Broken Toys

Don’t mean to nitpick but that url is fubar

I played the SWG beta way back when and I thought the game had so much promise, with a decent skill system and probably the best crafting system to date. Then add to that what they originally promised (player run cities and decent pvp), it would have been possibly the best mmog out there till they neglected it for the longest time without fixing glaring bugs and not delivering on promises (happens a fair amount with SOE games).

It was pretty clear they were out for (just) money even after release.

An extremely well written article.

What is not mentioned is how the release of the NGE came hard on the heels of the release of the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion, which many players had purchased in order to obtain new loot designed to enhance their professions, not knowing SOE knew full bloody well those professions would be removed from the game in 2 weeks and the loot items rendered useless. It was a bait-and-switch of monstrous proportions.

The current dev team is doing a LOT to earn back the respect and trust of the players, respect and trust frivolously frittered away by Torres and friends.

Neither definitive nor accurate. A strange emphasis placed on Julio Torres with no mention made of the SOE management structure itself (Julio was external to SOE). He makes the combat upgrade sound like solely the decision of the “LucasArts executives” ignoring the role that lower level producers played.

SWG had problems with producers who felt they knew more about design than the design team.
SWG had problems with a design team that was largely technical systems designers who had the ability to rewrite core systems.
SWG had problems with a design team that didn’t like or play the game.

If anyone at the design level had a clear and intelligently articulated plan for where the game should go, they probably would have been able to avert the direction the game took. That isn’t to say that such plans didn’t exist, only that the leadership to make a plan the vision for the product didn’t exist (outside of Jump to Lightspeed, which had a clear vision and path to completion). Since that leadership from design was not existent for the core product, producers who felt they had better ideas were able to control the direction of the project. I’m talking about SOE internal producers, not external ones at LucasArts.

This article reads like someone making assumptions about the politics of the NGE from what they gleaned from google searches.

Interesting overview. It surprises me how much rancor I still harbor at SOE over the way they handled those changes.

The only part of the article that bothered me was a small statement at the end about how WoW was launched when it was ready. I’ve never played Star Wars Galaxies, but I did start playing WoW about a year after it was launched. At that time, it was clearly not ready, even after a year post-launch. Blizzard built WoW the way they build all their games. They release and patch it and patch it and patch it until it becomes close to something that might be considered stable.

Am I just not remembering this? Weren’t there significant class changes even in the most recent of WoW patches? Is there a lot of history revision going on where WoW is concerned? And why might that be? Because of its phenomenal success? Because people want to believe that Blizzard succeeded because of initial merit of the game itself instead of (in my opinion, more likely) a user-base built up from previous games that simply buy up Blizzard’s games no matter what they are? I don’t ask this possibility because I dislike Blizzard or because I believe they did something wrong anywhere along the line.

Instead, I think that Blizzard’s huge fan base has been a carefully crafted asset that took a lot of hard work on their part, back in the days of Battle.Net when they weren’t making monthly income for their constant patching of Starcraft, Warcrafts, and Diablos. Certainly, there were some merits of the game itself as released, but in my experience even a year after launch, server problems, balance issues, the early introduction of the Honor System into an environment without any foundation for what to do with that Honor System and which lead to some difficult times for many players (like the neverending Southshore-Tarren Mill war) and even frustration for PVPers. All of this got worked out over time, but this was almost two years after launch when they were making drastic changes to the game.

I just find it odd that the reportage of World of Warcraft seems at odds with my memories and experience of the game during those early days (and I was by no means an early adopter). WoW may be a success story, but I don’t think that it is because Blizzard didn’t make mistakes. In my opinion, it’s because they have carefully built up a reputation as a developer that will change a game, guaranteed, until it works.

I don’t know anything about how Sony Online Entertainment works or their story or their reputation. But is it possible they haven’t crafted that kind of reputation pre-Star Wars Galaxies?

Anyone who knows more, I’d be ever so grateful for a history lesson and your thoughts on this subject, which I hope isn’t too far off the topic.

Love,

Hanna

I’ve always thought that speculation about the internal development decisions of SWG was a bit silly. From my observations, there had only ever been one core design decision- pump tons of cash out of Star Wars fans who will buy (or would have bought) anything Star Wars and persistant-world enthusiasts hungry for another MMO.

