Though I loved SWG it was a trainwreck from the very start, bugs bugs bugs and broken content and skills. Still think it had the best crafting/housing system to this day and very surprised noone has tried to copy this.
WoW came out, SOE panicked, wanted to attracted more casual players because pre-NGE was a complex game if you were into crafting, NGE happened and game died.
/agree
Aside from that the game was released too early.
Also too much focus was put on Jedi and it should not have been a superior class to any other force enabled class (ala a force enabled pistoleer)... Big mistake.
But nothing comes close to the mistake that was the NGE.
It was never about SW , but more about the designer and the complexity of the game he could build. In the end he built an overly complex game for the technology on a extremely popular IP . To compound matters he/they then did the CU and NGE to attempt to save the game, and botched it badly. Failure to deliver on promises . Not keeping to the concept of the game and timeframe it was set in . Just so many more points you can go to , but the most important was the hubris of those on the managing end. Let's not forget the release of WoW ( I'm no fan of WoW and never have been , either . Sadly I have to add that disclaimer , least I be lableled a WoW Fanboi ) also that drove the final nail into that cofin.
It was never about SW , but more about the designer and the complexity of the game he could build. In the end he built an overly complex game for the technology on a extremely popular IP . To compound matters he/they then did the CU and NGE to attempt to save the game, and botched it badly. Failure to deliver on promises . Not keeping to the concept of the game and timeframe it was set in . Just so many more points you can go to , but the most important was the hubris of those on the managing end. Let's not forget the release of WoW ( I'm no fan of WoW and never have been , either . Sadly I have to add that disclaimer , least I be lableled a WoW Fanboi ) also that drove the final nail into that cofin.
If "he" is Raph Koster then "he" left the development team right after release. Raph did not want to release it unfinished, it was SOE.
WRONG!!!!! Wow had nothing to do with it!!!! The game died after...
Real reasons imo:
1. They NEVER fixed early bugs and exploits!!! They kept adding stuff causing even more bugs!!! This was the beginning of the end !!!
2. The wound system was great dunno why the deleted it (gave entertainers a purpose in pvp)
3. Decay and death penalty!!! Could of been a little less harsh but was great taking it out was DUMB!!!!
4. Did i mention not fixing bugs????
5. 20 man hunting groups rocked!!!! Why delete it? /sigh
6. Ealry BH system was good Jedi who whipped out their sabre in town got on the bounty boards...The names on bounties were realistic who the F$#$ hunts a mark not knowing who it is? Cmon SOE really?
7. Hologrind was not thought out imo...
8. Player faction bases didnt cost enough and should of gained added features the longer it survived, SOE dropped the ball there.
thats just off the top of my head the CU and NGE was just the kill shot.. SWG was already hurting after year 1... The stuff they copied from WoW and going to combat levels was the biggest fubar in game history but hey it was STAR WARSY!! NOT!!!
who the F$#$ hunts a mark not knowing who it is? Cmon SOE really?
If it was someone on the board that I knew was going to be really tough to beat, I might not think it was worth it. But, if I went to the trouble of tracking an unknown person down, I always fought them.
Anyone that was there knows why SWG died. SOE decided to create a New Game Experience. They took 32 classes down to 9 "iconic" classes, took away our ability to multi-class and rewrote the game. One of the lead developers also said the game was too complicated and required people to "read" too much, that gamers wanted more action and less stuff to do. Let's also not forget they totally rewrote the combat of the game nad put in a psuedo first person-esq type combat system that blew chunks like sea-sick kid. LOS for it was no existant(could shoot through entire mountains) and laser blast tracked targets like homing missles. What a joke.
That is it in a nutshell. Prior to the NGE, Star Wars Galaxies had over 350k subscribers...after the NGE the pop dropped to under 50k. Now back then, sure WoW was pushing 4 mil subscribers...but WoW was WoW and SOE decided they wanted to be like WoW. Instead of realizing what they had and it was good...they alienated their core player base and drove them away. The game never recovered. Because if you look at most western MMO's today, they'd kill to retain 350k subscribers. To bad SOE head muckity muck was so stupid. Anyway, it closes it doors for good this Dec. Good riddence to bad game.
