Allen Varney of the Escapist handed him the matches.
The tinder? The quote many of you have waited roughly a year for, judging from my search engine logs:
I could give you my opinions there [about Star Wars Galaxies' design direction], but there’s no point – even those changes have been changed… I’ll make an exception for the NGE. I don’t think you can or should change a game that radically out from under a user base. You dance with the ones that brung ya, whether they are the market of your dreams or not. They have invested their passion and built expectations about where they want the game to go. Changing things out from under them isn’t fair in my mind, especially given how they have been loyal to you in times of trouble. It’s like dumping the girlfriend who has always been patient and loving to chase after the supermodel who probably won’t love you back.
And a thousand message board posters cried out in pain, and were suddenly silenced.
{ 54 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
KilljoyX said: “And vehicles may have come first but I seem to think mounts were first, then cities, then single-slot vehicles. Could be wrong about that, though.”
You are correct. Player cities and mounts were introduced in the same publish. Vehicles followed in another publish.
I also agree with your assessment of the setting, 5 years after RotJ would have made more sense as you said. But if I play devil’s advocate, it means you are tying the game to the original trilogy only, making it even harder to tie to the new trilogy. While you and I may not care, LucasArts did, since they wanted to leverage marketing opportunities around the new movies and the other games based on the prequels.
Mounts came first because they were a technical stepping stone to vehicles, as we said at the time.
I’d have loved to have the full-blown vehicles you describe. But please remember when we came out. Nobody had those vehicles, from a technical point of view, until Planetside. That’s why instead we made the AT-STs hirelings, because we still wanted that sense of warfare.
Seconded. If you want a good licence, you’d need:
a) a story that adapts well to having thousands of people doing little things rather than a three people doing big things.
b) a pre-existing fanbase comprised largely of gamers instead of a pre-existing fanbase comprised largely of movie-goers.
c) hot elf-chicks.
And since Planetside came out slightly before SWG, and much longer before SWG vehicles, that excuse is insufficient. A better excuse would be “full-blown vehicles would have been nice but they didn’t make the feature cut” or some such.
Aside from that, SWG failed because Sony only shipped half a game into a no-longer-new market, and that half of a game was buggy, unbalanced, and largely devoid of content. That happened at least partly because the devs, the suits, the beancounters or all of the above fell for the old line that PvP = player content = less need for all that expensive hand-tuned story/quest/content stuff. Contrast that with WoW which released in a polished state, with few critical bugs, reasonably well-balanced gameplay, and oodles of content virtually all of it bug-free and playable from beginning to end.
I really can’t overstate just how important that last sentence is to the success of any software product, but especially one where the financial balance sheet is dependent on customers paying over time. Unlike most software, the MMO customer isn’t really paying for the product up front, they are just making a down payment. And they have the option of cancelling their subscription and stopping all further payments at any time. If you want to attract and keep a customer long term (ie, keep him long enough to pay the development and hosting and marketing costs and maybe even make some profit from him), you must deliver working software. Every time your software product fails to do something the customer expects of it, or worse yet outright crashes or causes the customer to suffer a direct loss of his invested “work”, you give that customer another reason to reconsider if it is worth investing more of his time and money in your product.
So the moral of the story is, don’t ship buggy, incomplete software. If you aren’t going to make your deadline, and you can’t delay release, then you have to be ruthless with the feature set triage hatchet, making early and honest (and conservative!) evaluations of what you actually CAN get completely implemented by your ship date, and strip everything else out. If by some miracle you finish the stripped down product early, then you can start adding in the other features. And strangely enough, the more stable, well-designed and well-polished the core product is, the EASIER it is to add all the other bells and whistles to it!
And now, back to the real world where only Blizzard actually lives up to the motto of not shipping until it’s done, and everyone else whines about how unfair it is that Blizzard has raised the bar so high by actually delivering something that was completed before it was released.
&
← Previous Comments