@@thegreatape884 That's a goof, right? A joke? I don't mean to sound unkind, it just seem to me that there's been something of a misunderstanding and what you intended to be taken as a joke got taken very seriously
The sad part is the developers thought we wanted to be Luke, Han or Obi Wan but they failed to realize is we wanted to be our own person living in the Star Wars Universe. I left when CU came and tried in late but finally left when NGE came out.
7:15 I can't speak for anybody else but that quote is the 100% opposite for me. I really enjoyed feeling like just an everyday nobody in this massive amazing universe, it made it that much more intense when I saw a jedi fight happen. We have enough SW games where you get the experience of being han or luke that wasn't what the appeal of this game was.
I agree with you, I never really wanted to be force sensitive. I was happy just being a non-FS combat class along with having a crafter alt. I remember the almost sick joy of scouring for perfect spots to plop down my extractors lol. Damn, I miss the community and experiences I had in this game.
It definitely was not marketed in the beginning as being a game that brings you into the shoes of the movie's characters. The whole point was to make your *own* mark in the Star Wars universe you see fit. The Jedi part was a pissing match.
Found this comment last night while I was logged off so I had to log on real quick to agree! We have so many Star Wars games with us being the hero. I'm so sick of it. SWG was like a breath of fresh air. I loved being an average nobody in that game. It made you feel like you're part of the actual world, rather than a hero who is saving it. If I had played and had the chance of becoming a Jedi, I probably wouldn't have done it.
The sandbox is what's sorely missing from most mmos. You create waiting areas and requirements to go to cantinas in order to give opportunities to engage your players with other players and socialize. Kill loot repeat was the complete wrong direction.
Sorry you are wrong. it was not about sitting there for 2 hours doing nothing. It was 2 hours having fun with friends talking crap. Maybe crafting building friendships for future battles. Being part of a guild that expanded 3000 players with sister guilds there was a community to the game. In todays games there is no commuity it is just burn through the story content and move on to the next game. What makes games like everquest, EQ2, lord of the rings, ff11 good was that comunity. Once you take away community you just have a simple easy game might as well be a solo based game you sell in stores to play on a console.
You make new ones. You walk into any cantina in pre-CU SWG and you'll find a dozen or more people just hanging out, talking about whatever. Entertainers were also all there, unlike later in the game cycle where the majority of them are just AFK bots. They acted more like a bartender at a small pub, greeting new people that come in and chatting with the patrons. Hell, my server set up an entire town in the southeast corner for the Corellia map to host a server wide party. This was before everyone had any sort of good gear and I worked as an escort to get low/non-combat professions players through the dangerous wildlife. You had chefs cooking food for people, musicians and dancers that would do performances, and a group of people that even did a fireworks show. The social aspect of the game was completely different than most games these days. I mean, people made a living in the game as interior decorators, to the point where it basically became an unofficial profession. I can't think of a game right now where I can say I brought a friend to my favorite tailor's shop, where she then proceeded to present her latest work, chatted him up about his likes and dislikes, and finally sold him a white suit that he was extremely happy with. When Jump to Lightspeed came out, people hosted parties aboard their pre-order space yachts. And now I'm just rambling. I guess what I'm saying is that for some reason, most everyone who played SWG was extremely sociable. It's actually probably because the combat system was so broken, anyone that only cared about that just quit. But because the game was a giant sandbox, a lot of people enjoyed it nevertheless. You know how GTA 5 roleplay is popular on twitch? And it's just roleplaying (mostly) as interesting, but regular people? That's kind of what the SWG experience was, everywhere. That was a game where I could just hang out at the cantina all day because the people were interesting.
@@NecroAsphyxia Then you move on to a game that fits your time constraints. Maybe make new friends who are online around the same time as you are. There are tens of thousands of games out there, not all of them have to fit your (or mine or anyone's) needs.
I thought not. It's not a story EA would tell you. It's an mmo legend. Star Wars Galaxies was an mmo so powerful and so fun it could use the force to influence the players to create.....life
Julio Torres basically just said "they think they do, but they don't." The fall of these franchises comes when game makers stop respecting their their players. Plain and simple
that's true to an extent, honestly, a lot of the fan base doesn't actually know anything about game development, and if the Devs listened purely only to the players, they sometimes add stupid ideas, it's better to have a balance among the devs and the community.
DJ Serpent yeah I understand but I'm a Swtor player since the beginning. I agree that things like the more streamlined levelling system with 3 disciplines made the game better and they brought about many good class changes. But it's not hard to understand that PvE and PvP content is what keeps players. I do think that they definitely had staff cut because that's the only reason they couldn't pump out and make good stuff like they did before.
@Billy Benkins the game was pretty easy though, the only thing I'd say is the missions/quests could of been less grindy. Like as some more variety to the mission types and how the enemies spawned in those quested areas.
@@hawkingseye8464 It was easy unless you did actual endgame content like solo farming on Dantooine or did group farming in POIs on Dantooine and the like. I played a pikeman and loved it because I could go toe to toe with jedi. Loved the game - miss it to this day and I disagree with the combat being lame. There were benefits to using separate abilities because each creature had varying pools of health/stamina/mind, so it could be easier to kill them if you targetted their weakest bar. But whatever, you know. People call it easy because they sat on tatooine killing womp rats. And oh god, the kangaroo monkeys on Naboo as a new player were the worst. Shaupats can forever rot in hell.
Objectively, Pre-CU was a horribly designed, buggy mess. But it was still the golden age of SWG. Why? Because there was nothing in the game telling you what to do. It was a true Star Wars sandbox, where players controlled the economy, players controlled the storylines (city vs city), players had to make friends and meet new people to get stuff done. There was an actual COMMUNITY where knowing the right people and being likable were extremely important. I had several groups of people that relied on me for Endor runs because I was a Squad Leader/BH and was the best one they knew. One of them even bought me a sweet set of Composite armor and double sliced my LLC. Sure, by today's standards, there wasn't much to actually DO in the game, but that forced people to make their own fun, and I have not seen a game before or since where the community did that as well as pre-CU SWG.
@Hilbert França yes some good ones like EQ2, final fantasy 11 lord of the rings. But now there making MMO's to be solo played and easy. What made the early days of MMO's great was the large raids and community. That is truly being pulled away for easy to play games with battle royal and PVP every where. Its target is the person that just wants to play 10 min matches now.
@@troodon1096 I totally agree. I had this whole "make your own fun" Argument being used as a positive. If i am paying out for a game i kind of expect them to actually have gameplay in it. As you said it's the developers job to give us the consumers a fun game to play, not just give us the virtual equivilent of an empty cardboard box and say "There you go, make your own fun".
@@troodon1096 Correct you don't pay anyone for any rights. Rights can't be bought, privledge can though. And history has certainly shown that there is room for sandbox games like SWG where player can make their own fun. If you need an analogy try a house or a car. Do you expect your house to come with a maintnence crew? Do you expect your car to come with a chauffer who can take you every where? After all do you not buy a car for transportation? Do they expect you to learn to drive and decide where you want to go? Ridiculous!
I am one of those that did like BattleFatigue, the HAM system, The complex mixable professions, the 10 min shuttlewaits, it made you interact with an amazing community ingame! It was the CU that broke my game, the NGE was just the extra kick in the teeth while I already was lying down! Still miss this game.
Yup, I used to have situations where my HAM was drained to near nothing, and would walk into a Cantina (more like drag myself in) only to be greeted by entertainers who were eager to help me get healthy again, and ask about my story of how I ended up getting so messed up. Great times. The game had life.
CU combat was the best update for me it has actual strategy and skill to it other then the broken afk combat of PreCU it's so weird y'all old heads wanted some afk combat game.
In the two years I played Pre-CU, I hunted Jedi, protected Jedi, made millions selling organic resources for Medic classes, made more millions buffing as a MD, chatted for hours in Mos Eisley Cantina as the sexiest male Mon Cal in the universe, making more millions through tips and Image Design, piloted a YT-1300, was elected mayor of a the second largest city on Kauri, officiated a marriage, got married, opened a VERY successful tailoring/BE shop, killed Krayts, destroyed Rancors, pimp slapped every Nightsister on Dath, constructed a jet pack, made more millions selling bomb droids that helped kill Jedi I once protected, unlocked my FS slot (only used for the ten plots, though), happily paid for three accounts, crafted BH (shit stats) armor, got three pieces of Mando armor, destroyed a set of VKs that cost me 25 million due to a mind fire DoT effect that was BRUTAL, went through the Rebel, Imperial, and Jabba "theme parks", and actually celebrated the first time I was able to unleash an ATST on a Jedi, only to watch the immortal fucker cut it to ribbons in 15 seconds. In the three months I played NGE a few years later, I chatted with absolute shit stains in Mos Eisley Cantina and realized that coming back to hundreds of farewell emails from people who quit when I did definitively signaled the end of an era. Kauri was dead and transferring for free to Bloodfin made me realize that those who stayed through the changes weren't enough to hold back the onslaught of poisonous fuckmonkeys who had invaded the game because they were done with TBC content and were just needing something to do before Wrath came out in WoW. The graphics were shit, the sheer amount of bugs such as speeder rubber banding that persisted through every update were beyond atrocious, the heavily imbalanced PvP combat, and Jedi silliness of first skill grinding, then Village tripe, were not enough to deter people who enjoyed the game in its near original state. No game has come close to the sheer amount of enjoyment I experienced playing SWG. Even 20 man "solo" grouping was more fun than the loot treadmill bs so common in modern MMOs where everything is min/max, queue waiting, forced grouping, fetch quests, or days of mindless grinding just to prepare for the CHANCE at something that increases DPS by .02%.
