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The Truth
bleed0range
Member Posts: 109
Now, I played this game way back when it first came out in 2003/2004 and had fun. It was my first MMO if I recall correctly. I largely ignored the game for a long time after because I lost interest after the shock of being in a "star wars world" wore off. The gameplay itself wasn't ever mindblowingly awesome to me, or so I thought. But over the years I have heard so many stories about how great it was before the NGE, and so much time had passed, I kind of wasn't sure what it was like back in 03/04. Until I read the oldest posts in this forum.
If you read them you won't find people praising the game. You'll find people complaining about how buggy the game is. How SOE doesn't listen to it's playerbase (which you do still hear), how there is nothing to do in the game and it's boring, how it's too grindy, they complained that the JTL expansion was going to be a rip-off of X-WING vs. TIE FIGHTER sims (which is something it's now praised for), they compained of the boring crafting system (which it's praised for), they complained of the period it was set in even SUGGESTING that they should have set it in the time period of the Old Republic and then they reasoned that it would be easier to just make another game, "but they're not going to do that." They complained about how it didn't feel "Star Wars."
I read through posts from 2003-2005 and everything up there was listed, multiple times by different users. A lot of people paint the history of this game as being so wonderful until NGE ruined it. Granted, SOE were incredibly dumb with that decision and how they handled it, but it's obvious how they came to the conclusion to do that.
It's funny, that's all I'm saying. Funny to me, because I see people complain about how SWTOR won't be like SWG. The space game should be more like X-wing vs Tie Fighter... or that being set in the old republic they can't identify with stuff as well as in the original trilogy. Or how the crafting system might not be in-depth enough.
My own personal opinion of the game is that it's much better, technically, than it was in 2004. But it's still only okay. I re-subbed in 2009/2010 for awhile. Legacy was one of the most boring things ever, especially at Naboo. Anyway, I guess I just wanted to post this because people tend to paint either a really bleak or really glamarous picture of SWG's future or past... when the truth lies somewhere in-between.
Comments
First forums are where people post complains few get on a forum to talk about how great something is and few people will say that the game was perfect. It wasn't the classes weren't balanced, it was very grindy, and it was buggy. So of course your going to find ALOT of posts back then about how the game sucked, but it had alot of potential to be a great game if SOE would have just kept it to it's original game design.
It was and still is the only combat MMO since UO where the vast majority of gamers had to get their equipment from players and not as loot. It's the only MMO I know of where guilds had their own towns and bases which could be attacked and destroyed. It's the only combat mmo I know of that had non-combat classes that people enjoyed playing.
But instead of fixing the lack of content or the grindiness or the bugs, SOE decided to change the combat system. From a unique skill system to wow/eq the star wars edition.
I will not play a game with a cash shop ever again. A dev job should be to make the game better not make me pay so it sucks less.
I totally agree with you in that SWG was really not all that when it first launched. The combat was the terrible EQ clone type you get in most MMOs like WOW and it just did not fit into a sci-fi setting.
Star Wars is about lazer pew-pewing and hitting people with light sabres. Not auto attack, sit back and watch...
The funny this was that Sony release PlanetSide about the same time, that game had full FPS style combat for 399 consecutive players in one area back in 2003 !! Sony missed out a real big trick when they did not put the combat of planetside into Star Wars - they tired later with the new combat changes but it was half assed job. They were on the right lines when they upgraded the combat system but the engine could not handle it.
The space part of the game "jump to light speed" was awesome. There are still no MMOs out there that can what JTLS did (jumpgate perhaps).
SO I totally agree the original SWG was only good in peoples minds, in reality it was a bug fest with shit combat that was out of place in the star wars universe.
It was "so good in people's minds" that 350k seperate paying accts were going at its peak. Few games can say that.
After the NGE 50k accts were cancelled in the first week, another 50k in the following month and more followed. That is how good the NGE was compared to the old game. Maybe 10k accts left, maybe less. That is how good the current game is.
Was Pre-NGE perfect, not even close. Was it very enjoyabe for a lot of people and was it truly innovative in many respects (crafting, open world - no zone, player economy, level of player interdependency), absolutely. But the devs dropped the ball, they had all the chances, and screwed them all up. They didn't fix bugs, they didn't fix unfinished quests and systems, they did not flesh out the content that was supposed to be there.... "Working as Intended"... remember that? The didn't clean up combat. Any Pre-CU vet could tell you what SWG needed back then: Fix the Bugs, Add more content. (There were supposed to be several story acrs after the Cries of Alderaan, but SOE dropped the ball on that, too).
