeavor on all accounts, good and bad.

[Fordel]

I would call it horse shit still. 


Like, whenever I read something like this:

--Complex crafting system, unlike any other game to date.



My first reaction is to run away and never look back. Crafting fuckers are just as bad as the AssRape fuckers.

[Lantyssa]

And yet Jedi appearing is what started the downward spiral. I wish we'd kept them out altogether! 

The holocrons and grinding is what started it.  But that's a dead horse.  (Also I'm still bitter about the system...)

But really the pre-NGE SWG was the most enthralling game I've played.  I can only hope that one day something tops it for those of us who enjoy the things it offered.

[Ingmar]

I hope you like games like Wurm, et. al., because that is about the size of that niche at this point I think.

[WindupAtheist]

Imagine SWG never existed.  Now imagine that this announcement is made tomorrow:

It would hit beta and we'd hear that pistol damage didn't stack with rifle damage, that there were no Jedi, that there were fencers and animal tamers and other "I ported these over from UO because I'm Raph Koster and I don't know what Star Wars is durr durr" bullshit character types, and we'd laugh at it.

And yet Jedi appearing is what started the downward spiral. I wish we'd kept them out altogether!  

Yeah man you managed to keep out everyone who wanted Jedi everywhere. Then they put Jedi everywhere and pissed off everyone you hadn't kept out in the first place. It was the worst of both worlds. Plus, I mean, an overpowered-by-design class that can be used in PVP? But which is balanced by PERMADEATH? In a mass-market commercial MMO? Yeah you can pretty much just take the lumps you deserve when it comes to the whole Jedi thing.

[Jobu]

This is pretty melancholy for me. I guess it's as good a time as any to come out of the closet a bit, but I actually worked on SWG. It was the first, and remains the only game I've made that I also routinely played. I still to this day remember the name of the very first beta tester who logged into the servers on our first stress test (his/her name was Kebernet). We swarmed around him like groupies, we were all so excited to see someone from the outside in there with us. I remember all the fun I had wandering around the game and watching random interactions with strangers blossom into memorable events and stories. Looking back, I really feel it was a special and unique game. It's always made me smile when people write fondly about their memories in it, and it's really sad on a personal level to see it disappear even though it realistically disappeared awhile ago. I'll probably try to get back in and find my way back to the old hill we started from (I think it was outside of Bestine?)  and wait for the crowds of other diaspora to trickle back in and take one last look around.

[UnSub]

Wonder if LucasArts tried to renegotiate the contract and it would just not work (profitably) for SOE under the new deal.

I don't think LucasArts cares either way if they have 1, 2 or 100 SW MMOs out there provided they get their cut.

Alternatively SOE sees that SWG was going to take a big hit whenever SWOR launched and didn't want to sign another contractual period to pay royalties when they also expect the player base to plummet.

[Ginaz]

WTF!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWb3cxA4g_U&feature=player_embedded

Edit:  I see the problem now.  She's a Twilight fan.

[stu]

I enjoyed the chat system, community and ship customization.

[Zetor]

SWG's been a love/hate thing for me... some moments of brilliance mixed with kludgy / frustrating gameplay. I was also a dirty RPer, and the game was pretty awesome for that! Some things I remember:

- Treating people in the coronet med center as a doc, and chatting them up about where they got those scars, etc. Unsolicited mad scientist escapades (TF2 medic had nothin' on me). Also a whole lot of random RP happening all over the place, even with people who didn't think of themselves as RPers!
- A huge player city with lots of activity around the clock; plenty of events like theater productions or live bands (Greenmurk on Naboo, Kettemoor in case any of you played there)
- Operating a very specialized store (explosives only, basically ) and taking care of bizznezz: ad campaigns, marketing, researching the competition, etc etc.* It was probably a bit more involved than '450 jewelcrafter lfw, have all metagems', and a lot more fun.
- JTL was good, and reminded me of the X-Wing days. I didn't have a joystick, so some of the missions were a bit tricky (hi, mr. corellian corvette!)
- A whole lot of frustration about how bad some of the game systems were (there's a reason I never had a combat character) leading to quitting in 2004, checking out the post-NGE ruins in 2008 briefly, then leaving for good.