Adamurquhart I was a brawler tank at the beginning. Super strong. Always helpful in grouping and I followed the smuggler tree. I eventually began slicing weapons for people. I posted a message in my guild hall and next thing I know I had people lining up paying me millions to overpower their weapons. It was a lot of fun. The CU nerfed my battle strength but I was still slicing and dicing terminals in groups or weapons...that NGE shit sucked ass tho and I barely hung in there til finally logging in after a year away to see it go away. A couple years ago I played again on an emulator and met some cool players and it was cool for a little while but couldn’t get the bugs out and it was hard to stay at it. It would be beautiful to see this game come back in its original form with support from the devs. I’d pay $15/mo again.
the arrogance of the management towards the fans reminds me of what is happening with marvel comics. the belief that your customers are morons might be common in business, but it is something that should never be obvious.
The game literally went from ahead of its time to plain wow clone, the devs failed to realized that it had a following of people who wanted a sandbox, there were people who wanted to play as Owen the farmer, you could already play as han solo or Skywalker it just took work and you grew more attached to your characters and community. A lot of mmo games ESPECIALLY a sandbox is heavily influenced by it's players. I remember I used to be part of an organization in a game called Face of Mankind, HUGE failure of a game with admin abuse and dev problems, BUUUUuuUuUUUuuT I also had the time of my life playing it meeting people I play with to this day, we were a small defensive contract mercenary faction and we were small but good enough to influence game wide wars and conflicts. I remember I wasn't good at combat so I did something else, my job was a recruiter, and oh my god it really was in that game. The starting area would be full of people trying to recruit new people. I got paid for every person I got and a bonus if they lasted. Let's just say my org leader underestimated how good I was and I ended up richer than the whole faction, they actually borrowed from me XD. We'd go on missions and stuff and we'd have a steady supply of newb grunts because of me. By the end of the game a wave ban went by because we were at war with the biggest faction in the game, SwagRats, who was led by a gm, but most of them literally didn't want to fight us so much half of them wore blue shirts and fought for us, literally the best mmo fight I've ever been in, it was like a 6 hour battle were we even weeded out a spy from our faction from those dirty EquestriaRoyalGuard. Then the big man himself, BRAD RIVERS, AND HIS STUPID GM TOP HAT, banned us all over butthurt and actually created a huge community uproar, we eventually got unbanned but the game was already dying, so me and my vast wealth went to the black market and bought as many deadly alien eggs that I could afford, which was almost all of them, and planted aliens all over Paris (one of the cities and headquarters of EQRG), it took 2 weeks before Paris was uninfested with giant alien bugs. Long story I know but my point is that you can do whatever you want in sandbox games and make it work even if it's not a perfect game but taking that freedom away from the players when you already had it is a death sentence
We had one of the coolest CSR on Lowca. His name was Jason and he was really a part of our community. Lol sometimes he'd randomly switch our factions mid-pvp wars.
The complicated system for unlocking “glowing” then slowly learning and mastering Jedi class was the best feature. I agree that the CU a great move, the expansion were solid in fleshing out the full experience and improved game play. The death of SWG came at NGE launch because of 1 unforgivable mistake… the game was set in the middle of the “Jedi Purge”, having Jedi as a chosen class from the start was utterly insane. On day one of NGE there were 100,000 new Jedi running around on every planet. This flew in the face of every player like myself who worked so hard to figure it out on our own.
If they had to have Jedi everywhere, they should have at least gone with the perma-death approach to population control. :-) The original intent for unlocking Jedi was supposed to be so much more difficult, and intended to take years before the first person succeeded (which should have happened without them even realising how they did it). Unfortunately they didn't have time to build the complex system of randomised, hidden achievements involving a mix of combat, exploration and social activities that they wanted before SOE demanded that the first Jedi appear soon. So they initially tied it to skills, and then introduced holocrons to speed it along. Once the first few holocrons had dropped and they all said 'learn x skill' people just systematically grinded through every profession until it unlocked for them. It meant people were playing classes they didn't enjoy, and caused most of the dancers and such who'd previously been dedicated role-players to be replaced with bots just grinding xp.
I was actually happy the player base was limited. Whenever I play an game nowadays I yearn for the maturity and courtesy commonly offered by the majority of SWG players. Pretty much everybody I knew in game was an adult and I have hardly if ever experienced griefing or verbal abuse.
Thats a flawed way of thinking imo. Just like the maker of this video says: If this game had proper ambition and vision supporting it, it would've lasted quite a bit longer. All the core sandbox elements where there, it was just managed in a really shitty way. I think there is a reason why there are so few sandbox mmo's: It's all about making an easy buck. And just look at how much money the last Star Wars: The Farce Engorges made.... 2 billion, even though it is a shit movie by anybody's standards. They didn't HAVE to spend effort on a script because people would have gone and seen it anyways. The box office proves my point. 4/5 people thought it sucked balls. And it's the same with gaming: Just make the next linear hallway shooter disguised as something greater (CoD) and people will flock to buy it. IQ has gone down in a rapid manner over the past 2 decades. Around 1995, the average IQ was far above the victorian era, and scientists were absolutely positive that every generation would be smarter than the previous one. But, according to IQ tests worldwide today, we have now sunk below the IQ of the average person in the Victorian age. I'm betting this has something to do with it. I blame the consumer.
wow, I think your unprovoked emotional response is a testimony enough to who is and who isn't sane. I think it's literally best for both of us if we stop this exercise in communication.
Also, they released NGE a matter of days (less than a week maybe?) after the trials of obi wan and as a result, a class action movement was enacted to get their money back on the expansion due to claims of false advertising and basically forcing people into an update after spending money on the previous game mechanics. Epic fail. Also, the attitude of "they'll get over it" just angered players and drove the ones that left even further away.
Also, I disagree about the NGE. It basically made it so that people who worked HARD to become jedi had all their effort, time, and skill wasted for a beginner class. NGE was the moron patch. They basically said in other words "We need to appeal to the broader base of players, IE morons."
The NGE turned a skill based game into a level based game and that ruined it. The best time in the game was just prior to NGE. Sure, it needed content and patches but not a whole rework. No one wanted to play a skill based game for years only to have it turn into something else. Most of the people who left went to warcraft as did I, because we figured that if we were going to play a level based game we would play a better one. SWG forgot what it was and what worked. Only 2-3 skill based mmo's were around to play at the time, and they all got ruined when people tried to rework them into something else.
Man I guess I’ve been going backwards chronologically with the content on this channel, and I got to say, you have improved DRAMATICALLY with the delivery of your commentary 👏🏻
I don't know I had a friend who was a grind-o-holic, he had a swordsman who was also a chef. He was a Wookiee who wore a pink chef's hat. Although once he found out about Jedi and how to achieve it, he ground out every profession until he unlocked it.
I was a master bounty hunter, a teras kasi master, an architect, a droid engineer, a marksman, a merchant, an image designer, a medic, a musician... I did so much stuff! My fave was Teras Kasi.... Loved the high DPS!
I chose the combination master Ranger/Master Pistoleer class combination from the start. I camped for so many hours to raise skills that I read multiple books while playing? the game just to be one of the first Master rangers. I then found out that Rangers were practically useless and I had to either respec or buy a second game and subscription to have an alternate character. I just couldn't respect my skills after all the work so ran a second subscription. I still have both my set of disks saved for the nostalgia factor though.
Wounds and fatigue were awesome! They gave medics and entertainers purpose! This leads to the one aspect of SWG that I haven't seen in any other game, it relied on players. The best equipment was crafted by players, the economy was decided by players, to get a mount or vehicle or spaceship you had to buy from a player. I still consider it the best game I've ever played, especially for the community it created.
Akray Bothorda it was what Raph Koster calls loose player dependency, much like PC crafters being the only real source of equipment above "vendor trash" level.
Heck yes, I used to play a doctor/combat medic combo a lot and I spent hours in the Corellia hospital, treating and chatting with the patients that limped inside. My fondest memory was a guy that crawled in completely blackbarred and roleplayed that a Rancor ate and shit him out. During the treatment he kept asking if he'd make it, still be able to play the piano etc, it was bloody hilarious; and a situation you can't experience in games today.
i loved playing combat medic/doc..Crafting poisions and stimpacks. I made some really good stuff, spent tons of time getting all the good resources, surveying planets for those high concentration spots before anybody else gets them and then setting up harvester farms. Then spend the time to make stims, the schematics, then mass producing them in the factories and then sell them on vendor. And then afterwards go do some huge PVP guild wars.
this so much this! The entire player based reliance on the community was the best part of the game. Players also had to train each other to learn new skills and the skill tree was amazing. One of the best aspects was you didn't have to be a combat player, you could just be super casual playing an instrument in the cantina or dancing or crafting to your hearts content.
TheEreder No, your role and character is determined on which gamemode you play. If you're playing Hero Assault, you're not playing as CT-85715, you're playing the one and only Grand Master Yoda. When you're playing Space Assault, you aren't playing Bob the Rebel Soldier, you're playing Jimmy the Rebel Pilot.
"Players wanted instant gratification, kill get treasure, repeat." "Players wanted to be hon solo, not uncle owen." No, players wanted to work for stuff, to be proud of what they created, and they didn't want to be han solo, they wanted to be... their own character... be it a humble droid mechanic, or a world famous weaponsmith that was sought after. A slicer or an animal trainer.
I had a lot of combat ability. I would go solo to places that others feared. With one friend we once locked down Mos Eisley for about an hour. My greatest achievement, the thing I most remember, was most known for and most proud of is that I was perhaps the number 1 supplier of Lok Wheat on my server. When I read that statement from the developer I could only think "Are they insane?" That I could also be a wheat farmer and generally choose my own path was it's biggest selling point for me.
