Archive for the 'Star Wars: Galaxies' Category

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Group Size

Posted by Suzina on June 7, 2009 in General and Star Wars: Galaxies. 5 Comments

Star Wars Galaxies started out with a 20 person group as the default. Early on, this could mean a group of 20 people running around on a planet ganking alien beasts that would take several minutes to solo. Sometimes, this meant gathering outside a place with tough-mobs like Fort-Tusken and killing everything that came out of there. There were even multiple 20-person groups there sometimes. This made you feel like a small part of an army. But you know what? You felt powerful because the group is powerful. You were a very small part of a very powerful force.

Five years later, Jedi’s had a boss unique to them and them alone. In order to obtain the best cloak in the game, each Jedi was forced to face two bosses solo. Anyone could stand and watch the Jedi fight these bosses, but no one could help. Unless a player read strategies ahead of time, they would fail both fights. Even when someone knew of strategies that worked for fighting these bosses, it was still a difficult set of fights. Complaints from players on the forums about the absurd difficulty of the fights only served to make the eventual victory more sweet. You felt powerful because you knew you had become skilled as a player.

Feeling skilled and feeling powerful. Can these two feelings exist in the same combat scenario? To me it seems they are at odds. The larger the group becomes, the greater the diffusion of responsibility a player feels. Too big a group, with a role shared by too many others in the group (like DPS in a raid) and I feel as though I don’t matter at all.

Light Themes

Posted by Suzina on May 28, 2009 in General, Lord of the Rings Online and Star Wars: Galaxies. 16 Comments

You know, MMO’s aren’t particulary good at theming.

Take the medic class in Star Wars Galaxies.  Sure, when the game launched you could be a doctor and sit at the hospital doing doctor things, but today’s medic is more combat oriented.  The purpose of having a medic to take into groups is clearly driven by the tried-and-tested gameplay mechanic of having a healer in a group along with a tank and someone to deal out the damage.  The medic as it stands today, doesn’t really resemble any kind of medical professional, either in reality or in Star Wars.

This medic class can instantly heal a person who’s running and shooting with a “bacta bomb” or heal an entire group of people in mid-combat with a “bacta spray”.  Playing a medic doesn’t feel like playing a medic.  It feels like playing an MMO healer with skills like “group heal” and “single-target heal”.

To be fair, playing a healer in fantasy MMOs doesn’t fair much better.  You know if you pick a priest in a game that you won’t be doing much praying.  You won’t have to attend church or give any sermons.  You’re going to run around clicking buttons that make your friend’s health-meter go up.

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Swish Effect

Posted by Suzina on May 2, 2009 in Final Fantasy XI, General, Lord of the Rings Online and Star Wars: Galaxies. 4 Comments

You know what makes combat in an MMO really satsifying?  Yes, a deep combat system is important.  But right now, I want to talk about the sounds.

A lot of the classes that swing their weapons in Lotro make a “swish” sound no matter if they hit a target or not.  It’s not something you notice the first time you fight, or even the millionth, but at some point you play a character in Lotro or another mmo and you whack something and go, “Ouch, I think I heard some bone breaking!!”

As an example of the swish effect, I’d like to direct your attention to some bloody penguins.

First, the swishy one:

http://www.logan.ws/games/penguin.asp

Then the more satisfying smashy one:

http://www.logan.ws/games/bloody-penguin.asp

Notice how when you smash the penguins in the second link, it just feels more gratifying.  You get to hear a “splat” sound when you actually hit the penguin to begin with, plus the penguin makes “ouch” sounds whenever it bounces, and finally there are sweet “boom” sounds whenever the penguin hits a mine.

FFXI is great at having very satisfying sound effects.  Other games like SWG really drop the ball in this department.  With Lotro, it depends on which class you play and which skills you use.  One of the reasons I like playing my new Warden alt in Lotro is how satisfying the stabbing sounds are.  I really feel like I’m inflicting some virtual pain.

Hang out spots

Posted by Suzina on April 14, 2009 in Lord of the Rings Online and Star Wars: Galaxies. 15 Comments

When I first started playing Star Wars Galaxies, I noticed there were certain “hang-out” spots in each city.  Even if you went to a different server, the hang-out spots were exactly the same.  I thought it was weird because back then, you could choose to start in any city on any planet.   There were no quest-hubs to draw anyone to any place in particular.

After thinking about what all the hang-spots had in common, I came to realize that gamers are very lazy creatures.  If the game mechanics didn’t force a player to go somewhere to hang out, they would hang out wherever they loaded in.  This meant the main hang-out in every city was the starport.  The developers tried to force people into the cantina’s by giving them a nasty debuff called “battle fatigue” that could only be slowly removed in certain locations.  They also tried to force people into hospitals to have their other crippling debuffs removed.  But even if these locations were 30 seconds away from the load-in spot, people wouldn’t make the journey.

You can’t artificially create game-mechanics to force players to hang out somewhere.  Oh, you can try, but leaving the load-in spot to go have a medic remove my wounds in the hospital was about as much fun as waiting in line at the DMV.  If they really wanted players to hang out in the hospital, then they should have made the hospital the place you load into after you die.  But they didn’t.  You woke up as a clone,  if I remember.  A wounded clone…. or something.

By contrast, everyone hangs out inside the Prancing Pony in Lotro.  Could the developers behind SWG believe that players use instruments to play music there on a daily basis without being forced to grind “entertainer xp”?  The Prancing Pony has several reasons it’s a hang out spot.  First of all, there’s a mile-stone right outside to make it a possible load-in location.  Second, the beginning of the Epic quest line forces you to go there several times.  Third, there are many amenities inside such as a barber, vendors, and a bard, so people can stop off there for multiple reasons.  And of course, it’s a memorable location from the books/movies.