Most simply put $0E released an incomplete and unfinished game. They made sweeping changes to it not once but twice. The whole thing is most analogues to having your favorite book turned into a movie and finding out that the screen play was written by someone who never read the book and a director who did not read the book and has an assistant who told him the highlights of the screen play.
After the movie comes out it does not do as well as you would think so it is reworked and released with some new scenes about a year later. About another year later a new person is hired who did read the book. However this person thinks the old movie is to heady and wants it to become more light hearted but no longer has money to shoot new scenes or just make a reboot of the movie so instead they just re edit the old movie.
Put it this way: You buy yourself a nice new and shiney rolls royce, you drive that car and love it for three or four years and at the next service the garage takes it away and gives you a mini.
Shift my crafting empire to a pile of dust .
Recources shifted to crap , stuff that i took a long time and credits to get.
All my good weps normailzed.
Oh and ...
3 classes i played gone.
I had 4 accounts.
I didnt care abount jedi , our guild BID made more content that you could want.
Jedi go from WTF Pwn machines to Cheerleaders with glowsticks. TKM, gone, buffs gone, Ents, useless. AI showing code levels at level 500. They repaied alot of it over time but it was too late.
You can blame greed, politics of IP games, SOE. I hate to blame SOE, they are the only ones who paid for the mistake and they paid dearly. They still are to this day but the best description I could give would be, they acted like a publicly funded company. Like they were immune to any sort of damage, as if they were untouchable. Every game they have releases since has pretty much been a flop because they are forever the NGE company. The people who broke SWG. I don't know if they should carry that cross alone but with SW-TOR looking fine, it's clear LAE aren't hurting from it.
as said before.. swg went wrong in only 1 simple thing : SOE
Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), games division from SONY, and owner of Verant Interactive.
While the motives behind their decision are still debatable ( some think Everquest II developed by SOE and released at end of 2004 was one of them ), SOE decided to totally remap the way swg was played in 2005, 2 years after swg was released, killing the game and leading to a massive exodus of players from swg.
Easiest question in the world to answer... cause its kinda blaringly obvious.. rather then capitolizing on the game they had at creation they op'ted for a complete redesign in hopes of attracting more players.. unfortunatly all they actually acomplished was to alienate thier already existing solid player base.
The Marketing people at LEC/LA saw the obscene sub's at WOW and twitched. They assumed that because Star Wars is one of the Largest IP's on the planet (at the time) that the Subcriber base should be near WoW numbers.
They told SOE what they wanted done to the game to make it more accessible to the MMO player base, and forgot the most important thing:
Star Wars is a Niche Sci Fi genre.
WoW is a Fantasy genre.
Fantasy MMO gamers are not just going to play and stay with a Sci Fi game just for its name/IP.
If LA/LEC had kept their hands off of SW:G and just let SOE develop and introduce Star Wars content for the game, as well as FIX the profession Problems, then the CURB wouldn't have been Needed and the NGE wouldn't have happened.
SW:G would have had more expansions after ToOW if LA hadn't screwed up.
The problem though...People would have still been complaining about FoTM this and OP Jedi that and AFK regardless of the Timeframe of the game, be it 2004 or 2011.
And the game would still have lost sub's because eventually everyone but the Biggest Fanboy/girl is going to eventually move on to the next new shiney.
Just think about it as a normal game and its pretty obvious.
When you create a game.. pretty much you stick with what you sold your customers.
If things are broken you fix them.
If you want to make a different game then you make... another game.
Beyond that... we heard all this BS about "bleeding subs"... well ok but seriously? At what point after the NGE did they have more subscribers than before... or prior to the CU? There is just no way they ever had as many subs as even the CU had. Yet they didn't change the mostly empty game (yes some servers like star sider had population) to something else.
The point with that isn't even the bleeding subs part. When the CEO of EA was talking about subscribers he says... "we will make a substantial profit at 500,000" and then alludes to the fact they are thinking more like 1.5 million. I have no idea what they currently think this was something he said a while ago.