That was my biggest frustration. I never wanted to be a Jedi, or a bounty hunter, or a smuggler. I wanted to be a crafter and make clothes, weapons, and armor for people.
Exactly...if you want to be a famous hero, you can do that in literally every other SW action game. The whole point of MMOs is being a small part of a large world.
Bronzeager apparently you are wrong as SW:G is tiny compared to MMOs now... even with the Star Wars name behind it, it was only 1/5 the size of Vanilla WoW? Me thinks you may be the minority.
The best part of SWGs was that it was social. My best memories were being a Doctor in the medical center healing wounds. Being a grumpy Doctor with my Droid. Asking how this happened, yada yada, be more careful next time. The Journey just to become a skilled Doctor was amazing. You could be unique and useful. I can see having to rely on a Doctor, Medic and Dancers to continue to play being a problem, but for me I loved staying logged in for hours for tips to heal. Once NGE launched, all that went away, made the game something it wasn’t. You could no longer be impressed by another player or your own character/profession in the same way. If it existed now, I’m sure classic servers would exist, or maybe not. CU wasn’t terrible IMO. I definitely played the heck out of NGE, it was just a different game at that point.
There are private servers of this game still going if you ever wanted to put those doctor gloves back on for old times sake. I'm enjoying the restoration server the most currently.
The NGE absolutely killed Galaxies. The "unnecessary" complexity of the game was its biggest appeal to me. Being an "Uncle Owen" was the whole point. And making Jedi a starting class? Yeah, that totally makes sense. A horde of Jedi running around in the SW imperial era...
Requiring buffs was actually a good thing. It made entertainers and medics absolutely necessary to gameplay, which brought them into the fold and strengthened the overall communal experience. Players needing each others help was a huge component in Pre-CU SWG. You couldn't just solo everything guns blazing like in modern MMOs. That was one of the best things about the game.
The reason old-timers say the NGE (and the CU) destroyed SWG is that the NGE changed SWG from a virtual world in the Star Wars universe and turned it into another themepark MMO. The number 1 strength of SWG is that it wasn't just a silly game where you kill stuff to fill up an XP bar. SWG was built around the crafting community. The community provided content. When SWG became another hack and slash, it scared off the existing community and the hack and slash people quickly realized SWG was a terrible themepark game.
Indeed, it alienated the whole community that made it thrive from the start. The strengths of SWG were pretty much from the Pre-CU era; and it amazes me that it is being thrown off as wearing tinted sunglasses with a sense of nostalgia.
Complaining about having to wait for a DR to tend to your wounds or give you a buff is missing the point entirely of that system. It created an environment and economy that the players drove. Don't want to wait for the best DR with the best buffs, pay for the cheaper guy and be on your way. Watching the entertainers in the cantina was another plus to a player driven world. It's not a time sink if it actually builds a community, which was the point. What other MMO has ever done this? WoW? Nope. ESO? Nope. Harvesting, vendors, player crafted weapons being BIS (SWG did it). Resources spawning on different worlds of different qualities that could then be crafted into different weapons of various quality (SWG did it). This game was never meant to be a linear adventure like WoW or any other MMO I've ever played. Waiting for the shuttle or starport actually provided a sense of realism (that feeling when you hear the shuttle taking off and you are still buying your ticket!!!!). It's not nostalgia, it's things that were done right and haven't been tried since.
I basically stopped the video when he talked about wounds and healing being a bad thing. It is obvious he just did not not understand and therefore the rest of his opinion on it was to be taken with a grain of salt so why bother watching.
I’m watching all of these SWG videos and I just want to cry. I miss my years when playing with my online friends. I miss my house on the city of Rawr on the planet Talos I think it was called. I want to go back to when I was in junior high school and played SWG
The main point of a game (ANY GAME) is to be fun and entertaining. Well pre-CU galaxies was the most fun and entertaining time to play! Try to deny/ignore it all you want... it won't change anything.
I agree it became great once player cities and vehicles were in place. Also before the combat upgrade. Before the vehicles I was really starting to think this is Starwars! Why am I running everywhere?
@Kitty McFurball It was fun to play a character, particularly since that character become identifiable with you. If you become tired of being a TK, you could alter your skills and take up pistols or smuggling or any combination, but you would still be identified as that character rather than being one of many alts (even though some did have multiple accounts to have a designated crafter/trader).
I have to agree but the CU didn't really do more than force people to do a bit of a change in tactics nothing more. Some players really do not like change at all but those do adapt, what cannot be adapted to is the attitude of those running the game. All too common in MMOs before and since but this was either the top or second worst case of it. All it needed after CU was some freaking content and we yelled that call for months with no impact on dev plans. TS were solid if a bit tedious but very flexible it was a good game, then well all this stuff happened...
Fatigue and Battle Wounds were the reason I talked to people. Best idea ever, made me be social with purpose all the time. Actually how I met a lot of my in game friends.
You couldn't get away with it now days in a game but I loved the 10 minute wait between shuttles too. Met so many people in the starports while waiting.
semimad100 that's what people don't realise, SWG was a social sandbox, not just an action game. Talking to people to get wounds healed, standing waiting for shuttles, watching people in cantinas wasn't taking away the game, it WAS the game. He condemned taking out the professions, but didn't like the things that made those professions useful?
John Tinning yeah, and he seemed to act like those of us that like pre cu are talking about the day the game launched when really were talking about the game literally right before the cu rolled out usually. My favorite era in the game was when Jedi started popping up but, before it was common knowledge how to unlock them. I also wish they didn't give people free holocrons though. That killed a lot of the social aspects when half of everyone was afk grinding.
semimad100 I was there when the first jedi popped, they came outside the starport on coronet, popped their lightsaber and got pounded on by EVERYONE. People were so excited, the story spread like Chinese whispers ha. I think this guy is looking at things in a "traditional" mmo way, wanting theme park stuff in there. This game wasn't built like that. This was a huge star wars sandbox, with the Devs saying "go play". To say there was no group content before isn't true, there were things like the corvette, death watch bunker, plus tons of other POI's with things to do. In this sandbox, the players were the content, like the real world.
A little note on grouping: Grouping pre-CU was useful because the harder mobs granted tons more EXP - the most important of which was skill-exp, not combat exp (which is used mostly in large quantities in advanced professions). Also, forcing 80 high reward missions in dantooine the same direction lead to the game becoming somewhat fun :P Something like 20 rancors on screen is quite cute. Also a second note on the waiting/healing. I think the community developed very positively due to shared waiting/healing time/crafting times/etc. For example, the downtime between combat while interacting at the cantina, or at a camp, allows people to chat. This effect has been exhibited repeatedly - queuing physically at a location in maplestory also carries the same effect, while random-lobby-queues for instances tend to lead to frustrating gameplay (people are more understanding if others get a chance to introduce themselves). It is different for single player games - there is no-inherent community in SP games. In MP games, as the DnD series where the wound system originates from - the wounds (together with daily limits) were designed balance risk-taking and to get the players to rely on each other. When porting the wound system to tyranny (i haven't played it), it might have been OK to make them episodic (cured at end of some series of events, say a day, where the day cannot be advanced arbitrarily) - players then would have to pick their fights smartly. Correspondingly, rewards for fights should be raised, but this isn't something that most cRPGs do. The issue with tyranny is porting wounds while making health and mana expendable resources. In cRPGs, the player's standard response is to fight (and loot) everything - tyranny avoids some of that, but the developers still retain some of that the mindset. XCOM does it somewhat better - while you might want to (or be forced to) fight everything, there is a cost and its part of the core gameplay. --------------- CU was also a failure because it alienated an entire portion of SWG's base - the crafting side. Essentially crafters could be wiped out by single hits of Corellian butterflies, because damage scaling. This made it damn near impossible to manage any harvesters you put in remote locations, without strong metal gear solid style stealth. "The difference between your CL and an attacking MOB's CL directly determines how much damage is dealt to you: targets of a much higher level (indicated by their con color) will do incredible amounts of damage, but those below you will receive a damage reduction." Its implicit in many games that higher-level drops = better drops, which was not the case for SWG pre-NGE which used a randomized material system. Thus the level scaling prevents people from gathering resources, because no exp. As you mentioned, it was also an issue of the CLs stratifying the content - this simply means that at any point in time, one can access about 10% of the available content in the game ("good-exp range"). This is generally why SWG has influenced my POV that levels are mostly-harmful. Overall, the failure of SWG i think was trying to beat WoW at its own game and alienating its customer base in the process, with about a fourth of the resources* and 1/20th of the planning. I think your review strongly neglected how the community development affects the perception of the game. A game with half the features and polish can be viewed very pleasantly by the players provided the community is good - SWG pre-CU had virtually nothing but a good community. *A strong hint one should not try to play the same game.
I just found your channel this week and went back and watched this video and must say you have come a long way in improving your content and delivery! Well done.
This is an excellent video. I played SGU since launch day and remember logging into the NGE one day and feeling so blindsided and gutted. It was like someone had broken my toys. That taught me what a weird new risk you take when investing time into an MMO as opposed to traditional gaming. I'm embarrassed to admit how depressed i was for months after.
