scratz wrote on Jul 12, 2011, 14:21:
I'm genuinely surprised SWG lasted this long. The tiny numbers of core players it has retained for the last half decade or so is testament to the lack of interest in a "sandbox" game.
I don't think that there is a general lack of interest in a sandbox game (for reference see Oblivion or Skyrim which are offline RPGs but sandboxes about as pure as they get and very popular obviously).
There is, however, a general lack of interest in a sandbox game that is run by a totally incompetent developer who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag and an even more clueless utterly retarded publisher.
The game could have worked out if they would have addressed all of the post-launch issues properly. But they didn't. They were too busy working on new "exciting" (I hate reading that word in dev interviews or press releases thanks to SOE's/LA's over the top abuse of that poor word) content like mounts, vehicles, player cities and the Jump to Lightspeed space expansion.
The problem was they kept on piling more and more broken and buggy content on top of a broken and buggy base game.
Then you had issues like item and credit duping which incredibly took them weeks to fix and that completely ruined one of the fundamental game systems, i.e. the player-driven economy. Then there was enormous lag, especially after the addition of player cities. Then you had this super unimaginative unlock system for Jedi (grind to master multiple professions) which was not even in at launch (the first Jedi were unlocked manually) instead of a proper quest-based system that involved a bit of mystery.
And there was pretty much no trace of any Galactic Civil War (GCW) going on, you know, the whole "minor" Rebels vs. Empire thingie which they completely overlooked because of its apparent insignificance. Additionally the system was retarded. Anyone remember the dreaded Temporary Enemy Flag (TEF)? That one was dumb as hell...
And don't even get me started on Smugglers. This other really insignificant issue where thousands of wanna-be Han Solos waited for years for them to finally fix the profession which NEVER happened until the NGE hit. And that was a "fix" that no one wanted.
Or Creature Handlers... since everyone and their mom running around with three rancors in tow was sooo iconic and Star Wars-y.
The list goes on... every single one of the 32 original professions was FUBAR in one way or another with broken skills or rampant exploits (FOTM professions FTW!) that reared their ugly head whenever SOE tried to "fix" something or bugs that rendered a class nigh unplayable.
Nah. Seriously. All in all there was so much really, really fundamentally messed up, wrong, buggy, broken, poorly (or actually unearthly shitty) designed, laggy, dopey, non-Star-Wars-y content and gameplay in this game that it is no surprise it failed, sandbox or not. This game was destined to fail the way it was "handled" by the mentally and technically very weak powers that were.