SWG didnt have RMT.. pretty sure thats all greedmonger is about.. the only game it reminds me of, oddly enough, is Entropia Universe, wouldnt surprise me to see same sort of people behind it.
but yeah, would love to see an actual Starwars MMO, even SW;TOR was only based on an 'alternate universe' kind of thing, or prehistory even of Starwars. My guess is though that there won't be any game developers out there with a desire to fullfil that wish..
SWG didnt have RMT.. pretty sure thats all greedmonger is about.. the only game it reminds me of, oddly enough, is Entropia Universe, wouldnt surprise me to see same sort of people behind it.
but yeah, would love to see an actual Starwars MMO, even SW;TOR was only based on an 'alternate universe' kind of thing, or prehistory even of Starwars. My guess is though that there won't be any game developers out there with a desire to fullfil that wish..
The only thing RMT about Greed Monger is buying parcels of land. You will not see any other item on RMT other than land. so you drop $20 on one piece of land and your set to build a house on it, farm on it, put a shop keeper on it, or whatever.
The project which will remain unnamed is cool and all, but the game hasn't aged well. What we need is SWG 2 (or something like it.)
The closest thing we have coming, in spirit, is The Repopulation. It will have a lot of modernized similar features, but it's not Star Wars. It is its own game.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
SWG didnt have RMT.. pretty sure thats all greedmonger is about.. the only game it reminds me of, oddly enough, is Entropia Universe, wouldnt surprise me to see same sort of people behind it.
but yeah, would love to see an actual Starwars MMO, even SW;TOR was only based on an 'alternate universe' kind of thing, or prehistory even of Starwars. My guess is though that there won't be any game developers out there with a desire to fullfil that wish..
The only thing RMT about Greed Monger is buying parcels of land. You will not see any other item on RMT other than land. so you drop $20 on one piece of land and your set to build a house on it, farm on it, put a shop keeper on it, or whatever.
I'm cautiously optimistic about this game. What I worry about is what I call "Xsyon Syndrome", which is potentially a problem with any almost pure sandbox.
Xsyon was actually very interesting and fun, depsite bugs and stuff, largely due to the sandbox nature of it. The problem is that once you craft your brains out, and get together with people to make a fort/community, there is little else to drive the game forward. As a result, most people consider it to be more of a crafting simulator sandbox than an actual game. It gets old fast.
So far, I am waiting to see what kinds of gameplay drivers Greedmonger will have. It's not enough to just have an open world with deep crafting and in-world housing / shops. An example I have used in the past as a gameplay driver would be the very strongly opposed factions in Star Wars Galaxies, which drove conflict and reason for crafting and economy to be important. While some people didn't get involved in the GCW, most people had ties to it in one way or another whether it was faction PvE or PvP. People very strongly associated themselves with the Imps, Rebs or Neutrals / Indies.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
This conversation spoke to me, and so forgive me for getting a little soapboxy. I'm actually not trying to derail this thread. I also never played SWG, and like Asheron's Call and Ultima Online, I feel like it was a missed opportunity. I deeply sympathize with the folks who feel so passionately about the game, however, in large part because I feel like MMO gamers are more and more frequently finding common ground somewhere we wish we couldn't: we're all disenfranchised one way or another.
That's not to say we're all (or at least 47% of us) refugees being persecuted by a malicious conspiracy of game developers to shit out garbage title after garbage title, but the longer this genre runs, the more of us are going to become personally acquainted with a doomsday for a game that means something to us.
The other day, after finishing another round of alternately shaking my head and sighing over the travesties of late at ANet, I thought to myself, This is horseshit; I'm gonna go log onto my Brute and kick some ass to blow off some steam. --Oh, wait. No I'm not. It's not that I can't afford it; it's not that I'm behind the population curve; it's not even that I cba to sit through an install and patch.. The game just doesn't exist anymore. There's a big metaphysical black hole where Paragon City and the Rogue Isles used to be, and while the people I can blame for that aren't the same people who're presently raping GW2, they work for the same shareholders. That was a lot more disheartening than a developer making a decision I disagree with and then lying about it. [Hell, if you're just getting started getting lied to, you must have just hooked up your internet this morning.]
