SWG/SWTOR
Submitted by Abalieno on December 13, 2008 - 00:09.
As I wrote on the forum I wouldn't bet today any money on the success of the Bioware MMO. It's not about the announce/denial of the game being based on RMT, which again may be ascribed at the difference between "being official" and "being true", it's that there are only reasons to justify skepticism.
The horrible art style is the 1# reason why I'm skeptical about this game. From the first screenshots released a while ago, to this new video I simply think it looks terrible. I've looked up their art direction guy, Jeff Dobson. It all makes sense: he comes straight from Star Wars Galaxies, another game that I thought looked like ass. Plus this video has also crappy and jerky animations to make it worse.
2# reason that justifies skepticism: the game is built on a bunch of unproven third party middleware. From the graphic engine to the server, they are using third party tech. And it's third party stuff that has never been tested on a *real* game.
3# reason: no good ideas at the foundation of the game. These are some of SWG guys who believe that the main flaw of SWG was that it wasn't heroic enough. So they make this new game. They give everyone a lightsaber and a single player story. Nope, the main flaw of SWG wasn't not being heroic. SWG flaw was that it had, simply put, bad gameplay (just think of the combat system). Giving everyone a lightsaber (as they tried to do with NGE) didn't help the game in any way, if anything it pushed away those few who liked it. So the Bioware guys stick to what they do: single player storyline. Which doesn't answer the most simple of the questions: why a MMO?
Bad art, unproven tech, no ideas that develop the innate qualities of a MMO. I just don't see anything that is worth looking for in this game if not the big names.
Bioware is known for the good stories, so it made sense for them to stick to what they know. But again, why a MMO? Either you do as Blizzard and change the face of your business and welcome a dramatic change to adapt to a wholly different genre, or you stick to what you do already: single player games.
The main problem is that no one likes to read online, especially in multiplayer. Everyone has innately different speeds to immerse himself in a story. The very last thing you want is that every player in a group is stuck at different stages, while other wait someone else to finish reading and make his choice. You have played WoW, you should know very well that even the small text in the quest window sometimes feels too much. Online games need a different pacing, and in particular they need to use their potential to the fullest, not to the minimum. This Bioware game is attempting to do a MMO through a style that is inappropriate to it and that doesn't use any of the potential.
Sure, you can add voiceovers, branching dialogues and ramp up the interaction. But this increases exponentially the costs and the time required to develop content. At some point the game has to launch. At lighting speed players go through all the content and surpass the speed at which that content is done. Moreover, to avoid boredom the content has to stay fresh, and its freshness is proportional to all the possible interpolations (variations), so limited by an engine.
What I'm saying is that this model is suicidal, simply because it can't realistically work in the longer term. Assuming, of course, that you expect this MMO to have a longer life cycle than the average single player game.
Maybe you can reduce the odds by adapting the business model, like making players pay for smaller content pack (which is why I say there may be some truth in the RMT announce by changing the perspective). As Guild Wars, you won't be scared if players leave, as long they return when you're done developing content overhead. But this just seems a hopeless and pointless battle to fight, when instead what makes sense is simply to EMBRACE the potential there's in a MMO and that still all the major companies are scared of.
My opinion, of course.
Want something to look forward with slightly more hope (at least till they don't sink those hopes)? I'm waiting to know more about Guild Wars 2 and that side company to Bethesda, Zenimax Online. Something good may come out.
Submitted by Abalieno on October 14, 2006 - 16:52.
I was reading a promotional booklet about Company of Heroes (sublime game) and it starts with this (approximate translation):
A new point of view
In Company of Heroes you have to learn to see things from a military point of view. There aren't anymore houses, walls, city squares, towers. But refuges, covers, zones of fire, sniper spots.
[...]
When you see an opening or a crossroad you have to evaluate from where the enemy is going to approach and set your positions to intersect the zones of fire, so that it is impossible for the enemy to come near without suffering severe losses.
That pretty much summarizes why CoH feels great. Nothing in its concept makes it really stand out. It's yet another RTS, set in the WWII.
How it can be special? Because it feels great and plays in a way absolutely unique, as that excerpt demonstrates. It is great in the measure it moves AWAY from classic RTS gamey mechanics and TOWARD an immersive experience that doesn't delude expectations.
Not the absolute, faithful simulation. But selecting those few mechanics that "matter" more and are faithful to an immersive and yet fun experience. It is fun not because it simulates everything. But because what it simulates is a few "core" mechanics (covers, arcs of fire) that feel right and that you can approach from a "fresh" point of view (the military one, opposed to the classic RTS gamey strategies).