* of course, ~1 month after I made that posting, the devs decided to remove explosives from the game. I followed this up with removing my subscription from the game. :P

[Raph]

Jobu, who are you? :)

I hope you like games like Wurm, et. al., because that is about the size of that niche at this point I think.

Ironically, many of those features are what drives the massive massive social games audiences today. Don't get me wrong, SWG was nowhere near "mass market" in terms of accessibility. But in terms of many of its features, we were far more correct about what the true mass market wanted than any other MMO -- too on target for powergamers, in fact. Farmville was a *feature* in SWG, after all. If anything, the SW license held it back in that sense.

Plus, I mean, an overpowered-by-design class that can be used in PVP? But which is balanced by PERMADEATH? In a mass-market commercial MMO? Yeah you can pretty much just take the lumps you deserve when it comes to the whole Jedi thing.

Some of those lumps aren't mine to take, actually. A lot of what Jedi were when they first appeared was developed when I wasn't on the team anymore. That said, if there's a single design decision I regret more than any in my entire career, it's when the AP on the project came to me and said "we can't manage the Jedi selection system as designed... how about this compromise?" and it was a long, frazzled day of crunch and I listened and said "sure, whatever."

I've said it before elsewhere, but the intent even with the permadeath was quite different. Jedi was supposed to end up as a minigame, not something you invested months of work in. One day, you unlocked it, and you got this extra slot. So your main didn't become a Jedi, but a new character. It had some powers from the get-go, but was also hunted by everyone. And when you played, you died fast, within the first couple of minutes, because you had an awareness meter that went up when others saw you use your powers. Then you tried again with a new character, and a fresh timer ticking. Stay alive long enough and you got a blue glowy of that jedi you could summon with your main as an emote -- bragging rights.

Bits and pieces of this were in what launched, but a lot of it was not. Or was altered in crucial ways: making your main the Jedi, for one. Working for months to unlock the slot created a very different atmosphere. And slow grinding as a Jedi likewise didn't work with permadeath.

[WindupAtheist]

Anything but "Let's make Jedi a character class and balance them with everything else!" was sheer madness from whoever had final say on making the call, whether it be you, your boss, or some guy from LucasArts whining that it wouldn't be canon. Anyway.

Five minutes in Paint. Because I am a dick, and have not expressed my undying UO fanboyism properly in ages.

WTF!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWb3cxA4g_U&feature=player_embedded

Edit:  I see the problem now.  She's a Twilight fan.

She's a roleplayer who refers to her character as if they were another real person. "She and I have been through a lot together." I have seen those people up close and they are crayyy-zay.

[Raph]

Well, my first proposal was not to have Jedi as PCs at all, but that lasted for mere seconds after I proposed it. :)

[WindupAtheist]

See, Raph, this is what I mean. Like don't get me wrong. You were the main dude behind the genesis of UO, so you know WUA loves you deep down. But it's obvious that you Just Do Not Get Star Wars At All. Like if you think you can make a Star Wars RPG and not let people run around with lightsabers kicking ass, then you just do not grok the IP on a fundamental level.

Like if you watch this and somewhere inside the depths of your brain a six-year-old doesn't scream "OH YEAH YOU ASSHOLES ARE IN FOR IT NOW!" as the lightsaber swishes on then you were just plain working on the wrong game. They were right to make you add Jedi, and your mistake was trying to implement them in the most beardy text-muddy way possible.

