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Been trying to play MMOs since 2004...
Dauzqul
Member RarePosts: 1,982
... still can't find one that holds my attention like old SWG did.
Comments
And if more people felt the same way, they wouldn't have changed the whole game in desperation thus causing the remaining players to bail leaving the game empty and ripped to shreds by the community at large.
A relative newcomer to the MMO scene (2005) I never even tried it because I was consistently told that it wasn't even worth trying (on this very forum). It wasn't just a few, it was what could be considered a consensus.
Either the game was the greatest sandbox mmo ever created or nostalgia is making people see something better than it actually was.
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
I feel your pain. I joined SWG at launch (beta 3 actually). It was my first MMO. No MMO since has held my attention as long, or has interested me as much.
What's worse is that I feel people like you and I are in the minority. If the industry landscape is any indication, most MMO players lack the understanding, creativity and imagination to succeed in a game like SWG.
I feel that you and I will be longing for SWG for years to come, never to find a replacement.
I believe I am a pretty fair judge, and while I do have quite a bit of nostalgia about the game, that isn't it.
This game put into place a system where things mattered, and didn't matter. Crafting in SWG has no equal anywhere else, period. The same goes for PvP in terms that a brand new character could kill an experienced veteran. It was unlikely, but it could happen because there was no levels, merely benefits from skills you had trained.
No game has class choice and variety as Original SWG did. You could master a couple of advanced trees, or take a little of this, a little of that, and so on.
Finally the player economy in this game has no equal anywhere. Since everything decayed, broke, and eventually went away you always had a supply and demand. There were ups and downs based on what people in the game were trying to do. A giant clan war breaks out? Armor and guns all of a sudden are in high demand. The guys with the top dollar (credits) get the best stuff made with the hardest to get materials, and then pay someone to slice it for even more improvements.
My final point, the faction system they had. You started neutral and had the choice of staying that way, going Imperial, or going Rebel. And later if you wanted to switch you could do that to. Faction was mostly for story and wars, if you didn't care then it didn't affect you. No being stuck being Imperial just because you chose a Zabrak or any crap like that.
What I posted above are actual facts, they aren't pieces of nostalgia. If a new game came out that was basically this I would play it in a heartbeat. They could replace SWG with steam punk, fantasy elves, I really don't care. For me it was the choices I had and the economy that made this game great.
What's odd is how much better the game suddenly became once its closure was announced. While it was struggling along for eight years with its slowly dwindling player base...not so much. For most of the game's actual history, the player base was indulging itself with "Never Forgive, Never Forget" that still remains, in some of them, to this very day.
But you know, the best MMO (and best sandbox) I ever played wasn't an MMO at all. We've all got our nostalgia goggles for something.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
SWG was a great game it had it's problems. Any time I would go to the jedi village that would usually result in a ticket as some npc would be stuck in a way. The problem with mobs being buried in the sand, and so forth. The rubber band issues I had when heading to the dwb. I hated the combat upgrade that changed the game from a skill based game to a level based game. I have no rose colored glasses on. There were some days I would be very aggravated. Things I loved if I wanted to go farm light-saber crystals all day in the Tuscan bunker I could, and make a killing in credits, If I wanted to go out to the krayt grave yard and solo one I could.If I wanted to just get on my speeder and drive from one side of the map to the other while gathering resources I could.
Then came the NGE and I will say it totally ruined the game immersion for me. In fact I only went back to try it when I got a free 30 days to move my toons from intrepid server to starslide. Even then I hated the NGE and still do.
However I will say this if I had to pick a star wars game to play SWG VS SWTOR I would pick the NGE every time. I hated how all of Jedi Knights got that title ripped from us and made elder jedi. I hated the fact that Jedi were made a starting class. I hated how the NGE stripped all 36 classed down. I hated how they changed a great crafting system into just a plain one. Still no rose colored glasses in place. I still feel even with the NGE that I hated so much for what all it did to the game was far more superior than what we got with swtor. Especially space, JTL was the one thing the NGE did not mess up.
Yup. And that other game I mentioned? Still people complaining about de-ICEing, removal of breakage--that happened in 1995(!!!) The ability of gamers to continue grumping about their favorite grudge, perpetually, is just astonishing.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Honestly, for me, SWG gets better every time I try a new MMO.
I hear you man.
SWG was never really struggling, though. It was being compared to World of Warcraft, .e.g, "How can we achieve WoW subscription numbers etc." From a business standpoint, it made sense to change the game into something more like WoW. It backfired.
I pity those who never got to experience SWG. There is a reason why it's still talked about every day. It was a good game. I'm completely shocked that there still hasen't been anything like it, e.g., deep crafting, true exploration, freedom, lore, etc. SWG was not a sandbox in the way Darkfall is. SWG was unique.
SWG was not struggling financially in the least.
At ~200k subs, they were pulling down almost 10% of the gross cost of making the game every month (based on the oft rumored $30-$32 mil price tag SWG had up to launch). The game had paid for itself several times over by the time of the NGE.
That said, SOE/LA decided that was not enough, after seeing the numbers WoW was getting. Go read the Rubenfeld "om-nom-nom" blog entry or the Freeman "apology" article(s) for insight into what was really going on.