Its just the idea that they would like this bigger number of subs... but really would be very happy with this lesser number because it would make a lot of profit.
Any game where the developer totally changes the product sold.. in the attempt to find the larger number of subscribers is pretty much going to fail.
Oh and yes I would say its really not the best idea to work with 3rd party IP's. The cost of license along with restrictions or possible friction from the IP holder is just way to much Murphy added into something that has too many variables already.
both soe and la are at fault in my opinion. i love aspects of both pre and post nge. i wish i could have played a mix of both. too many changes to original game, it was a great game that just needed some adjustments.
Does anyone remember the SW ccg? why did Lucas pull the liscence and give it to another company who had a dumb down version? How about what Lucas did to the movies? There might be a pattern, there may not. But, I have given up spending my money on Lucas and everything SW cause of Lucas' Empire crushing everything I love and had respect for.
SOE on the other hand dosent get away on how they treated thier costomers. They were HoRRiBLE!! And all you that blame the fans for "complaining the wrong way" and "not saying what you think they should say" to appease LA and SOE is absolute BS. nice try though lmao
Smed was a push over and Luca Arts are a bunch of ass hats. the end.
Playing: PO, EVE Waiting for: WoD Favourite MMOs: VG, EVE, FE and DDO Any person who expresses rage and loathing for an MMO is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
SWG did already have issues from start. It was poorly coded (like all SOE games) and they didn't care to fix many known issues, and in some cases pretended the issues didn't exist at all.
The NGE was just the final straw.
They had some great ideas and a better lead programmer and more will to fix what wasn't working from the start would have made wonders for the sub numbers.
Mainly, they tried to make the game more what i would call hard core.
Single character to start, lots of grind to get jedi.
Lots of dependencies on other characters, entertainers, medics.
Lots of skills, and character types, with all kind of ways to make use of skills.
Really, really complex crafting and gathering system.
All the above can be and are good things. IF you take the time to make them work right. But also not something that will get you mass appeal.
Then they tried to turn the game not made for mass appeal into one that would be. By taking what could have been fixed up into a nice hard core type game, they took a chainsaw to it and made a mess.
SWG was not "niche" as some would like you to believe. Star Wars is the largest name in marketing. MMOs were "niche" at the time of release, but W0W changed that...SOE got jealous, failure ensued.
SWG was not "niche" as some would like you to believe. Star Wars is the largest name in marketing. MMOs were "niche" at the time of release, but W0W changed that...SOE got jealous, failure ensued.
SWG was niche in regards that it wasnt a straight foward themepark
"We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base," said Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director at LucasArts.
"There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer.
We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves."
SWG pre-CU was unique in so many ways. Sadly, after the departure of Raph Koster the rest of developers lost the original focus, and were probably pressured to do changes which corporate bosses were thinking would increase revenue.
SWG had something for practically everyone - even housewives were enjoying social aspects of it, there were grinders, incredible crafters and "businessmen", even elite smack-talking PvPers.
What it lacked is a certain accessibility for beginners, which could have been tweaked easily.
I remember some elements which were supposed to be included in the ORIGINAL Combat Upgrade - and those were excellent, but probably difficult to implement, so under constant pressure to "fluff-up" the game for kids, they come up with the rushed-up CU, which basically just introduced silly colored icons, destroyed many great combat animations, and added "root and snare" silliness.
I don't think Jedi destroyed the game - but in my opinion, the secret of unlocking should have remained a secret. It was mysterious and exciting - should have stayed that way.
All in all - WHAT WENT WRONG IS - if they wanted to make a new game, they should have just make a new game and leave the original one - even barely supported - for those who DID NOT want a new game.
Jedi completely ruined the game.
With the introduction of Jedi the focus of the game shifted from living in the galaxy of starwars to grinding out your jedi character.
To be competitive in PvP you had to be a Jedi because if you weren't Jedi you were the victim of a Jedi.