This pretty much summarizes again all my critics (and hundreds of posts on Grimwell) to SWG combat. Both before and after the New Genesis Evangelion.
Please notice that CoH is FAR from twitch. Which is what I tried to explain restlessly. You don't need twitch to get ranged combat "right". CoH is a demonstration of this.
Linking back to past comments:
The basic critics I was making is that when we "simulate" something in a game we surely cannot replicate every other element. But we should choose the elements and rules that we are going to use to "make sense" in the game world. So, even if choosing a few elements, they must be drawn from a reality. If there are going to be five basic mechanics, those five should be "life-like". Immersive. They should tell something concrete that matches the expectations.
Submitted by Abalieno on July 27, 2006 - 02:42.
Answer to that comment:
I can see your point about moving on too early from SWG, but in the case of UO, I was on there for two years after launch, and was in fact the only original team member left. :)
Let's agree on something: both UO and SWG were ruined by the fact that the original minds left. And it will be the same for EVERY mmorpg out there. Now and in the future. Dev teams change and things usually go right in the toilet. In particular those games with a so strong "imprinting".
Bring in more people with new ideas, that's good. But an high churn rate in the dev team will almost surely lead to a disaster. If people won't stick then nothing good is going to come out. Before or after the launch it doesn't change absolutely anything. It's in fact quite obvious that SWG was hurt in particular because it lacked a real direction. Every few months there was someone else at the wheel with a different idea about where to go.
It was your own game and there was noone in the world who could run it beside you. That's the only real truth. *You* killed it the moment you accepted to pass the duty. It's your own responsibility.
Actually I even think that you consciously or unconsciously built it so that the game would have rejected everyone else. Or you or noone else. Like some kind of DNA code identification system that started a countdown to self destruction as someone else tried to "violate" it. You definitely cheated SOE by handing them a crippled game that noone else beside you could have utilized productively.
I do think that not only SWG was rushed out, but that it was also flawed. But this doesn't change the fact that the only one who could have fixed those flaws were you and noone else.
Want to design new games every few months? Good, then DO NOT aspire to be a Lead Designer for a mmorpg. These games aren't waiting rooms where you sit for a couple of months before moving onto something else. A mmorpg is a life-job, if you have the opportunity and privilege to continue. It shouldn't be a walk in the park. Being a Lead Designer should be a daunting task that noone wants, not the easiest way to the game industry stardom.
Plus I only see two different kinds of game designers: the first is the "George Lucas type", who continues to make the exact same game over and over and over. The other is the one who make ONE great game that will be remembered and mimicked for a long time, while all the rest he tries just sucks so hard and is better forgotten.
I wrote that also thinking to what Gordon Walton said about TSO. I mean, you both had the opportunity to continue the development.
It would be different if you were *fired* from the respective projects. In that case it would make sense to "rant" about what went wrong and how things should have worked. But instead you both decided to drop the ball and leave it there. There's no privilege of ranting in that case.
That's too easy. Or you admit that things went wrong and you made a mistake and decided to flee away as quick as possible, or you could have taken the opportunity and kept working on those projects if they were something in which you still believed.
Imho a Lead Designer shouldn't move AT ALL. Stop. There's no "early" or "late". Or there is commitment, or things go to hell.
Or you build a game without personality and so derivative that everyone can lead it. That works too.
SOE did the right thing. Yes. They lobotomized the game because it was the only way for them to break that goddamn DNA lock you sneaked into it.
And *why* you put in that lock? Because it was the greatest way to demonstrate that you are unique and irreplaceable. Or, romantically, a "work of art" ;p
Submitted by Abalieno on June 14, 2006 - 08:31.
If you go look at the SWG category on this site you'll see that I wrote a whole lot about the NGE (the last radical redesign of the game).
My opinion basically was that I wouldn't have personally gone in that direction and dump the RPG-style of the combat in favor of something completely different. But I would still have moved away from that absurd and stupid kind of inconsistent, unimmersive "puzzle combat" with three bars and special shoots, to instead integrate more realistic elements that could make sense in a ranged combat. Like arcs of fire, covers, barrage fire and things like that. Patterns that make sense and are coherent with the setting, maybe even with a focus on formations and other tactical decisions (some elements taken out of "Jagged Alliance" could have helped).