Star wars Galaxies, if you want people to hang out in a cantina, let me land on the roof!  Put in bazaar terminals, mission terminals, bank terminals, and bounty-hunter terminals inside it, and then make the cantina the default place to land when coming from another planet.  Basically, if you let me load in and get my stuff done without having to move my little virtual legs, then I might consider hanging out there.

Gamers don’t want Hardcore

Posted by Suzina on April 9, 2009 in Star Wars: Galaxies. 17 Comments Tags: .

Oh… gamers think they want hardcore.  They even say they want hardcore. But no, they do not want hardcore, or at least not the kind of hardcore that mmo developers usually dole out to appease their requests.

When a gamer says they want something to be hardcore, they mean to say they would like to achieve something and then stand triumphant while those who have not achieved that thing are impressed beyond measure.  It has to be something that they can achieve where others fail. This is where the vision stops.  Players don’t stop to think WHY those who are impressed have failed to achieve.

In SWG, getting a gunship is considered a somewhat “hardcore” space goal.  In order to get one, you have to kill hundreds of fighters of every kind, of every level.  The barrier that keeps most people from getting a gunship isn’t some boss, but rather a huge boring grind. Many of the ships you have to destroy to get a gunship die after a couple hits, but are so weak you could bring your engines to a full stop and safely go to the bathroom during a dogfight.

It should be the other way around.  Hardcore should mean that you have to face very difficult fights where you could easily die against a dangerous opponent.  Instead, your chief enemy in most “hardcore” games is boredom.  * Cough *  Darkfall  * Cough *

When players ask for hardcore, they may expect some twitch-based challenge or near-impossible boss, but they’re really asking for a huge grind.  Hardcore doesn’t = Challenging.

Prices as Signals

Posted by Zubon on August 25, 2008 in General, Lord of the Rings Online and Star Wars: Galaxies. 12 Comments

I was listening to Michael Munger’s podcast on price-gouging last week, and it reminded me of the price of silver in Middle Earth. “The only way you get low prices is by letting people charge high prices.”

Silver is a bottleneck for jewelers. There are two types of metal nodes at each crafting tier, and silver is the less common one in tier 2. If you want to advance a jeweler, you make a lot of silver jewelry or polish a double-lot of gems. As a tier 2 resource, it is where the level 15-20 folks hang out, not the level-capped masses. Because it is a less common resource with relatively few people collecting it, price is high. It was selling for higher prices than ancient silver, the tier 5 (top-level) jeweler metal (which was just made more common).

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Happy 5th, Star Wars: Galaxies

Posted by Ethic on June 26, 2008 in Star Wars: Galaxies. 2 Comments

Star Wars: Galaxies turns 5 years old today. Happy Birthday!

June 17, 2003 – LucasArts and Sony Online Entertainment Inc. today announced Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided, the highly anticipated initial installment of the first Star Wars massively multiplayer online (MMO) game series, will release June 26, 2003. The Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided online fan community now exceeds more than 500,000 registered members.

“After three years of intense development, we’re thrilled by the imminent release of Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided,” says John Smedley, president, Sony Online Entertainment. “We’re honored that LucasArts felt only Sony Online had the right combination of technical know-how and game design skills to produce a game of this scope. The Star Wars Galaxies team has been working non-stop to deliver a product that lives up both to the stature of the Star Wars license and the expectations that LucasArts had set for us.”

- Ethic

Why I Play Multiplayer Games By Myself

Posted by Dave on November 19, 2007 in City of Heroes/Villains, Guild Wars, Star Wars: Galaxies, Tabula Rasa and World of Warcraft. 5 Comments

gw001.jpgAkela Talamasca at Massively posted today about why he enjoys soloing through his favorite MMOs. This is something that I find myself enjoying as well and I’d like to share a few more reasons why it can be fun.

Akela lists his reasons as such:

Feeling of being a hero, not a nameless part of a team.
Inability to trust other players.
Time management.

For my situation, the first two certainly apply. I enjoy being the star of the show and I detest when other players lower my enjoyment of a game. Time management isn’t a big concern for me, as I tend to be the one scheduling the guild events and trying to get everyone together.

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Guardians at the Gates 1

Posted by Zubon on April 9, 2007 in A Tale in the Desert, EVE Online and Star Wars: Galaxies. 1 Comment

When I posted about barbarians at the gates last month, I did not expect the most famous one in English literature to appear in response. As it turns out, the upcoming Age of Conan has exactly what I was looking for, including PvE and PvP city-building and -defense that integrates crafting and has various sizes for big and small guilds. Ask, and the internet delivers.

My thanks to our commenters who pointed out my ignorance and cited other games doing something along these lines. Please consider this your report-out on games that have aspects of player-run, -built, or -defended cities. Add more to the comments if you think of any.

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This Just In…

Posted by Ethic on November 14, 2005 in Star Wars: Galaxies. 1 Comment

Star Wars: Galaxies still sucks. Film at 11.

Really, all they have accomplished here is to chase away all the people willing to play that horrible excuse for a game. I gave it some decent play time, ignoring the bugs, and still could not really find any enjoyment. It is an improvement in my opinion, but not enough.

These changes may encourage some previous players to try it out for a month and many of the current players will stick around (just how much grief can you do to these people before they finally quit?) but I just don’t see any possibility of drawing in brand new players. It ain’t going to happen. The writing is on the wall my friends, the game is doomed.

- Ethic