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SWG and the lack of consistency

Submitted by Abalieno on March 28, 2006 - 13:39.

From FoH:

Talk about immersion killing. First thing I noticed about SWG and something I never really heard a good excuse for. I'm can be a jedi, master the force, wield all sorts of weapons, see Darth Vader(!), but this 3-inch bit of rock stops me dead in my tracks!

This always bugged me and everyone else. Noone tolerates the lack of jumping (and innatural boundary boxes) but, despite still criticized, in Guild Wars this problem isn't so terribly frustrating as it was/is in SWG. I think it's because this issue is part of a bigger problem.

There was everywhere a lack of detail and attention, you could sit, but only displaced from the chair, on the thin air. There was a sitting animation but you would stand up by rotating in the wrong direction, melting with the back of the chair. The space shuttles used to fly right through the ceiling of the shuttle station, you could bring a huge pet in a tiny corridor with two thirds of the body going out of the roof, you could walk right through chairs and tables, run up and down terrain with absurd inclinations, reach every place without any limitation (if within the boundaries of the zone), the laser of your weapon would shoot at unrealistic angles, the animations and models had constant clipping issues, the NPCs were often stuck half buried in the city walls and everyone could start an impromptu classic dance as a skilled master dancer at any time. Race-specific animations, what are they?

The problem is much, much bigger and encompassing. It's a problem of consistency.

The whole world was just generic wilderness, most of what you saw was graphic fluff, you could disable most of the "environment". Everything was just somewhat randomly generated around you, without really "existing". There was no geography, no roads, paths, environments. It was just generated terrain, but featureless and inconsistent. A "space", but not space with a sense or justification.

This isn't a problem of "content". It's not about a lack of POIs distributed around the world. Before I canceled for the first time I was following one of the quests for the first events and I had to walk through half a zone. A spread of nothingness, dull terrain, hills and mountains. I was a ranger so I could just walk in a straight line. The world just didn't exist, it was a technical feature but it wasn't there to offer something, to offer consistency or something you could relate to. It was supposed to be "pretty", but with no substance. Even the POIs didn't help in any way, again they didn't help to create any kind of geography. A POI was usually just a building spawned somewhere with a few NPCs standing around it. They were dots on the world, but not "world" themselves.

These being all basic structures on which the whole game was built-up and engineered, problems that the game will always drag around, without the possibility to free itself from them.

The combat was also affected by all this.

If you ask me what was the biggest flaw in the original SWG I'd answer: lack of consistency. It is what makes the game "unresponsive", hard to decipher. The combat was hard to figure out because it reacted in unpredictable ways. It was based on odd variables and mechanics that you wouldn't expect and that you would find hard to fully understand and manipulate. And those who managed to get past this barrier would become invulnerable, exploiting the hell out of the system.

Everything was connected to that basic point. Lack of consistency and similarity to patterns that the players expected from the game. The lack of Star Wars-y feel and iconic classes was a drift of the same problem.

The "language" of the game felt alien, and not familiar as the Star Wars universe the players used to know (and hype and anticipate). A problem of communication.

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Re: SWG and the lack of consistency

Heartless_ (not verified) on March 29, 2006 - 03:46.

Like I've said... they had a dev team full of talkers and no one around doing the dirty work of making the game "consistent" as you would put it. But still blame can't be placed on the shoulders of one person, but the team let SWG down. What caused that could be a couple things.

1. Just plain bad design. Dreaming too big and forgetting all these dreams have to somehow make it into the game. Thats why John Carmack and John Romaro worked so great together at ID... Romaro could talk all day and hype something up, but it was Carmack who was the brains of the code. It just didn't last though, but designers are easier replaced than good coders.

2. Business and management pushing too hard on the team causing the team to just accept the way things are and move on. When I started SWG beta we did one thing at a time. Character creation tests, log in tests, chat system tests, NPC tests, and on and on until we had a game. But come late beta combat was just thrown in and everyone was like "WTF you mean you are releasing this like this?" We spent 3 weeks getting chat bubbles to look right and combat is getting a five day stint... and PvP only enabled for a brief few hours?

So dev team or management? Got me, but I can point to other SOE products and see the same patterns. So I look at the people that influence all of the teams and say there is definately not something right in tinsel town.

I won't call anyone out because the failure is above that. Its not one person, but its a lack of something in SOE that stinks up their games.

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Re: SWG and the lack of consistency

Soln on March 29, 2006 - 16:53.

yeah "consistency" or "coherence", I've felt that for awhile. The real problem was not so much the individual designs, the mini-games etc., it was

1) no feeling of connection between the narrative of SW and its civil war in the path of any player. Solution: make the GCW matter

2) bad execution, bugs, such that quests didn't work or couldn't connect. Like the planned Jedi advancement/rare-unlocking system was impossible near launch. Solution: better people, better planning

3) bad functional testing (#2 above) but bad usability testing, such that combat was unbalanced and filled with exploits from launch (shoot through walls). Solution: longer beta (seems impossible given how long it actually was), better testing, better people, better planning...

4) no narrative paths. In a sandbox game, I think you still some overarching narrative for players to rely on when they want. When they want the option to inscribe themselves in an external (working narrative). Solution: key advancement paths in the game world for every profession. What was the point of Creature Handlers or Smugglers? None of the professions had "profession quests." Having things like armor quests etc. actually help I think justify having a profession for players, even if players only wanted a few skill boxes

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Re: SWG and the lack of consistency

Woody on March 29, 2006 - 21:11.

I for one really appreciated the lack of a "jump" in SWG as it made bunny hoppers almost non-existant which just made the world seem more real to me. Yes you couldn't jump over a rock, but then again, you could go around it, or blast it in some cases. How often do you see people jumping in real life? How would the huge battles in movies like Braveheart look if everyone was hopping around? How about the big fights in the newer Star Wars movies?

I wish you could explain this thought of consistancy a bit more, because the way I am understanding your arguement is that people found the randomness of the world unsettling, that they expect to see the same stormtrooper camp in the same spot every day for the life of the game. By having this be randomly generated, the world didn't feel real? If this is your arguement, then I would have to say I disagree with you as I found the random nature of spawns to be more realistic than having the same thing in the same place every day that permeates most other mmogs.

I do think inconsistancy played a big part in what is/was wrong with SWG, but it would be a inconsistancy with the world as portrayed in the original trilogy. Just a quick rundown on inconsistancies between game and the movies...........

No person ran around with 3 rancors/AT-ST in the movies
No person spent 98% of their time killing animals in the movies
No person became 3 times as powerful by getting a shot in the movies
People died in one shot in the movies, not several hundred as SWG has you believe
Other than the force lightning the emperor shoots Luke with, jedi don't have visual effects swirling around them.
Doctors/medics didn't use magic to heal, and they didn't have special effects going off when they did

I'm sure anyone who played more than a few days could easily add to this list, and I feel these issues were more of a reason for the games problems than having no jump and a randomly generated wilderness.

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Re: SWG and the lack of consistency

Innsmouth on March 30, 2006 - 16:43.

How often do you see people jumping in real life?

But in real life there's much more z-axis development. The jumping thing was an excuse to say that the whole game developed on a flat plane and felt "on rails".

About the bunny-hopping. It truly annoys me. This is why if I would work on a game I would implement a fatigue system that drains every time you jump. The point is not about removing the jumping, but making it more like a meaningful action instead of something unrealistic.

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Re: SWG and the lack of consistency

Woody on March 30, 2006 - 17:39.

I guess true z-axis movement was missing for all intents and purposes, but if you look back on all the complaints/issues/problems players had with the game, lack of z-axis would probably be down near the bottom of the list.

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