I criticized strongly the way SOE brought over these changes, but at the same time I said that going toward a model of "twitch" combat whould have forced them to make it more consistent and move away from the retarded puzzle game. It's not that "aiming with the mouse" is "more fun". It's just that it is more consistent with the mechanics of "ranged combat". So more intuitive. So more fun because it speaks to you in a known tongue instead of through an arcane and abstract puzzle system that worked properly only in Raph's mind.
Problem is that the execution, when you do a twitch game in particular, is king, and the execution of SWG:NGE was AWFUL. For example it was rather frustrating to manage aggro since a creature you were attacking could pass near a neutral one and you could finish easily to pull both. In particular with the jerky movements and animations that the game has (and a problem shared by all SOE games). You really cannot hope to do "twitch" if the controls aren't perfectly smooth and if you don't do a great work on the movement and animations.
With the last patch the devs finally managed to partially fix this system by improving its usability. There are detailed notes explaining how the new targeting system works. The complete patch notes are also available.
If you read their explanation you may think that the system is still rather intricate and complicated, but I think I can do a better work and explain how it works in short (guesswork, though. I don't play the game from years).
With the "old" NGE system you basically had to target with your mouse as in a FPS and then shoot with the left mouse button, or use silly specials with the right, while switching them through an hotbar. This lead to the issues I explanied above since the game has no collision detection and the execution was really bad.
With the new system they introduce some sort of "safe lock", so that you don't shoot at things you don't want to. Basically you have still to target with the mouse and then press "X" to acquire it and lock it. Let's say that you are walking around and decide to shoot at something. With this new system first you target with the mouse (mouseover), then you press "X" to acquire it (the brakets around the target will change) and then you start to shoot with the mouse button. It's not a "full" weapon lock because you still need to "aim" while you shoot, so if you turn in the other direction you will shoot at the air.
Basically the "lock" is just there so that or you damage it if you aim well, or you miss. Without risking to hit things you didn't want to. Then with the "Z" key you can also cycle between the targets around you, classic style. But, again, when you fire you still have to aim.
My opinion is that these tweaks will help to make the original system usable. And it definitely wasn't before. So it's an improvement.
Darniaq is still convinced that collision detection is coming, while I'm still skeptical about this. Sure thing is that without it this system will continue to be crippled. Quoting the patch notes:
- Kneeling and Prone positions may be used in combat by using either an ability button (the buttons can be found in your command browser by pressing ";") or the slash commands (/kneel, /prone)
What's the sense and purpose of this without collision detection? It's when I can take cover behind an object that kneeling can make sense. Right now you can shoot (and get shot) right through solid objects, so why I should need to kneel? To be a better target?
Plus they seriously need to bind those actions to default keys, not the quickbar or slash commands. At least if they want to incorporate those actions consistently in the combat mechanics (as they should when collision detection will arrive, if it will arrive). Giving more relevance to the environment (like ducts that you have to crawl through, indoor) is the way to go.
There are other fixes that were long due, like making creatures attack at slower speed and slow down melee movement. Things looked ridiculous before. We'll see if the implementation is good this time and if the combat "looks and feels" decent. On the paper the changes are good.
Then there's a last thing that drew my attention:
Weapon Retrofit: Combat damage inflicted by all weapons in the game will be based primarily on the weapon's stats, rather than the character's level.
I wonder who the hell approved the design document where it was written that the character level affected the damage of a laser pistol. This was utterly retarded. I guess that the weapons still have level requirements on their own, so the system is basically the same. But at least it is more coherent.
Darniaq also mentions a veteran reward that allows you to insta travel by calling a shuttle anywhere in the world. I wonder if you just click on an icon and select the destination from a menu before being insta-ported, or if you really do see a shuttle coming and landing that you can board with your group. Because if it's the first case then it's superbly lame. If it's the second it's the coolest thing ever.
I suspect it's the first...
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.
Submitted by Abalieno on March 25, 2006 - 07:47.
I distilled a few interesting parts from the flood of posts from Smed on the SWG boards. Now that I'm gone through it I think I should have organized it better, dividing the general considerations from the discussion about the specific changes. This is what I have right now:
Our communication has been terrific. I can't say you neccessarily like what we've been saying, but I think our community people and our devs have been much more active than before. I never liked that system of correspondents before (they did a great job..don't get me wrong) but I prefer direct communication.