[Venkman]

Back during whenever the "let's make a SW MMO" decision was made, the most popular period in the lore was ESB. Two Jedi, one ghost, all unknown. To do Jedi right, you need to pick a different period. Ep 1-2 would work if anyone liked those movies, or more recently Clone Wars (Ep 2-3) if a serious MMO was made in that setting. Or, of course, you integrate a lot of "hey that almost looks like..." stuff into KOTOR.

Regardless, set aside the holocron mess for a sec. I don't think Jedi would have felt right in SWF. And personally I don't think people needed to play Jedi as much as the lens of history (and SWTOR) makes some believe. A better combat system that made sense to the combat fan would have done a lot more for SWG than having everyone running around with a light saber.

Man, it's 2003 all over again. Queue 100 pages! :)

[WindupAtheist]

LORE LORE LORE

DON'T CARE. STAR WARS. NEED LIGHTSABER.

Regardless, set aside the holocron mess for a sec. I don't think Jedi would have felt right in SWF. And personally I don't think people needed to play Jedi as much as the lens of history (and SWTOR) makes some believe. A better combat system that made sense to the combat fan would have done a lot more for SWG than having everyone running around with a light saber.

You are wrong. Also, remember this when Star Wars: Half Our Classes Have Lightsabers comes out in a box with a guy triple-wielding lightsabers on the front of it and outsells the entire history of SWG in like a month.

[Malakili]

See, Raph, this is what I mean. Like don't get me wrong. You were the main dude behind the genesis of UO, so you know WUA loves you deep down. But it's obvious that you Just Do Not Get Star Wars At All. Like if you think you can make a Star Wars RPG and not let people run around with lightsabers kicking ass, then you just do not grok the IP on a fundamental level.

Like if you watch this and somewhere inside the depths of your brain a six-year-old doesn't scream "OH YEAH YOU ASSHOLES ARE IN FOR IT NOW!" as the lightsaber swishes on then you were just plain working on the wrong game. They were right to make you add Jedi, and your mistake was trying to implement them in the most beardy text-muddy way possible.

I love Jedi as much as the next guy, but give me a little shop in Mos Eisley selling speeder and ship parts and I'm a happy man.

[Modern Angel]

LORE LORE LORE

DON'T CARE. STAR WARS. NEED LIGHTSABER.

This, right here. I got into the SWTOR beta (which I am allowed to say). I'm not going to talk about NDA breaking stuff but I'll say this: I have been extremely not giving a fuck about this game and the second I turned my lightsaber on I was 8 years old again.

[Amaron]

And yet Jedi appearing is what started the downward spiral. I wish we'd kept them out altogether! 

You think adding easier to get Jedi before NGE started a downward spiral?  I can't agree with that.   Maybe that nonsense about Jedi's being more powerful caused some problems but that's another topic.

[Sky]

I guess I'll jump in, as another Raph fanboy who enjoyed UO immensely and thought SWG had a lot of potential.

I agree with Raph about Jedi, given the time period of the game and the game world itself. However, as everyone has pointed out, the big draw for the masses is lightsaber combat and Lucasarts wants the masses. The IP was just not right for a Raph world.

However, I know I'll miss a lot of what made SWG immersive when TOR comes out. The crafting will be some cheesy WoW-alike, the social portions will be forced (but lets not forget forcing dancers on people), and the planets will be more theme park than world.

I'd almost add a third leg to the old horse Darniaq and I used to pine for - a cross between SWG's world and crafting, Planetside's modified shooter combat, and I'll add in TOR as the quest/story layer (and of course JtL, lest Lantyssa lambaste me).

And at the end of the day, HAM did not work and could not be made workable. That I'm /still/ bitter about my rifleman speaks volumes about that.

[Threash]

Back during whenever the "let's make a SW MMO" decision was made, the most popular period in the lore was ESB. Two Jedi, one ghost, all unknown. To do Jedi right, you need to pick a different period. Ep 1-2 would work if anyone liked those movies, or more recently Clone Wars (Ep 2-3) if a serious MMO was made in that setting. Or, of course, you integrate a lot of "hey that almost looks like..." stuff into KOTOR.

