Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
The definitive SWG review in a nutshell
panache
Member UncommonPosts: 397
Just quit SWG after 5 years of on off play. Servers are dead apart from die hard players who try to persuade everyone that this is to the contrary. But saying that if you have never played SWG and want to try it out over the long cold winter months i recommend it wholeheartedly. The sights sounds etc of lightsabers, tie figthers etc brings a tear to the eye with a nice easy legacy quest line that will take you through the game meeting iconic star wars characters. Think of it as a star wars single player game and enjoy it heh!
Pan
Comments
TIS a shame too pan.. I remember starting SWG on launch day.. It was truely a great sandbox MMO with so much potential. however.. it had some game breaking issues
I look at SWG as a paint canvas with everyone in the room just tossing their paint at it.. No direction, No flow, and absolutely NO VISION.. That in my opinion is why "they failed". (using my best Yoda voice).. Too many chefs in the kitchen as the old saying goes..
For us Star Wars IP fans, here's to TOR and hoping they learned from history..
Methinx they have learned, and it will be much different than SWG. For better AND for worse. Even at it's best, SWG was a love/hate relationship.
The thing that gets me, is that the things SWG did really well, and perhaps the best of any MMO to date, have not been taken up by any other game since.
The crafting and resource system of the original Pre-CU game is widely acknowledged as "the best" and most innovative to date, and nothing has come close in the intervening years. Which is not to say a couple other games don't have decent crafting (EvE jumps to mind), but nothing has topped it.
The open world feel and system of player interdependency (including the crafting/economy aspects) has also not been topped. In original SWG, everyone had a place and no matter what build you had, you had a place in the economy, PvE and PvP worlds. Which is not to say there were not imbalances (and SOE was all too ham-handed to deal with this particular problem well), but the world and the players in it, fuctioned like no other game to date.
There were plenty of things that SWG did not do well, under SOEs game management, but those things that were done well, were ahead of their time and very enjoyable to the people that liked them.
And there has been no game to take those things up, since.
To sound like the people I normally debate with, I don't think casual players appreciate it as much. Aside from the interface, SWG's crafting and gathering is my undisputed favorite. I think the trouble is fitting it into what would be otherwise a pretty casual friendly game.
The only way I see getting that level of complexity to work is to create a way to play in which not doing it has few/no crippling effects. Which means lowering the significance of crafting. Which neither of us would like, methinx. And developers tend to avoid spending time on a complex system that a small percentage of the pop will partake in.
Aren't I all doom and gloom?
To be honest it shouldn't be too surprising that dev's haven't picked up the things they did well like crafting (which I thought was pretty well done too). The end result is the game never had a large following, just a strong one so it's easy to see looking at it that way why most devs haven't tried any of the design elements of that game good or bad.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Did you end up playing on Eclipse or Chimaera with the majority of your playtime, Pan?
Are you Moosemanuk on the official forums?
Are even the busy servers dead now?
Oooh, this makes me so mad. If only SOE had poured some of the money it put into expansions into balancing and bug-fixing the game would be alive and expanding today in my opinion!
There is a server population imbalance which has led to some servers being packed and others being almost empty.
More information here:
>>> SWG Galactic Civil War and Player City Statistics - 14th of October 2010 <<<
Odd...why Oct 14th data? Not a complaint or a knock on you, of all the things you do, these charts of yours are by far the most useful and most appreciated (or...actually under appreciated by most tbh) of any data players gather. And I only ask because you're always on top of this...being December 6th, the date of the data just stood out to me.
There isn't a huge change in population levels, looking at the charts I've updated to date. I was going to give it a few more weeks before posting a new set. I've also been polling the players of Radiant and Sunrunner on their views as to the populations levels on their servers.
The two servers are by far the least populated and I plan to include their feedback in the next article, hopefully it will help them get the Free Transfer and server closure for Radiant and Sunrunner that the vast majority of them seem to be waiting for.
soe? free transfers? lawl
Thanks Badger. I'm usually just shocked by how quickly you update it and keep it spot on current, that this struck me as odd for the opposite reason (not that 6 weeks behind is bad, just not 'normal' for you).