Sony To Encase Half the Star Wars: Galaxies Servers In Carbonite 140
Impy the Impiuos Imp writes "Sony is apparently merging out of existence half its Star Wars: Galaxies servers. In spite of a number of innovative features (three health bars, choreograph-able dancing, music you can coordinate between several players, 'your own R2 unit and 3PO,' programmable droids, and so on), a complete overhaul of the combat system, designed to simplify it and make it more action-oriented, actually drove away more people than it attracted. It soon thereafter retired to that great, Sony one-fee-for-all stable of aging and also-rans in the sky. Still on life support, it was preceded in death by Sony foster brother The Matrix Online."
Innovative features (Score:4, Insightful)
I laughed out loud at "three health bars". Thank you for making my day, Impy.
When will they get it??? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't release a game and then change everything about it. Add content and features, sure. But you never drastically change the game. People start to feel like they don't "know" the game and leave. You aren't going to attract new customers by touting something like "new improved attack system". They don't know about the old one so they can't judge how much better it is. And the people that don't like the changes will spread their opinions that it sucks.
Get it right before you release it or deal with the consequences.
Re:When will they get it??? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to have to disagree here. Drastic changes were very much needed. The problem is they tried to do totally new things inside the framework of their existing engine to save money. They basically tried to tack semi FPS gameplay onto a client that very much did not support it. Then on top of that the changes they wanted to make just sucked. If they had spent a bit more money on it and not tried to do stuff that was obviously stupid it would of worked fine.
Re:When will they get it??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just overhauling the combat system would have been reasonable, but they also scrapped the skill system that made the game unique.
Re:When will they get it??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, that's exactly why I'll disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, that seems to be like exactly the kind of move that will drive players away, no matter how it's done.
See, it's not just whether the turning to FPS is well done or (as was the case) crap done. It's that it turns the game into a whole other genre than I signed for.
If I wanted to play a FPS, I would be playing one of the many FPS-es without an online fee. It's not like people were sitting going, "man, I'd so play a FPS, but I have no clue where to get one. If only Sony could turn one of their game into a FPS..."
Then there were changes like that to the skill system. Honestly, when you hear someone rant about how great the old SWG was, _the_ thing that invariably comes up is the skill system. There were a lot of people who basically put up with its many other sins, just because it was the only one which didn't force them into the mould of a pre-defined class.
So then Sony comes and throws exactly that away.
It doesn't really matter inside which framework you do something like that. It's going to piss people off.
Then there were the changes to the characters. Everyone had their own combination that they played because genuinely that was what they liked to play, and they had spent months tweaking them to exactly their taste, collecting gear, etc. Then suddenly that combination isn't even available any more. I'm not talking just "nerfed" or "changed", but, really, whatever combination you were playing, chances are there wasn't any close equivalent available after the NGE. For some, like animal handlers, there was nothing that even played similarly after the change.
For those without SWG experience: Imagine if Blizzard one day and said basically, "nah, hybrid and pet classes are now out, they're too complicated for you lot. And you've been bitching about specs and your guild making you respec since we first added raid dungeons, so we're throwing those out too. So from effective now, we'll only have the classes: fighter, archer, cleric and thief. (Which incidentally don't play like warrior, hunter, priest and rogue either.) With a fixed progression of a abilities. If you were playing a paladin or druid, sucks to be you, you get to choose one or the other, not be that jack of all trades crap."
"Oh, and what's that crap about being a warrior _and_ a blacksmith? Can't you just make up your mind? From now on, you can be a fighting class or you can be a trade class, not both. The traders won't even have a combat level, but we'll make all monsters ignore them."
Also imagine that it wasn't an April Fools post.
I'm willing to bet that three quarters of their population would cancel their subscription over such a drastic change. Which is what happened to SWG.
Re:When will they get it??? (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't release a game and then change everything about it. Add content and features, sure. But you never drastically change the game. People start to feel like they don't "know" the game and leave. You aren't going to attract new customers by touting something like "new improved attack system". They don't know about the old one so they can't judge how much better it is. And the people that don't like the changes will spread their opinions that it sucks.
That's the problem with MMO's. If I buy Knights of the Old Republic and love it, I might resent changes in Knights of the Old Republic 2. If so, I can just stick with the old game. But that's not the case with MMO's, you're stuck with the upgrade. I don't really see how this will change.
It's actually kind of funny how chaotically divergent the reactions can be to elements within a game. When the game launches there's no debate, it is what it is and people experience it together for the first time, warts and all. For every element in the game you'll find people willing to fight to the death for or against it. And every time the developer tries to fix something it's like they just tried to eat someone's baby.
The problems I've seen with games is either when they try to add features that really bring nothing to the game or when they try to simplify complexity that was actually a core part of what made the game interesting.
4x games are a good example of this. It's basically an elaborate version of GO. Expand across the map, control territory, beat the enemies. There was a great game on the Palm that reduced this to the essential elements. You had a map with dots. The dots were planets. Each planet could be captured by a ship and a colony established. You have three resource allocations: factories, ships, and science. There was only one type of science and one type of ship.
So from that point on you built your fleets and explored planets. More science meant your ships had greater range, had better saves against attacks and greater odds of hitting when fighting. Fights meant your stack of ships went against the enemy stack. You fire. If you hit, you get to fire again. Keep hitting, keep firing, one ship dead for every hit. Once you miss, the enemy gets to fire back. Numbers count but so does science. Low-tech fleets will just be cannon fodder.
We're talking black and white graphics, no sound effects, but this is basically the essence of 4x games. And if you compare it to the classics like Master of Orion, Civilization, etc, you can see where more detail isn't always better. Civ had some problems with this. That's what made the console version so amazing. They were able to strip out a lot of the stuff that made the game more complex but not more fun and were able to bring out the essence of the game. Of course, for those who think the crufty bits are the best part, Civ4 is still out there but you're going to need a computer.