And frankly, that was one of the reasons the NGE was approved: they had already made their money from SWG, so if the game went down the toilet (which it did) they didn't care quite as much.
SWG had a lot of problems, but being solidly profitable up to the NGE was not one of them.
This is false on so many levels. Lucas/Sony made decisions that NO ONE wanted; proven from polls/testing and it was ninja dropped onto the populous without warning. Simply stating because it wasn't a fluke Warcraft subscriber number it must not have been popular is a complete fallacy.
I hear ya, op. Its in my top 10 best games of all time list.
Goddamn it was so good. I miss it so much.
TEF was da bomb!
Remember those large battles that started with a Reb and an Imp fighting inside the Mos Eiseley cantina?
Good times. Good times indeed. Can't wait to relive them!
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
If I remember correctly, taking over / gaining control of cities/towns via PvP didn't happen until much later.
And in the beginning, the PvP was awful due to the extremely overpowered FOTM builds. First year was really, really rough for that.
Rifelman 1-shot Mind shots, TK was unstoppable for a while, Commando and Bounty Hunter had so much better Pistol skills than... the Pistoleer... Smuggler was worthless (made me so sad) and I remember Combat Medics being OP for a while due to disease grenades.. there was the CH craze for a while - one of the few fads I gave into on my quest for maxing out the Pistoleer/Smuggler lines...
Oh and I almost forget the pocket AT-ST phase where people would carry those around and just trounce entire groups of players in PvP.
On the PVE side of things - there was nothing to do but farm missions for XP because the few Theme Parks (yes they WERE called that) of Jabba's Palace, and the Rebel/Imperial theme parks were incredibly broken.
I also remember maybe 1-2 months of "monthly story arcs" that actually worked, though they were completed in about 10-15 minutes.
They added creature mounts into the game before speeders - which was so odd because it's Star Wars people wanted speeders and bikes first not frick'n bantha's and dewbacks.
I remember when they finally added in the player cities and all the great social hubs on Tatooine/Corellia emptied out like a plague had come through which ruined the whole cantina scene of Entertainers/Dancers.
I remember how overpriced all of the goods on player vendors were on my server... ummm... I can't remember the name now... Chilastra maybe?
I remember how you could wear any armor you wanted... as long as it was Composite because everything else was shit - so everyone ran around looking like a wanna be Stormtrooper.
I remember the day I got into the beta of JTL and was so excited to relive some of the great memories I had from my X-Wing/TIE-Fighter days (I had those games on floppy disks yo) only to find a complete RPG'd up garbaged up turd that was a complete joke of a flight sim.
But still, despite the fact that game was truly garbage and one of the buggiest/most broken messes in the history of MMO gaming... it was Star Wars and it had its own special charm...
I remember going back and playing the trial in early 2011 and a lot of the SAME issues/bugs from 2003 were still in the game. The same wierd animation bugs and rubber-banding issues, the same wierd sound glitches etc.
Let's face it - SWG may have had some great ideas, but the implementation was so poor the writing was on the wall since launch people.
SOE mismanaged and ran this thing into the ground long before WoW came out in 2004 and stole just about everyone who was still playing SWG.
Regardless of the bugs Spock, the game was DAMN fun. All they had to do was fix what they had but they chose not to.
I'd still be playing today if they did.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Go look at the chart at MMOCharts.com to see the best numbers available.
It shows: there were plenty of people playing SWG, in regards to total historial numbers for SWG numbers after the launch of WoW.
There were heavy drops after: 1. the CU (which was badly done) and 2. the NGE (the worst patch in MMO history).
You didn't like SWG, fine.
There were plenty of people that did, and considering its low production price, it was solidly financially successful as well.
With all that said and still people claim it to be the best goes to tell you how good it really was flaws and all. The search continues......
What killed the game and its subs was the Holocron. This was told by Raph Koster himself a ways back. You can find it on his web site if you want to dig it up.
I would too.
The game had so much potential.
I left when they told me that "content' was grinding out a dozen or so professions in order to try and unlock my FS slot.
Professions I had NO interest in pursuing - the first Holocron I got was for Doctor I believe.
I wanted to be a SMUGGLER, I wanted them to FIX SMUGGLER.
I didn't want to be a Doctor, I didn't want to be a crafter, I wanted to be a Smuggler and Pilot and both of those parts of the game were complete trash.
They lost my sub by failing to do exactly what you said - fix what they had.
That's the true story of SWG people - failed execution.
That is what makes it's story so damned tragic - it had the potential to be THE defining MMORPG of the genre - a true game-changer that would last forever and be the touch stone of every game to follow.
But they f*cked it up - and they lost their players - and then someone came along and did a whole lot better at the execution part.
Can you guess what game that was/is? lol
That is what he said, in regards to hurting the fabric of the player interdependency part of the game. And he was right.
But that is not what made the majority of people quit.
The stupidifying of the game mechanics with the CU/NGE did far more damage.
I feel the same way with Dark Age of Camelot, before they put in the turds called new frontiers and trials of atlantis. That was by far the best mmo I've ever played.
In a world of sharp knives, you would be a spoon.