Regardless, set aside the holocron mess for a sec. I don't think Jedi would have felt right in SWF. And personally I don't think people needed to play Jedi as much as the lens of history (and SWTOR) makes some believe. A better combat system that made sense to the combat fan would have done a lot more for SWG than having everyone running around with a light saber.

Man, it's 2003 all over again. Queue 100 pages! :)

Completely ridiculous.  Lore matters to about 0% of the population, star wars = jedis.

[Numtini]

I think there's a generational aspect here. Star Wars to me is blasters, speeders, x-wings, the Millenium Falcon and Han shooting first because he's just so cool.

[Malakili]

Back during whenever the "let's make a SW MMO" decision was made, the most popular period in the lore was ESB. Two Jedi, one ghost, all unknown. To do Jedi right, you need to pick a different period. Ep 1-2 would work if anyone liked those movies, or more recently Clone Wars (Ep 2-3) if a serious MMO was made in that setting. Or, of course, you integrate a lot of "hey that almost looks like..." stuff into KOTOR.

Regardless, set aside the holocron mess for a sec. I don't think Jedi would have felt right in SWF. And personally I don't think people needed to play Jedi as much as the lens of history (and SWTOR) makes some believe. A better combat system that made sense to the combat fan would have done a lot more for SWG than having everyone running around with a light saber.

Man, it's 2003 all over again. Queue 100 pages! :)

Completely ridiculous.  Lore matters to about 0% of the population, star wars = jedis.

Well, with Raph in this thread I can hardly speak for what the goals of SWG were with any kind of authority, but it was always my impression that SWG was trying to faithfully recreate the Star Wars universe in that time period and let people in to do what they would.    At the time, I think that was a reasonable approach for an MMORPG - clearly at this point it would not fly, but at the time MMOs weren't what they are now.

Had they gone with the old republic setting that TOR is and had more or less the same game with lots of Jedi running around do you think that would've made the game successful?  I don't personally, because the real issue is that it turns out that that kind of game is just incredibly niche, most people want to kill shit and collect loot and absolutely nothing serious beyond that.

For Raph:
I know the facebook games give credence to the idea that there is a huge population who wants to play games where they are farming and stuff, but I think thats misleading.  Those games are competiting with people's jobs/work etc, where launching any kind of client might get you fired, but having a browser window open isn't a big deal.  A full on MMO has to compete with every other possible game for entertainment, so I suspect that there isn't as big an audience for this kind of crafting/social based MMO as facebook makes it look like.  I know Garriot said something similar in a recent interview and the he thinks the kinds of games he likes to make would work well with that mindset, but I'm not convinced.


In summary:  I really appreciate what SWG was trying to do, but I don't think we can seriously suggest that there is a very big market for that kind of virtual world/virtual life sim game.

[palmer_eldritch]

Yeah, as someone who simply knew the setting from the first three films, the idea of having lots and lots of Jedi running around actually seemed a bit silly. Back when SWG was announced, it was the real fanatics who started talking about an "extended universe" with lots of Jedi in. All I knew was that the Jedi were pretty much extinct, because that's what Peter Cushing said in the first film.

[Lantyssa]

You think adding easier to get Jedi before NGE started a downward spiral?  I can't agree with that.   Maybe that nonsense about Jedi's being more powerful caused some problems but that's another topic.

A lot of it was how you obtained Jedi.  There were other social and balance implications, though I really think the grinding mentality it caused forever stuck with the game from that point on.  It wasn't supposed to ever be about grinding, and then future revamps made the grinding worse.

[Malakili]

I think there's a generational aspect here. Star Wars to me is blasters, speeders, x-wings, the Millenium Falcon and Han shooting first because he's just so cool.

Yeah this was always what made me interested in Star Wars.  Sure, the wizards with laser swords were neat, but they were neat because they were part of this kind of Bladerunner grungy universe.  Mos Eisley basically sums up everything I like about Star Wars - for all the galatic politics and plans, the idea of a kind of Tortuga in a space faring universe was fascinating.

