Another One Bites the Dust: SWG Edition!

[Merusk]

It seems that different posters on this board have different opinions on the topic of "the type of game I enjoy most". Don't get so angry - they're not doing it to upset you.

Anger assumes a level of emotional involvement not in play here.   Trippy said "if you didn't play, hushup" so those who were questioning the systems did so, leaving me alone sitting here saying "Uh, no, it really wasn't all that fun or successful. Here's some of why."

Assuming anger in any of it just seems like projection to me. To wit:

Hard to see the rest of the world I guess, when you are the center of the universe.   

200-300k people sticking around to play a buggy-as-hell game is plenty enough.

If that were the case they wouldn't have entertained the idea of the CU in the first place.   You don't do that kind of thing unless you're pretty sure it'll be embraced OR you're not meeting your financials.

No. She's totally right. The ONLY reason they weren't making their financials was because they were paying LA a mint for the license. Any game then that wasn't WoW would've killed for sub numbers like that.

Yeah, but if the game can't meet its license fees it's not really doing well or successful, is it?  Are we aruging that there's an audience for the genre? I'm not, because there is.  Was this the game type right for the license? No.   Was this the license for that game type's audience? Some very small segment of it, maybe.  I still say if it had been baby killer online the virtual world types would be praising it.  You're all defending the genre while ignoring the specific game in question.

Tha's lead me on to ranting about the game type itself.. which is widly off track.  I hate the genre but I don't begrudge you all from enjoying it if you want to spend that much time in a game.  More power.  My experience in these types say it's self-destructive rather than entertaining, and in a way DIKUs Post-EQ can be only if you're ultra-alt-catass.  That's all a discussion for a different thread, though.

[Mrbloodworth]

Quite clear they met the license fees. The issue was, Blizzard came out with a game with a younger IP and crushed all before it. Many, thought that any game with the starwars IP must do the same. So they knee jerked.

Baby with the bathwater and all that.

Also, do you REALLY think that bioware would be able to put out Star Wars: The Old Republic in the Old republic time frame if the last three movies and the TV show had not been made yet? The choise of SWG's time frame was the one most known.

[Fordel]

Considering its set thousands of years before any of those things, maybe?


I don't think KOTOR lined up with any previous Starwars release, could be misremembering though. I've forgotten how old the prequels actually are.

[palmer_eldritch]

One of the things I like most about sandbox games is the way they let you play for as long or as short a time as you like. No pressure to keep up with your guildies levelling or anything like that.

Hell, in Eve one of the measures of success is the size of your bank balance and my best hope there is to play as little as possible. Because I am bad at playing Eve and get blown up a lot.

[Simond]

SWG was A Bad Game. End of story.

I disagree.

Oh, I'm not saying it didn't have some interesting systems, or that people didn't enjoy it, or it wasn't immersive or whatever. I'm saying as a game it was bad. As a toy? Quite good, if you like that sort of thing.

SWG was A Bad Game. End of story.

You play (and like) WoW.

That's like a Ke$ha fan casting aspersions on Joy Division.

WoW is still (even after the Cataclysm fuck-ups) a batter game than SWG ever was.

[Surlyboi]

And you still missed the point of what I posted there.

[Ratman_tf]

And therin lies the problem.  I have a life. It's not perfect but I don't need to escape it so badly I fawn over terrible mechanics and space-cadet decisions for some guy wanting to test his social theories. I also don't need to get home from my job in one life to get to my job in another.

And thus is why I despise 'virtual worlds' of all stripes.  I'm looking for entertainment, not another even less convenient and time-consuming life.

Some people find that entertaining.

Not enough people.  Some people enjoy having their balls kicked, that doesn't make their particular taste worth basing a game around either.

All games should be Farmville!   

[Sjofn]

SWG was A Bad Game. End of story.

I disagree.

As a game, just like with EVE, it wasn't all that great.  It was buggy as hell and there was very little dev made content for players to go through.  What it did, however, was give you the tools to make your own fun, again, just like EVE.  Some people like that while others (the majority it seems) like to have a more directed experience. 

I definitely do. The Sims is like ... the only sandboxy game I have been able to stand for more than 10 minutes. I don't even like Minecraft. :(

[Merusk]

One of the things I like most about sandbox games is the way they let you play for as long or as short a time as you like. No pressure to keep up with your guildies levelling or anything like that.

All depends on how the world is structured and what you want to do.  UO I hear was totally like this.  I'd have like to have tried it but the magazine reviews I read all detailed how the reviewer was ganked & full-looted within minutes of logging in, so I decided it wasn't for me.  (And I imagine thousands of others did the same.)