Pre-CU and Pre-NGE were far superior games to the SWG that is now. More importantly to many gamers that enjoyed the early versioins of SWG, nothing has come along in the intervening years to take that place in the market. So that is part of why people still think fondly of that game: because nothing has built on what it was.
All the bells and whistles they have thrown in there since then, could have gone perfectly well on the Pre-NGE framework. But... no.
Smed got WoW fever, and the rest is history.
And NGE entered the gamers' lexicon.
Thank you. Its funny that some people can't comprehend this line of thinking. But oh well lol.
"The Truth" : The overwhelming majority of video game forum topics are complaints.
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I didn't know SOE ever released sub numbers for SWG, or maybe you just pulled them out of the air?
I loved precu SWG, but it had quite a few problems. All of them could have been corrected with simple fixes. That's what was so frustrating about the game back then. They threw the baby out with the bathwater. But even though it had its flaws I still loved it.
Take out the ADK's and I think the CU was the best combat system in SWG's lifespan. I think they screwed up crafting somewhat during the CU though, made it to easy to cap weapons and armor; same for food and buffs.
They were on the right track though, why they scrapped it after 6 months who knows.
3 expansions in just over 2 years, big zero in 5+ years since the NGE. I think that says it all.
They did, when the numbers looked good.
350K WAS impressive at that time, before the WOW-era. The MMO market was much smaller back then.
You can say that WOW learned people (the mass) to play MMO and get used to pay a monthly fee. Had SOE put their effort into fixing bugs and content instead of rewriting the game twice in a year, the could had a part of this new mmo market.
Instead SOE went into panic mode, and destroyed both the game and their reputation.
Remember that prior to the CU, there were no caps on crafted items (just a kind of soft cap). The caps were imposed to try to make gear fit into the combat level system also imposed by the CU. I had a couple of very nice "good low level rifles" in pre-CU, but CU made that phrase a complete oxymoron. So yes, not only were there caps in CU, but they were so low that a half-skilled crafter with average resources could easily hit them on low-end gear.
Just so.
The 350k number came out slightly before or slightly after SOE reported selling "1 million units", which I think was right after JTL was launched.
The timeline is a bit hazy, but yeah, SOE was happy to release numbers when they were "good".
I remember completly, I played since day 1.
That's what I was trying to explain, the CU was a better combat system, but in the process they screwed up the crafting professions. The only crafting profession worth a damn after the CU was Shipwright it didn't change and quality of resources still mattered, did it change in the NGE, or is it still the same?
I still believe they were on the right track with the CU though, it needed some adjustments, but it was a much better foundation than pre-cu or the fiasco that is the NGE.
If they would have stayed with the CU system with constant tweaks and continued content like wookie world and lava planet instead of pushing all developmental man power into trying to fix the NGE classes and how they botched everything up, I think SWG would be in a different place today. 250k - 500k players under the CU combat system and continued content patches is not out of the realm of possibilites imo.
They would have went down drastically in 2006, that is a given with the success that WoW had. But many who got burnt out on WoW later would have tried out SWG and found a home. Unfortunately SWG NGE is whack a mole and except for die hard Star Wars fans or those who for some reason who like whack a mole, SWG is a complete failure today. Not to mention all the bad press that SWG received after the NGE was pushed, who would really try it out?
Funny, i"ve played all the mainstream mmos since pre nge SWG and none seem to cling to me like SWG did.
The bugs were livable, the content was there if you looked for it, and as for the grind I spent my time making friends and connections in game and in RL. Still talk to the same core group of players that I shared the daily grind with 7 years ago.
The problem pre NGE was the game wasn't vanilla enough, it took thought and skill to create a class that worked well for you. Sure there were plenty of FOTM melee stackers, but thats carried over into all games since. I think my favorite combination was when alt made master smuggler/master chef.
Crafting took a real love and I knew players who prided themselves on their skills. How many games have come out since that you would give a multi million credit +15 armor assembly tape to your favorite armorsmith cause you know it would help him make you better gear?
I may be looking back with rose colored glasses, but I have never played a game that was so enjoyable to play.
I hear you. In $OE's chase for the WoW players, it sacrificed and/or nerfed the best parts of SWG that set it apart from the 'WoW clones' we see today. No matter what 'shinies' and 'content' $OE bolted unto the NGE version of the game, it failed. While there are those that still enjoy SWG for what it is now, there were tons more that enjoyed it for what it was before the NGE.
The truth is sony can't be trusted.
It has nothing to do with SWG for me i just imagined at the time them doing that to a game i really loved and how pissed i would be.