[UnSub]

Back during whenever the "let's make a SW MMO" decision was made, the most popular period in the lore was ESB. Two Jedi, one ghost, all unknown. To do Jedi right, you need to pick a different period. Ep 1-2 would work if anyone liked those movies, or more recently Clone Wars (Ep 2-3) if a serious MMO was made in that setting. Or, of course, you integrate a lot of "hey that almost looks like..." stuff into KOTOR.

The end result for SWG was to basically ignore the timeline it was situated in, add in Jedi so that they were everywhere, then add in whatever could be scrounged together all the way up to zombie Stormtroopers.

It was an odd decsion. Why not just set it after the original timeline, somewhere in the EU where it didn't matter so much what was canon and what wasn't?

[Murgos]

I was five when Star Wars was released, lightsabers aren't actually a massive part of that story but they were still awesome enough for me to register them at five as 'better than blasters and speeders'.

If SWG had released with the name 'Future Laser Gun Battle World" it may have done better long term because there would have been no expectation of things like Space Ships or Jedi.  Instead it got named Star Wars and shipped with the HAM system, which I hated more than not being a Jedi (My sniper rifle shoots your MIND but his pistol shoots your HEALTH so we are less effective cooperating on the same target than on separate ones?  What?).

I know the HAM thing has been discussed to death so we don't need to rehash it.  There are things that SWG did really well, although when I stopped playing crafting wasn't one of them.  That aspect actually didn't get really working until several months after launch if you recall.  I firmly believe that there is room, a LOT of room, for a solid sandbox MMO.  But, we have also learned a lot about multiplayer systems in the last 8 years and that would need to be incorporated to any new effort as well.

I absolutely love Raph's vision and would sign on to one of his projects in a heart beat but I think Star Wars was the wrong project for his strengths.

[Amaron]

At the time, I think that was a reasonable approach for an MMORPG - clearly at this point it would not fly, but at the time MMOs weren't what they are now.

I can't really agree.   At that time a lot of us felt the market was ready for a 1mil+ MMO.   EQ was making a lot of money even while it foot stomped on casual nuts.   Star Wars had a million subs in the bag if they just went for something more accessible than EQ.   They didn't need to go diku but getting the combat right should of been priority one.   Anything else was totally unreasonable.    

I'm guessing the decision on that was far above Raph's head though.  Probably a lot of nonsense about any kind of casual accessible combat focused game stealing EQ customers.  

[Malakili]

At the time, I think that was a reasonable approach for an MMORPG - clearly at this point it would not fly, but at the time MMOs weren't what they are now.

I can't really agree.   At that time a lot of us felt the market was ready for a 1mil+ MMO.   EQ was making a lot of money even while it foot stomped on casual nuts.   Star Wars had a million subs in the bag if they just went for something more accessible than EQ.   They didn't need to go diku but getting the combat right should of been priority one.   Anything else was totally unreasonable.    

I'm guessing the decision on that was far above Raph's head though.  Probably a lot of nonsense about any kind of casual accessible combat focused game stealing EQ customers.  

Well, if they had stuck in a good combat system would that have really made the difference though?  I mean, maybe, but I'm betting people still wouldn't have liked the sandbox direction even with snappy combat, at least in the long run.

[Surlyboi]

In other news, SWG is dead as of Dec 2011.

Guess Lucasarts like to keep their eggs in as few MMO-baskets as possible...

I'm not at all surprised and reading the other article that is linked from there I saw that Smedley had the perfect quote about why SWG failed even though the author hated it along with the others who stuck around. He basically said that SWG delivered the Uncle Own experience and not the Luke and Han experience. He's right and that's why it failed.

No, SWG failed because Smed and a couple of douchebags at Lucasarts thought they could make it like WoW when it was never meant to be.