Well, hey, at least we can all get excited about EQNext, right?! No, wait... that's Smedley. We hate Smedley. Don't we? Wait, why did I decide I hated Smedley before? There was something ...
Assuming for the sake of argument that the jedi population would have inevitably approached a critical mass over the continuing life of the game (I didn't play it so I'm not about to suggest anything other than in hypothetical terms), it would probably be fair to say that something was needed, and whatever it was was heroicly botched. That's not the first time a company has shot itself in the knee, though, nor will it be the last, and the older I get as a gamer (to say nothing of as a human), the harder I find it to hold a grudge against someone who makes a bad decision for objectives which by all accounts are, if met, as good for me as for the content provider (e.g., under a subscription model at least, game population increasing is good for everybody). And at least Smed had the cojones to come out later and say that he fucked up, something that a lot of collosal screwup masterminds haven't done. Being blind to people telling him at the time, "Smed, this is a bad idea" --well that's another issue, but I won't speak to it because I wasn't there.
Aside from just coming here to vent and join you guys in being maudlin about a game that, even for those of us who never experienced it firsthand, offered such a tremendous insight into the directions the genre has gone at its pivotal crossroads during its short existence, I also just wanted to take a moment to lobby for a little solidarity.
Part of why SWG, as an idea, not necessarily as an IP of Luc--uh, I mean Disney--doesn't exist in the MMO landscape today is the rampant, out of control Schadenfreude that surrounds the way we interact with each other. Couple that with the apparent deep-seated conviction by developers that anything earning less than WOW money out the door is a financial catastrophe, and it's really no surprise that we only have one pendulum measuring the genre's trends. We should have a bunch. We should have sub-genres of different games catering to people's tastes. Instead all we have are more games, each one trying a new set of gimmicks, a new way of marketing or monetizing itself, or a prettier face, each one in a grueling effort to outspend and cannibalize the others into an early grave. Sure, part of it is the dollar signs in investor eyes after the advent of WOW, but we could do a lot to mitigate the cutthroat nature of the market by being a little less cutthroat as consumers.
If anybody knows what it's like to have somebody else cheering at your misfortune, though, it's gotta be the guys on the SWG board. I miss SWG because somebody took it from me before I even knew what it was. That's not all they took, though, and they've been waging a crusade against everyone who doesn't want to play their game ever since, and that affects me because I like MMO's philosophically. I don't even know if I'd like SWG. Hell, I might think it's rubbish. But I'll never get the opportunity to derive any satisfaction from knowing that people who share my hobby think highly of it since it's gone. I'll never get to be part of a dialog with people who can testify to the contributions of this game to the industry, except in hindsight, and that's a pretty grievous loss. Least they're working on an emulator.
I'm sorry for your loss, guys. That sucks balls. Hope they make another someday so I can play it.
I will have to weigh in on this, though normally I don't post on the forums (as you can see).
I played SWG pre NGE and after, thought not sure about CU. I enjoyed it immensely. NGE did break a lot of things, and the game wasn't as good, however the ability to build your house / settlement / town almost anywhere on a world, craft almost any item, display it, and have good combat is something I have yet to find in another game.
Wurm Online satisfys my creativity bug, allowing me to terraform, build, create, and so on, but doesn't have the player following that SWG did, or nearly as good combat. I really hope that someone remakes SWG and creates something like it that works as well as it did.
I'm sorry for your loss, guys. That sucks balls. Hope they make another someday so I can play it.
As someone who not only makes giant posts like yours, but loves to read them too, I thank you. I enjoyed your thoughtful comments.
I believe, as you alluded to, that one of the reason there is so much bickering on sites like this one is that what constitutes an MMORPG has so many faces. I'll just use two examples, themepark and sandbox, to keep things simple. The two camps are so fundamentally different, it drives me nuts to see them lumped together on this site. It's like trying to lump FPS games with RTS games (apples & oranges, yadda yadda yadda).
SWG was more than just a game. It was a virtual world complete with sufficient tools to let the player forge his own path and story through the game world, whether you wanted to be a hero or a zero. There was something for all kinds of people and it drew a diverse and interesting player base, and that is a key point in my opinon.
There has not been a themepark yet that comes close to such diversity of gameplay and players, and I doubt there ever will be. They are designed to hold your hand through someone else's story, not to allow you to make your own.