To be honest, the fact you state that Pre-CU was poor is something that makes me cringe. I am one of the old players of SWG who played before Jump to Lightspeed was released and to be honest? I wasn't all for combat. I enjoyed the game as it was unique in it's own right and it was unique in a way no OTHER game ever tries to go for: It has a class-less skill system that allowed you to TAILOR your class as you wished, explore paths that others may have not done. Crafting was something I invested in alot. I was a high-grade Mon Calamari Rifleman and Combat Medic, almost master Civilian Starships by the time CU came and ruined the party for me. Yes, the game may be now seen as poorly designed. But I was young back then. 2002-2004 I was barely 17-19 years old and I was new to MMO's back then. Yet the complexity didn't deter me, it fascinated me, made me wish to go down different paths and see what waited for you down those paths. Exploration was also fun, especially when I rolled a crafter alt and she was nothing about combat, just crafting and to be fair, combat isn't always 100% of the game. These days, it seems that combat is the only focus that matter in an MMO. Many forget the exploration that should come with such games. The community was also great in the Pre-CU days, there were people who helped out new players like me. Hell, one player (whose name I sadly forgot by now, since it has been... what? 15 years or so now?) who heard that I was going Rifleman, gave me a FULL set of Composite Armor and a VERY good high-tier rifle. And that had me invest in the game and enjoy it, despite it had its flaws (although I didn't really take notice of them too hard, seeing again I was new to MMOs and it never occurred to me). Then CU came along... it RUINED the game for me and alot of players. Hell the developers even blue facedly lied that the players enjoyed the CU, despite there was an outcry about it. Funny thing is, the CU came out on test servers on the 1st of April... Everyone thought the CU was a poor, poor developer joke to scare the crap out of the players. Then outrage when the players did find out that it was an actual change. Let me ask you something: Did you play during the old days of 2002-2004, before the CU came out? If you had, you wouldn't be too quick to judge Pre-CU as you do now. Trust me, experiencing how the game was in that era is completely different than to look at some videos and then make some judgements purely because of the bugs. There was a time during Pre-CU where the game was very good, despite it had it's bugs and flaws (but they were managable, so was combat once you got used to it). This may seem as a rant and honestly, I dont give a damn. I was passionate about this game once and it still holds a special place in my heart. I wanted to speak my mind and experience about this game, seeing I was one of the many players of SWG before Pre-CU. I did try SWG again during NGE and.... it was horrible. I could never look at the game the same way again.
GuilmonIX first sry about my english. i never read this long coments but when i saw how passionate u wrote i readed all and i must say i fell sry for u and that i never tried this game i heared many great coments (before CU). i heared that in game u rly had fealing u developing ur character into something more and rly have porpouse
His biggest mistake in the video is equating pre cu to mean day 1 launch. No, we typically mean right before the cu was launched. The game had too many bugs at launch to really be enjoyed but most were fixed well before the cu came out.
Zoran the Zekrom you really covered a lot on what I loved about this game. The exploration, crafting, player customizations it was some of the best in an MMO as far as I'm concerned it was one of the best MMO I have played and I've played almost every major one and a ton of smaller ones. Hell galaxies was where Capt'Wes Starwind came from lol. I was there when Restuss fell. I followed that game since it was a rumor and started playing at launch and was playing on the last day. I didn't get into PvP for maybe a year or two, then I found a great guild that I ended up being GL of. We had some great PvP events. The NGE and the CU were what killed that game with each one cutting out more players rather than bring in new ones which was their idea and a moronic one at that. If all that time had just been spent on content and story work rather than 2 major overhauls I wouldn't doubt this game would still be going. They had given up with making the Jedi meaningful and that was a big end game thing for so many. The Jedi/Sith temples and all that stuff could have been improved on so much, instead of just being dropped. Maybe a major graphics overhaul could have been done by now. I'll always miss this game and hope for another like it.
I played in the closed Beta. SOE made two decisions during that beta that started them tumbling downhill. Initially Stim Paks healed Health, Action, and Mind. But one day a developer noticed doctor characters in a medical center stimming each other for xp. The came up with a solution overnight, remove mind from stims. This took a three way, very well thought out, balanced system and completely screwed it up. Second, there was a bug that was causing clothing to decay even when people were offline. The solution? Fix it? Nope! Turn it off. After launch they made another huge mistake, they failed to communicate with the players. We all knew there were problems BUT we didn't know if the developers knew of these problems because they wouldn't say. When they took flak in the media for having too many open tickets, they reduced the number of tickets a player could have open from three to one then made a press release claiming they reduced the number of open tickets by two-thirds. The game as originally intended would have been great, the problem is the developers (I guess management) didn't understand this. So rather than fixing little bugs they scrapped everything. If Star Wars Galaxies was to re-launch today, I'd be there. I tried to get involved and help with the emu but the leaders were just too damn viscous. Ask a question and get cussed out. Your video is old enough that I don't know if anyone will ever read this but here it is anyway. If people complained about repetitive actions in SWG they obviously never played any of the other MMOs like WOW or LOTR.
Lucas Arts made SOE release the game well before they were ready to, or wanted to release it. SOE wanted to not release it for another 6 months to a year later then when they did. It's part of the reason why the login server on release day kept crashing and no one could create an account and login was because they were planning on adding another one to handle the load, but were so rushed that they couldn't do it in time.
As a first time viewer of your videos, I need to disagree or correct you on a few points for Pre-CU and Post-CU Combat Level: This was not just a visible representation of prior power. Combat Level determined your base health and overall power. This is not the case Pre-CU. Weapons also gained 'level' requirements. This might not seem like an issue, but it effectively removed the ability to be a hybrid character set up. Combat Stacking (A character only focused on Combat Professions, particularly ones that stack a specific defense) was always advantageous, but with enough knowledge of the system, a Combat/Crafter, Combat/Dancer, or Combat/Anything could still compete. However, a Combat/Non-Combat build capped out at level 55, making them weaker and having less access than a Combat Stacker, who capped out at level 80. It was not just a cosmetic change, but one that punished a player for for being a mixed bag. The queue: While I can agree this was a clunky system, there was a macro system that included a command that cleared your combat queue. Unnecessary work around by standard systems, but it was there. The Queue / Macro system allowed you to set up complicated or simple chains of commands, remove them at a moment's notice, and react to the situation. It provided a choice between tactical approaches and reactive ones. HAM: Rifles and Swordsman may seem like the best weapons on paper, but this is mostly untrue without considering every other factor. I won't bore you with the details, but in terms of overpowered professions, Combat Medic was the best unless you had the hard counter of a Doctor to remove Mind Poison and Mind Disease. Rifles and Swordsman more or less even out once factoring in everything. Forced Downtime: Shuttles, battle wounds, and etc. I understand why this is a negative. However, the forced down time is mitigated by the fact that the game was at its core a social game. You depended on other players, not because a dungeon has a mandatory party queue, but because you need things you cannot supply for yourself completely. Other players healed you, crafted for you, buffed you, provided hunting services, escorts, surveying resources. This is a mixed bag, but in my opinion this wasn't a terrible choice. Instead of jumping around Ironforge shouting Thunderfury, I sat in a Cantina talking with people or teaching people the intricate parts of the combat system. Jedi in Pre-Village, Pre-CU: Overpowered, but only about 1 or two Jedi per 100 players. Jedi in Village, Pre-CU: Jedi were upper echelon, but were possible to fight in smaller groups. I could regularly hold my own as a Teras Kasi Brawler against any Jedi, as well as killing the less experienced ones with little issue. Combat: This had a subtle level of depth that separated spammers from killers. This is most apparent in the PVP, while PvE was largely about hitting magic numbers (Not all that different from now). Technical Shortcomings: No argument. By standards today, Pre-CU SWG is a hot mess of a game. It was still way ahead of its time for the approach to crafting, character building, player settlement, the oddly chaotic but satisfying group PvP. I won't pretend I would go back and play it again, it required more time than most of us can spare these days, but the rose tinted goggles are well earned.
The only disagreement I have with your comment is your defence of HAM. Everyone became a sniper or swordsman, which became boring. I felt it was better when all classes had a balanced chance of victory. Otherwise, agree with every other point you make.
Akray Bothorda I played from Beta to NGE, and my main was a Carbineer, and my alts were mostly non-combat or dabbled pistols or carbines. Although I did have one Rifleman, but it never made me want to change over any of other characters to that.
Akray Bothorda I won't defend that Mind was the best attribute to attack as a Medic dab could greatly hinder hitting Health or Action. There are many factors though that come into play with how the old system worked. A few being: Ranged weapons took bonus damage from Melee, with Rifles being the worst in that category (Suffering a staggering 2.5x bonus damage from melee, making even great composite armor an inconvenience rather than a wall) Swordsman also had the second lowest 'Toughness' stat of any melee, with Fencer being the lowest. This means despite the higher base damage on weapons, Swordsman dealt roughly equivalent damage before Armor Penetration was 'working', and even then, the slower speed multiplier kept things from being absurdly in their favor. Ranged builds, like Rifleman, usually couldn't fit Master Brawler in to them, and Master Brawler was one of the strongest supporting professions for any Combat build. Targeted Attacks also had a significantly lower damage modifier than non-targeted. You're always hitting the same area, but for less than the 'Strike 3' variants. Rifles also were the only profession other than Commando who didn't hit the attack speed cap and had no way to do so outside of extremely rare skill tapes. Access to Posture Change effects were also more limited and less potent than those of Melee (Knock Down, force Kneel, force Prone) Again, Mind was certainly the best attribute to attack. No defending that, but there were enough downsides to both Swordsman and Rifleman that kept the other combat professions on more or less even footing.
Excellent retort. I too have a more different view of SWG than some and vehemently disagree with nerdSlayer's analysis. In particular, I still believe to this day, that SWG could have existed and been popular if the devs. had focused even less on the space mode of the game. The added development resources could have been used to bolster land game play, enhancing what worked well and ultimately incentivize that which brought players to the game in the first place: immersion.
the community was the strongest part of the game by far. its hard to describe. idk if it was the game itself or maybe the time period. no other mmo community can even put a scratch in it.
