On Star Wars: Galaxies

With the impending release of The Old Republic, I've found myself thinking more and more about the SOE's previous (and, truly, failed) attempt at a Star Wars MMORPG: Star Wars Galaxies.  One reason this is on my mind is that I've been explaining the old system (especially the "one character per server" rule) to a variety of individuals; mostly players who were too young to have played the game.  Another reason is because of a recent a article about the loss of ingenuity and stagnation of MMORPGs, which mentioned SWG as one of the most ambitious launches to date.  This may indeed be true. SWG was indeed an ambitious game, and it expected a lot from its players.  Maybe too much.

Let me take an aside to make quick statement:  It is not my goal here to explain and dissect why SWG failed.  There were a LOT number of reasons and a LOT of places things went wrong.  I only intend to address line of thought here: The conflict between the game economy and story progression.

On the surface, these two concepts don't appear to be related.  

Story progression should occur when the character pursues in game quests and activities that progress a narrative that the player, at least nominally, feels they are playing a part in.  Typically, this consisted of hunting down troopers of the opposing faction, and bouncing around the worlds.  These missions almost always involved combat.  The story that was included in the game was incredibly sparse by these standards.

Game economy, in SWG, was nearly completely run by the players.  There were some NPC vendors, typically for the players to vendor trash to and make some credits.  Almost nothing of value was sold by NPC vendors.  Characters improved their crafting and learned to craft better items by crafting to gain crafting experience.  Characters could also become merchants in the same fashion.  Ground vehicles and even starships were crafted in this way as well.  Training was also intended to be done by players; to reach the master level of each class, you had to spend apprentice experience earned by teaching skills to lower level players of your class.  

In today's games, players can craft and gather materials while they progress the story via questing.  They may need to take time away from questing to return to a social hub to use a crafting station (an anvil, loom, or some other shit), but the pursuit of improving your crafting skills at worst minimally interfered with questing, and at best equipped with improved gear and improved your combat ability.  And really, your ability to pursue your crafting was independent of your combat abilities.  


However, In the SWG skill system, you had to choose to allocate your skill points (of which you had a limited pool of a fixed size), into abilities in different classes, meaning you could "spec" into being a merchant, or into improved combat abilities.  But not both at the same time.  This flexible skill system not only tied together a players combat abilities (used to pursue quest objectives) and their crafting abilities (used to power the economy), but made them mutually exclusive.


In retrospect, this reminds me of some problems that came into old pencil and paper systems, where the designers attempted to balance classes with weaker combat abilities by improving their non-combat abilities.  While this might seem balanced "on paper", it makes for fucking dull game play.  


So in the "ambitious and innovative" SWG system, to power the economy, some players were forced in to dull game play.  And while some individuals may enjoy a "free market, craft-and-sell" game, it never would have been enough to support a server.  


Ultimately, this was one of a number of failings of SWG that led to its ultimate demise.  There were problems at launch, and while some of the solutions to these problems were appropriate, other were very far from the mark.  I stopped playing some time between Jump to Lightspeed and Rage of the Wookies (yes, "Rage of the Wookies" was the actual name of the expansion), so I can't comment on everything that happened.


All this was a set of realizations that fell into place as some of the bits were floating around upstairs in random access.  Now its been compiled, and can be flushed from cache.


In other news, this evening we finally got a group together to for an SWTOR flashpoint.  I hope to have the impressions from that up soon.  The server load beta is done for this weekend.  Hopefully it'll go open beta soon, but really, 15.Dec big date we're looking forward to.  Good ol' early access.  

I think that's it for now.  I'll catch you all again soon.

/endofline