--
The truth is the community morale won't improve until the game does. Communication can't fix this. Improvements to the game can. The fact is our communication has improved.. people don't neccessarily like the message is all. I get that. So do our community folks. My preference is that all the posts in the gameplay forum are discussing gameplay balance.. and in-game issues.. but they won't until we get the game to a baseline fun level. We're not there yet. We know that. We're working to fix it. There is no other answer.
--
The SWG community has been voting with it's feet since the NGE came about. Either we end up being right about our ability to turn the ship around and make a game that's BETTER than it was before, or we were wrong and we fail. Either way we were losing subs before the NGE and believe it or not, we are losing them at a slower rate than before. I'm not going to pretend we didn't lose a bunch of subs from this. We did. And I don't think the game is where it needs to be yet to aquire new subs. But it's getting there with each and every publish.
At the end of the day there are a lot of people in this community that wonder why we did this? Why did we "deliberately" try and piss people off. Obviously that wasn't our intent. This is a business and we needed to improve the results of the business. Did we make a mistake? Maybe.. but only time is going to tell on that one. One thing is certain. We made a mistake with how we presented it to the community, and for that I'm sorry. I still think it was a needed thing though. It's not as simple as "you should have just fixed the things we were complaining about". That doesn't address the very real fact that what we had was a hardcore game that wasn't going to attract the mass audience that the Star Wars IP brings to the table.
--
I respectfully disagree with your position on this. The profession system had fundemental flaws that couldn't be corrected and still be able to both balance the game and add meaningful content that made each profession really matter and be differentiated from the others. Was crafting absolutely the most amazing part of the game? Probably IMO. Can it still be a major part of the game? Hell yes.. and it will be. BUT that needs to be balanced with the fact that adventuring and killing things needed to have meaningful rewards as well to reach a more mainstream audience. I really hope you can see this point even if you don't agree with it.
--
Allow me to respectfully disagree with your point here - Star Wars as an IP is every bit as capable of delivering a WoW level audience. The reason it isn't is the game needs to be that good. No, not the SAME game.. but it needs to be that good and polished. Everyone thinks we are trying to make SWG like WoW or EQ2. That's completely not the case. Yes, we're going to a more rigid class based system and are doing more linear content.. but that's where the similarities end IMO. In theory we still have an incredibly deep and rich system based MMO that can deliver some world class gameplay once we live up to your expectations.
--
SWG never attracted the size audience that the Star Wars license delivered in the first place. One of those reasons was combat wasn't exciting enough. We have done enough research on the people who quit or people that didn't purchase the game to know this is a hard, brutal cold fact. Could we have gone a different direction with the combat? Yes. Could we in the future change this direction? Yes. Do I think we will? No. Why? Because I don't believe that this will be an issue if we solve the other half of the equation - making the professions feel different... and making the content really exciting.
--
Let's get this out of the way right now - SWG in no way has a low sub base. That's just not the fact. The truth is it's still the #4 game in North America (WoW, EQ2, EQ, SWG). I'm sure this will bring the naysayers out of the woodwork, but it's just a fact.
I also totally disagree with our assertion that we can't make this game the biggest and best MMO out there. We still have a full dev-team on this game and we're going to absolutely push ourselves until we achieve our goals. Noone is going into coasting mode on this game. Period.
--
The only answer I can give you on trust is that we have to earn that trust by continuing to make forward progress. That's it. We know that.
--
What exactly was the difference between most of the combat professions? There really wasn't one unfortunately. Adding meaningful content for over 30 professions just wasn't something we were capable of. We bit off more than we could chew. Also, the fact that a person who had seen the movies won't know what most of those professions were presented a real problem for aquisition.
--
You will never hear me saying the people that are complaining aren't passionate about wanting things to be like they were before. In fact, if there is one big lesson I've learned from all of this it's how NOT to go about making big changes in a game
--
I don't like trying to pass the buck. I may say stuff you disagree with, but I don't want to try to imply something that's not true. You may all believe that early on with the NGE we were just "spinning" things. We weren't.. we honestly believed (and still do) that we could make the game better and convince you all that this was the right direction.
--
I actually think this is something that will make things a lot better. I'm not sure where it is in the pipeline of things to do, but I think having mobs not all bunch up will fix a lot of what people complain about. Unfortunately this is not a simple technical problem to solve. It sounds like it is, but on the server side the single biggest frame rate killer is collisions for a lot of reasons I won't get into. We need to solve this problem. I don't have an ETA yet though.
--
we've lost some dev team members. A lot of new companies have sprung up in Austin and we lost some key people... new people take time to ramp up. Simple as that. NCsoft and others are losing people too. This is a competitive job market. Seriously competitive.