"This is not what our players want" "Yes it is, you're fired for saying otherwise" "Hm, this wasn't what our players wanted" Fucking amazing logic going on there. A wonder the game didn't tank completely day 1 with that kind of decision making involved in development.
Very nice video, well delivered. I only started playing after the CU and was having an absolute blast. It was buggy, dated and ugly but I loved it. I remember the first time I logged in after the NGE, very confused at the mangled mess of a UI and wondering why I had to become a set character type rather than continue to mould my own custom character to my desires. I remember the guild chat, usually about 15 to 20 people online at a time, all of whom asking the same questions, bewildered at what had happened to our game. I logged on periodically for a few more weeks, tried to get in to the game again, basically starting from scratch or hoping in vain that the changes would be reverted. Fewer and fewer people were logging on and I remember the last time I logged in and said hello in the guild chat and nobody was online - that heartbreaking silence is what hurts me the most when thinking back to SWG. The town we'd built was deserted, the hub cities had far fewer players in and about 75% of those logged in were running around with lightsabers and that was enough for me.
I remember when I was kid I saw stuff about star wars galaxies and it seemed like the coolest game ever. I wanted to create a bounty hunter and travel the galaxy hunting other players who had committed crimes for cash. Of course as a kid I had garbage computer and dial up internet. Years later when I finally had the ability to play the game it was shut down and that dream died. Yeah I had fun with many other games(including SWTOR) but I never got to play that dream game.
It went to shit after the CU anyway. Seriously, forget what this guy says in his video, Pre-CU was the best time to play Galaxies. If not for that first year, plus Jump to Lightspeed update, the entire game would have been a complete failure.
PixelProfessor I agree. I never had an issue with CU. What I really hated was NGE. I only reluctantly returned to play NGE to fill my SW needs. I miss my force sensitive MBH. sad panda.
I'm sorry to make it worse for you but bounty hunting in that game was absolutely amazing. You'd pick up a bounty, send out a seeker droid and it would give you a waypoint right where they were. One time I caught a roleplayer with no armor on in a player made guildhall, sitting down. I came around the corner and lit him up. Best game of all time
I played because I wanted to be nobody explore and be part of a star wars universe as a friggin moisture farmer! it made the game amassing, I do agree that you should be locked into one craft class.
Yeah I agree. What made the game so unique in the beginning was that almost no one was a Jedi. You were just a person living in the Star Wars universe. You could be a Mercenary/Soldier/Bounty Hunter if you wanted more action. But you could also just be a businessman or explorer. This is something that MMO's completely lost once everything tried to clone WoW.
Most MMO's don't get that the point of a massive multiplayer community is to feel small, not weak per se but to give the illusion of discovery and a sense of freedom without having the pressure of being "the chosen one"
I remember that after the NGE there was a discussion about the prior Scout skills and how players hated losing some of the skills. Most noteworthy was the loss of Camps, which acted like decorative, personal outposts. One of the lead developers asked “You liked just sitting around?” and the replies of “Yes!” eventually drowned out any further replies.
After they added they added that Jedi village the number of Jedi increased by such massive numbers that it might as well be a starting class. The original concept of them being rare but overpowered with perma death wouldn't work anymore.
I have to disagree with you on your assessment that NGE didn't kill Star Wars Galaxies. You basically say "NGE didn't kill Star Wars Galaxies; just everything that it represents did." Pre-CU was not perfect by any means, But the fixes that it needed were not personified by the CU or NGE.
Game failed because it had no PvE content and was buggy as hell. It's a testament to how good the social aspects of the game were that it even did as well as it did. They sacrificed their social base (their only base) in hopes of luring wows PvE base. Damn fools. No ones going to leave a massively popular MMO for an old game with no players and no loyalty no matter what changes you make. The social aspects of SWG were light years ahead of games still to this day. Developers seem to think these aspects aren't valued by players but they are. The issue is they aren't enough to carry a game, they still need to be married to a successful PvE/PvP core.
I totally agree with this. PVE was silly but I enjoyed the PVP. It was awesome to be wandering the countryside and come across a Rebel...he switches weapons and pulls out a rebel npc, I pull out 2 or 3 (can't remember) stormtroopers...he runs.
agreed the non combat class's the crafting. One of the best crafting systems to date. If they took the base game of star wars galaxy and mixed that with lord of the rings online it would have been the perfect mix of a game. The early days of lord of the rings had some great PVE content. You take that content level with the community and class's of swg you have the perfect game to be released.
My experience differs. Many of the groups I was a part of created our own campaigns and stories just by playing. One PA pissed off another and is now going to war? Awesome, let's get paid to merc for one side. The players ran the show and didn't wait for devs to hand them the content.
I was a master doctor in Pre-CU that had a buff line. When the CU was coming out I found out in the test server that buffs I owned were becoming useless. I decided the last few days to give out free buffs :`(
I really hope Star Citizen does come close. It has a lot of the same simulated life in a future space faring universe concept to it. If they ever let you make your own player towns it will be close. All it will need is a good crafting system but then they have not shown much interest in doing that aspect at all.
Star citizen cannot do a good crafting system simply because they have been selling ships for thousands of dollars. They would have to do something like "craft everything but ships" or "craft everything but ships and cosmetics" (or integrate cash shop materials into crafting).
+Jav253 I want player housing in SC as well. One thing I loved about SWG was being part of a player owned/run Town. Being able to build a little city wherever you want, own a shop, have actual neighbors, build turrets and defenses... it was wonderful.
The HAM system was great, fun, unique, and deep. Raph Koster said that buffs were not meant to be so powerful. That was the real problem with the game, it caused the balance to be off for combat and armor and professions. They should have balanced that and added a more gentle introduction to the system, such as having the basic profession's skills not drain your HAM and the basic enemies not damage your A or M. Basically it needed more time, and Raph should have been more realistic about what he could include in the launch. You hit it on the head talking about arrogance of the people who brought in the NGE.
I'm only 2 mins in and in very impressed by your presentation. As some who is getting back into the game, the nostalgia really overrides my stance on game as dated as this. There is so much to unpack and the macro/modding community for this game is so expansive its almost daunting wanting to jump back in. I know finishing this video you will have a very well thought out conscience on how this game should have, but didn't, prevail. -an instant fan
I don’t think any SW game has ever brought me the real “Star Wars Experience” than SWG. I remember starting on Tatooine and meeting a Rodian named Feeto, that then spurned into a long friendship with TONS of adventures that followed. We joined guilds, had wars, and explored for years. There’s just too many moments to list. Who else remembers the countless fan made movies & creative content SWG inspired here on YT? I’m glad I was too young to understand the Sony drama back then, because I had a grand old time regardless. I still miss it :(
G Alex.Games I miss the days when becoming a Jedi seemed like an impossible goal. When they made it to where everyone and their mom could start as one....it killed the game for me. SWG was the game that got me into mmorpgs
The only real point I 100% agree with NS on is SOE's imbecilic mishandling of their player base. Bliz at least talks to their players before they ruin their game. [Ruin is used for hyperbole, WoW is still a fun game] Choice is what made Galaxies good pre-MCE. Everything I did was my choice (mostly). I could spend a month outside Mos Espa prospecting for minerals before going to town to join up in a posse to dance with Oola. Then a day later fly to Naboo to stop a rebel incursion on theed. MCE stole that choice from the players. Every other MMO I've ever played says, YOU ARE THE GREATEST HERO EVER!!! Now do these household chores on my to do list. The list 99.5% of the time is; go to Y, to do X. It's not my story at that point, it's just the narrative of the author. That's fun in it's own right, but I didn't invest myself. More thoughts on Galaxies available upon request as replies.
Alot of people fail to understand how much power/influence in the community Jedi had. I ran a guild of nearly 400 people. We had a huge city on lok. We organised events and battles with rebel guilds and we had our own Galactic civil war on chilastra . I spent billions of credits and Imperial influence on such events. The CU started to kill that off and the NGE destroyed that. The crafting and buffs were huge parts of the social interaction and created an economy and a fantastic inter connected community. Coreilla had ques of people lining up for buffs. When my Jedi was nerfed I lost some interest, when the economy was nerfed I just stopped playing. SOE never understood or listened to its player base and the majority of devs like smedly and torres were absolute retards( thats being kind). They also sold the trial of obi under false pretenses and they blatantly lied after. You have no idea how much anger that caused. The game was basically closed down by individuals to save face so they can pretend it never happened, but I will not touch another SOE/Sony game ever again as they are a lying bunch of scumbags.
AngryTech what was your name? Kauri and ahazi were my main servers. My kauri guy was named Spetoba. Was a mainly rebel wookiee tkm mdoctor. Briefly went imp when the guild TKA recruited me. Couldn't play the game without raiding theed every couple days so I had to go back.
It really wasn't SOE at all from what I gathered over the years. The decision to change up the game came from Lucas Arts. Lucas Arts held the Star Wars license. I have zero doubt right when WoW was making billions for Blizzard was the time when LA pushed for first the CU as a compromise and then full blown NGE. And from what I gathered I wouldn't doubt the push came from Lucas himself.
I feel you, and totally agree, i think i stoped playing in 2005 or 2006? cant remember, but it was 1 week after NGE was released. And to this day i have NEVER EVER bought anything that has a SONY log on it, not only games, but everything with a sony logo...im a computer technician, and firends, customers and family regulary ask questions about what TV to buy or stuff like that, and i have always make sure that they never get any SONY products... so even though i know a few TV's here or there dont make a difference, im satisfied knowing that to a tiny degree im making SOE pay back with $$$ the insloence of NGE :)
I was mostly ok with CU but NGE did kill it for me, even after all the later fixes it didn't change the fact that having jedi as a starting class destroyed all immersion I could have for the game when the Star Wars universe was only meant to have a couple to a handful of jedis left at that time.