As someone said, I believe at LTM, they could have named it Chewbacca’s Dirty Socks and people would have lined up.

@Hanna – The difference is that WoW was closer to ready at launch than other MMOs. There’s no such thing as perfectly ready for launch, and never has been. (And yes, there’s also a bit of revisionist history in there – the WoW servers were pretty unstable the first couple of months, mostly due to having far more players than anticipated. They probably could have done better.)

SOE’s reputation for buggy launches prior to SWG and the NGE was fairly bad, so that tends to color things as well. WoW’s major patches tend to have minor bugs that are fixed a few days later – about 50% of SOE’s major patches for EQ1 and SWG had game-breaking bugs that made large swatches of content (and sometimes whole classes) completely unplayable.

Saying WoW was “ready” at launch isn’t an exaggeration, but it’s applying a fairly low standard based on poor industry practice.

Hanna,
I have been playing various MMOs for more then ten years starting with UO and everything in between up to WoW so I might be used to taking more crap then the gamers starting out with MMOs today, however, saying that WoW wasn’t ready at launch simply is not true.
I started beta testing WoW seven or so months before release and was really taken back by the polish of the game, having experienced the disaster that was Anarchy Online at launch and beta, Everquests first weeks after release, I marveled at the stability of the servers and the amount of content (up to level 35 which was the cap when I started).

But understand that I am of the opinion that MMOs grow and change over time and that’s the way it’s supposed to be, it’s part of the medium and I really don’t think we will see any MMOs that won’t balance and change things that isn’t working as intended in a long time, if ever.

I had this big long rant re: Hanna’s WoW question, but realized about a page and a half in that I had strayed completely off the grid as it relates to the topic at hand. In succinct terms: yes, you’re mis-remembering…mostly.

If anything, the way Blizzard has actively (sometimes with a metric shitton of prodding) altered the game to suit to players instead of suiting their vision should be an example to all MMO teams not to automatically discount your customers for no better reason than they’re your customers. Like any rookie MMO team the WoW staff has made mistakes, but I’d put an honest tally of pro vs con against ANY game/team in industry.

SWG, on the other hand, is a perfect example of a team losing their way, in part, due to players being morons. I blame this on the fact that they were stupid enough to make a licensed property vs having complete creative freedom from canon and fan expectations. Raph and his group really did have some innovative ideas in the beginning. Cutting “use XP” after less than a week because a tiny (but loud) group of grind-happy fucktards bitched on the beta forums was a mistake. It’s a decision analogous to when rest XP was announced in WoW. The fan uproar was deafening – but they were dead wrong. In practice it’s one of most casual-friendly features of the game.

Making changes contrary to your vision because your players make COGENT POINTS supporting said change is good. Making changes to your vision because people are bitching about something on the forums and you don’t know why is bad. It’s a pretty easy test, actually.

My thoughts:

I still play SWG and I have to say that they have improved a lot since the NGE. They lost a lot of subscribers to the NGE and although things are picking back up a little, both players and the devs have spent the last year basically picking up the pieces and trying to make things sane again.

The worst parts of what the NGE did to the game have been mitigated via patches – for example, the latest patch substantially increased encounter difficulty and put a new emphasis on grouping up for survival. It ticked off a few players, but since most players almost universally agreed that the game was too easy before, it’s gone over fairly well. Long-term it was a good move.

What I as a player am seeing from the SWG design team now, after 4 years, is that they finally seem to have an idea about where they want to go with the game. Brandon is sort of correct I think – a lot of SWG’s problems were probably brought about in part because SWG’s dev team wasn’t really in tune with their players or with the game. Had they been, then things might not have been so bad.

