Another One Bites the Dust: SWG Edition!

[Ingmar]

Any downtime more than stopping to eat a cheeseburger to restore health/mana and I'm out regardless of what else a game has or does.

The downtime there was functionally equivilant, or at least if it had worked as designed, to the "downtime" of armor repair in WoW. Except having a medic, entertainer, and scout (One person could be all three of those, at least enough for jazz) could fix it in the field -- like a repair bot.

Armor is 100% functional til it breaks, it sounds like the wounds actually made you less effective progressively?

[Lantyssa]

Wounds usually weren't all that incapacitating in PvE, unless you ran into something like the Mantigrue Screecher or Toxic Merek Battlelord.  I loved watching people get hit by them.  "5... 4... 3... 2... 1... incap!"

Nowadays I don't think it'd work as a forced mechanic, but recovery rates really weren't as bad as other games of the time, and with a bit of preparation were easily mitigated.  The system couldn't work at all in a world where you pick one class and that's it.

Armor is 100% functional til it breaks, it sounds like the wounds actually made you less effective progressively?

Yes, though under most circumstances you were talking about a slow reduction to a 1-2% hit on your HAM.  Rezzing could ding you if you went to an unbound station.  Disease could blacken the bar a bit more, and a few very rare creatures were "g'bye now" levels of death.  (Incidentally I loved taming them.)

[Morat20]

Armor is 100% functional til it breaks, it sounds like the wounds actually made you less effective progressively?

yeah, because the combat whole system was fucked up. Wounds were SUPPOSED to be the fight ender, which means you lost, which means you rez/heal/whatever and go back to 100%.

Instead, people buffed the shit out of HAM bars that regenerated glacially without buffs, and "losing" a fight meant just getting a HAM bar depleted. Which was like wounds lowering your total health, instead of wounds BEING your health.

Like...say mind was 100 points. Supposed to be you'd spend like, I dunno, 20 to eyeshot a guy (doing 30 points of damage to his mind pool). You'd get those 20 back in like ten seconds. If you eyeshot a guy 5 times in 10 seconds (or the other guy hit your mind pool) you'd take anything over the 100 as wounds, leaving you like 90 to use in the fight. Eventually a pool would hit 100% wounds, and you'd die.

Instead, once you hit 0, you died AND got the wounds. Which means you rezzed with a total of 90 or so mind to use, until you healed.

And HAM regenerated super-slowly, unless you were buffed, in which case you had like 5000 mind and it regened at like 500 every 10 seconds, so you could never run out. Which meant people had to spam specials and weapon damage had to go up so you could actually incapaciate someone.

Original armor design was to work like wounds...like light armor might reduce your mind pool by 10, and heavy armor by 30. So less room to futz around. Done properly, it might have led to some rather interesting tradeoffs and styles. Instead it became a spamfest of specials that hit mind, because it was the hardest to heal.

Some classes were so screwed -- carbineers, for one -- that they actually killed themselves faster than they killed you.

[Soln]

as an aside, and I wish I had a picture, but for awhile it seemed the deadliest weapon in all of SWG was.... a CDEF Pistol with a massive Mind Poison DoT and a number of shots of.... -1.  Yeah infinite shots.

[Morat20]

as an aside, and I wish I had a picture, but for awhile it seemed the deadliest weapon in all of SWG was.... a CDEF Pistol with a massive Mind Poison DoT and a number of shots of.... -1.  Yeah infinite shots.

Yeah, I loved me SWG. I would not, even remotely, claim the combat wasn't all sorts of fucked up. Or the crafting results. Overly complex system, insufficient testing cycle, and then moving to Live without legacy knowledge to actually FIX the broken shit -- and handle emergent behavior.

I don't think the Devs understood the game they were 'fixing', because design got thrown out the window as they rushed to launch. What went Live probably didn't look a whole lot like the original design, and there were so many moving parts and interlocking systems that no one stuck around long enough to get the expertise to even think about fixing it.

[Tale]

Shh, it's time for the non-SWG playing UO troll to add a random negative one-liner.

[WindupAtheist]

No, no, sounds great. Totally not a disappointing shitpile of a game that nobody including the devs could make heads or tails of and should have been put out of it's misery years ago.

 

[palmer_eldritch]

Hey, I understood it.

