This board totally cracks me up. It seems like the bulk of the poeple who hate this game are the people who find the easiest or quickest way to do something, and because it doesnt suit them, the game sucks.

I have read postings from people who realize that this game isnt an ACTION game, but a ROLEPLAYING game, and they enjoy it greatly. Even at times when they did nothing more than wander about aimlessly or explore - or better yet, when they WERE hunting something, and never found it.

There IS no excuse for releasing an unfinished product, a game with gamestopping bugs, or missing features that are still advertised on the box/feature list/website. And MMO games, while having a laxer set of rules regarding this, shouldnt not be immune either.

This game will be attractive to many gamers - mostly those with the maturity and imagination to immerse themselves, and play out their characters development, rather than closely monitor how much xp they get, and time how long the have to recover.

To the folks that havent learned how to do more than queue the same manoeuver over and over again - those who only play a craftsman for the gratification of an uber-item (that will never come) - those who call the entertainers boring or useless - go play Jedi Knight. This game was not to be a MMO version fo that, and (if we are lucky) wont ever become such.

This game will advance because the number of people who want to bury themselves in this universe will far outwiegh those who are bithing on this forum.

Other than money, there is no one thing that will appeal to everyone. The vocal minority here is the same group (in heart, if not person) that attends the forums of every other game ever released. And the same response still applies - if it isnt worth your MONEY, then it shouldnt be worth your time. Your not trying to help anyone - your simply trying to make your OPINION into something thats casts a shadow on this game, where you SHOULD be trying to explain that this game doesnt appeal to you. There is not a single unbiased opinion here (except mine - i niether played the game in beta, nor followed many of the boards until THIS thread got me involved this week).

For those of you who would like an opinion from the other camp, here is an excellent slideshow from one fo the Beta 1 players.

http://www.scomplink.com/VisionQuest/vq1.htm

ArKhaine

Thanks for the informative post. As a former MUD and constant CRPG player who has not yet decided to go for any of the graphical MMORPGs so far, I conclude that I should keep waiting. Maybe in five or so years technology and game design will be far enough along to make this sort of game entertaining for a larger demographic.

There seem to be a few basic flaws with MMORPGs in general:

First, one will never have the player focused story and feeling of individual accomplishment as in a single player game where the entire gameplay is focused on that. Every single one of the thousands of users cannot be made to feel special. That is why you all have to start by doing boring stuff like countless random encounters.

Second, one also doesn't have the feeling that the people who are high level have gotten there because they have some sort of admirable skill, such as a Q3A player who is able to clean out a level or a Warcraft3 player who is able to maintain his standing in the top ten of a worldwide ladder. These other multiplayer games most certainly don't make all the players feel special either, but they motivate because one aspires to build one's own skills rather than simply accumulate the experience points of one's alterego. The only thing that can be said with certainty about a high level RPG player is that he has been playing for a long time / spent a lot of money.

The social aspect is the only redeeming element in my eyes that one doesn't necessarily find in other genres, but there are enough free social places on the net (IRC, usenet, forums, MUDs, etc) to make one think twice before paying a monthly fee for it.

I disagree with your post in one point: Jumping is not the feature that is missing, it is the walls that are too small. Clearly, the wall is there so you are prevented from going across it for some obscure reason.

If the wall was meant to be scaled, perhaps jumping across it would be the commonly accepted game mechanic, but it is rife to be replaced by more true to life sorts of context sensitive climbing animation (see for example Splinter Cell). Jumping was fine in Super Mario and is fine in Olympic sports games, but it needs to yield to more sensible options just about everywhere else.


(Edited spelling)
This comment was edited on Jun 23, 17:53.

Woohoo, I went and cancelled my SWG preorder today. The people there were like "why do you wanna cancel?" My response? "I'm not gonna pay $15 for an open beta test. I'm glad I got into beta, saved me lots and lots of money. Maybe I'll try it after the space expansion, but even then, it's probably not gonna be as good as other SW flight sims.