EVE you can do empire at your own pace, sure.  If you like EVE's mission system or empire mining (if that's even possible w/ all the macro miners) there's no pressure to do anything.  In 0.0 that's a quick ticket out of your corp for inactivity (as with raiding guilds, I'll grant.)  However, the distinction is very few raids in WoW involve long stretches sitting around doing nothing (Gate camps) or staring at a screen that's frozen (fleet battles) or minimizing your window while you circle a place with cannons on Autofire for 2h trying to destroy something. (POS) 

Yeah, there's the odd small and exciting op or infiltration mission but those are few and far between.  Your chances of getting one with an off-and-on playtime (in anything but goons) is pretty limited.

SWG, however, you couldn't do the entire sales & merchant game in spurts.  Doing it for resources meant you'd miss a shift and quite possibly the only resource crafters would want in bulk for the next few weeks/ months. Doing it for crafting meant you'd slowly lose your clients.  If you're not around or only around every few days and they want that new weapon now, you're just unreliable.  Which meant less income so you couldn't buy the best resources, which meant fewer clients..

The only thing you could do that way was combat, which sucked ass.

[Ratman_tf]

SWG, however, you couldn't do the entire sales & merchant game in spurts.  Doing it for resources meant you'd miss a shift and quite possibly the only resource crafters would want in bulk for the next few weeks/ months. Doing it for crafting meant you'd slowly lose your clients.  If you're not around or only around every few days and they want that new weapon now, you're just unreliable.  Which meant less income so you couldn't buy the best resources, which meant fewer clients..

If you wanted to be a competitive crafter/merchant, you had to put in some effort. And if you want to be a competitive SC2 player, you had to put in some effort. And if you wanted to progression raid in WoW, you had to put in some effort. If you just wanted to putz around and make your own droid, you could do that too.

The only thing you could do that way was combat, which sucked ass.

I don't think anyone will argue with that one.

[Merusk]

There's "Some effort" then there's SWG Resource shifts, where you had to be able to be on within 10-15 mins of an occurrence or else you'd miss out entirely because of the legion of harvesters that would be dropped within that window.   It was just plain broken.

[UnSub]

Quite clear they met the license fees. The issue was, Blizzard came out with a game with a younger IP and crushed all before it. Many, thought that any game with the starwars IP must do the same.

There was a lot of hype that SWG would the be the first million+ sub title in the West. Lineage was out there with a multi-million membership and the combination of some big name MMO talent (Raph and all the others forgotten to history) plus SOE (big success with EQ) plus Star Wars IP (favoured nerd IP) meant it was an incredible shot.

Game launched, didn't get there, so there was probably a "hmm, maybe there aren't that many MMO players out there in NA / EU".

Then WoW launched and took (I think) less than 1 month to exceed SWG's population and less than 3 to hit the 1 million subscribed mark.

I'm fine that people loved SWG, and the NGE serves as a fantastic example of what not to do to a player base (and how every MMO you love is exactly one patch away from driving you off). However, from a business point of view, it didn't meet expectations and WoW showed it up badly.

And also despite the talent involved, despite the time / money invested in it, it was still horribly buggy at launch which helped drive a lot of people off. Themeparks are comparatively easier to build than sandboxes and appeal to a wider audience, which is why the themepark model dominates (if you want to draw a binary line, of course).

[Morat20]

There's "Some effort" then there's SWG Resource shifts, where you had to be able to be on within 10-15 mins of an occurrence or else you'd miss out entirely because of the legion of harvesters that would be dropped within that window.   It was just plain broken.

Actually, you could do just fine. If you wanted to be the top -- or one of the top -- crafters, yeah. You either had to do that or buy from someone who did. (It wasn't hard to do the latter). But plenty of people -- myself included -- did just fine by tossing down harvestors somewhere convienent and merely picking what to harvest when we passed buy.

Plenty of things --furniture, paintings, architectural stuff -- didn't need quality, it needed quantity. I think I had down a factory, three harvestors aimed at minerals, two at energy, and one or two at biologicals. (I think. It's been a long time). I just left them near my house, and since I habitually logged out there it took all of five minutes when I logged on to zip by them and make any changes.

Stuff sold pretty well, and I used a lot of it for paintings and such.

Anyways, back to profitability: SWG was profitable. It had, by pre-WoW standards, a respectable player base. Then WoW came out and had approximately 43 million players, making EVERYONE look second rate. The CU was a knee-jerk attempt to grab some of the new WoW market. You could practically see the seams where they'd taken an in-house combat revamp and basically thrown 90% of it and radically shifted gears.

The NGE was simply a hail Mary pass, because they lost a lot of subs to the CU.