[Ginaz]

as an aside, and I wish I had a picture, but for awhile it seemed the deadliest weapon in all of SWG was.... a CDEF Pistol with a massive Mind Poison DoT and a number of shots of.... -1.  Yeah infinite shots.

There was knife on the Intrepid server that did something like 700-800 fire damage a tick to the action (yellow) bar.  It was nasty and became known as "Da Knife".

[Count Nerfedalot]

as an aside, and I wish I had a picture, but for awhile it seemed the deadliest weapon in all of SWG was.... a CDEF Pistol with a massive Mind Poison DoT and a number of shots of.... -1.  Yeah infinite shots.

Yeah, I loved me SWG. I would not, even remotely, claim the combat wasn't all sorts of fucked up. Or the crafting results. Overly complex system, insufficient testing cycle, and then moving to Live without legacy knowledge to actually FIX the broken shit -- and handle emergent behavior.

I don't think the Devs understood the game they were 'fixing', because design got thrown out the window as they rushed to launch. What went Live probably didn't look a whole lot like the original design, and there were so many moving parts and interlocking systems that no one stuck around long enough to get the expertise to even think about fixing it.

This is what I haven't been able to forgive Raph for. Risky design decisions in the pursuit of theory/dogma over reality/logic is one thing, but he and his team screwed the pooch with SWG's incomplete design, botched implementation and total failure to produce a software system that could even be completed much less maintained, then bailed rather than fix the mess they had made. "But I’d rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity." (quoted from his blog)  my ass.  That only flies when the work itself isn't mediocre (to be generous). He over promised and under delivered then took his bonus and promotion and ran and made no effort to make it right nor even acknowledge nor apologize for it. 

[Tale]

as an aside, and I wish I had a picture, but for awhile it seemed the deadliest weapon in all of SWG was.... a CDEF Pistol with a massive Mind Poison DoT and a number of shots of.... -1.  Yeah infinite shots.

I submitted the complaint that got this weapon removed. It was on Valcyn server, from whichever event gave those random temporary uber weapons. It was looted by someone in Soga Mijizi, a Rebel PvP guild that regularly raided our Imperial city.

At first, it belonged to some guy who used it until the shots ran out. It was then supposed to become unusable. Instead, it went to -1 shots which, as you say, was infinite. It was given to another player who was a regular PvP raider.

It spammed an area-effect mind poison DoT in a cone shape. It was far stronger than any craftable Combat Medic poison. At maximum buffed mind, it meant incapacitation on the second tick (incap = unconscious, ready to be killed with a deathblow or healed back to consciousness). It took two charges of a Doctor cure pack to remove the poison from one person. A poisoned Doctor had to attend to himself first, while everyone else fell incapacitated. Cures were only worth doing if the victim reached cover inside a private building, otherwise the gun would immediately inflict the poison again.

When we found out it had infinite charges, I submitted a detailed petition and the devs ultimately apologised and removed it. Soga Mijizi wasn't happy. My best PvP win :)

[Bloodgut]

When I first heard of a SW MMO I thought of big space battles, being a BH, killing rebels etc. The last thing I thought of was decorating my house or a new dance routine.

I guess I should have read up on the game first before I subbed and recieved a free box.

I will never understand the reasoning that people wanted some SW sim world instead of an actual experience where you felt ike a rebel or a imp. Within 2-3 days I grew a hatred for the alliance in WOW that I never felt in SWG towards the rebels.

My opinion is that SW was the definate wrong choice to test out some world sim game instead of what WOW became, yet everyone claims Raph is some genious.

Oh well. I think myself and my guild would have stayed with SWG if it DIDN'T concentrate so much on the social aspects, and worry more about the actual war.

[Kail]

My opinion is that SW was the definate wrong choice to test out some world sim game instead of what WOW became, yet everyone claims Raph is some genious.

I don't know, I suspect SW could work as a worldy sandbox game.  If someone handed me a trillion dollars to design my ideal Star Wars game, it would probably be some open world GTA-esque thing with Jedi.  I'd say that the problem is more that SWG is lousy at simulating the Star Wars world rather than that "Star Wars world" games are a lousy idea in the first place.  Cities in SWG don't look or work like they do in the movies, combat doesn't work like it does in the movies, politics is nothing like it is in the movies, even crafting is nothing like it is in the movies.  I can't speak to the quality of the systems (since I spent less time in the game than I have reading this thread) but to me felt more like someone trying to fit the Star Wars license around a set of pre-concieved systems than someone looked at Star Wars and said "how can we design a game which feels like THIS".