If you were fighting an elite mob the jedi would come up and steal it right from under you because they put out more DPS in seconds than your entire group could in minutes.
Jedi were gods that made "masters" of combat professions look like as if they were holding a sharped stick by the wrong end.
When Jedi became too numerous to count everybody (even those that didn't want to) was forced to either join the jedi or quit for the reasons I gave above.
So in the end you had jedi on one side and chefs, medics, entertainers, and mineral harvestors (the only professions that catered to jedi) on the other and that's all that was left of pre-CU SWG. SWG wasn't just bleeding subs - it was hemorrhaging fast and something needed to be done about it.
The combat rebalance was the cure, but instead they gave us the combat upgrade and before we were comfortable with it they dropped the NGE on us and that was the bullet in the head that stopped the bleeding once and for all.
SWTOR has avoided most of this mess by making jedi and sith just another class like any other...
Comments
It went wrong as soon as they added Jedi. Once that happened, it was all over.
Though I loved SWG it was a trainwreck from the very start, bugs bugs bugs and broken content and skills. Still think it had the best crafting/housing system to this day and very surprised noone has tried to copy this.
/agree
Aside from that the game was released too early.
Also too much focus was put on Jedi and it should not have been a superior class to any other force enabled class (ala a force enabled pistoleer)... Big mistake.
But nothing comes close to the mistake that was the NGE.
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
It was never about SW , but more about the designer and the complexity of the game he could build. In the end he built an overly complex game for the technology on a extremely popular IP . To compound matters he/they then did the CU and NGE to attempt to save the game, and botched it badly. Failure to deliver on promises . Not keeping to the concept of the game and timeframe it was set in . Just so many more points you can go to , but the most important was the hubris of those on the managing end. Let's not forget the release of WoW ( I'm no fan of WoW and never have been , either . Sadly I have to add that disclaimer , least I be lableled a WoW Fanboi ) also that drove the final nail into that cofin.
If "he" is Raph Koster then "he" left the development team right after release. Raph did not want to release it unfinished, it was SOE.
'Overly complex' :-)
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
WRONG!!!!! Wow had nothing to do with it!!!! The game died after...
Real reasons imo:
1. They NEVER fixed early bugs and exploits!!! They kept adding stuff causing even more bugs!!! This was the beginning of the end !!!
2. The wound system was great dunno why the deleted it (gave entertainers a purpose in pvp)
3. Decay and death penalty!!! Could of been a little less harsh but was great taking it out was DUMB!!!!
4. Did i mention not fixing bugs????
5. 20 man hunting groups rocked!!!! Why delete it? /sigh
6. Ealry BH system was good Jedi who whipped out their sabre in town got on the bounty boards...The names on bounties were realistic who the F$#$ hunts a mark not knowing who it is? Cmon SOE really?
7. Hologrind was not thought out imo...
8. Player faction bases didnt cost enough and should of gained added features the longer it survived, SOE dropped the ball there.
thats just off the top of my head the CU and NGE was just the kill shot.. SWG was already hurting after year 1... The stuff they copied from WoW and going to combat levels was the biggest fubar in game history but hey it was STAR WARSY!! NOT!!!
If it was someone on the board that I knew was going to be really tough to beat, I might not think it was worth it. But, if I went to the trouble of tracking an unknown person down, I always fought them.
Just my thoughts on it.
Anyone that was there knows why SWG died. SOE decided to create a New Game Experience. They took 32 classes down to 9 "iconic" classes, took away our ability to multi-class and rewrote the game. One of the lead developers also said the game was too complicated and required people to "read" too much, that gamers wanted more action and less stuff to do. Let's also not forget they totally rewrote the combat of the game nad put in a psuedo first person-esq type combat system that blew chunks like sea-sick kid. LOS for it was no existant(could shoot through entire mountains) and laser blast tracked targets like homing missles. What a joke.