Ok, 208 posts. You guys can stop talking about SWG now. Seriously.

ok the beta isn't technically over, but it's being released to stores on the 26th or whatever. they have to print cds and have boxes with those cds inside them in the stores on that day.

They're selling a beta as a finished, retail product. Granted, this has only happened a million times before. But each time it happens, your customers get a little more pissed.

No wonder gaming isn't ready for prime time. And this is why console sales increase. Maybe when they start shipping feature complete and without game-breaking bugs, they'll be taken more seriously.





Naaa...ain't gonna happen.


Supporter of the "A happy fredster is a muted fredster" fanclub.

http://www.originaltrilogy.com/

half elf, you're misinformed.

ok the beta isn't technically over, but it's being released to stores on the 26th or whatever. they have to print cds and have boxes with those cds inside them in the stores on that day.

they can't do that overnight...so have to have already finished the release version of the game.

"Yeah there is a bunch of open area with not much to do but random mobs, but hey look at EQ when it came out, and look at it today.
Not to mention Player Vehicles and Player Starship coming soon as well. "


i'm tired of companies releasing games based on content that is "coming soon" or releasing buggy software that they intend to patch after release...it's one thing to not know about a bug...and it's another thing to release knowingly buggy software.

of course all MMO games will have post-release features...but they shouldn't be features like vehicles...or "things to do"

seriously...if i wanted to team up with a bunch of players and beat on mobs, i don't have to play SWG to do it. it takes entirely too long to get into the more fun parts of the game...and even then it's not that great.

i respect that companies set lofty goals...but they should be careful about it. in this case...galaxies was announced sooooo long ago...and even now it's coming out missing key features.

that's just my opinion...i'm sure many ppl find SWG fun...but not me :\

lol Half Elf you noob ... Have fun with your mindless game
I wish Lucas gave more thought on this project with out Sony whispering in his ear “$$$we will charge them for more content ever six to three months with expansions $$$“
This comment was edited on Jun 22, 16:11.

What I'd really like Urza do to is take his post print it out, and on the 24th or 25th when the Beta is ended go back through his list and see if it's the same or not. I'd be money half his list would be checked off.

I wouldn't hold my breath, seeing as they didn't fix the stuff in the months prior when they were just as obvious.

----

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds...

-Bhagavad Gita

Urza, your forgetting 2 things. 1) it's a Beta, 2) The Beta Ain't over.

and 3 thru whatever) Just reading through your post is hillariously wrong on so many accounts, like swimming, the bazaar, combat etc etc etc.

WTF do people even sign up to beta test games, except to bitch about all the stuff that's not fixed, ya know there is a reason it's called a BETA.

What I'd really like Urza do to is take his post print it out, and on the 24th or 25th when the Beta is ended go back through his list and see if it's the same or not. I'd be money half his list would be checked off.

Edited for more content cause Urza just pisses me off to no end.

(Further Content here)
What is the goal of Battlefield 1942, Unreal Tourney, Quake3, Everquest, Planetside, Ultima Online, Anarachy Online, ETC ETC ETC? There is no end goal, except to achieve the best you can. In SWG the goal is to Unlock the Force Sensitive Character, keep them alive and Hopefully become a Jedi Master. As for Content? Yeah there is a bunch of open area with not much to do but random mobs, but hey look at EQ when it came out, and look at it today.
Not to mention Player Vehicles and Player Starship coming soon as well.

"The last successful MMORPG, DAoC , was stable throughout beta and shipped stable. Why? Because it was a second generation MMOG, and they learned from the past, and they made a stable gae like modern game designers should be able to do."

Funny I didn't know the game shipped yet, and of right now in beta it's pretty damn stable, as mentioned today when you sign on, the majority of any crashes they have now are due to outdated drivers.

"What happened guys? One of you must know how to set up a database so it doesn't crash the server every 3 hours. One of you must have designed a quest system at one time. Some of you helped design the most successful MMORPGs out there. What happened? On top of all the things missing from the game, don't any of you know how to set up a server so that it's stable?"

Um, ever hear of server loads? Noone can predict how hosting thousands of players in a game like this will do on a server, one of the things they do in the last stages of any MMORPG Beta is Server Balancing.

