SWG (Star Wars Galaxies) - An autopsy...
By smokemare 10 Comments
First of all to suggest SWG is dead, may be wrong. I know a lot of servers have shut down - and merged, but I think there are still people on there trying to play it. Following on from my last post and the one before about content I thought I'd discuss the rise and fall of Star Wars Galaxies. I've read a lot of articles on the topic, and I have mixed feelings about it.
The Birth
SWG was an ambitious project. The aim was to create an open ended game wich gave the player unprecedented freedom. The economy was designed to be entirely player generated. In some respects, you'd think it would have a chance of a great start - with developers from Ultima Online and Everquest joining the team, and a record-breaking size pre-launch community and fan-base. It had everything an MMORPG developer could want. However it had a difficult birth. Factors affecting this were:-
- Incredibly ambitious core mechanics
- Spiralling development costs and fan-demand forcing an early release
- A clear issue with what sort of player SWG was for
In Beta 3 at the point of release, it really needed another 12 months of development, to do the following:-
- Balance professions
- Fix the borked professions
- Add meaningful and interesting content
- Solve all the game-breaking bugs and graphical glitches that plagued the game at the time.
The Jedi Saga
If SWG had been left alone and fixed slowly but surely - then it could have been great. However that wasn't going to happen. Jedi changed the game significantly. When the first player unlocked everyone was very excited, the developers wanted to see Jedi unlocking - but not many. Eventually out of frustration they began dropping hints in the form of holocrons, which then turned the game into a soul-less grind-zone. Everyone stopped RP'ing and playing the game the way it was intended 'Live a life in the Star Wars Galaxy' and macro'ing and power-gaming their way through professions to get Jedi. Cantina's full of entertainers AFK desperately grinding for a Jedi slot and there because they wanted Jedi, NOT because they wanted to play a musician.
The number of professions needed to master changed, at the start it was something like 4 (They had to be the correct ones.) to about 18 at the end. This became a system which pre-cluded RP'ers and casual players, and Jedi ended up being soley a possible profession for Uber Leet 'powergamers' which was entirely the sort of gamer the profession wasn't aimed at!
The problem then, is that the Power Gamers are the ones with the loudest voice, so gradually all their complaints about the profession were addressed, and it became truly a 'powergamer' profession.
The intention was that playing a Jedi was playing a fugitive, having to stay hidden and train in secret, not being particularly powerful, but having to keep their ~Jedi identity secret. What the community wanted was for Jedi to be an Uber Leet Combat Class that pwned everything and anything. The powergamers shouted, they got their wish - the game was ruined.
The village didn't improve things really, but at least the pointless grind-fest of profession grinding for Jedi came to an end.
Moving forwards
Eventually, with subscriber numbers trickling away, because of the poor decisions up to this point - the Combat Upgrade was thrown in. It messed up a lot of peoples templates and didn't actuallly fix the core problems with the game. It was like trying to repair a magnificent antique clock by hitting it with a slegehammer. The principle of design of SWG was good, but pandering to a vocal player-base and straying from the original design instead of fixing and developing what they had killed it. Players who had dropped off, and tried the game later would be so put off by the Combat Upgrade they wouldn't renew. If the time had been spent improving what was already there and sorting it out properly - people might have stayed.
Jedi became more commonplace, players started just playing the space flight part of the game, ghost towns started to emerge, empty and lifeless and the few players that were still on were grinding Jedi night and day at the village.
The final nail in the coffin
Eventually just prior to the trials of obi wan being released. The NGE was dropped on the game. Or the 'New Game Enhancements' which basically, appeared that some senior executive had seen World of Warcrafts subscriber figures, and decided a Star Wars Licence could generate more - and said 'We'll make it more like WoW with a Star Wars Licence and market it hard.' but it didn't work, changing the game so radically, and mdumbing down the complex core mechanics just annoyed the entire player-base. It was a heroically stupid move and anyone with an inkling of sense would have seen it and stopped it happening. I seriously cannot believe this seemed like a good idea.
Yes subscriber numbers might have been falling, but breaking the game and alienating the few subscribers you had was surely not the best way to go about solving it!?
Was it greed? Was the licence not earning the revenue to warrant LucasArts licencing fee? I don't know, I do know it could have been better, it could have been great. It could have been consistently popular to this day. What would I have done differently?
How I would have tried to save Star Wars Galaxies
- Bankrolled another 6 months development time in Beta 3 AT LEAST, possibly another 12 months.
- Ignored Jedi at release, focused on getting mounts vehicles and player cities incorporated the professions balanced.
- Not released until the game-breaking issues of getting stuck and the graphical glitches were at least RARE rather than VERY, VERY COMMON.
- Instead of wasting hours of development time on Jedi - built more content - like the Corvette mission, Deathwatch Bunker - these kind of things.
- When Jedi WAS eventually implemented, kept the method to unlock secret - and forget whether anyone unlocked or not. Jedi was not supposed to be the main game!
- Not pander to the 10 year old power gamers who wanted Jedi to be something they weren't intended to be.
- Spent the majority of development time on fixing, balancing and adding content - only the surplus of surplus on Jedi. Jedi should never have been allowed to be considered peoples main profession. It was supposed to be something most people would want to experience, but that the reality of the experience meant only people who actually understood the place of Jedi in the star wars universe at the time the game is set.
Jedi are fugitives, in hiding, on the run... Call it what you will, Tarkin describes them as being 'extinct' Obi Wan whips his lightsabre out in Mos Eisely Cantina and he has to do an immediate runner and Storm Troopers turn up...
You might turn around and say, "Yeah but what about Luke 'pwning Jabba's henchman and then all the Imperials on Endor' ?" The thing is Luke is the son of the chosen one, and was trained personally by two of the greatest Jedi Masters of the old Republic, a Jedi who defeated the chosen one and survived the purge and a 900 year old former head of the Jedi Council... Your character in SWG might be a Jedi, but you can't expect them to be Luke Skywalker...
A final change
I thnk I final change I might have made was so people could be a combat class and non-combat at the same time. With one character per server and the time taken to grind elite professions, it would've been nice to say, been able to be a Bounty Hunter or Commando and go adventuring with your friends, and with the same character be a Dancer or Armoursmith and be able to contribute to the economy and enjoy that side of SWG.
All in all it was a wasted oppurtunity, a string of mistakes and poor decisions... The only possible thing that can come out of it, is that developers can learn from these mistakes. My big fear is that Star Wars : The Old Republic actually sounds rather like the NGE. It will be built from the ground up with a clear intention to be what it is - so it might be better than the NGE, but it won't have the depth. complexity and open-endedness of original Star Wars Galaxies : A Community Divided. And that divide played a part in killing the game, the conflict between Power Gamers and RP / Casuals brought about many of the games problems, plus the fact that so much was done in a rush... Maybe building a seperate server on the same engine called 'Star Wars : Jedi Wars!' just for the power-gamers would have helped....
We'll never know... But at least we can play SWG EMU :-)