SWG: An Opportunity Lost
Jun. 30th, 2005 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kathygnomeTwo years ago give or take a few days the Wanderhome server opened on Star Wars Galaxies. I'd been playing on Starsider, the official unofficial roleplaying server, but the server was frequently crashing or full or both. And I wanted to try a crafting profession. I logged on within a few hours of Wanderhome coming up, started a crafting Twilek, Karai the tailor, and never looked back. I spent the next month or so gathering, mining, and crafting, working my way up to become the second master tailor on the server, second only to Omek, who got there mainly through factory xp. (At launch factories gave 100% xp) I had a great rep. When I logged in, I had clients messaging me before I the screen could load.
It's really hard to remember how big a deal SWG was. Now it's pretty much reckoned a complete failure. Many of the servers are ghost towns. The last time I played, there was a buliding outside of a Coronet named "SWG sux see you in Vana'diel." But when it was released it was ludicrously ambitious and had everything going for it. This was going to be the game that hit the mllion mark.
I remember logging in and seeing the whole matchmaking system. Now that was something i'd never seen before. It hinted at a really grandiose design. It was obvious that the game wasn't done and that it wasn't stable. But we looked at so many of the extra features and thought "oh wow, when they flesh this out it will be incredible."
But they never did.
No vehicles? Surely those aren't more than a few weeks away. Turned out to be six months. After a month, things were worse than launch. Things disappeared from inventories. Tailors didn't have primary colors available. Entire systems didn't work. There are bugs in the game today two years later that were introduced in the first month after launch and never fixed.
I gave up when my factories didn't work for a week and they couldn't fix them. You could demolish and rebuild them as a workaround, so they removed the cost for doing so, until they could fix them. The fix to remove the cost didn't work either. They tried again and that didn't work. I cancelled.
I still look back with sadness. It was a great design for a game. Not so good for Star Wars, but for a game it was most of what I wanted. I'd had such optomism and I actually for once did the achiever thing and made it to the top of my profession.
If it had worked and they hadn't been starved for funds by lucasarts so they could fix things in a timely manner, it would have been incredible. Instead we have WOW as the first western game to break a million, a great game, but one that's pretty simplistic. And very far from the grand virtual world design of SWG.
/mourn
It's really hard to remember how big a deal SWG was. Now it's pretty much reckoned a complete failure. Many of the servers are ghost towns. The last time I played, there was a buliding outside of a Coronet named "SWG sux see you in Vana'diel." But when it was released it was ludicrously ambitious and had everything going for it. This was going to be the game that hit the mllion mark.
I remember logging in and seeing the whole matchmaking system. Now that was something i'd never seen before. It hinted at a really grandiose design. It was obvious that the game wasn't done and that it wasn't stable. But we looked at so many of the extra features and thought "oh wow, when they flesh this out it will be incredible."
But they never did.
No vehicles? Surely those aren't more than a few weeks away. Turned out to be six months. After a month, things were worse than launch. Things disappeared from inventories. Tailors didn't have primary colors available. Entire systems didn't work. There are bugs in the game today two years later that were introduced in the first month after launch and never fixed.
I gave up when my factories didn't work for a week and they couldn't fix them. You could demolish and rebuild them as a workaround, so they removed the cost for doing so, until they could fix them. The fix to remove the cost didn't work either. They tried again and that didn't work. I cancelled.
I still look back with sadness. It was a great design for a game. Not so good for Star Wars, but for a game it was most of what I wanted. I'd had such optomism and I actually for once did the achiever thing and made it to the top of my profession.
If it had worked and they hadn't been starved for funds by lucasarts so they could fix things in a timely manner, it would have been incredible. Instead we have WOW as the first western game to break a million, a great game, but one that's pretty simplistic. And very far from the grand virtual world design of SWG.
/mourn