That is it in a nutshell. Prior to the NGE, Star Wars Galaxies had over 350k subscribers...after the NGE the pop dropped to under 50k. Now back then, sure WoW was pushing 4 mil subscribers...but WoW was WoW and SOE decided they wanted to be like WoW. Instead of realizing what they had and it was good...they alienated their core player base and drove them away. The game never recovered. Because if you look at most western MMO's today, they'd kill to retain 350k subscribers. To bad SOE head muckity muck was so stupid. Anyway, it closes it doors for good this Dec. Good riddence to bad game.
Most simply put $0E released an incomplete and unfinished game. They made sweeping changes to it not once but twice. The whole thing is most analogues to having your favorite book turned into a movie and finding out that the screen play was written by someone who never read the book and a director who did not read the book and has an assistant who told him the highlights of the screen play.
After the movie comes out it does not do as well as you would think so it is reworked and released with some new scenes about a year later. About another year later a new person is hired who did read the book. However this person thinks the old movie is to heady and wants it to become more light hearted but no longer has money to shoot new scenes or just make a reboot of the movie so instead they just re edit the old movie.
Shift my crafting empire to a pile of dust .
Recources shifted to crap , stuff that i took a long time and credits to get.
All my good weps normailzed.
Oh and ...
3 classes i played gone.
I had 4 accounts.
I didnt care abount jedi , our guild BID made more content that you could want.
Was one of the best comunity driven games .
then everyone went way.....
Short and simple, NGE killed SWG.
Jedi go from WTF Pwn machines to Cheerleaders with glowsticks. TKM, gone, buffs gone, Ents, useless. AI showing code levels at level 500. They repaied alot of it over time but it was too late.
You can blame greed, politics of IP games, SOE. I hate to blame SOE, they are the only ones who paid for the mistake and they paid dearly. They still are to this day but the best description I could give would be, they acted like a publicly funded company. Like they were immune to any sort of damage, as if they were untouchable. Every game they have releases since has pretty much been a flop because they are forever the NGE company. The people who broke SWG. I don't know if they should carry that cross alone but with SW-TOR looking fine, it's clear LAE aren't hurting from it.
as said before.. swg went wrong in only 1 simple thing : SOE
Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), games division from SONY, and owner of Verant Interactive.
While the motives behind their decision are still debatable ( some think Everquest II developed by SOE and released at end of 2004 was one of them ), SOE decided to totally remap the way swg was played in 2005, 2 years after swg was released, killing the game and leading to a massive exodus of players from swg.
Easiest question in the world to answer... cause its kinda blaringly obvious.. rather then capitolizing on the game they had at creation they op'ted for a complete redesign in hopes of attracting more players.. unfortunatly all they actually acomplished was to alienate thier already existing solid player base.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
LA is where SWG went wrong.
The Marketing people at LEC/LA saw the obscene sub's at WOW and twitched. They assumed that because Star Wars is one of the Largest IP's on the planet (at the time) that the Subcriber base should be near WoW numbers.
They told SOE what they wanted done to the game to make it more accessible to the MMO player base, and forgot the most important thing:
Star Wars is a Niche Sci Fi genre.
WoW is a Fantasy genre.
Fantasy MMO gamers are not just going to play and stay with a Sci Fi game just for its name/IP.
If LA/LEC had kept their hands off of SW:G and just let SOE develop and introduce Star Wars content for the game, as well as FIX the profession Problems, then the CURB wouldn't have been Needed and the NGE wouldn't have happened.
SW:G would have had more expansions after ToOW if LA hadn't screwed up.
The problem though...People would have still been complaining about FoTM this and OP Jedi that and AFK regardless of the Timeframe of the game, be it 2004 or 2011.
And the game would still have lost sub's because eventually everyone but the Biggest Fanboy/girl is going to eventually move on to the next new shiney.
MMO History: 2528 days in SW:G
Just think about it as a normal game and its pretty obvious.
When you create a game.. pretty much you stick with what you sold your customers.
If things are broken you fix them.
If you want to make a different game then you make... another game.
Beyond that... we heard all this BS about "bleeding subs"... well ok but seriously? At what point after the NGE did they have more subscribers than before... or prior to the CU? There is just no way they ever had as many subs as even the CU had. Yet they didn't change the mostly empty game (yes some servers like star sider had population) to something else.