Not from Smed:
We recognize that the current profession system doesn't allow for any real level of character differentiation. As such, we're currently working on an "Expertise" system, that grants the players "points" to spend on specialization. The expertise system gives the profession system a similar feel to what we had pre-nge as far as character customization goes. The tech for this system is being developed for the next publish (this won't be visible to you guys). The publish after that, we're looking at pushing out the first two professions's worth of expertise trees, with two professions targeted for every publish after that. Generally speaking, we'll have three trees for each profession to choose from, including a GCW tree and a "path" tree that will hold things like "dark" and "light" side powers for Jedi, for instance (or droid specializtion, vs poisons for Bounty hunters - for instance).
--
(about the respec NPCs that will be added)
Starts 100k credits and goes up to 25 million i think.
--
Lots of talk about the "secret" project which really isn't a secret anymore. We are doing a playable demo for E3 and Swede is working on the team that is putting that together. The project is actually going to be larger then just the demo and become a new themepark with a GCW theme (lots of Rebels v. Imperials) to it, which will be put into the game in publish 29.
The intention of this themepark is to cover our bases with E3 and develope a new set of repeatable, high end content for all of you.
The expansion team, which is no more, is now working on nothing but high end content that will be sent out in our regular publishes.
--
(about collision detection)
We are still working on it. It is a huge change to the core game, so we want to make sure it is solid before we roll it out in a publish.
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Animations - We will be doing some significant work on our animation system in the upcoming months. The collision system we are working on will allow us to get jumping into the game.
--
We're going to put the stuff that's clearly SW in first. We're going to modify or retrofit the best of what was fun but not completely SW in second. We're going to remove or eliminate those things that clearly aren't SW.
And, we're going to do it all at a pace that ensures quality and fun.
--
SWG is no longer striving to be a world simulation.
There would be so many things to say about all this.
Submitted by Abalieno on February 20, 2006 - 05:40.
First of all EQ 2 is growing quite well and is doing great as a business. SWG wasn't in that condition.
"There's a reason that we did this. The story … is kind of getting lost here…the game was losing subscribers. We had to make this game more accessible to a wider audience or eventually we would not have a business,"
And:
What actully happens is called "Market Research". This involves multiple focus groups (not like putting up a web poll.. actually a 3rd-party company with a one-way mirrored room where dev people can watch how people react to the game.. then they ask those people a number of questions). In addition to this surveying the existing userbase via volunteer surveys (which was done before and after the NGE btw). Those focus groups also included different populations including existing users.
This is Totally Retared (TM). If that's what happened I'm not surprised of the total clusterfuck. And, again, you deserve every little bit of it.
Polls, surveys, outside consulting. If this is the trend, it may be as well the tomb of the genre.
What a total waste of money and resources. Mmorpgs need competent authors with a sincere passion. Not hamster experiments.
Submitted by Abalieno on December 27, 2005 - 07:42.
FoH's forums are dead once again, but before passing out someone linked the scans to PC Gamer's review of the latest changes in Star Wars Galaxies:
IT'S: Buggy - Desolate - Back to the drawing board
IT'S NOT: Got any depth - Fun - The way forward
27% - Disatrous
"Gives SWG more problem then ever"
And more:
"What a heap of junk"
"A failed attempt at resuscitating a dying game. Too many bugs and frustrating action."
"ABANDON SHIP: with a diminishing number of players, you may never group with others on a regular basis, thus missing out on the high quality adventures that exist out there somewhere."
"CRYING IN THE TERRAIN: Terrain plays a more integral role in combat now. You cannot attack through rock, which seems sensible enough. Infuriatingly, the reverse is not true. Mobs always appear to hit you even if they are hiding behind buildings or solid lumps of land."
"COMEDY COMBAT: A redesigned combat system with make-believe damage numbers makes it impossible to work out how much punishment you are inflicting. It's an attempt to move the game from stat-watching to faster-paced action. Sounds good in principle, fails in practice."
"CLASS WAR: Classes are only given an handful of combat skills throughout the entire game. This makes combat a dull and repetitive stream of default attacks, a special move than a swift heal. Repeat."
"Thirty-four professions were culled into nine 'iconic' classes. With no option to chop and change professions the classes are more nondescript than ever. Each of the combat classes are virtually identical, with no customization options to suit differing players' needs. Abilities granted every few levels are now merely replaced with higher ranked versions of the same ability when you level up."