And the point is sony didn't give advanced notice that they where going to change the game drastically, it's like if you spent years gearing up atleast 1 character in wow and getting rare crafting recipes and etc bleh bleh, then one day you log in and find your lvl 80/85 toons are lvl 60 and the game has been reverted back to vanilla wow.
I mean if they atleast had the consideration to give advanced notice and turn the game into nge overa long period of time or something id have some respect and trust for sony.
Maybe i would like DCUO , but i dont trust sony enough to play any of their games knowing what they have done in the past, i cant take the chance they would do it again.
And the only reason i would play SWG in its current state is if i bought DCUO and had a stationpass.
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This is just my stance on the matter if they simply got rid of stun as a form of resist and damage and lowered the armor caps to lets say 50% instead of 80% or whatever the highest was I honestly can't remember. The game would've been better off.
Like others have said, the game had it's fair share of problems, but SOE should have fixed those problems instead of changing the core design of the game. I'm sure 350,000 subs would look good to SOE right now.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
Bugs, imballances, and all in pre-CU SWG problems; it was still better then wow ripoffs today.
Truth told, the real assessment of community sentiment before the CU and NGE would have been found on the official forums. Unfortunately, those forums have most likely been purged several times over since then. That's the way SOE handles disgruntled customers. I can recall some pretty good brainstorming in the Professions forums in the weeks before the NGE hit the fan. We were optimistic and hopeful, but it's sad now knowing that we were being jerked around.
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@OP: I think both truths are correct, that SWG was great and that SWG sucked and all the arguments you mentioned in the OP, for the simple fact that they applied to different groups of people.
To a lot of gamers SWG was simply not the Star Wars game they'd expected or wanted. There was a lack of content and things to do at launch, to a number of people it just didn't feel like Star Wars, but just an MMORPG with a thin SW skin pulled over it, and there was always a number of bugs and lack of polish at its launch that can annoy and hinder someone's gameplay.
Those that 'got' SWG however had a great time, enjoying a free-roaming, massive universe that actually felt like a vast world.
WoW's major succes was a sharp contrast to SWG's moderate success even if SWG had a far better franchise, this contrast could make people in the gaming business wonder whether Smedly & co hadn't made a mistake with the approach they chose for SWG, if it couldn't bring in those numbers. What reaffirmed that idea even more was that SWG was losing huge numbers of subs to new MMO's as EQ2 and WoW. I can recall that we had entire SWG guilds move to EQ2, even those who were the first on their server to build an entire guildcity with all things attached to it.
Sure, those who were enjoying SWG couldn't care less whether SWG was losing 10k subs a month when those other 2 MMO's went live. After all, they were still enjoying it. SOE saw their sub numbers however steadily drop to 200k and lower.
Their gamble to draw more subs in with the NGE didn't pay off, MMO gamers who never liked SWG or who had grown bored quickly of it were fully into MMO's like EQ2 and WoW and couldn't care less, and those who had still been enjoying SWG felt what a prisoner must feel when he unsuspectingly bends over in the public shower to grab the soap, the equivalent of a nasty surprise.
So in hindsight it was a bad gamble, the NGE change, even if they were losing 10k subs a month at that time. One can only wonder how things would've turned out if there had been no WoW. But then again, maybe SWG would've lost to other MMO's, for it was clear right from the start that SWG wasn't a game for every MMO gamer, not even the oldschool EQ, AC and DAoC gamers.
If there had been no WoW, and if the devs had executed things smartly by keeping the core the same but adding a larger variety of content while continuosly finetuning things, then it might have been a different story.
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Sorry to cut up your post so bad but...
This. I say again THIS!
This is what I had been searching for when I finally decided to purchase/sub to SWG on 13 November 2005. Patching and more weird patching lasted until I logged in on 17 November. I did not get what I was looking for (look closely at the date I subbed).
This is what "I believe" many of the players that were there from the beginning miss about pre-CU SWG, and even perhaps CU SWG.
There really hasn't been a MMO since that had it's features... a MMO with characters that is (there is a good one but you are a ship all the time).
And I do not care if WoW was a major success or not.... for WoW was NOT developed for MMO gamers like myself... it was developed for a new kind of "gamer" that Blizzard was hoping to attract to MMOs.
Blizzard's plan worked out all too well. There is zero chance that an innovative MMO with design and features like pre-cu SWG will ever again be created.
So when people HERE point to WoW and say "WoW is the standard" or "WoW did it, it must be good".... well let's just say I do NOT agree.
I am the Player that wonders... "What the %#*& just happened?!"
...............
"I Believe... There should be NO financial connection or portals between the Real World and the Virtual in MMOs. "
__Ever Present Cockroach of the MMO Verses__
...scurrying to and fro... .munching on bits of garbage... always under foot...