I give up, there are so many holes in his post it's disgusting. I think this is a person who was either a) in the beta for about a week and quit, cause they don't understand what BETA means, or b) has heard it all second via the beta boards or someone else who is in the beta.

This comment was edited on Jun 22, 14:21.

I don't see how it's biased, unless he's part of the Star Wars Haters' Club or something.

----

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds...

-Bhagavad Gita

What do you mean you cant swim?! Do I have to show you footage of people swimming or are you going to come to your senses?

Apart from that I'd say good but biased review. A lot of people find what you are talking about fun, I have no idea why but they do.

Gas pricing is based of supply and demand... except SUPPLY is decided by OPEC. It's not price fixing, but it has the same effect: they just limit production when they want the price to go up.

But the demand is outrageous! How expensive would gas have to be for you to stop driving your car? Society is pretty much dependant on it.

Lets go through all the problems shall we…



Immersive ness

99% of the world is, simply put, a randomly generated mess that lacks any feeling. It's obvious, as soon as you leave a city, that no thought went into the world whatsoever. In place of actual content, we have "random" encounters constantly. Every 15 seconds you can be sure that a group of mobs will spawn in front of you. Mobs have no life of their own; they're generated just because the player is there, and it makes the game more like Asteroids than an MMORPG.

Trying to trick players by having a random number generator do your work for you is a poor, poor excuse for content. It will not fool anyone. There's a feeling you get in a game world when you explore and find new things around every turn... new structures, creatures, places with a purpose. Places designed by a human for interaction with humans. Having the game randomly place blobs of mobs everywhere will never, ever duplicate that feeling.

So right away, 99% of the game world is uninteresting. Yes you have nice graphics for your terrain. Good job. But let me tell you something I read while designing zones for a MUD some years back. In the MUD builder's manual, it said "everything must have a point and a story" (paraphrased). This is sage advice, not just for MUDs but for all games. In SWG, nothing has a point or a story (except for missions, which have stories, but I'll get to that).

You know what would have been the best thing for SWG? If you had FORGOTTEN GRAPHICS and just designed a good game. A good game is good whether it's text based or has the prettiest graphics in the world. The "oooh and ahh" factor doesn't last for long. Take "blockbuster" movies as an example. Every summer, movie makers spend billions of dollars cranking out big budget movies. We all know the result: most of them suck. Hard. They're contrived, with no story, no writing, nothing but pretty explosions. SWG is the blockbuster movie of the MMOG world.

SWG needs more premanent features. I'm not talking about a battlefield or theme park hidden 10,000 meters away between 9,999 meters of zero content. I'm talking about giving the world life. Those random globs of bandits that appear constantly when you're in the wilderness? Give some a permanent home. Make an outpost, complete with scouts on the outer perimeter, campfires inside and a boss in a building somewhere controlling it all. Make it permanent and then it will mean something. Getting to the middle of it and slaying the boss will mean something to a player. The player can say "I went there, I did that, yeah baby." It gives players a sense of pride. Destroying a camp that appears in front of you just like 500 others like it, with the same 5 bandits standing around it, means nothing.

That's the key really, making a world that is meaningful. Every little bit has to be special in some way. It has to be designed by human hands, and when other humans see it and experience it, they'll appreciate it.

Other immersiveness things

-You can't jump in SWG, or swim. Instead, jumping is an emote. These two things are the very basics of immersiveness in a 3D world. Players need to feel like they can interact with their environment. In SWG, they can't. I'll give you an example.

Every town is surrounded with these low walls with only a few openings in them to get out. These walls are only knee high for even a short player. They're very, very annoying, especially because you cannot jump over them. They're like invisible barriers, walls in a pac-man game, that constantly remind you that you are in a game, not real life. To be immersed, players need to forget that as much as possible.

The walls were a bad design decision, but they wouldn't have been if the fundamentals of a 3D world were included in SWG.

It's very troubling that the devs couldn't include something as basic as jumping into their engine.