Miraculously SWG still has a lot of potential, and the amount of good things that have happened since the NGE (which is mostly the dev team saying “yeah, we were wrong, so we’re going to put stuff back as best we can without compromising the integrity of what we have now” is slowly starting to win back the trust of players. There’s still work to be done but it’s night and day from where we were a year ago, when most of us were quitting or taking long breaks. Now the challenge in front of the dev team is to follow through on the positive momentum they’ve created. While there’s a few more of the “old-style” systems that players would really like to see come back, they also need to start seriously churning out new content. To provide an example of why, lately we’ve had something happen that hasn’t really happened since the game launched: players are leaving because of general endgame burnout. Not because some change happened that they’re upset about, but more because they “just felt like they’d done everything there was to do”. It was kind of a shocker for most of the player community to finally realize we were losing people to normal churn, the kind that hits every MMORPG, instead of just because of the latest patch or dev stupidity. That means now the team has to focus on fighting that churn if they want the game to continue though.

Personally I think the game is almost ready for a re-launch, probably with a new blockbuster expansion. If it were me making the call I would have the team make a kick-ass expansion based on Empire Strikes Back because no Star Wars fan can really ignore that tie-in. Besides, the game doesn’t have a snow planet right now

I wonder – but not too often – if SWG is the reason I don’t play any MMOs anymore. Aside from some experiences with MUDs in the dim distant past, SWG was my first real encounter with the the more modern incarnations.

It was flawed, but interesting. I played CoH for a while in parallel, and tried WoW but they were unsatisfying – like a fizzy drink once it’s flat.

The NGE was.. Actually it was an interesting idea, but it pretty much killed the game for me – flushed away those who were ‘hanging on’ hoping for something better. The game play got boring after a two or three months.. I just had no real reason to keep playing.

A year or so playing SWG, a few months on CoH and a year on Eve. I view none of the upcoming (or recently launched) MMOs with any anticipation. It would be rash to blame this on the NGE, but equally – I don’t think its entirely unconnected.

I still like the idea of MMOs, I just feel increasingly cool to the reality I’ve seen.

NGE was a curse that should have never happened, and yet *had* to happen. SWG suffered from an “ivory tower” mindset from the very beginning, which crippled the game under its own weight. To launch an MMO, especially one based on Star Wars, with 34 classes (professions, whatever) demonstrates a lack of understanding the license. If Star Wars had been written from the view point of a space anthropologist, then it would have made sense. But until JTLS came out, it was a Star Wars game only in that it looked like a Star Wars game.

NGE was a disaster, but only because it wasn’t part of the game at launch. It really does do a better job of conveying the Star Wars “experience,” and it’s an absolute shame that it wasn’t implemented from the start. It was a bold move on Sony’s part, but it’s too bad they had to learn such a hard lesson on a license that held so much promise.

My take on the article is over here: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/06/12/tired-of-hearing-about-the-nge/

Hanna, I do think you’re mis-remembering WoW in beta. I was in the WoW beta, and I remember thinking that it was better than most MMO’s in full release. It was certainly better in beta than SWG was at any point in time.

That said, SWG had some components that I sorely miss. It was my favorite crafting game. I miss having a house right in the game world. I felt like I lived in SWG more than any other game, gathering resources, running factories, selling products, managing vendors…all while also being a fairly decent fighter and enjoying running missions.

I think there’s a disconnect in the gaming world between people who think you have to BE the hero in order to enjoy a game (I’d put the people who wanted to make the game more “Star War-sy” and action-oriented in that camp), and people who want to create their own characters in a familiar universe, but don’t have a need to play Han, or run missions with Luke.

SWG really appealed to the latter group. It was a fabulous sandbox. If they wanted to make a different MMO, they should have designed a different MMO. Instead, they took away a lot of the uniqueness and successes of SWG, not least of which was the community.

It’s going to take a lot for SOE to prove to me that they’ve really learned their lesson, and that their arrogance and hubris will never again take precedence over their community. I haven’t played an SOE MMO since. The only one currently on my radar is The Agency, and only because it’s such a different concept…and by then, I’ll be looking for Warhammer, since Mythic and DAoC was about the exact opposite of Sony’s poor community relations.

I agree with Raph, although for a different reason. I’m tired of hearing about the NGE because all that is ever talked about is the development mistakes. The NGE broke the original game and tried to make it into a new one and players didn’t like it and left. Ok, we get it. That’s not news, it’s been said enough times, and in fact I do think it has been a lesson learned, both inside and outside of SOE.

To me, the lesson that hasn’t really been touched on enough is the communication errors made leading up to the NGE. He mentions it briefly in this article, but it’s glossed over. It shouldn’t be. In many ways, the NGE struggled just as much because of how it was communicated as it was implemented.

