Imagine if WoW tried to blow through the Talents 2.0, Garrison, Artifact, Azerite Armor, and HoA Trait systems over the course of a single 2-year period. SWG changed way too much and way too frequently in its attempts to compete with other MMOs, which led to them not drawing in a lot of long-term players while constantly upending their existing playerbase.
That said, even during its best days, SWG was a niche MMO.
swg’s first mistake was when they didnt have a good plan for rolling out jedi - you had to figure out how to do it with no clues. to stem the impatience over non existent jedi, they made a martial arts type class called the teras kasi. all would be jedis latched onto it and it turned out to be overpowered in pvp and pve due to an ability that was equivalent to rogue stunlock, which resulted in them being very popular. eventually so many non teras kasi’s complained, they were nerfed hard. immediately they lost several thousand teras kasi players.
then security holes/bugs/glitches allowed some unscrupulous players to dupe game currency. this resulted in a few very rich players before it was discovered, which would go on to effect the rest of the game, cause though the dupers were banned, they werent banned before they handed off alot of their ill gotten gain to guildies. those guilds would then go on to corner the jedi market.
then after a year had gone by and no one had figured out how to unlock jedi, some hacker found there were no files relating to jedi in the game folders. they lost several thousand would be jedi players over that.
when it was finally discovered how to make a jedi, it required a collection of components that were only available from non instanced mobs, located in only one place in the game. it was camped night and day by the same guilds. and once all their guildies had the components, they continued to camp it so they could sell the components for so much game currency, only former dupers could afford it. they lost several thousand players over that.
then jedi were too powerful and summarily nerfed…to the point where you didnt even bother logging on them because they just die repeatedly and have negative xp gain. they lost several thousand players over that.
somewhere in here they deleted bio-engineers, which lost them players. and finally one day, i log in and my hunter (creature handler) was deleted, also. my rancor and graul hunter pets sat uselessly in inventory. thats when i left.
No the mistake SOE and SWG team made, which they have made numerous posts about, is that they didn’t listen to their players and take into account what the players wanted for their game.
It’s the same exact thing Blizzard is doing. Taking the game in a direction that the players have already protested and have argued against. Surprise, surprise, WoW’s numbers are down y/y.
I think SWG ultimately would’ve been shuttered regardless of the game’s faults, thanks in part to Disney buying the franchise, what with their love of axing other moderately popular games (ie, Club Penguin, ToonTown, PotC Online), and the release of SWtoR being around the corner.
I had a Teras Kasi back in the day… They remained OP for quite some time, I remember dueling some of the Jedi in my guild and the fights would last forever. SWG was some good times!
Man, you can really tell when Asmongold does a WoW is dying vid. All the low post count Chicken Littles swarm out of the woodwork.
Not long. Love or hate the NGE, SWG absolutely needed to change. There’s really no iteration of the game that wasn’t just busted and clunky.
A lot of people forget that SOE also no longer had the Starwars rights and the game was going to be shutdown regardless since The Old Republic was coming out. I liked SWG as a sand box, but I felt it would have been a better game if made outside of the movie canon.
The crafting system in SWG was incredible. Resources had different stats depending on when and where they spawned, creature handler. I miss SWG.
If blizzard continually pushed content as buggy as beta currently is that also re-broke as much as it fixed, that would be the same level of mistake as SWG. Live was as much about finding workarounds as playing the game. The test realms and closed beta’s were long discussions about broken things that had a dev responses and still made it to live broken.
The CU and NGE was attempt to chase WoW and change the game from a complex sandbox to a simpler theme park. For blizz to make a similar mistake in this way they would need to be changing to a complex sandbox game. Well Systemlands… can kind of see that.
you know you can play classic right
What was really weird about the NGE and CU changes, I was in the CU closed alpha and beta and NGE development was going on secretly and in parallel. So we were testing a combat system that only lasted a month or two before the NGE dropped.
I don’t remember CU but I do remember NGE and that was a nightmare. That is when I was out.
Yeah i agree with OP
SWG was NOT good. What about all the broken as hell classes and the people rushing to play whatever OP flavor of the month was? Then there was the total lore breaking decisions like a Wookie Imperial…if you know how the Empire treated wookies you’d know why this could never ever happen.