"Jedi (the game's only real melee class) are at disadvantage and ranged classes fail altogether because it's impossible to keep a target singled-out when faced with more then two mobs that are close together."
"The crafting aspect of the game remains similar, but the demand for items has almost disappeared. The weapon you use no longer makes much difference: a level 16 DH-17 carabine will kill your target as fast as a level 80 Krayted T-21 rifle. The abolition of item decay limits Traders to one-time customers rather then the repeat sale economy of the past. Money will soon be just a figure with no actual value, driving crafters out of the game."
"There are no heroic characters in the tradition of the Star Wars universe, just your average Joes going through repeat missions on Mustafar, with nothing else to do."
"Welcome to a game that has lost its identity, where everybody is nobody."
"Nobody could have expected a total massacre of an two-and-a-half year old game in two weeks."
And more:
Influenced by: Star Wars, Benny Hill
Alternatively: World of Warcraft, 94%
OUCH!
Now to maintain a glimpse of balance in the Force I guess I'll have to link Darniaq's optimistical hopeful "review".
If that's the popular sentiment, I guess we have to reconsider the comments that followed the announcement of those changes. Back to discussing whether "change is good" or not.
The problems pointed out by PC Gamer are the same that I collected and listed just by reading the impressions of the players on various forums:
These changes don't seem to be for the better of the game. And, in particular, the implementation is terrible.
Which is exactly what I wrote in my comments as all this was announced:
My point of view is exactly the opposite. It's the context (completely changing a live service) to be useless and the content (the specifics of the changes) to be relevant.
It's only the quality of the implementation to matter here. If the quality is very high, the dissatisfaction would be easily reabsorbed. If the quality is poor, instead, you'll simply fail to get both new and old customers and the context would be branded as "not convenient" for future, generalized references and commonplaces formed out of thin air that will be very hard to discard.
It's really this simple.
What was important was to consider the resources available and figure out if there was enough "space" to do a very good work or not. SOE made its choice. We'll see the results. These results should be always considered for the specific game and the specific changes. Not generalized and standardized as absolute principles.
I don’t support “change” just for the sake of it, in the same way I do not support fancy ideas with no foundation. What I’d like to see is working actively to deliver what was planned and adjust what you are creating with what you learnt along the way.
The truth simply depends on how “change” is executed and not “whether change or not”. I hate this generalization about “change”. If *this* change is well executed the players will finally reward it, if it sucks the game will pay an harsh price. The same would apply if we were talking about a brand new product.
People are RAGING against the NGE but what I read in the complaints is about NPCs shooting through walls, melee being retarted, and huge problems with the controls. Yes, they are hating "change", but they are hating it because it's, once again, an half-assed, incomplete *implementation*. IMPLEMENTATION. And yes, this is the fucking problem of SWG since day 1. They dragged the game in every direction possible, finishing nothing.
I said it in the past and I'll repeat it. The HUGEST problem of SWG is the high churn rate of the developers. Starting from Raph. The game switched hands like the cheapest whore and its current status is NOWHERE SURPRISING. But there isn't anything to learn from here, if not that without commitment, long term and STABLE commitment, you go nowhere. This is why it's so important the managment in a company to keep things together.
On the same lines were the comments from TerraNova I quoted:
The problem is that SWG's chief problem from the beginning has been poor implementation, poor communication, poor service. Koster's design ideas went wrong when they got awkwardly stitched in late Beta to counterposing designs, when the center could not hold. They went wrong when they went live in a horribly unfinished state, with an underresourced live management team desperately trying to keep a very leaky ship afloat.
Unfortunately, the live management team seems to have ignored another long-standing criticism of SWG by many observers: that their design and implementation process is a disastrous mess. Never more so than with the NGE: whatever it is conceptually, in practice, it's roughly on par with an alpha build of a MMOG.
And more or less the same is what Darniaq observed:
"For the most sweeping change to ever hit an MMORPG, SOE effectively gave the players a few days of notice. They didn't seek opinions. They weren't testing it for months on the public Test Servers. They didn't have a long dialog with the players. They basically made the announcement, pushed the code to the Test Servers two days later, and as usual for them, regardless of what the players found on the Test Servers, the entire game was patched with it shortly thereafter."
"As such, they have received a lot of complaints. These criticism though, from game forums to traditional mass media to industry professionals, are less about the changes to the game and more about SOE's handling of it."
"This system is both completely different and nigh incomplete. The reason there's not much to say yet is because so much is left undone. Even true collision detection is not yet in, nor is it slated for another six months."