One way to look at a game is as a challenge that must be solved. Great games provide freedom for the players to solve problems in as many ways possible. Take away something as simple as jumping or swimming and you take away very important ways that players feel out their environment.

-You can't attack most NPCs in cities. Being held accountable for your actions is arguably the greatest strength of an MMORPG. In one sense, players build up a reputation over time which adds another layer onto the game world. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about actions within the game world. You should be able to attack NPCs, even if they're so powerful they'll kill you in one hit. Why? Because that makes the world more real. It gives you the sense that every little thing you do is meaningful. That friendly trainer will kick your ass if you attack him. It makes everything more alive.

Missions

I know you wrote neat stories for some missions, and in a way, those stories are the best thing about SWG. Some are genuinely funny.

But the fun of reading the mission details doesn't last, as they're just another trip into the useless wilderness (or a trip to another city if it's a deliver mission). After your first mission you realize that they're quite mindless, and just a source of cash.

To decrease the immersion, there's a limited number of missions and they're repeated. The solution? It's obvious, guys. If you had a history and story for each planet, the solution would be there already. Missions would be a way to delve deeper into that history and participate in it. You could add progressive missions, where you complete one and get another, more difficult mission, that gives you more story and involves you more deeply in the planet's politics, story, whatever. (Yes, I know there's one progressive mission in Jabba's palace. Big deal. You can't have something like that in just one, or two, or 5 places inthe game, fellas. It has to be all over.)

Give players a chance to feel part of their world. You deliver a loaf of bread to an old woman, and in doing so meet her grandson. He's in trouble with the law, and needs you to help him get a message out of town. You deliver the message and realize he's involved in the rebellion when you reach the hideout. The people at the hideout ask you to help him escape from the town. You help, but you have to kill a few Emperial troopers in doing it. You become more trusted in the rebellion after that and are given a mission to assassinate an Imperial General. And on, and on. There, I just wrote a whole progressive mission for you. It's easy. SWG needs it.

Missions or quests are one of the best ways to get players deeply involved in a game (in fact, most single player games are based on a single evolving quest that the player must complete). Don't ignore their potential.

Combat

Like I said in the immersiveness section, there's no point in exploring. So there's no point to combat. There's no goal. Nothing to drive the player on to accomplish some great kill except for gathering bones and hides. Adding loot wouldn't solve this. The only solution is giving content and context to combat. Once again this boils down to making a more permanent world. Running out into the wilderness and killing big_fat_mob_00 doesn't mean anything: every player and his grandmother is going to have 500 big_fat_mobs generated for them too every time they leave a city. There needs to be permanence in a world for combat to mean anything.

Combat is awkward. There shouldn't be 2 different buttons for "attack" and "stop attack". It should be one button that toggles on and off. You should be able to change your target in combat. You should be able to hit escape and clear your target whether you're under attack or not. You should be able to sit while under attack (that's right, if something has aggro on you, you can't sit or log out).

It's almost impossible for a group to have a working healer. Besides having an impossible time trying to target people, the healer has to run back and forth trying to locate the person he's trying to heal so that he's close enough for it to work? You'll never have a good combat system because of this; grouping will always be zerging.

Player Crafting

The very basic machine that's supposed to allow players to sell goods, the bazaar, doesn't work. Why?

Because it has a 100 item limit. Combine that with the SEVEN DAY AUCTION SYSTEM and you have 100 CDEF pistols being sold on a 7 day auction, and bang, the market is useless for 7 days. Whether your item shows up or not in a search seems random. Players that want to sell high end goods have reverted to shouting "WTS uber rifles 5000 credits!" in the middle of town. Not that there's anything wrong with people shouting to sell things; there isn't, if they have no alternative. But if your game is designed with a market system and people are still forced to go out and shout because the market doesn't work, something is wrong.

I'm not going to go into the many flaws in the "economy" as people like to call it. Plenty of people have done that already and I've already made enough posts on it to be sick of it. Let's just say that the crafting system is the best thing SWG has going for it. More thought seems to have been put into it than anything else. When the game comes out it'll probably still be the best thing about it, so they should make it so that the economy isn't flooded with every kind of item within a week, making all that hard work worthless. If the game came out today, that's what would happen.