What’s more interesting are the newer interviews that Smedley has given where, now that hes not at SoE/Daybreak, hes been much more candid about the NGE/CU.
Essentially whats been said is that SoE didn’t want to do the NGE/CU, including Brack and many others who knew it was a mistake, but LucasArts had ALL say in what went into that game and they had seen the success of WoW and told SoE they had to change SWG to be “more like that game” - which is how and why the NGE/CU happened - In fact when SoE pushed back apparently LucasArts threatened to pull the license completely from them.
Its a pretty candid interview with some choice language. He fully admits the mistakes they made and what went wrong, but its interesting to know that SoE knew that the NGE was a bad idea but were forced into it regardless by LucasArts.
Right… I played SWG from 2004 until it’s final moment in 2011. I remember the Pre-CU, the CU and the NGE. And sorry but I’m not going to give some player revisionist history about how SWG was the single greatest thing made more so in it’s Pre-CU days.
SWG was a broken mess of a game, that had a ton of people leave it when WoW came out in 2004. Sure it had some nice ideas, and to be far some of the player stuff out there fixed a number of the faults.
Lets see… We had a massive lack of content when the game came out. More so if you believed Jump to Lightspeed the starfighter/space system should have been in at launch. Game balance was a joke, Doctor Buffs, Composite Armor, defense stacking, for the most part gave a player god mode. Melee Players could do a knockdown/dizzy macro that amounted to an “I win!” button. Crafting was the only way to get anything, not a awful idea but the decay rate on items was a little insane. Wanna PvP? Make sure you play a class that has an attack that targets another players mind pool thanks to SWG’s broken HAM (Health, Action, Mind) system.
Oh and end game? You grind Jedi. Or you can go about trying to farm up the stuff to make Mandolorian Armor that wasn’t that good. And note I’m leaving out how broken Jedi was and believe me it was broken. By the end of the CU era of the game you could go to the city of Theed on Naboo and see something like West Side Story being played out with one gang of Rebel Jedi throwing down vs. one gang of Imperial Jedi.
Again… SWG did have some nice systems, however the whole revisionist history that SWG came out and blew everyone’s mind is bull. Granted the insane SWG Vets will tell you how it was this magical land where everyone was happy until big bad SOE came along and laughed while forcing the NGE onto people. Truth was it was bleeding subs to WoW, EQ2 and other MMO’s.
That was the biggest problem right out of the gate. Everything was just always broken. We’d report on the test realm, it would be acknowledged and then it would go live broken. Things that got fixed would usually be broken again one or two patches later. I swear I think the issue was they weren’t using any version control
But it was also amazing in a lot of ways. Definitely not for everyone, especially if you’re looking for a single player theme park experience where everyone gets everything.
There were things only one or two people on a server might have. The celebrities were the top crafters and the content was content the players created. You were in competition with everyone for everything. Great times
I never played SWG prior to the CU and NGE so I have no basis for comparison. I will only list what I liked and didn’t like about the game when I started playing it.
I liked the Tansaari Point Station starting area. Great place to rack up some starting credits and get a free starfighter before going to Tattooine.
The ground combat to me was meh, but I liked the space combat and spent most of the time levelling my pilot levels. That’s the one aspect where SWG is superior to SWTOR.
I liked player housing. Finding a nice spot to build and customize my character’s home. Though it did take me a while to learn how to place objects where I wanted to.
I liked the concept of non-combat levelling with traders and entertainers.
I liked being able to visit a player’s shop to purchase any equipment I needed and creating waypoints to favorite merchants.
I liked that regardless of your race, you could join the Rebel Alliance, the Empire, or remain neutral. Though it didn’t make much sense for certain races to willingly join the Empire.
I didn’t like that jedi were unlocked for all players. It was the GCW period when jedi are supposed to be extremely rare. Yet you saw them all over the place like there was never an Order 66.
I wished all of the lore characters were voiced by the original actors where possible. That’s one of the things I like a lot about Star Trek Online.
They haven’t deleted a class yet