Star Wars Galaxies Q&A

I never really knew anyone who played this. I tried it out way back when it was in beta. I found it to be an annoying, overly-complex time-sink. Too much forced travel, forced downtime, etc. Blech. Not my cup of tea.

I appreciated what they were trying to do though. They essentially made the game and told everyone "NO, you can't all be fucking jedis, NO, you can't go camp Darth Vader for his light saber, and NO, you can't all be superstars. You've got to meld into the world and be happy with being background figures in the overall setting". I respected that. They were taking a stand, and didn't want to trivialize the fiction of the movies and stuff by allowing every asshat who logs on to be Luke Skywalker Jr. Cool.

But apparently, videogame players didn't really dig that. I guess Joe Average considered that "boring", "mundane", or perhaps even "shitty". Yeah, sure, it did have a dedicated base of fans, and longtime players are now quitting in droves. But that installed playerbase was VERY small compared to other games. SWG was basically a failure for them. Sony + Star Wars = 200K subscribers? Yeah, those guys were NOT going to be happy with sitting back and being a niche game. They HAD to do something to try to shock this game back to life. It's unfortunate that people who liked what the game *was* have essentially been told to piss off, but oh well, that's big business I guess. :\

That being said, I did just DL the trial version again tonight, just because I got curious. Didn't really get out of the newbie space station yet, so I don't know what the actual *game* is like. I'll play it more tomorrow. I do think it's stupid to have Han Solo dealing with the misadventures of every stupid newbie to enter the game -- it cheapens his character. And having Boba Fett just chillin' in the corner? Ugh.. dumb. But I can see how Joe Average who doesn't give a shit would get more of a Star Wars vibe from it... I guess.

This game has so many problems I don't even know where to begin.

I reactivated my account recently to see what the 'New Game Experience' was all about. They fucked the game up bad! All the cities are empty, I created a character on like 8 different servers and every town is a ghost town.

The economy is a mess, the new changes do not promote grouping, it's just a total disaster and I hope they trash it and start from scratch on something new.

Cant we all just agree that all Lucas needs to do is Remake X-Wing v/s Tie fighter in a MMO galaxy?

Yeah that's the said thing about SWG's that type of game now is probably effectively dead, devs aren't going to want to make that type of mistake again. But it wasn't really the direction of SWG's that was so bad, it was the implementation of it.

I liked the way it was mostly freeform and you had to work to get the most of the game. You could come up with business plans to make money for example.

Games like WoW and EQ2 are better than SWG's but the holding your hand stuff and having the content laid out in a path does get boring.

I'm sure we won't see a freeform MMO from SOE ever again anyway.

From the interview:

"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.

It sounds like they want this to just be a glorified Battlefront.

And they pissed off all the fans who actually liked what SWG was in the process.

I havent played this game. The onlm mmo i have played is CoH and this cycle seems to be the norm for this types of games. I wonder if they games wouldnt just be better if they vowed early on not to change.

Related item:

For Online Star Wars Game, It's Revenge of the Fans
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/arts/10star.html

This article mentions an infomercial they've got lined up to promote the game... they're pretty much set on switching out their entire user base, aren't they? For their sake, I hope they manage to attract as many new subscribers as they've lost. :(

GS: And what did you find out after all that playing with the game?

JS: Star Wars never hit that excitement level around here. It never got--there never was a critical mass of people here that wanted to play it. So we knew we could do way better. And I guess as much out of a love for making these kinds of games, even though that sounds corny, though it's true, we wanted to make this game better.



so they made the game worse.... cool.