I was long gone from SWG before this happened, but its a great read regardless of whether you played the game or not.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/101/14
Just read the article and I was pleasantly surprised for the most part. Aside from fucking up and cramming 34 classes into 9 classes and taking the sandbox idea away, some the changes sounded a lot better to me, actually. They removed alot of the grind factor and focused more on the twitch or player SKILL factor. Man, I guess I should have read up on the game more when the NGE changes came out. If I would have known they went ahead and focused more on twitch and skill instead of auto-lock and auto-fire features, and took away some of the grind, I would have re-installed the game.
Some shitty things, though: Taking away creature handling was a step backwards, so was the betrayal that SOE pulled. I think if a focus on player-centric skill and character-centric innovation would have been the focus from the get-go, rather than the grind; none of the mess would have happened as drastically as it did.
Now auto-fire and target locking are re-introduced to make players happy again? How about left clicking the mouse to fire and using some manual dexterity to stay on your target without relying on a game mechanic to do it for you? It's becoming more and more apparent to me that a decent portion of the MMO community prefers to have it's hand held where skill is involved, and would rather grind instead using auto attack features and other mind-numbing principles. I still don't get this trend...maybe I'm just a born pnp AD&D guy who fell in love with FPS games and sees potential between combining the two; rather than through mindless grinding for ways to compensate for lack of skill...
I forget why I never played SWG... If its release was during WoW beta then that'd be why, i was busy having fun in there since phase 1 of the beta. And yeah i admit it, WoW during beta was alot of fun... then the noobs and annoying kids showed up aka final release.
That's why I originally quit SWG was to play WoW beta. But I should have went back to SWG as soon as Blizzard changed WOW by removing character stat-allotment per level and buffed item stats/item-centricity. I wasted time, and later both time and money on WOW after that point.
yeah thank god i didnt play through that, i know i would have been mad pissed at soe, i played it after they lost 90 percent of thier community and it did suck, sucked alot.
I loved NGE, like Crim said, twitch ftw. Problem was it was a lock-combat engine converted to twitch, so it felt really funny, but still, it was way more fun than how combat was before. Only problem was the servers were soooooo empty.
And yeah Crim, no one wants to play a game they suck at, so developers take away twitch and skill-factor from gaming so they don't get their asses handed to them by FPS players.
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I loved NGE, like Crim said, twitch ftw. Problem was it was a lock-combat engine converted to twitch, so it felt really funny, but still, it was way more fun than how combat was before. Only problem was the servers were soooooo empty.
And yeah Crim, no one wants to play a game they suck at, so developers take away twitch and skill-factor from gaming so they don't get their asses handed to them by FPS players.
I think you guys miss the most important part:
You don't change core game mechanics on your subscribers after they've invested years into a game. Its betrayal. When you've invested your time--your life--into a game your bound to be pissed.
Developers are supposed to have all the game design done before the game is released. It's totally inappropriate to reshape mechanics afterwards. It's customer service, stupid!
I haven't read it yet, opened it last night, but I was busy. And yeah, I know what you mean, Val, it's getting you to pay for a certain image, and giving you a different product in return. They thought it's what the community would really want. It turned out to be what A community wanted (the Rogue-Squadron, Jedi Outcast-loving twitchy FPS community I'm a member of) sadly, few of these people played their game. They wanted to bring in more customers at the expense of theirs.
I'll read it when I get back from class.
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I loved NGE, like Crim said, twitch ftw. Problem was it was a lock-combat engine converted to twitch, so it felt really funny, but still, it was way more fun than how combat was before. Only problem was the servers were soooooo empty.
And yeah Crim, no one wants to play a game they suck at, so developers take away twitch and skill-factor from gaming so they don't get their asses handed to them by FPS players.
Well Bos, hope to see you in FURY then =) Third Person Slasher with full skill arrayment, both character and player-wise 4tw!!
AOC is focusing slightly more on twitch than previous MMOs as well. Think DFO is too.
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I loved NGE, like Crim said, twitch ftw. Problem was it was a lock-combat engine converted to twitch, so it felt really funny, but still, it was way more fun than how combat was before. Only problem was the servers were soooooo empty.
And yeah Crim, no one wants to play a game they suck at, so developers take away twitch and skill-factor from gaming so they don't get their asses handed to them by FPS players.