Ahhh the memories! This was my FIRST MMO. I was a member of the Central Imperial Order (CIO) on Eclipse Server. Great bunch of guys and I miss running Heroics with them. Where ever you are guys.../salute -Iagrid
Holy cow, I remember a character on BF, Delz Nope .... in TR if I can remember? or the rival guild of TR on the rebel side? I remember everyone bought weapons from TR's main crafter ... Enot was his name???
:) , TR's rival. I joined TR a lil bit for wow, ran raids for them late in vanilla. Yea, Enott was TR's weaponsmith, I traded krayt tissues for weapons, then sold the weapons for double the price in theed. Thanks for making me smile man :)
FIGHT! That's right! Bestine was full of imps and Anchorhead had all the rebels and each would come to each city and pvp to try and take over. I remember seeing you often, most memories I have was people farming at fort Tusken and you used to duel people and they would get so pissed off loosing. Think you were a fencer. This was pre cu. good times.
One of the problems with SOE was the arrogance of the developers, specifically Torres and Smedley. I beta'd every expansion and change, specifically the CU. We told them that the CU was going to go over badly and that they were making changes that the player base wasn't asking for. There was upwards of 75% negative feedback amongst the CU testers, but SOE lied and said we all thought it was great. Then there was the NGE, which I personally thought was a garbage system. The suits at SOE were fine with losing the existing playerbase, because they actually thought they were going to recoup their numbers through new players, not to mention the class actioj suit over ToOW, where they teased that awesome creature handler necklace to get people to buy it, only to ditch that profession 2 weeks later. The NGE hit so quick, they had have been developing both the CU and NGE systems concurrently as the CU was only around for 5 months.
Actually SOE didn't even poll you guys. Lucas Arts polled "private control/test groups". SOE admitted to not doing their own polling...how terrible is that?
+nerdSlayer Just another example of poor implementation. I think had SOE given the testing a couple more months and actually listened to the testers, the CU may have been better received.
SOE would often ban people providing feedback on the official forums. SOE had very poor relationship with their customers, and the NGE was the straw that broke the Nerf's back.
imo, terrible analysis of the "failure" of the game, thing like needing a doctor or a dancer to heal you before playing is what made the game sociable and unique
I agree. I made many friends in the Cantinas. And spied on enemies for our guild. Performed a marriage. Huge pvp battles. Being able to have 3 npcs to help you in battle.
There was nothing like being in a cantina at 3am chatting with 20-30 people at once with dancers and medics around. Go defend a base from a raid to blow up your 40k factiton point base out in the middle of no where. The non combat class's is what made the game great. They could have added on that. The crafting class's is what made this game great.
All fairness you can't randomly be a force user but simply studying and grinding out missions or what not in the star wars universe. Now if you was a force sensitive and wanted to be a sith or jedi then yea make a bit more sense with a few changes. This is really just in terms of lore and what overall makes sense. Also who the hell wants to waste a lot of time on something like that. Don't have to exactly easy just make it tougher not tougher in terms of play time.
I didn't play SWG, but I was paying attention to its development. Aren't you forgetting the part of early Jedi implementation that while yes, Jedi were the most powerful class, they would die permanently if they were killed, whereas non-Jedi could respawn.
Until they were made commonplace due to that whole "instant gratification" streak they were on with the game's updates. According to at least one senior dev for the game back then, that was the beginning of the end - taking a mysterious, hard to obtain, risky character and then watering them down to the point where they were just a "super class" of any regular character.
I'm honestly impressed by how much Star Wars music you were able to put in your video and still keep the video up with the audio intact. I had to stop uploading Battlefront gameplay because the videos would be either muted or removed the same day of the upload. Sometimes even within the hour. x_x
Played pre-cu and post-nge. It’s not even a comparison how much better pre-cu was. This was suppose to be a sandbox mmo where you could be anything you wanted. And NOT be the hero. You are the hero in EVERY OTHER game. The community in this game was unmatched. Features like the wounds/battle fatigue encouraged community. My best memories are just hanging around socializing at a cantina, then going out on a giant hunting party to hunt. The guy who made this video sounds like he just wanted to play WoW.
I would like to say that Pre-CU was a sandbox in the way you said, but being a hero *was* possible. But it wasn't some stupid reward the game would give you. Your heroics came from your place in a community, and to me that was far more rewarding then some "vending machine" of a game spilling out tokens to my own ego when I did nothing to earn it. I wasn't a very important person in the game's community, and I was completely ok with it. What I am trying to say is, there were players who belonged to powerful guilds which were well-known and in fact, did become someone special to the community. That is where I am going. The game doesn't force it on you, you can choose to be a lone wanderer in seclusion, with a selection of a few friends. But it being a sandbox that was player-driven meant that really you could evolve socially into a figure. It did happen. That is one of its strong points in fact, but the game wasn't demanding it from you. You were truly free in that sense to define yourself through your own conscious decisions. There were not so automatic by game scripts or level ups.
As a post 9 player. I never had the true path to jedi, but the village grind was months on end like a full time job. That being said, SWG was my all time favorite game, and nothing will ever compare to it again. I loved how you could mix and match your skills so you didn't need to group for everything, then nge ruined all that. Now, no online games allows you that kind of freedom. JTL was in my opinion one of the best space sims ever on the market. I like being able to upgrade equipment, and reverse engineer for the best possible results. Add to the fact it was part of SWG and your invested character was still usable made it even more of a win. What bugs me the most is how much of my life was invested into a game that ended up being dumbed down for a new market and ultimately shut down.
yeah, I have it installed, but its just not the same. I had so much invested in my main character, it just makes me sad when i try to log in and start a new guy from scratch knowing i'll never have anything near what I once did.
You made a great video here, but I want to point out an inconsistency. You said the game was doing really well at 200k-250k subs. After NGE hit, it tanked hard at 100k subs. How can you sit there and say the NGE didn't cause the death of SWG? If SWG was pulling great numbers, there is no doubt in my mind that it would have stayed active even through the launch of SWTOR. However, as you correctly stated, the suits wanted MORE. There is no doubt in my mind that if the powers that be were a little more realistic with their numbers, they would have seen the game as a success, but LucasArt/LucasFilm pushed too much too fast. I don't think you lay enough blame at the feet of George Lucas either. That man is an absolute tyrant when it came to his baby, the Star Wars IP. As soon as you start deviating from his Star Wars, meaning the movies, he becomes an insatiable baby. SOE didn't want to make the game in during the Prequel Era, but he made them do just that. Also, you say that players see pre-CU SWG through rose tinted lenses. That is just not true. I was there at launch, I was there and unable to log in for several days after release. I saw how absolutely BROKEN the commando class was, to the point that you couldn't gain commando exp outside of using a launcher pistol (which took weeks to figure out). I saw how busted the BH class was and how you begged people to let you train them in Combat I over and over so you could get the Master EXP needed to reach the master box. I was there before the Jedi/Holocron grindfest. Most people just wanted to eke out a living and be some no name dude part of a larger group. It's a sandbox game, and one feature of every sandbox game out there from SWG to EVE Online to Minecraft to Black Desert Online - you make your own content. The devs give you tools, it's up to the player to use them. We scheduled mass battles with Rebel Guilds, everything from in town brawl and raids to using the battlefields. A group of us would go to Moenia on Naboo and rid the cantina of rebel scum and hold it down and wait for the reinforcements to come and try to clear us out. Sometimes we won, sometimes they won. It was great though, no matter results. It is by far and away the best time I ever had. Didn't feel like battling with imps? No problem, log onto my crafter and harvest resources and make cool stuff for others to buy. Most of the major issues at launch were solved and patched by the time JTL launched, and the game was shaping up to be amazing. Did it release prematurely? Absolutely, you won't find a sane person to say otherwise. Did it have a ton of problems at launch? Of course, no major MMO has ever had a smooth launch. Did it bring the Star Wars universe alive for thousands of players? Absolutely, it let us live and breath how we wanted to. Did you want to become a galaxy-renowned smuggler? Do it, even if that is an oxymoron. Want to be the most fear bounty hunter rivaling even Boba Fett himself? Go ahead and try. Want to become the next Czerka Industries and mass produce weapons, armor, and droids? Buy as many accounts as you can afford and get to work setting up factories and harvesters. We don't look at it through rose-tinted lenses; we made the most out of our time spent in the game. We did whatever we thought was fun, and if it wasn't, we didn't do it, nor did we have to. Now, if I'm playing a game and I don't like what I'm doing, tough shit, muscle through it until it's over. I've never belonged to a better community than Y1 SWG. We laughed, we cried, we made fun of the game that we all sank far too much time in. It was no where near complete, but we took what we had and ran with it. That's why we love the game before the changes.
Event though i didn't know the "pre-cu" time I played for quite a while during the CU time and I have only great memories... NGE is strill a trauma for me decades later. I was never able to find any mmor or game that gave me what SWG gave me at the time. The community, the freedom, you weren't on rails. There was no push to do anything or to absolutely farm, you could just RP and be a politician in your Guild's City... Great memories. And yes as you said we were aware of issues and limitations but nonetheless I don't think we overate the game when we said it was brilliant and one of the best online experience ever...
Good video, but you really need to work on your cadence and presentation. The entire video just sounds like you're reading off of a piece of paper (which I'm assuming you are, of course). Do multiple takes, don't just go with the first one. Work on sounding more conversational and less like you're reading a book report. It'll help a lot.