"That the players pay for how poorly they are all implemented can't mean we forget that they're being tried at all."
After these changes were announced I criticized three specific points:
1- How the transition was handled (communication with the players) (1, 2, 3)
2- Overall design (choices made nowhere solid or convincing) (1, 2)
3- Implementation (1, 2, 3, 4)
ALL three of these went terribly wrong as I feared. But the "change" itself wasn't an issue. If not in the equation: change = increasing risk.
What was important was to consider the resources available and figure out if there was enough "space" to do a very good work or not. SOE made its choice. We'll see the results. These results should be always considered for the specific game and the specific changes. Not generalized and standardized as absolute principles.
Then, sometimes, it's also possible to hear some positive comments:
Still having fun in SWG. Not only the first fun I've had since the game came out, but this will probably be the longest I've been subscribed. Despite any problems with the NGE. I didn't want to be a fucking moisture farmer, I wanted to be a badass Sith and crush Rebels under my heel. It's too bad crafting is getting shafted so hard, but the focus on crafting all this time shafted the entire game.
Submitted by Abalieno on November 22, 2005 - 23:36.
Still on TerraNova someone linked a recent post (12 September) from Raph on SWG boards about the communication with the players and their plans to improve it.
Truly amazing if compared to what happened in the last weeks.
(link)
Hey there everyone--
Lots to reply to in the above, but I figured you're less interested in rehashing the past and more interested in concrete things that we will do to improve things.
I wanted to let you know that I spoke this morning with Alan Crosby, who recently became our director of community relations, about the update process. For those who do not know, the position of director of community relations is a relatively new one here at SOE, one that we've been planning on having for a while. Alan's job is to enforce community policies across all the titles--and one of the first is the update process, which includes the whole In Concept->In Dev->In Testing thing.
I didn't mean to give the impression that this process is fully in place across all the games, or even working at peak on the games where it is implemented. It's not. That's why we have Alan in this position now.
The plan is to have this system roll out across all the games in the coming weeks, and along the way, fix it on any games where it exists but is not being used to its full intent.
To reiterate: our goal is
* prospective changes should be discussed in advance of implementation to gather community feedback
* as implementation proceeds, the changes are documented and posted to In Development as they are completed
* when ready, these detailed notes are posted as a source of information for testing
* when propped to Live, the notes are updated with any changes necessary, and posted as the latest update
* a history of updates is maintained to serve as documentation for added features
As you have pointed out, some of this is not happening. The objective is to make it all happen and become habitual, as soon as possible.
Not everyone seems to agree at SOE.
This confirms my suspects about it being nowhere planned.
Submitted by Abalieno on November 16, 2005 - 09:15.
Not from me. I was busy in my first DarkSpire run in DAoC and getting mad at Mythic (and, once again, congratulating the artists, that place is another masterpiece).
The bad impressions are coming from SWG and with a few things that still annoy me even if I'm not playing the game:
You still canNOT sit on the beds (benches, chairs). Just as in the beta all that time ago, I sat in midair about 7 feet away from the bed. It was vaguely amusing.
What the hell. What the fuck! I thought they fixed this in January. No. Characters still sit in the air. It tells a lot about the rest of the execution.
I'm not totally sure but I've read that if you download the trial and try to connect you have to download another 200Mb patch.
On day 1.
--
FIND A BOMB AND DEFUSE IT! Follow this glowing blue fairy thing!
Walk for 1 minute, click once, walk back 1 minute.
Yeah, shot through walls. Stuff meleeing me from 20 ft away.
--
Most force skills don't even have an animation, the enemy just turns into a corpse as soon as you click the right button on it. Some other don't even work.
--
It's simply *impossible* to shoot a mob between some dead bodies due to the retarded target system. You try to shoot but instead you target the dead bodies and start looting them while you are getting shot.
--
12k+ ham bars. It feels like playing a pinball.
--
Anything you "target", your character LOOKS at. So this means as I move the mouse around, my characters head is twitching madly as it looks at dozens of different things for a tenth of a second at a time.
--
My favorite part of last night was standing in front of Mos Eisley cantina and saying that the game looks like a piece of shit now, everyone moves all stupid and everyone's heads snap left and right all the time, and several folks shouting ADAPT! and THIS IS BETTER you just have to get used to it and give it a chance!