I think you guys miss the most important part:
You don't change core game mechanics on your subscribers after they've invested years into a game. Its betrayal. When you've invested your time--your life--into a game your bound to be pissed.
Developers are supposed to have all the game design done before the game is released. It's totally inappropriate to reshape mechanics afterwards. It's customer service, stupid!
Valentein. Read through my initial post again carefully. I wrote that one of the bullshit things that happened was the betrayal by SOE...'nuff said.
It certaintly is betrayal, no wonder people were furious, I didn't realise to the extent that they changed the game.
Was an interesting article though thanks.
Crimthan I think you would be happier playing a differnt genre of game like fps rather than getting so upset at every mmorpg that doesn't concentrate on twitch. None of the mmofps's to date have been at all successful so unfortunatly for the people like you who long for one are probably in the minority.
It would be nice to see a little more skill in mmo's and a perfectly balanced class system however its incredable difficult to achieve, most of the skill in mmos comes from knowing what abilitys to use and when, knowing about your class and others and knowing how to work together well as a team rather than about who is the most accurate with a mouse.
Personally I like that which is why I mostly mmo's rather than fps or rts. I enjoy the later two occasinally but it's not something I feel is able to keep my attention for many hours a day for years.
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I forget why I never played SWG... If its release was during WoW beta then that'd be why, i was busy having fun in there since phase 1 of the beta. And yeah i admit it, WoW during beta was alot of fun... then the noobs and annoying kids showed up aka final release.
SWG was out a long time before WOW, I played SWG for a long time, then quit and went to shadowbane for a long time, before quiting that and joining WOW beta (although it was the later stages, not early like you).
Not many had even heard of WoW when SWG came out. It was at least a year.
i prefer .hack/fragment was way better but such a small play time, lasted less then six months, but the gameplay was awesome, and it was kinda hack and slash, more fps orientated but hell fun,
"sigh"... SWG was my first MMO and god I hated what SOE did to it (a reason I am avoiding Vanguard)... when they nerfed Creatures to make them essentially worthless it was really hard... the biggest problem I saw with SWG was they never tested things enough... they never anticipated the extent to which the player base would take a little of this a little of that and viola they were virtually unhittable (no fault of their's).
Then there was the whole Doc thing with stat boosters... hell you could solo virtually any mission with those boosts which were so good because a drop of a particular ingredient was 1000 OQ which sent the overall effect through the roof. Bad/Limited beta testing was a killer for SWG.
Hell on the test center you had to grind a character through all the boxes which is why they did not run into certain issues till way after launch... makes sense to have some grinding done but then they learned their lesson and you could goto this console and select what you wanted to learn and then you had the skills... if they had done that upfront that would have forewarned them of a lot of stuff.
And last but not least was the Jedi grind... what an absurd way to implement a method of obtaining a new class... god what that did to the economy and the whole game play issue... people "group soloing" so that they could get the highest level mission possible yet solo it so that they got all the xp just to find out if that class was "the one"... destroyed the community...
There are other things also but I rant too much... sorry.
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It would be nice to see a little more skill in mmo's and a perfectly balanced class system however its incredable difficult to achieve, most of the skill in mmos comes from knowing what abilitys to use and when, knowing about your class and others and knowing how to work together well as a team rather than about who is the most accurate with a mouse.
That's what I like too. Coordinated action/reaction, move/countermove. Like team based chess played in real-time.
With SWG, it was actually Lucas Arts that fucked it up more than SOE from what I've read.
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SWG was out a long time before WOW, I played SWG for a long time, then quit and went to shadowbane for a long time, before quiting that and joining WOW beta (although it was the later stages, not early like you).
Not many had even heard of WoW when SWG came out. It was at least a year.
Now that you say that I remember now that I didn't play because I was still leading things up in Dark Age of Camelot:Andred server. PvP was fun there, guess SWG couldn't lure me away at the time.
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SWG was out a long time before WOW, I played SWG for a long time, then quit and went to shadowbane for a long time, before quiting that and joining WOW beta (although it was the later stages, not early like you).
Not many had even heard of WoW when SWG came out. It was at least a year.
Now that you say that I remember now that I didn't play because I was still leading things up in Dark Age of Camelot:Andred server. PvP was fun there, guess SWG couldn't lure me away at the time.
I think Andred was dead before then. I believe that SB came out before SWG.
Val's right
Here's a screen shot I have of basically everyone that was still playing DAoC in June of '03 which is when SWG was released.