I remember the first time I logged in SWG. It was my first real MMO I ever played. I was so thrilled. Back then, it was also one of the first game I played where character customization was so deep. Literally spent hours trying to recreate myself in the game by just looking at myself in a mirror or at pictures. Me and my friend bought the game together and did a lan party for our first time. Didn't take us long to be sent to Tatooine. And man, were we confused! ended up getting lost in this world that was larger than any frikking game that ever existed yet. We kept walking in the mountains, not sure of what we were doing and just making sure we stick together to protect one another. Then out of nowhere, some guy passed by, stopped and asked if we needed help. Yay! After telling them we were noobs (I guess our starter gear gave us away), he guided us back to the nearest city (think it was Mos Eisly), and started showing us the ropes of the games, helped us with some better gear, showed us how to do terminal missions, and even suggested we could join his guild, and be invited to live in their player owned city! This was the start of the best social gaming experience I have yet to be part of again. Yes the game had it's many flaws. But no other game as ever forced me in a good way to socialize with people. I literally felt SWG was my home away from home. Even to the point where most people were logging in and off from their home, so that when you logged in the morning, you would see other early birds login in, almost giving you a feel of crossing path with your neighbor before going to "work", often more than not, leading to asking what that person was off to and if we could help each other. The health injuries and buffs, while I admit being a bit annoying, DID force you to go to social hubs where you had nothing else to do but to interact with other players. You literally had to talk to a medic or a dancer for heals and buffs! The whole economy was also amazing. Everything was player made, and everything had a quality to it depending on the materials and skills of the crafter ,meaning over time, crafters and vendor would literally become famous by just being reliable business people. It's the only MMO as far as I know where you could play the entire game and have a blast without ever needing to fire a single shot. you could be a politician for crying out loud! I remember this woman in our guild that had played the game for over a year without even knowing HOW to actually use a gun! All she did was dancing and being a musician, and she had a blast, cause it gave her people to talk to all day long. This is where the real strength in SWG was. Not in the game combat, or quests, or what not, but in the social. Nowadays, you can play most online games without ever needing to talk to a single soul. Everything is made so that even in an MMO, you can just solo everything without ever needing to interact with anyone. No other game ever gave me that feeling of belonging with a group of people. to feel that bond with your guild mates and this need to just want to help out whenever you could. Plus, what can beat the fun of having a building-sized Kimogila as your personnal pet? :P
dude battlewounds are a great way to give a non combat player a job and players a place to reunite, group for misions .. i think the mechanic was great
Not really, because players got cities and then got alts/bots to buff/entertain people for the buffs. The mechanic has to be more useful than just granting a buff, which is why it was exploited.
nerdSlayer in the beginning it wasn't exploited. 1 character per ACC. dancers and doctors actually talked to thier tipers. most games people find things to exploit.
but over time exploits are found. so while it might have had good intentions, it ultimately quite easily was take advantage up. The lead dev on the game never meant for buffs to be so powerful.
I was a doc so I liked buff lines. Top 3 buffs on starsider. Used only the best ingredients. Chasing resources and janta blood was fun for me. The buffs were needed for pve. Kraytt, lizards, rancor. In the early days. Overpowered for pvp, maybe. Every game has issues with pvp. Constantly nerfing or fixing classes. Money spenders buy the best armor. There are always issues. nge at the end put in cool stuff. I liked the houses and the new be build. Good video but everyone's experience was different. There were six many reasons for the game dieing. I would have been happy with 300k to 500k subs. Tweeks were needed but the game would have survived.
At 14:40 I think that you entirely miss the point of combat fatigue and wounds. Why do Entertainers and Doctors exist? To heal combat fatigue and wounds (and buff). SWG was built on the fact that you don't need to be a combat profession to play the game and have fun, and everyone relies on each other. Completely player-driven.
@nerdSlayerstudioss At that point of the video you state it’s a bad game-mechanic. I’m simply responding to that statement. Maybe it could have been executed better, but battle-fatigue and wounds are not inherently the “problem” of the AFKing you refer to. I wonder what could have been done differently to incentivize non-combat players to be ATK…
I played on Sun Runner. as a jedi at first after the SOE capture. I loved the game, and met so many good friends that I wish I still knew today. I miss them all dearly.
As someone who experienced the NGE first as a later player (via free trial in it's final year), then went back to the pre-cu via the SWGMU, I prefer pre-cu. The only thing it lacks is the content and stories as you say. But the system is superior. Currently playing on EIF (Empire in Flames) which is making improvements to the original game, some of the downfalls you spoke about the Pre-Cu. The server has many RPer focused but is also great for PVPers (as we have a new PVP system known as GCW, which revolves around taking over other planets) and those who want to play pre-cu SWG but with an improved system, making SWG even more into what it was loved for. The class system etc, making more variety. Worth checking out for anyone interested.
The problem with your defence of post NGE is that it can be summarised by "too little, too late." Yes, it added loads more stuff, yes, it improved, but by the time this all happened, players had so little faith in SoE that weekly polls on when SWG would die would show up in the forums, and pages of threads were dedicated to organising which game everyone would move to next.
i was a beta tester of the game and let me tell you the game was not ready to launch when it did. it was plagued with bugs, glitches, and totally unbalanced. i ever emailed the devs directly saying that but my responses fell on deaf ears
I feel your pain. Tried to save Mighty Number 9 myself... and people know all too well that a single tester's voice didn't save the princess in both our cases. RiP gaming industry. :P
not really, even with a WoW similar combat, the game was still very unique, the main reason it died was because of licensing but it still had a really strong player base, people just didn't give 2011 NGE a try.
DJ Serpent face it most of the existing customers *liked* the sandbox nature, causing a mass alienation of the pre-NGE players. Furthermore, by copying WoW it was while the base was still quite novel it meant it had to compete directly with WoW and most people only have time to play a single MMORPG at a time.
DJ Serpent it wasn't during the initial rollout of the NGE! :p I was actually willing to give the CU a chance and thought on balance it could have been made to work, although as stated in the video it never got a chance before players were blindsided by a complete shift in far more than just the combat mechanics. Edit: Oh and even after they added back some of the crafting, etc... it was still fair closer to a theme park than a sandbox.
Areanyusernamesleft they added everything back, including spices, and added so much more content lol, I am currently waiting for ProjectSWG to finish, 2011 NGE was pretty hype.
One of the takeaways from SWG for me, as someone who played for its entire run, and as someone who has played a large portion of the available MMOs over the years, is it was refreshing for me and many others because of its complexity. Many developers seem to think simplicity is what all players want, but there is definitely a niche that enjoys a much deeper experience than that offered by the likes of WoW and post-NGE SWG. I worry that the failure of SWG taught developers the false lesson that it was too complex and too ambitious to succeed.
Well wow actually took some dedication and skill too before the developers listened to the casuals 🤷♂️ But the casuals loved seeing someone in rare gear they couldn't get and you'd have twenty casuals following you around when you got a new weapon plus they could do all their RPing and stuff that they like and it didn't hurt anyone...
Very good video about a game and topic that meant a lot to me. I will disagree on one point, though. NGE did kill the game. it was the final straw and proof when they sold an expansion and didn't tell you the game you were playing would be completely changed without community input. they had slowly stopped listening to it's community and ended with a massive deception. I put up with all the flaws including no content and gave them ample time and my sub for years in hopes of improving the game I chose to play but, unfortunately, they made the wrong decision in the direction to go with it. ... maybe, they were aware and that's why the changes were kept a secret. Sometimes the boss just won't listen even when you try to warm them.
nerdSlayer This is my favorite SWG related video on TH-cam. You hit SO many really good points that other videos didn't elaborate much on. NGE eventually introduced great content and didn't solely kill the game. All the profs compressed down to 9 did suck tho. Like you said, it was "mismanagement" in every sense of the word. Your video is helping to inspire an upcoming video that I'll be making. I've been hesitant to do it for a while. I'll definitely be referring your video since I'll be focusing on personal experience of 4 years playing SWG. Thanks much, sir! You're brilliant! Damn I miss the old SWG community so much. See you soon, SWG Legends! -Wesker Doodle, Sunrunner server, 2005-2009. TRM, J-E, StWr, and HA guilds.
NGE did kill the game, There was no cross-server auction house so don't understand where you got that idea or how you think the NGE saved crafters. The NGE or CU removed condition from items thus killing the whole economy of the game, the only time traders were viable after the NGE was with each content patch for about 5 minutes to build whatever the patch added then fell back into redundancy. Despite all the GREAT content we got after the NGE the population was still in complete decline, not to mention what the NGE did to guilds. Are you sure you even played SWG?
Liam Morris Julio Torres didn't fuck up the game. He was the assistant LA producer in Pre-CU. apparently he liked the dancer class which was a funny/joke class (yet innovative) apparently from the creator, Raph Koster. Someone at the very top of LA wanted the billions that WoW was making. Lucas ended selling Lucas Arts anyways for 4 billion dollars just imagine how much more he could have gotten for the franchise if they had a WoW caliber MMO.
The auction house change was the best thing done to that game! You didn't have to actually travel to the players house and access a specific vendor in order to buy that item. Not to mention, miss out on something with better stats because you weren't online while they were spamming their vendor location! Also as a seller, you didnt have to sit in town and spam your items\vendor so people would buy your stuff.
Yeah, I played SWG up until the CU ruined it... And I also played SWTOR up until it went F2P. I kept my TOR membership active for two more years, but never actually logged on. I finally canceled my sub in 2016. Now I have about $10,000 put into Star Citizen.
i enjoy SWTOR a hell of a lot and still sub to the game since i have a lot of fun (would i take SWG back over swtor? in a heartbeat! but i still love swtor)
You still sub? For what? Endgame is over-done, the new content is just story (u can get that by subing once a year). Gearing is one big LOL since rng. PVP is well super-over-done. Youre just wasting money dude.
nobody said pre cu swg was perfect. It still is the best part of the game. It had a good solid foundation. They needed to fix broken classes and bugs also give a better new player experience so they learn the game better. I dont see how swg was a complicated game. it wasnt. And pre cu combat wasnt boring. thats an opinion.