End Game

SWG has no end game. There really isn't anything a player can aspire to except becoming an overt and killing some other obverts. The rate of advancement is so fast that mastering your class is hardly part of the game.

You devs have said that maxxing out your class is only the beginning of the game. Ok, where do we go from there? Battlefields? Is shooting people across a battlefield supposed to hold my attention for years? The life of an MMORPG should be years, unless you spent years in development so that player could get bored with it in a month.

Is shooting other overts supposed to hold my attention for years? What, exactly, IS supposed to keep me playing? Even as a beta tester after only a few weeks, logging on is a chore. No, it's not the bugs. If you've noticed, I haven't made one mention of bugs. My critique is all of the game as it is when "working as intended".

Shooting the same random mobs that appear for me when I leave a city is not a goal. Shooting people across a battlefield is not a goal. The game needs goals that players can aspire to right out of the box.

In original EQ, players had killing a dragon someday as something to aspire to, right out of the box. In DAoC, players had realm to realm combat, right out of the box. What can SWG players aspire to? There's no permanent world like there is in EQ, so players cannot have goals to conquer some mob or place someday. There's no PvP reward system like DAoC, so players can't aspire to becoming the greatest at PvP and having an in-game reward for it.

What, exactly, do players have to aspire to?

Keep in mind that this is coming from an experienced MMOG gamer. I've played multiplayer games since there was nothing but text based MUDs. At this point, like many 10+ year veterans of the industry, I can look at a game and see right away where it will fail and where it will succeed. And I honestly don't see SWG succeeding anywhere in the long run.

”Hardcore Star Wars fans will play the game for a month, sure. But just because it's star wars doesn't mean it will hold their attention despite all its flaws. There are a LOT of Star Wars games out there. The hardcore Star Wars fan has plenty to choose from. What will make him choose SWG over all the others? “ IGI Denis graven

Game Stability

Now that I've talked about all the game systems as they would exist with no bugs, I'll talk about the bugs.

When someone points out the many, many massive bugs that plague every game system in SWG, someone inevitably says, "You think this is bad? You should have seen EQ when it first came out!"

Well, there's a difference. EQ was the pioneer in the 3D MMORPG industry. They didn't have anyone to tell them what to do or how to do it. They didn't know how to make a server handle that many people, or how to make sure the graphics would work when there were 50 other players on screen. They had to figure it all out on their own.

That was a long time ago. Not only has the industry made leaps and bounds since then, but SWG actually has people from EQ working on their staff! They aren't baby-faced college kids straight out of freshman year, these guys are supposed to be the best of the best of MMORPG design veterans, gathered form games like UO and EQ.

What happened guys? One of you must know how to set up a database so it doesn't crash the server every 3 hours. One of you must have designed a quest system at one time. Some of you helped design the most successful MMORPGs out there. What happened? On top of all the things missing from the game, don't any of you know how to set up a server so that it's stable?

The last successful MMORPG, DAoC , was stable throughout beta and shipped stable. Why? Because it was a second generation MMOG, and they learned from the past, and they made a stable gae like modern game designers should be able to do.

That's all I can think of for now. If I had another couple hours I could come up with a lot more.

Hey, it's not my millions of dollars that will be lost. It's not even my 50 dollars that will be lost, because I'm not buying the game. Thank god I was in beta…

This comment was edited on Jun 21, 22:15.

Ok, this thread's dead.

Now we've got bitching about liberals, not that there's anything wrong with that, I do it all the time. It's just better done on a site that's, you know, devoted to politics. Can a comparison of George Lucas to H_tl_r or St_l_n or P_l P_t be far behind?

Not that there's anything wrong with that either. Phantom Menace speaks for itself. And plenty of gamers have compared Sony to the Empire.

By the way, comparing anything to the price of gasoline is a losing analogy. Might as well use airline tickets as an example. Gasoline is most definitely not a free market.

I agree, subscription based gaming funds terrorism.