The expansion pack should have been the NGE. It should have had a full communication plan, lasting at least 4 to 6 months that focused on explaining the changes, taking feedback, and working to “sell” the change to the players and the press with a positive message that reinforces the reasons behind the changes. Almost none of that happened until it was far too late. If you as a developer don’t take the time to create the message, someone else will create it for you – and that’s never a good thing when you’re talking about a controversial change. You don’t want to spend your time post-launch writing reactionary posts to player concners, you want those messages written and posted well before the launch.

The truth is most players wouldn’t have quit over an announcement taking place 6 months before the launch. In my experience, people generally don’t leave games over announcements. They leave after the change takes place. That gives you six months to set expectations, create public evangelists, tweak your design, and do whatever you can to prepare people for the change. It can be done.

It’s not like no game has ever made a sweeping change to their world. UO did it with Trammel. Sure that wasn’t as big of a change, but Trammel had a dramatic affect on the way UO was played by virtually everyone involved, PK or not. The difference is, we communicated about it, we got people on board early, and we sold the idea. UO’s subscriber numbers didn’t decline at all when we announced Trammel. Even those who hated the idea continued to subscribe as they gave us feedback and waited for the final implementation. We worked with the players and the press to create a sense of excitement over the expansion, not a sense of betrayal. You can make the arguement that Trammel was a “good” change that most UO players wanted, and I won’t disagree, but the fact remains that without proper communication it coud have backfired terribly.

Again, I’m probably biased because of my background, but I really do believe that the NGE’s troubles had just as much to do with communication as it did development and not near enough time is spent talking about that. I wasn’t there when it all went down, so I can’t say the why’s or who’s (and wouldn’t waste time with that anyway), but somewhere a decision was made not to communicate this until the last minute and I think that, more than anything, backfired badly.

Pretty much everything about SWG was a mistake. The NGE was certainly a mistake, but it was no more of a mistake than say designing a sandbox game around a Star Wars license.

All MMOs are Sandboxes, it is simply a question of the quality and depth of the sand.

All those funny WoW videos, all the angst and drama, all the guild posturing and politics, all the forum whoring, whinging and campaigning – all sandbox aspects.

Shallow sand works well for certain game designs because it works will with leveling and raiding, deep sand works well for RP and explorers.

IMO SWG had relatively shallow sand when all is said and done – but it didn’t have much leveling and raiding, so it got a little perplexing what to do next for a lot of players. What was usually left was the social sandbox all MMOs have, but with slightly more advanced tools.

Thank you everyone for sharing your experiences an insights. I learned a lot.

Love,

Hanna

I’ll refrain from adding opinion or observations, as I did last year, when I filed my report from AGC: “The Market You Have,” quoting two people who were very much involved in the decision process behind NGE, one of whom has since departed SOE.

Raph, you need to pay your web hosting bill!

This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota

* Your site has used more than 20% of the cpu.
* Your account has too many processes running at the same time.
* Your site was consuming too many resources. This happens on occassion to very busy sites that have inefficient scripts running.

A true Jedi would NEVER be defeated by an inefficient script…

This isn’t the script you’re looking for.

Thanks god there’s Brandon who at least repeats the important part, and not the unimportant, demagogic part.

And once again Abalieno butchers what was almost coherent use of an 800-point SAT word.

The biggest problem wasn’t the NGE. It was the NGE put on a game that while I think it sucked BIG TIME, was a game that had a small dedicated niche. Admitted, one capable of putting up with massive bugs and a game engine that chugged on almost any fair machine.

SWG was like the anti WoW in all respects. Massive visual customization, tons of RPing, insanely open world, very sandboxy.

It also had about as much compelling BUILT IN content as a rock. And no good crayons to color it with.

Everything was player run. The worst people have the most important PCs. What little content there was seemed to be group only. DAMAGE THAT REQUIRED OTHER PLAYERS TO HEAL. (Seriously. This has got to be the dumbest thing ever.) Items and crafting were like WoW, only less fun to do, and like turning everything into a Blues/Purples market commanding the highest prices from the biggest catasses. Otherwise crafting was a grindsink till you mastered it. DUMB.