The point with that isn't even the bleeding subs part. When the CEO of EA was talking about subscribers he says... "we will make a substantial profit at 500,000" and then alludes to the fact they are thinking more like 1.5 million. I have no idea what they currently think this was something he said a while ago.
Its just the idea that they would like this bigger number of subs... but really would be very happy with this lesser number because it would make a lot of profit.
Any game where the developer totally changes the product sold.. in the attempt to find the larger number of subscribers is pretty much going to fail.
Oh and yes I would say its really not the best idea to work with 3rd party IP's. The cost of license along with restrictions or possible friction from the IP holder is just way to much Murphy added into something that has too many variables already.
not that I played it, but SoE. duh
both soe and la are at fault in my opinion. i love aspects of both pre and post nge. i wish i could have played a mix of both. too many changes to original game, it was a great game that just needed some adjustments.
Does anyone remember the SW ccg? why did Lucas pull the liscence and give it to another company who had a dumb down version? How about what Lucas did to the movies? There might be a pattern, there may not. But, I have given up spending my money on Lucas and everything SW cause of Lucas' Empire crushing everything I love and had respect for.
SOE on the other hand dosent get away on how they treated thier costomers. They were HoRRiBLE!! And all you that blame the fans for "complaining the wrong way" and "not saying what you think they should say" to appease LA and SOE is absolute BS. nice try though lmao
Smed was a push over and Luca Arts are a bunch of ass hats. the end.
Playing: PO, EVE
Waiting for: WoD
Favourite MMOs: VG, EVE, FE and DDO
Any person who expresses rage and loathing for an MMO is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
SWG did already have issues from start. It was poorly coded (like all SOE games) and they didn't care to fix many known issues, and in some cases pretended the issues didn't exist at all.
The NGE was just the final straw.
They had some great ideas and a better lead programmer and more will to fix what wasn't working from the start would have made wonders for the sub numbers.
Mainly, they tried to make the game more what i would call hard core.
Single character to start, lots of grind to get jedi.
Lots of dependencies on other characters, entertainers, medics.
Lots of skills, and character types, with all kind of ways to make use of skills.
Really, really complex crafting and gathering system.
All the above can be and are good things. IF you take the time to make them work right. But also not something that will get you mass appeal.
Then they tried to turn the game not made for mass appeal into one that would be. By taking what could have been fixed up into a nice hard core type game, they took a chainsaw to it and made a mess.
NGE
/thread
It went wrong the day SOE signed the contract.
SOE was the problem. SOE is the problem.
SWG was not "niche" as some would like you to believe. Star Wars is the largest name in marketing. MMOs were "niche" at the time of release, but W0W changed that...SOE got jealous, failure ensued.
SWG was niche in regards that it wasnt a straight foward themepark
regarding the SWG NGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/arts/10star.html
EQ2 fan sites
Jedi completely ruined the game.
With the introduction of Jedi the focus of the game shifted from living in the galaxy of starwars to grinding out your jedi character.
To be competitive in PvP you had to be a Jedi because if you weren't Jedi you were the victim of a Jedi.
If you were fighting an elite mob the jedi would come up and steal it right from under you because they put out more DPS in seconds than your entire group could in minutes.
Jedi were gods that made "masters" of combat professions look like as if they were holding a sharped stick by the wrong end.
When Jedi became too numerous to count everybody (even those that didn't want to) was forced to either join the jedi or quit for the reasons I gave above.
So in the end you had jedi on one side and chefs, medics, entertainers, and mineral harvestors (the only professions that catered to jedi) on the other and that's all that was left of pre-CU SWG. SWG wasn't just bleeding subs - it was hemorrhaging fast and something needed to be done about it.
The combat rebalance was the cure, but instead they gave us the combat upgrade and before we were comfortable with it they dropped the NGE on us and that was the bullet in the head that stopped the bleeding once and for all.
SWTOR has avoided most of this mess by making jedi and sith just another class like any other...