I'll leave SWG alone for now. I love the SW universe and movies but paying to play a game online based on a standard that everyone is charged the same amount regardless of how long they actually play the game online. By those standards you are paying not to play either as long as you are subscribed and offline. Crap I better cancel my DirecTV and DSL line. I don't use either of those all the time. Just in case someone tries to make that argument which is logical but not realistic. After the game develops a little more I may give it a shot.

The liberal conservative debate going on here leads to no end. The libs are rarely tolerant. They have the same comparable mind set as Hamas or Al-Queda. This striking difference only became apparent to many as the contrast between the two increased after 911. The problem with the liberal attitude is that not everyone on the face of the planet thinks like them and they don't understand why. That's the reason you see so many people switch to conservatism during times like this. The reality of the world has slapped them in the face and they have awakened out of their dream world. There is nothing wrong with their dream world and is preferred by many. I would prefer it, but I realize that there are those in the world who will not tolerate it, will kill to keep others from it, and show no compassion while doing it. The world is not a perfect place, and will never be one unless we all can tolerate each other. There will always be those who take things just a little to far. Humans are animals and will always act like them in circumstances that instinctively require it. That's why you see peace rallies get out of hand. Do they really oppose war while acting so violently protesting for peace? A lot of the pro-war rallies only became chaotic when the anti-war protestors showed up and started the brawl. So who really wants peace? The answer is we both do. Ever see an animal do something stupid. Animals tend to think only in their little worlds and are unable to think in terms other than their own. I'm not trying to insinuate that Liberals are nothing more than self-serving animals, but rather that their instincts are getting in the way of realistic thought. Conservatives need liberal though to have an idea of what they are striving to achieve while at the same time using liberal passion to drive their own to achieve what we all should want, peace on earth. Kind of like when your wife keeps nagging you to fix the washing machine. She doesn't understand the process to fix it but you both want the same thing, for it to be fixed. You more than likely will fix it just to shut her up. Her passion, or nagging, has driven you to fix the machine, but she also nags about the mess you left in the kitchen while fixing the problem. Her world is perfect as long as you can do the dirty work and make it that way. You would never see a liberal working in a slaughter house, but you can buy them a burger at MacDonald's.

Eh, a little more complicated than simple inflation from your parent's (or grandparent's) era. It is...but damn, being born in the British Isles, the British pound still has more value than the dollar, but you Americans have had more incredible buying power than any nation on Earth since the second world war. Actually, it was probably good that the inflation took some hold, because it was so insane what you could do with a few dollars compared to the mark, pound, etc. It stabilized itself in the long run.

OMG! what a bunch of whiners, its 15 fricking bucks! Someone call a Waaaaaaaambulance. Haven't you ever heard of inflation? Or do you still think a loaf of bread costs a nickel???

You guys making 5 bucks an hour or what? Jesus Christmas tree, shut yer pile holes and go back to work at McD's.

Better than paying $50 for a game that you finish in two days and never replay again.

Yeah, like Q3A, and Halflife.... oh wait, yeah I still play those all the time.
OK, then NWN and Starcraft were... no wait... yeah those were good purchases that I play / played forever too.

A few more I guess could be C&C Generals, Warcraft3 and Diablo, all of which I paid for once and play all the time.

Hmmmm, I guess I'll just have to say that your broad generalization is full of it, some games you can beat fast, but others do have lasting value for years on end. w/o the monthly fee.

Not saying that I'm against a monthly fee, I've played many MMO's, but Im saying that your arguement is really really weak.

My biggest gripe about p2p is that eventually, you will be paying the cost of the game's inital purchase each month. The first pay muds were about $5 bucks a month, then 10$ a month ones came out, then the graphical one's at 10$, then 12$ now they are up to 15$, in 3 years it will be 20$ not barring inflation... Thats 1/3rd the price of the game for each month's subscription, and the games aren't even that fun.

-Jaded MMO Antivist



"It's The Sims Online, but in a half-hearted Star Wars setting."

That made me laugh, after reading every single post, I agree... well now i'm sleepy, mission accomplished.

This comment was edited on Jun 21, 03:50.