Combat was hardly exciting, and just queued ability spamming. Compared to the kickass melees in CoH it was complete ass. Compared to WoW it was merely crap. I suppose it beat out EQ in that regard though…

NGE was a desperate fix to a god awful but well intentioned game design (huh. Just like Ultima Online. Funny that! It too had well intentioned ideas that just don’t work in a mass player game…) when it was entirely too late.

Scrap it all and start over fresh.

I think Hanna’s comments above are partially accurate, myself. I think people here are talking about two different issues.

Most people are talking about content, and WoW did do an exceptional job with that. The low-level quests were complete and bug-free for the most part. I didn’t run into obviously unfinished content, such as places that simply weren’t itemized, until I got into the much higher levels. WoW had an impressive array of content at the beginning, and that is where it always shined over other games. Especially at launch. This was WoW’s tremendous advantage.

But, what Hanna mentioned above was class content. As someone who played a Druid at launch, some classes at launch were hardly exceptional for the most part. Druids in particular had very little to define them as special compared to other classes, and while the developers said that Druids would be flexible, they became second-rate healers for the most part when I was playing in PUGs. It wasn’t until about 2 years later with some major revisions that Druids became much more flexible rather than simply being a mana battery for priests at the high end. Of course, the saga continues as people report that now Druids can be better tanks than Warriors and better healers compared to the many Priests who are shadow-specced. The wheel of fortune keeps turning as the eternal quest for something resembling “balance” is sought. However, I think I would agree that this is a lesser consideration in the overall quality of the game.

I also think Hanna brings up a good point, too, that a lot of Blizzard’s success came from what they did before WoW launched, too. Part of this was knowing how to polish game content exceptionally well, and that they had a lot of very rabid fans. Keep in mind that Diablo 2 had presales over 1 million units, which is mind-boggling for a PC title (and pretty exceptional for console titles, even). You can’t tell me that some of those D2 pre-orders weren’t people that simply love Blizzard games. (Hell, I bought the collector’s edition of D2 on launch day because I knew I’d probably enjoy the game tremendously even without playing a beta.) I don’t think this can be underestimated.

My thoughts.

@Calandryll – The reason that people harp on “The NGE broke the game” and NOT “The problem was communication”, is because the powers-that-be have only admitted to the latter, and not the former. The fact that the developers of the game have constantly restated that they will no longer, ever, be offering the old game has brought the former idea to the forefront, and it will be hammered on. Regardless of whatever features are offered under the NGE, it is not the pre-CU style of gaming, and that’s what most people miss. You say YOU get that, but the people that pull the strings do not.

@Bloodcat – Opinions are like assholes. The only thing I’d agree with you on is your statement about lack of content. Otherwise, it was the interdependencies that that ‘niche’ you speak of loved so much. (They’ve been awfully loud for a ‘niche’, don’t you think? Here we are coming up on 2 years after the change, and we’re still talking about it. That’s a large ‘niche’.) The game had the best crafting system ever designed, in my own humble opinion, and all the NGE did to wreck that was make crafting mostly irrelevant. Everything else is personal taste – you like apples, I like oranges.

Players of just about all classes from at-launch WoW have a bit of wonky built in to them. Paladin’s were completely changed less than a month before launch and we were able to provide very, VERY little testing and the only feedback we gave was shrugged off as “it’ll go away when you’re used to it” spam.

ALL classes were very shallow at launch. Warriors only became truly useful post-40 when the itemization skills equation ramped up to reasonable stuff. Most classes were very lucky to be good at one thing, let alone have flexibility.

Months ticked by, things changed. Some fast. Some slower. While some folks can (and will) argue, Blizzard has done 100x the job of any other MMO I’ve played to find a balance that works with “big picture” of the game as well as the desires of the players.

My pool of Karazhan raiders contains shadow and holy priests, protection and holy paladins, feral (tank and DPS), boomkin and resto druids, marksman and beastmaster hunters, assassination and combat rogues, fire and ice mages and destro and affliction locks. All have a place in raids and properly managed (that would be my job) I can put together min/max’d groups for various fights that give us the best possible chances for success without telling ANY player that they need to respec before they can go. That’s pretty damned great.