On that same token though, it is very easy to do a sandbox wrong, and we've seen a few indy studios make a mess of them and turn people off.
I don't know what the answer to my search is, except to say that I know themeparks are never going to provide me with a rich enough experience to hold my attention. I don't intend to buy any more themeparks unless I see something off-the-charts special. So far I haven't heard of anything that comes close.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Comments
SWG didnt have RMT.. pretty sure thats all greedmonger is about.. the only game it reminds me of, oddly enough, is Entropia Universe, wouldnt surprise me to see same sort of people behind it.
but yeah, would love to see an actual Starwars MMO, even SW;TOR was only based on an 'alternate universe' kind of thing, or prehistory even of Starwars. My guess is though that there won't be any game developers out there with a desire to fullfil that wish..
The only thing RMT about Greed Monger is buying parcels of land. You will not see any other item on RMT other than land. so you drop $20 on one piece of land and your set to build a house on it, farm on it, put a shop keeper on it, or whatever.
The project which will remain unnamed is cool and all, but the game hasn't aged well. What we need is SWG 2 (or something like it.)
The closest thing we have coming, in spirit, is The Repopulation. It will have a lot of modernized similar features, but it's not Star Wars. It is its own game.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
I'm cautiously optimistic about this game. What I worry about is what I call "Xsyon Syndrome", which is potentially a problem with any almost pure sandbox.
Xsyon was actually very interesting and fun, depsite bugs and stuff, largely due to the sandbox nature of it. The problem is that once you craft your brains out, and get together with people to make a fort/community, there is little else to drive the game forward. As a result, most people consider it to be more of a crafting simulator sandbox than an actual game. It gets old fast.
So far, I am waiting to see what kinds of gameplay drivers Greedmonger will have. It's not enough to just have an open world with deep crafting and in-world housing / shops. An example I have used in the past as a gameplay driver would be the very strongly opposed factions in Star Wars Galaxies, which drove conflict and reason for crafting and economy to be important. While some people didn't get involved in the GCW, most people had ties to it in one way or another whether it was faction PvE or PvP. People very strongly associated themselves with the Imps, Rebs or Neutrals / Indies.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
This conversation spoke to me, and so forgive me for getting a little soapboxy. I'm actually not trying to derail this thread. I also never played SWG, and like Asheron's Call and Ultima Online, I feel like it was a missed opportunity. I deeply sympathize with the folks who feel so passionately about the game, however, in large part because I feel like MMO gamers are more and more frequently finding common ground somewhere we wish we couldn't: we're all disenfranchised one way or another.
That's not to say we're all (or at least 47% of us) refugees being persecuted by a malicious conspiracy of game developers to shit out garbage title after garbage title, but the longer this genre runs, the more of us are going to become personally acquainted with a doomsday for a game that means something to us.
The other day, after finishing another round of alternately shaking my head and sighing over the travesties of late at ANet, I thought to myself, This is horseshit; I'm gonna go log onto my Brute and kick some ass to blow off some steam. --Oh, wait. No I'm not. It's not that I can't afford it; it's not that I'm behind the population curve; it's not even that I cba to sit through an install and patch.. The game just doesn't exist anymore. There's a big metaphysical black hole where Paragon City and the Rogue Isles used to be, and while the people I can blame for that aren't the same people who're presently raping GW2, they work for the same shareholders. That was a lot more disheartening than a developer making a decision I disagree with and then lying about it. [Hell, if you're just getting started getting lied to, you must have just hooked up your internet this morning.]
Well, hey, at least we can all get excited about EQNext, right?! No, wait... that's Smedley. We hate Smedley. Don't we? Wait, why did I decide I hated Smedley before? There was something ...
Assuming for the sake of argument that the jedi population would have inevitably approached a critical mass over the continuing life of the game (I didn't play it so I'm not about to suggest anything other than in hypothetical terms), it would probably be fair to say that something was needed, and whatever it was was heroicly botched. That's not the first time a company has shot itself in the knee, though, nor will it be the last, and the older I get as a gamer (to say nothing of as a human), the harder I find it to hold a grudge against someone who makes a bad decision for objectives which by all accounts are, if met, as good for me as for the content provider (e.g., under a subscription model at least, game population increasing is good for everybody). And at least Smed had the cojones to come out later and say that he fucked up, something that a lot of collosal screwup masterminds haven't done. Being blind to people telling him at the time, "Smed, this is a bad idea" --well that's another issue, but I won't speak to it because I wasn't there.