*shrug*. Someone, either at LucasArts or SOE, got dollar signs in their eyes when WoW started pulling in millions of players, not hundreds of thousands. The CU was a cynical, untested, quickly thrown-together attempt to cash in. It succeeded exactly as much as you'd expect it to. :)

[WindupAtheist]

Despite being years newer with a much bigger budget and a major IP, it only bested peak UO by 50k subscribers and never came close to unseating EQ. If WoW never existed it would still be remembered as underwhelming.

"Gee this UO thing made some money, but what if we did it over again with newer tech?"
"Hmm, go on."
"Then say we spend a lot more money on this version so it doesn't look like Super Nintendo?"
"Yeah yeah, I'm liking this."
"I know right? Then to top it off this game's setting is based on Star Wars, not some single-player RPGs that quit being good in the eighties!"
"Holy fuck dude, this is awesome, how many more paying customers than that old UO thing do you think we'll get?"
"Oh I dunno, like 20% tops, but our game will only last like half as long or less."
"..."

[Tale]

Too garish; didn't read.

[Morat20]

SWG was doing fine, sub numbers were north of 100k and while not quite EQ it was doing better than EQ2 and making good money.

Then WoW hit, SWG underwent two wrenching and poorly thought out conversions, and subs dropped off the face of the earth -- leading to the game being canceled. Claiming that it didn't last as long as UO is kinda pointless, insofar as SOE killed it to try to compete with WoW.

I have no idea how it'd be doing right now if they'd just continued on with as they had been, but I can't imagine them doing any worse. :)

WindupAtheist is basically looking back on it with rosy post-WoW tinted glasses. "Better than UO and EQ2 but not as good as EQ" was what, back then, they called a "solid success".

[Ingmar]

I think you might have your timeline slightly confused, EQ2 and WoW came out within weeks of each other.

[Ginaz]

Despite being years newer with a much bigger budget and a major IP, it only bested peak UO by 50k subscribers and never came close to unseating EQ. If WoW never existed it would still be remembered as underwhelming.

"Gee this UO thing made some money, but what if we did it over again with newer tech?"
"Hmm, go on."
"Then say we spend a lot more money on this version so it doesn't look like Super Nintendo?"
"Yeah yeah, I'm liking this."
"I know right? Then to top it off this game's setting is based on Star Wars, not some single-player RPGs that quit being good in the eighties!"
"Holy fuck dude, this is awesome, how many more paying customers than that old UO thing do you think we'll get?"
"Oh I dunno, like 20% tops, but our game will only last like half as long or less."
"..."

We get it.  UO was the bestest MMO of its type ever and to suggest anything else sandboxy was even remotely as good or fun is blasphemy.    Thanks for confirming what I've been hearing about for years regarding the hard core UO players.

The subs swg had may have been only 50k more than UO peak population but UO was competing with....hmm...no one else for subs while swg was competing with UO, EQ, DAOC and whatever else was available at the time.  I don't see how you fail to understand that swg was fun and enjoyable for many people.  Those same people will never tell you it was perfect and won't sugarcoat its problems.  They will, however, tell you that no MMO before or since has come to close to the great experience they had with swg.

[Morat20]

I think you might have your timeline slightly confused, EQ2 and WoW came out within weeks of each other.

Shit, it was a long time ago. :)

Okay, so SWG did better than UO, worse than EQ, but better than EQ2. In fact, if you neglect WoW entirely and compare it to every MMORPG every made that WASN'T WoW, it was solidly in the triple-A category and had levelled off at about six figures.

Then WoW came and every fucking shop and their dog had to stop accepting a mere 100,000 or so subs (and three or four times that in box sales) and shoot for millions or bust. I think SWG was the only one where the developers basically savaged an existing game trying to remake it to capture WoW's audience. Given the results, I'm not surprised no one else tried. (Somehow I suspect LucasArts was behind that particular stupidity)

So, in short, in a non-WoW world SWG was doing just fine. I'm sure LucasArts would have preferred it to crush EQ and take the top as the biggest Western MMORPG, but until WoW came along they were showing no signs of doing anything other than, well, continuing to support and expand the game.

Bluntly put -- SWG was only a failure when compared to World of Warcaft (well, up until the CU and NGE fiascos. If the first didn't drop enough subs to shitcan it, the second did). But by that standard, every Western MMORPG is an utter failure because no one is even remotely in WoW's league. And it's several years old now.

[DraconianOne]

Considering its set thousands of years before any of those things, maybe?


I don't think KOTOR lined up with any previous Starwars release, could be misremembering though. I've forgotten how old the prequels actually are.

Timeline of releases:

1994 - Tales of the Jedi: Knights of the Old Republic (comics)
1999 - Phantom Menace
2002 - Attack of the Clones
2003 - Knights of the Old Republic (game)

The KOTOR game is set 40 years after the events in the comics.

