SW: Galaxies - Retrospective @ Games Radar
- Thread starter Couchpotato
- Start date
ChaosTheory
Virtual Reality Hero
I played the *#$@ out of this when it came out, and at one point was the richest industrial robber-barron on the server. But the constant exploits, bugs and fundamental system changes made me walk away. I haven't really gotten into any MMORPGs since, as a result.
But in the beginning, this game blew Star Wars Old Republic away in pure open-worldness and the ability to create your own destiny.
But in the beginning, this game blew Star Wars Old Republic away in pure open-worldness and the ability to create your own destiny.
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SWG always had a lot of potential but instead of uphill, the game constantly went downhill after its release... with very few notable exceptions like the space expansion Jump to Lightspeed which was mostly good.
The biggest problem as far as I can see was that the game was not thought through very well from the start. The idea to have 32 professions was nuts. There was no way that the dev team was ever going to keep everyone happy. There is a good reason why most successful MMOs have a very limited range of classes so they can keep people happy with content and balancing changes.
The other huge problem was that obviously someone (LucasArts?) was cracking the whip in the background and forced the dev team to focus on the delivery of new content. They never got the chance or had the time to fix the base game. They had to work on speeders and mounts, then player cities, then the space expansion... whatever.
As a result, they kept pouring more half-baked content on top of a shaky base. The result was rampant bugs and insane lag at times (especially with the cities and vendors with thousands of items etc.).
They also addressed several credit dupe incidents way too late. This did crazy amounts of damage to the player-run economy.
Well, and then there were the really disappointing parts like the treatment of the whole Jedi thing. The first few months everyone thought that to unlock your force-sensitive slot to become a Jedi (or create a Jedi character to be more precise) there was some mystical quest somewhere out there in the galaxy for us to discover.
Not so fast. It turned out that the Jedi system was not even in the game at launch! And it turned out that there was no epic quest, no mystery, nothing Star Wars-y... nope, all you had to do was change professions (unlearn what you have learned) until you unlocked your Jedi slot.
What ensued was a mass hysteria of epic proportions when people started to hunt down the fabled holocrons (those told you in the beginning which profession you had to learn) and then ground out professions they never intended to play other than to unlock that slot. This, once more, did insane amounts of damage to the player-run economy and to the social parts of the game.
Finally, some genius had the grand idea to swap out the core gameplay systems TWICE in nine months. I personally made it fine through the CU (combat upgrade) which just took some getting used to but the NGE (new game experience) patch that hit nine months later was the final nail in the coffin for me and for what I would guess a majority of the player base at the time.
SWG definitely had its moments, and there was always this lingering potential underneath it all to turn the sandbox into a great game, but due to the constant mismanagement it unfortunately never happened.
The biggest problem as far as I can see was that the game was not thought through very well from the start. The idea to have 32 professions was nuts. There was no way that the dev team was ever going to keep everyone happy. There is a good reason why most successful MMOs have a very limited range of classes so they can keep people happy with content and balancing changes.
The other huge problem was that obviously someone (LucasArts?) was cracking the whip in the background and forced the dev team to focus on the delivery of new content. They never got the chance or had the time to fix the base game. They had to work on speeders and mounts, then player cities, then the space expansion... whatever.
As a result, they kept pouring more half-baked content on top of a shaky base. The result was rampant bugs and insane lag at times (especially with the cities and vendors with thousands of items etc.).
They also addressed several credit dupe incidents way too late. This did crazy amounts of damage to the player-run economy.
Well, and then there were the really disappointing parts like the treatment of the whole Jedi thing. The first few months everyone thought that to unlock your force-sensitive slot to become a Jedi (or create a Jedi character to be more precise) there was some mystical quest somewhere out there in the galaxy for us to discover.
Not so fast. It turned out that the Jedi system was not even in the game at launch! And it turned out that there was no epic quest, no mystery, nothing Star Wars-y... nope, all you had to do was change professions (unlearn what you have learned) until you unlocked your Jedi slot.
What ensued was a mass hysteria of epic proportions when people started to hunt down the fabled holocrons (those told you in the beginning which profession you had to learn) and then ground out professions they never intended to play other than to unlock that slot. This, once more, did insane amounts of damage to the player-run economy and to the social parts of the game.
Finally, some genius had the grand idea to swap out the core gameplay systems TWICE in nine months. I personally made it fine through the CU (combat upgrade) which just took some getting used to but the NGE (new game experience) patch that hit nine months later was the final nail in the coffin for me and for what I would guess a majority of the player base at the time.
SWG definitely had its moments, and there was always this lingering potential underneath it all to turn the sandbox into a great game, but due to the constant mismanagement it unfortunately never happened.
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2006
- Messages
- 3,201
Agree here,me and a bunch of buddies played and had a blast.Then the combat upgrades came and everyone started leaving in bus loads..heh
The "biggest problem" was the lead designer. He created a sandbox without creating a game, just like he did with Ultima Online. Oh, I think I'll log in and craft items for a couple hours, then check my vendors for an hour, then decorate my player housing for an hour, then run a few random anthill-kicking missions that are exactly like the last 300 anthill-kicking missions I did... how many days can go by and have the average gamer still consider it to be fun? Other biggest problem was when he moved on to ruin Everquest, there was nobody left to evolve his alleged vision. The guy was 1/2 a decent designer. If everyone who ever hired him made sure to hire somebody else to do all the things he didn't know how to do (or had no interest in doing) he might have been able to turn out decent product.
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