Which is where a lot of this Raphites are coming from, I think.  This game and the SW license do not belong together.  You can say "the game would have been better without Raph" or you can say "the game would have been better without Star Wars," and either would be (maybe) true.  And while you can say "DIKU SW would have been more popular," that's kind of missing the point: that some people want to play these social games more than they want to play a Star Wars game. 

[5150]

When I first heard of a SW MMO I thought of big space battles, being a BH, killing rebels etc. The last thing I thought of was decorating my house or a new dance routine.

I find myself asking [again]

Why can it not be both? Does the presence of one prevent the presence of the other?

[Fordel]

Unless you have unlimited Time and Money, yes, yes it does.

[Rasix]

When I first heard of a SW MMO I thought of big space battles, being a BH, killing rebels etc. The last thing I thought of was decorating my house or a new dance routine.

I find myself asking [again]

Why can it not be both? Does the presence of one prevent the presence of the other?

In SWG, yes it did. Sure you could be some sort of mutant hybrid (some of the combinations I had while clinging to droid engineer were hilarious); but socialization, crafting, and combat skill points came out of the same pool.  Bone-headed design decision #3,445.

Combined with single characters per server..  /BIG_SIGH.

[5150]

I'm going to disagree with you both on two counts.

Firstly the 'happy' element of the community didn't need to be touched [by the NGE] to try and appease the 'unhappy' part. I think the issue here is that LA/SOE decided to throw the baby out with the bath water and massively over-extended the scope of what needed to be fixed (i.e. fixed character classes) with the NGE.

Those unhappy/not-starwarsy-enough types wouldn't have spent points in the 'non-combat' skill trees anyway so why is that a problem? - if they don't want to have to deal with other elements of the community (crafters/healers etc) why the hell are they playing an MMOG?

[Shatter]

 I did enjoy my dancer phase in SWG when I was trying to unlock my Jedi, watching people run through the cantina fighting it out.  Rift and WOW have the achievements that offer nothing other then doing it to do it.  Never underestimate the attractiveness of a useless activity in an MMO cause there will be a group of people who enjoy it.  Im usually in the group who enjoys killing those people

[Merusk]

but to me felt more like someone trying to fit the Star Wars license around a set of pre-concieved systems than someone looked at Star Wars and said "how can we design a game which feels like THIS".

Well, because it was.  All the defenders want that Sandbox game and like to ignore that it wasn't appropriate for the license.  There's all kinds of mindtwisting that's happened over the years that boils down to "no, really I wanted to be Aunt Beru when I first watched ANH."  To that I said and still say, "bullshit."

The entire push to not see SWG as the colossal failure it was comes from people desperate to see a sandbox MMO.  That's not going to happen and I feel bad for it.  That still doesn't excuse the failure to deliver on the license rather than pushing a new UO in a SWG wrapper.

SWG always felt like Raph trying to fix mistakes made in UO and show that it was better than EQ.  My sentiments mirror Nerfdalot up above on this topic.

The genre could benefit greatly from a well-executed and well thought-out sandbox, but that time is passed.  Social media F2P games take their place and aren't nearly as complex and don't build as many new social connections.  The days of the Premium-fee MMO seem limited, which is also sad as the Cash-Shop games lack even the depth of WoW in favor of nickel and diming you out of more than that $180 a year.

[Malakili]

Well, because it was.  All the defenders want that Sandbox game and like to ignore that it wasn't appropriate for the license.  There's all kinds of mindtwisting that's happened over the years that boils down to "no, really I wanted to be Aunt Beru when I first watched ANH."  To that I said and still say, "bullshit."

I agree and disagree.  I love playing *not* the hero.  One of the reasons I love EVE so much is because I can play the game and be effectively an industrial worker in a remote part of the galaxy, and still have a place in the game.  To be fair to you, Star Wars always HAS been about the Heroes.   But I also watch those movies and think about all the not-heroic stuff that is going on in the galaxy and think it would be neat to see what that is like too.  Same with lord of the rings  - the FIRST thing I did in that game was just wander around Hobbiton for a few hours in LOTRO.