@Kylrathin: Crafting WAS great. Use XP, use XP, use XP, use XP, use XP, use XP, use XP. Once that was gone it was a grindy, fucked up mess. Point A -> Point B was all that mattered because nothing short of skill mastery was all that really mattered because no one wanted your gimpy Novice Architect garbage. Ultimately that’s why I left the game. Trades were 5x more complex than any other game but still demanded grinding so I just gave up as I didn’t WANT to grind. That pushed me into doing nothing but combat, which was about as deep as those plastic kiddie pools. SWG was the first game I actually uninstalled with more than a month left on my sub I was that sick of it…

@ Psychochild & Hanna,

You’re talking about class balance, while everyone else is talking about client & server stability and show-stopping bugs when they think of launch readiness. Class balance is highly subjective and depends on your frame of reference (what roles you *think* classes fill, what your focus of play is (solo, small group, raid, pvp, pve), and itemization). This has evolved a lot in WoW — some classes are hardly recognizable from their beta origins — and I’d argue that evolution of classes and gear can be a very positive thing, as it somewhat keeps things “fresh”. There were severe server problems when WoW launched due to demand, and Blizzard didn’t have a queue system (or had set the queue trigger far too high), but the client was stable for the large majority of systems, show-stopping bugs were few, and there was plenty to do. Joe Public could (once there were enough servers) log on and play 2 hours without a system crash or dieing constantly to invisible creatures (happened sometimes, but not often), have fun with his friends, gain some exp points and log off without fear of a rollback wiping out a day or two of his investment. You’d think this would be a pretty low bar to meet to win the “ready for launch” green light, but every single major mmo since (and including) UO failed in this regard, and WoW was the first to meet it.

I miss SWG

I really don’t mean to be argumentative and I don’t know the whole picture of WoW, because I didn’t even start playing until a year after launch. But even this last week, my friend who I have played with for over a year now was unable to log on for about a week after the recent patch. It was a known issue and Blizzard was working on it. When I first started playing — a year after launch — Blizzard was giving me days of credit due to server downtime. They’re on my account history, so I know it happened.

I think the (one of the?) elephants in the room is this bar that MMOGs either meet or don’t. And it’s my personal opinion that the bar is set at different heights for different companies and because of the reasons I listed above, the bar for Blizzard is set pretty low. Not because people give Blizzard a free pass, necessarily, but because Blizzard has proven that they will fix games. Even if people aren’t paying monthly fees for it. Not that they didn’t take a lot of criticism for the downtimes (which may be completely negligible compared to other MMOGs, but like I say, I really don’t know what the experience is for other MMOGs).

That’s just my experience as one person who played WoW long after launch.

I appreciate the valuable insight everyone is bringing and I’m starting to see just how complex this all is and I’m starting to have a huge amount of sympathy for the folks at Sony Online Entertainment and the Star Wars Galaxies issues because of it. Anyone who is building or supporting a MMOG. It just seems unfathomable to me the amount of hard work that must go on on even in the most poorly nurtured games.

I don’t particularly disagree with what anyone is saying. It just builds up a bigger picture of all the different ways things can go horribly wrong.

I hope that makes sense.

Love,

Hanna

So many experts talking about SWG, SOE and the NGE from so many different angles but all of them, all of you, either only know half the story or else are only able to tell half the story – and each half is from their different position on the astrolabe.

Despite the passage of two years, no-one seems to know or, at least, no-one seems to have told, the complete story.

Here are questions that do not seem to have been answered conclusively yet;

1/. What was the nature of the SOE relationship with its licensing partner, LA?

2/. Who within that relationship originated the the idea of the NGE? Sold the idea? Rode herd on the idea until it launched?

3/. Who – if anyone – opposed the idea? Or changed the idea while it was in gestation?

4/. What was the calendar of the NGE? When was it originated? What resources were allocated to it? Which areas were neglected because capital and manpower were denied them?

5/. What was the fallout within SOE and LA? Who was promoted and who, faint hope, punished for NGE in action when its implications became clear?

I ask these questions not because I have any stake in SOE or in MMOGs or in the wider industry – I don’t – but simply because I once played the game, enjoyed it and am interested in what happened to it?