I then proceeded to shout, "Are you fucking blind, look around you and how people are moving - especially people FIGHTING. It looks like shit, plain and simple. Get used to what? People in a near fetal position gliding across the Tatooine sand on invisible rollerskates?"
Aside from the many UI and control issues, they need to turn down what craptacular speed boost they put in, because animations are so fast that the server can't even keep up.
And then, they need to actually sit down and do some real work on melee, because it's pathetic.
--
melee is almost impossible. I had several mob AI run from me from melee range. I had several on Endor do the classic run-1Km-away-and-then-back-again-bug. Hadn't seen that since year1.
--
you can hit in melee facing your enemy backwards.
--
Even if you use your saber block, you wait out the root, then snare the other guy, he snares you, you both half-step your way towards each other (well, the Jedi gimps towards the gimpy ranged person, as they continue their kiting) and eventually - you get rooted again. And pummeled. Eventually ranged wins, because in the midst of all this running and gimping around - guess what - Jedi does 0 damage to their target, or they get a couple saber throws in that do a few slivers of damage. The ranged person has ample time to let that regen while they continue their snare/root/kite technique.
--
I can no longer be a dancer and make my own clothing and that royally sucks.
--
Within the first 10 minutes you meet C-3P0, R2-D2, Han Solo, Chewbacca, and get chased by Vader. It's worth nothing that Solo throws in a random "kid" about every other sentence. You also get to have a laughably easy turret shootout with TIEs moving at about 1mph, and take down some nonresponsive storm troopers that seem to be in the advanced stages of Parkinson's.
--
You just point at an object that the game deems as "shootable" and left click. The camera controls suck, frequently making it difficult to see since your character gets in the way of aiming. I also had occasional problems with the camera clipping out of the station and showing the stars outside. Objects in the game and in your inventory also flicker pretty badly.
--
So we know that they removed the decay. Once again people leave around their vehicles littering the place and lagging everyone.
--
Crafting is now also a bitch, because of the difficulty in turning off mouselook mode. This tosses you back to staring at your worthless crosshairs every time you sell an item on your vendor.
--
Using force run or force heal puts the character in combat, even without aggressive mobs in a 4km range. You are stuck in it. The only way to get out of combat is to search for a friend to duel or go shot a mob.
--
the right-click specials system.... So how do I clear a special so I don't fire it off accidently? Or better said, how the hell can I /peace anymore? Hitting ESC only brings up the HUD. If you target some objects -- let's the say a bank terminal, which I'm testing in another window as I type this -- and right-click, you fire off that special and start combat. And you fucking stay in combat...
--
As soon as I logged in, my server announced it was shutting down. I tried to sit down to log out, but it put me into combat mode and wouldn't let me leave. I ran around for a bit, watching random "-SNARED-" and "-LEVEL UP-" text come out of my character's head for no apparent reason. Then the server kicked me off.
--
The Officer buffs don't work on the group but affect only the Officer.
--
Well, it seems that since I posted my last blurb one of the medics four healing abilities now works.
--
Loot! Just like in the star wars movies, kill thousands upon thousands of small, inoffensive creatures and then rip their brain from their head. What do you do with the brain? Why you sell it to a fence of course!
--
There were at least a couple of "obj_value[skill_luck]=3" or whatever lurking about, the "Select profession" button (according to the text) was not called that (it was "Next"), and there were quite a few graphical glitches. And it still has all of that "I can't run underneath this spaceship because the transparent model extends to the ground" shit that I remember from my subscription days. Thanks for stressing the point that it's more 2.5D than 3D, except in space.
Slow: Not just the space combat, but the lag, and controls in general.
First of all, it's 3rd person with the "person" off to the side, so you end up running "sideways" because you're trained to move forward into the center. Anger!
Second of all, the switching between mouselook and interactivity is, as others have pointed out, inconsistent - frequently, the game will decide it should switch to the other when you would assume it would not. And ESC is dangerous, because it will close some dialogs, not just switch the modes.
Third, interaction sucks; Aiming the tiny cursor is hell when your target is obscured by big damage numbers. Targeting a conversation choice is hard when it's relative to an NPC going through animations.
Shooting through walls is bad, meleeing from far away is bad. Not being able to sit on a chair properly after more than two years is even worst.
Consistence, pls. No game based on ranged combat can have the *pretence to exist* without an even rudimental Line of Sight check.
The most comedy value comes from Smedley himself:
While the scope of the new enhancements is large, it's built upon a very powerful underlying engine that gives us the ability to enhance the game in meaningful ways rather quickly.
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