Now, being the hero is fun, and being powerful is fun, but one of the things that I like about sandbox MMOs is that you get to see the non-heroic side of these worlds too (less so in LOTRO of course, where they shoe horn you into the plot).   When it came to Star Wars Galaxies, it let me LIVE Star Wars more than PLAY Star Wars, and as a Star Wars junkie I loved it for that.  Was it fun 100% of the time, no.  But that was never the point for me. 

You can call bullshit if you want, but I'm the kind of person that doesn't like to be the center of attention, I like to be quietly good and what I do and stay out of the limelight (in real life).   I like games that let me do something similar.

[Merusk]

That's great, now the question is are there enough of you to sustain a large-budget MMO project.  History would appear to tell us the answer is "no."

[KallDrexx]

Not...exactly. You have to look a bit deeper. People are often, to be blunt, really confused about what they want. In games, especially complex ones, they often don't realize what would happen if they GOT what they wanted.

And then, more importantly, there's the fact that the loudest whiner isn't "your customers". I don't envy the poor folks whose job is to wade through cancellations, forum whinings, feedback surveys, and polls to find the sticky spots and then pass them onto the designers who have to figure out what should be fixed, what can be fixed, and what effects it's likely to have.

Ugh I hate this line of thinking.  The lead designer for Fury had the same ideals ("Do players know what they want?" was actually an interview question he gave me).  You can't dismiss complainers because "they aren't your customers" or "they just don't understand".  That's up there with Brad Mquad (sp?) complaining that players don't understand the Vision (TM). 

The reality is that when players complain they usually go for the extreme point of view in their complaints, and as a game designer you have to look at the complaints and find out what their core issue is of their complaints and find ways to design around that.  Instead game developers tend to take the complaints at face value and outright dismiss it, and then act all surprised when their games fail.  Most of the time there is legitimacy to what players are complaining about, but it's hidden in between the lines of their complaints.

Game design is harder than it looks, and since the players are the customers then ignoring them will make your game go die much faster

[Malakili]

That's great, now the question is are there enough of you to sustain a large-budget MMO project.  History would appear to tell us the answer is "no."

Yes, this is 100% true also.  I have no problem admitting that.

Keep in mind, I also plan on playing SWTOR at this point.  I can have fun with a variety of types of games, I just think that what I described above is really fun for its own sake independent of setting.  The point I was really trying to make was "Its Star Wars, therefore mass Jedi with laser swords needed" isn't really a good argument against SWG in my opinion. "The Combat Sucked" "I hated the crafting mechanics" "I think downtime sucked"  those are all fine arguments against the game that I'm perfectly happy to accept.  But there is more than one way to do a setting.  While extensive moisture farming wasn't something the main characters spent time doing in the movies, it is clear that SOMEONE in the Star Wars universe is doing it, so it isn't like the stuff in SWG was totally against the setting.  It just wasn't Star Wars the movies, the game.  It was Star Wars the universe, the game.

[Lantyssa]

That's great, now the question is are there enough of you to sustain a large-budget MMO project.  History would appear to tell us the answer is "no."

History tells us buggy games tend to lose customers.  The game was perfectly sustainable pre-NGE, and though down from its peak, still had more customers than 90% of other MMOs at that stage of their life.  All that despite idiotic balance changes, competing political interests, and the continuing annoyance of bugs.

Being "the hero" is fine for a single-player game, but much tougher in an MMO.  The entire design philosophy is making you weaker as you level up in comparison to your enemies, so you have to find groups to tackle the big-bad.  It's also completely subjective.  Plenty of people came away from the movies wanting to be Luke, Han, or Leia, but some of us just wanted to live in that universe.  Their stories were already written.  Watch the movies or read the novels if you want to be them.  How many works actually put as much effort as Star Wars into making the background interesting though?

[Sky]

All those games have made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Actually...history tells us the answer is "yes."

[Morat20]

Game design is harder than it looks, and since the players are the customers then ignoring them will make your game go die much faster

I didn't say ignore them. I meant pretty much what you said -- that what they're bitching about is not necessarily the actual problem, and giving them exactly what they want won't necessarily make them happy.

And designing with a 'The customer is always right' mindset is a good way to make your game fail, because what your customer says and what he means isn't always the same thing, and some of what they say they want...they don't.

For a potential derail: Take full PvP -- lots of people say they want it. What they often really MEAN is "I want lots of sheep to fleece. And I don't want the sheep to be able to turn it off". You've got to look at that, look at the number of real wolves, real sheep, and pseudo wolves, and decide if that's really something for your game....

or if you're just going to please, for a brief time, a bunch of griefers who will then ragequit because the sheep avoid them.