Aside from just coming here to vent and join you guys in being maudlin about a game that, even for those of us who never experienced it firsthand, offered such a tremendous insight into the directions the genre has gone at its pivotal crossroads during its short existence, I also just wanted to take a moment to lobby for a little solidarity.
Part of why SWG, as an idea, not necessarily as an IP of Luc--uh, I mean Disney--doesn't exist in the MMO landscape today is the rampant, out of control Schadenfreude that surrounds the way we interact with each other. Couple that with the apparent deep-seated conviction by developers that anything earning less than WOW money out the door is a financial catastrophe, and it's really no surprise that we only have one pendulum measuring the genre's trends. We should have a bunch. We should have sub-genres of different games catering to people's tastes. Instead all we have are more games, each one trying a new set of gimmicks, a new way of marketing or monetizing itself, or a prettier face, each one in a grueling effort to outspend and cannibalize the others into an early grave. Sure, part of it is the dollar signs in investor eyes after the advent of WOW, but we could do a lot to mitigate the cutthroat nature of the market by being a little less cutthroat as consumers.
If anybody knows what it's like to have somebody else cheering at your misfortune, though, it's gotta be the guys on the SWG board. I miss SWG because somebody took it from me before I even knew what it was. That's not all they took, though, and they've been waging a crusade against everyone who doesn't want to play their game ever since, and that affects me because I like MMO's philosophically. I don't even know if I'd like SWG. Hell, I might think it's rubbish. But I'll never get the opportunity to derive any satisfaction from knowing that people who share my hobby think highly of it since it's gone. I'll never get to be part of a dialog with people who can testify to the contributions of this game to the industry, except in hindsight, and that's a pretty grievous loss. Least they're working on an emulator.
I'm sorry for your loss, guys. That sucks balls. Hope they make another someday so I can play it.
Peace and safety.
I will have to weigh in on this, though normally I don't post on the forums (as you can see).
I played SWG pre NGE and after, thought not sure about CU. I enjoyed it immensely. NGE did break a lot of things, and the game wasn't as good, however the ability to build your house / settlement / town almost anywhere on a world, craft almost any item, display it, and have good combat is something I have yet to find in another game.
Wurm Online satisfys my creativity bug, allowing me to terraform, build, create, and so on, but doesn't have the player following that SWG did, or nearly as good combat. I really hope that someone remakes SWG and creates something like it that works as well as it did.
SWG 2 could only happen if they shut down TOR. Guess that would not be a bad deal.
Secrets of Dragon?s Spine Trailer.. !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwT9cFVQCMw
Best MMOs ever played: Ultima, EvE, SW Galaxies, Age of Conan, The Secret World
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2X_SbZCHpc&t=21s
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The Return of ELITE !
As someone who not only makes giant posts like yours, but loves to read them too, I thank you. I enjoyed your thoughtful comments.
I believe, as you alluded to, that one of the reason there is so much bickering on sites like this one is that what constitutes an MMORPG has so many faces. I'll just use two examples, themepark and sandbox, to keep things simple. The two camps are so fundamentally different, it drives me nuts to see them lumped together on this site. It's like trying to lump FPS games with RTS games (apples & oranges, yadda yadda yadda).
SWG was more than just a game. It was a virtual world complete with sufficient tools to let the player forge his own path and story through the game world, whether you wanted to be a hero or a zero. There was something for all kinds of people and it drew a diverse and interesting player base, and that is a key point in my opinon.
There has not been a themepark yet that comes close to such diversity of gameplay and players, and I doubt there ever will be. They are designed to hold your hand through someone else's story, not to allow you to make your own.
On that same token though, it is very easy to do a sandbox wrong, and we've seen a few indy studios make a mess of them and turn people off.
I don't know what the answer to my search is, except to say that I know themeparks are never going to provide me with a rich enough experience to hold my attention. I don't intend to buy any more themeparks unless I see something off-the-charts special. So far I haven't heard of anything that comes close.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.