[Ingmar]

The only reason we're having the 'was it a failure?' discussion is the license, really. Obviously it wasn't a financial disaster or anything, the question is more, did it achieve its potential?

[Morat20]

The only reason we're having the 'was it a failure?' discussion is the license, really. Obviously it wasn't a financial disaster or anything, the question is more, did it achieve its potential?

Compared to what, though? Obviously SOE and LucasArts wanted a "more subs than EQ or UO" since it was pitched as UO + Star Wars. It didn't get the former, got the latter.

And on what terms? Ignore WoW -- it's an abberation, an outlier. Nobody's EVER come close in Western MMORPGs.

So what are we looking at? Box sales? Sub length? Peak subs? Return versus investment? Compared to other MMORPGs?

*shrug* If you toss out the giant in the room, you're left with a more-successful-than-average MMORPG. Hell, EQ did better and I think one or two of the post-WoW MMORPGs did better (and WoW grew the potential market a ton), but basically you had a standard, profitable triple-A MMORPG. I vaguely recall SOE and LucasArts hyping it as expecting a lot more, but fuck -- every MMORPG does that. WoW's the only one that actually, you know, did.

I think that people expecting a license to somehow make magic happen are going to get disappointed every time. For the most part, licensed games suck and licensed MMORPGs tend to fail more than succeed. (LoTRO was a nice exception, and WoW was a license from a gaming company, so if anyone was going to turn IP into 'good game' it was them).

Did it achieve it's potential? Not as a game. It launched buggy as shit, and IIRC SOE yanked most of the development team and restasked them, and the Live team never stood a fucking chance with all the half-finished and broken shit. (The game was, as usual, rushed to launch. There have been worse launches, but SWG was definetly in the top lists for 'shit on delivery').

In terms of box sales, sub numbers, and longetivty? Yeah, I'd say it did. Right up until WoW changed everything.

[Numtini]

AFAIK D&D did better than The Star Wars Roleplaying Game. Or whatever it was called.

Generic fantasy always wins.

[Lantyssa]

The only reason we're having the 'was it a failure?' discussion is the license, really. Obviously it wasn't a financial disaster or anything, the question is more, did it achieve its potential?

Does anything, besides EQ and WoW, which surprised their creators?

Maybe RIFT.  GW if you want to include it in that category.  I can't think of another MMO that's unequivocally reached or surpassed its potential.

[WindupAtheist]

The subs swg had may have been only 50k more than UO peak population but UO was competing with....hmm...no one else for subs while swg was competing with UO, EQ, DAOC and whatever else was available at the time.

UO didn't peak until DAOC had already been out for a year.  

But no guys, it's cool. I'm sure that when they bought the Star Wars license and shelled out for development "Do little more than half of what our game from 4 years ago with no licensed IP did!" was totally their goal. It's the same song and dance you get from fans of every flop-ass MMO to have ever taken more than like a year to shut down.

"EQ2 doesn't seem to have done very well."

"Sure EQ2 didn't do WoW numbers, but who can compete with WoW? Those Blizzard guys have advantages that no one else in the industry has, such as competence!"

"But it peaked hundreds of thousands of subscribers lower than EQ1. That had to be disappointing."

"FUCK YOU SHUT UP IT TURNED A PROFIT EVENTUALLY FUCK YOUUUUUUU!"

[Surlyboi]

Show us on the doll where Raph touched you, WUA.

[Lantyssa]

He's mad Raph left UO to go work on SWG.

[Sky]

He's mad Raph left UO to go work on SWG.

And like everyone else, is now on fucking facebook games.

When Raph Koster and Brian Reynolds are doing facebook shit, it's time for some new blood in the industry.

[Mrbloodworth]

I would really like to see SWG done with out the IP, and with some of this stuff addressed. Fallen earth was close, but lost some of the charm and features.

[Ratman_tf]

Fuck WoW. Has any NA made MMOG since WoW got much more than 1 million subs? And that million is usually at launch.
Over the years has the combined playerbase of MMORPGs increased much since WoW? Or is it still about a million subs for a new big IP title (max) that then trickle off into the sunset?

WoW didn't expand the MMOG playerbase. It just made Blizzard a lot of money.

[Mrbloodworth]

WoW didn't expand the MMOG playerbase.

Yes it did.

[Ratman_tf]

WoW didn't expand the MMOG playerbase.

Yes it did.

How?

[Raph]

A lot of the numbers in this thread are wrong. Dev costs, sub numbers, all that. Of course, I am not going to tell you real numbers. 

[Ratman_tf]

Tease.

[WindupAtheist]

He's mad Raph left UO to go work on SWG.

The game got better after he quit and was replaced by people who weren't afraid to violate his social engineering ant farm Vision(tm) with some actual hard-coded grief protection.