[Rasix]

I'm going to disagree with you both on two counts.

Firstly the 'happy' element of the community didn't need to be touched [by the NGE] to try and appease the 'unhappy' part. I think the issue here is that LA/SOE decided to throw the baby out with the bath water and massively over-extended the scope of what needed to be fixed (i.e. fixed character classes) with the NGE.

Those unhappy/not-starwarsy-enough types wouldn't have spent points in the 'non-combat' skill trees anyway so why is that a problem? - if they don't want to have to deal with other elements of the community (crafters/healers etc) why the hell are they playing an MMOG?

How did you pull that out of what I said? 

I was only touching upon how the combat portions of the game and the ability to participate in them directly conflicted with the ability to participate in the crafting/social aspects because they were in the same pool of resources for your character. 

This was a major problem for me and for a lot of people I played with.  You could either be "Star Warsy" or "Sim Beru", but those of us that wanted to do both were fighting a losing battle with an extremely restrictive system.

[Merusk]

All those games have made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Actually...history tells us the answer is "yes."

Let's rephrase this for you, then.  As soon as making money becomes the metric for success you validate everything about pop music, Michael Bay and EA Games.

[Sjofn]

This was a major problem for me and for a lot of people I played with.  You could either be "Star Warsy" or "Sim Beru", but those of us that wanted to do both were fighting a losing battle with an extremely restrictive system.

I didn't try SWG, partly because of the one character, THAT IS ALL aspect. I would've been one of those miserable "I want to do all of it but I can't" people for sure. What was the reasoning behind that, does anyone know?

[Morat20]

I didn't try SWG, partly because of the one character, THAT IS ALL aspect. I would've been one of those miserable "I want to do all of it but I can't" people for sure. What was the reasoning behind that, does anyone know?

Twofold:

1) Because it encouraged community, rather than tons of alts.
2) Because of the nature of the skill system, you could be *anything* and change it at any time. Bored of pistoleer? Drop the boxes and start working up doctor. You could even do it piecemeal.

The only things you couldn't change were your race or gender. (You could change your looks by visiting...someone. Image Designers?. They finally added an NPC for it, I think, because Image Designers were a bit hard to find).

So the reasoning was you didn't need alts, because you could change your classes and skills at will. (You had to level up through the new skills, and you had a max number of points you could have, but literally it was just a choice to change).

I kinda liked that aspect, at least the flexibility and ability to change. I'd have preferred a way to change race/gender, because I had the urge to change later, but even without that....

Over the time I played I was a Tera Kasi Master, a Master Merchant, a Master Armorsmith, a Master Scout, a Master Pistoleer, and a Creature Handler -- and a few others that I took some or all of at times. Not because I was holocron grinding, but because I'd want a change. The only ones I felt "locked into" was part of the Merchant tree because I wanted to keep my vendors.

[Soln]

as an aside, and I wish I had a picture, but for awhile it seemed the deadliest weapon in all of SWG was.... a CDEF Pistol with a massive Mind Poison DoT and a number of shots of.... -1.  Yeah infinite shots.

...My best PvP win :)

Sir that's hilarious -- small place the Interweb!  Nice one.

[Raph]

The reasoning is pretty simple: there are two reasons to have multiple characters. One is to try everything, and the other is to cheat.

In the case of a game design with player interdependence and team-based PvP, the impetus to cheat is really really strong. Instead of working with others for supply chains, you'd do the whole chain yourself. Instead of knowing that an area was infested with Rebels but being unsure of how to scout it, you'd bring in your Reb mule and waltz through.

The "try everything" aspect is still a great reason to do it, don't get me wrong. That's why we let you drop skills and change. What you're really saying is "you want to do it all at once." Which immediately plays against interdependence and team dynamics.

[Amaron]

Which immediately plays against interdependence and team dynamics.

I'm not seeing the downside here.

[Raph]

What, you hate all team sports, all game mechanics arising from character classes, all economic gameplay involving multiple resources, and all other people? 

[Amaron]

What, you hate all team sports, all game mechanics arising from character classes, all economic gameplay involving multiple resources, and all other people?  

YES

Edit: Being more serious I just hate having to pick my in game friends based on their reliability.