You should make an updated version of your old videos cause I would definitely love to see a death of the game of star wars galaxies in your newer style
So many good memories in my first MMO. I died to a butterfly outside Coronet the first time I played. I loved tweaking your "spec". My favorite was my BH who had doctor and fencer and some other stuff with dodge so I could hunt Jedi.
In an RPG I want to be Luke Skywalker. In an MMO I want to be the thug that gets rekt by Luke in 1 second
@@thegreatape884 I want you to think before you write
@@thegreatape884 Time to move on
@@thegreatape884 That's a goof, right? A joke?
I don't mean to sound unkind, it just seem to me that there's been something of a misunderstanding and what you intended to be taken as a joke got taken very seriously
The sad part is the developers thought we wanted to be Luke, Han or Obi Wan but they failed to realize is we wanted to be our own person living in the Star Wars Universe. I left when CU came and tried in late but finally left when NGE came out.
So true. It's cool to be able to play as important characters in games, but sometimes I want to play as a bounty hunter trying to get by.
That's what most RPGs don't get.
@@tHeInEvItAbLePaRtY Right? Sometimes you just want to be a simple man trying to make your way through the universe.
Restoration 3 still growing
We wanted to be Uncle Owen
All other MMORPGs: "Here's how to play our game"
Star Wars Galaxies Pre-CU: "Here's our game, how do you want to play it?"
If you wanna play pre CU come play SWGEMU!!
7:15 I can't speak for anybody else but that quote is the 100% opposite for me. I really enjoyed feeling like just an everyday nobody in this massive amazing universe, it made it that much more intense when I saw a jedi fight happen. We have enough SW games where you get the experience of being han or luke that wasn't what the appeal of this game was.
Fully agree..."Experience the greatest Star Wars saga ever told....Yours!" And damn was it a cool saga for me
I agree with you, I never really wanted to be force sensitive. I was happy just being a non-FS combat class along with having a crafter alt. I remember the almost sick joy of scouring for perfect spots to plop down my extractors lol. Damn, I miss the community and experiences I had in this game.
Agreed 100%. I absolutely NEVER wanted to be a Jedi. I did though join in on Jedi hunting and (at least trying) killing. "Force Run" was so OP...
It definitely was not marketed in the beginning as being a game that brings you into the shoes of the movie's characters. The whole point was to make your *own* mark in the Star Wars universe you see fit. The Jedi part was a pissing match.
Found this comment last night while I was logged off so I had to log on real quick to agree! We have so many Star Wars games with us being the hero. I'm so sick of it. SWG was like a breath of fresh air. I loved being an average nobody in that game. It made you feel like you're part of the actual world, rather than a hero who is saving it. If I had played and had the chance of becoming a Jedi, I probably wouldn't have done it.
The sandbox is what's sorely missing from most mmos. You create waiting areas and requirements to go to cantinas in order to give opportunities to engage your players with other players and socialize. Kill loot repeat was the complete wrong direction.
Check out Legends of Aria.
Sorry you are wrong. it was not about sitting there for 2 hours doing nothing. It was 2 hours having fun with friends talking crap. Maybe crafting building friendships for future battles. Being part of a guild that expanded 3000 players with sister guilds there was a community to the game. In todays games there is no commuity it is just burn through the story content and move on to the next game. What makes games like everquest, EQ2, lord of the rings, ff11 good was that comunity. Once you take away community you just have a simple easy game might as well be a solo based game you sell in stores to play on a console.
possi002 but what if you don’t have time to waste hoping that your friends are online?
You make new ones. You walk into any cantina in pre-CU SWG and you'll find a dozen or more people just hanging out, talking about whatever. Entertainers were also all there, unlike later in the game cycle where the majority of them are just AFK bots. They acted more like a bartender at a small pub, greeting new people that come in and chatting with the patrons.
Hell, my server set up an entire town in the southeast corner for the Corellia map to host a server wide party. This was before everyone had any sort of good gear and I worked as an escort to get low/non-combat professions players through the dangerous wildlife. You had chefs cooking food for people, musicians and dancers that would do performances, and a group of people that even did a fireworks show. The social aspect of the game was completely different than most games these days. I mean, people made a living in the game as interior decorators, to the point where it basically became an unofficial profession. I can't think of a game right now where I can say I brought a friend to my favorite tailor's shop, where she then proceeded to present her latest work, chatted him up about his likes and dislikes, and finally sold him a white suit that he was extremely happy with. When Jump to Lightspeed came out, people hosted parties aboard their pre-order space yachts.
And now I'm just rambling. I guess what I'm saying is that for some reason, most everyone who played SWG was extremely sociable. It's actually probably because the combat system was so broken, anyone that only cared about that just quit. But because the game was a giant sandbox, a lot of people enjoyed it nevertheless. You know how GTA 5 roleplay is popular on twitch? And it's just roleplaying (mostly) as interesting, but regular people? That's kind of what the SWG experience was, everywhere. That was a game where I could just hang out at the cantina all day because the people were interesting.
@@NecroAsphyxia Then you move on to a game that fits your time constraints. Maybe make new friends who are online around the same time as you are.
There are tens of thousands of games out there, not all of them have to fit your (or mine or anyone's) needs.
You ever hear the tragedy of Star Wars Galaxies the mmo?
No.
I thought not. It's not a story EA would tell you. It's an mmo legend. Star Wars Galaxies was an mmo so powerful and so fun it could use the force to influence the players to create.....life
It could actually save players from death?
@@Grivian It was too good for this world...
@@Grivian NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERD!!!
Julio Torres basically just said "they think they do, but they don't."
The fall of these franchises comes when game makers stop respecting their their players. Plain and simple
Jerall 10 exact situation with swtor
Aids only the meetra surik stuff but okau
Torres and smedley shouldn't work on another game ever, period.
that's true to an extent, honestly, a lot of the fan base doesn't actually know anything about game development, and if the Devs listened purely only to the players, they sometimes add stupid ideas, it's better to have a balance among the devs and the community.
DJ Serpent yeah I understand but I'm a Swtor player since the beginning. I agree that things like the more streamlined levelling system with 3 disciplines made the game better and they brought about many good class changes. But it's not hard to understand that PvE and PvP content is what keeps players. I do think that they definitely had staff cut because that's the only reason they couldn't pump out and make good stuff like they did before.
being "uncle owen" was the best part of the game.
"That is why you fail."
@Billy Benkins the game was pretty easy though, the only thing I'd say is the missions/quests could of been less grindy.
Like as some more variety to the mission types and how the enemies spawned in those quested areas.
By FAR!!
@@hawkingseye8464 It was easy unless you did actual endgame content like solo farming on Dantooine or did group farming in POIs on Dantooine and the like. I played a pikeman and loved it because I could go toe to toe with jedi. Loved the game - miss it to this day and I disagree with the combat being lame. There were benefits to using separate abilities because each creature had varying pools of health/stamina/mind, so it could be easier to kill them if you targetted their weakest bar.
But whatever, you know. People call it easy because they sat on tatooine killing womp rats.
And oh god, the kangaroo monkeys on Naboo as a new player were the worst. Shaupats can forever rot in hell.
people could design their own quests
@@hawkingseye8464
No...we wanted to be the moisture farmer.
No.. I wanted to FIND that $@*^%$"*&~#+ for a long time lol
So true. I've never wanted to play a Star Wars game as a Jedi or a bounty hunter. I've always wanted to just be a storm trooper, the rank and file.
@@justingoretoy1628 that's how Republic commando did way better than most other prequel-based games...
@Tyler Durden me too. I made billions as a resource vendor supporting crafters all over the Galaxy
I know I did. I liked what they had going looking for the best quality metals in the systems. They ruined it in developements and upgrades.
Objectively, Pre-CU was a horribly designed, buggy mess. But it was still the golden age of SWG. Why? Because there was nothing in the game telling you what to do. It was a true Star Wars sandbox, where players controlled the economy, players controlled the storylines (city vs city), players had to make friends and meet new people to get stuff done. There was an actual COMMUNITY where knowing the right people and being likable were extremely important. I had several groups of people that relied on me for Endor runs because I was a Squad Leader/BH and was the best one they knew. One of them even bought me a sweet set of Composite armor and double sliced my LLC.
Sure, by today's standards, there wasn't much to actually DO in the game, but that forced people to make their own fun, and I have not seen a game before or since where the community did that as well as pre-CU SWG.
Exactly this. I don't know how nerdSlayer didn't cover or emphasize this as much.
@Hilbert França yes some good ones like EQ2, final fantasy 11 lord of the rings. But now there making MMO's to be solo played and easy. What made the early days of MMO's great was the large raids and community. That is truly being pulled away for easy to play games with battle royal and PVP every where. Its target is the person that just wants to play 10 min matches now.
You shouldn't have to pay someone else for the right to "make your own fun." Making the fun is what the game developers are supposed to do.
@@troodon1096 I totally agree. I had this whole "make your own fun" Argument being used as a positive. If i am paying out for a game i kind of expect them to actually have gameplay in it. As you said it's the developers job to give us the consumers a fun game to play, not just give us the virtual equivilent of an empty cardboard box and say "There you go, make your own fun".
@@troodon1096 Correct you don't pay anyone for any rights. Rights can't be bought, privledge can though. And history has certainly shown that there is room for sandbox games like SWG where player can make their own fun.
If you need an analogy try a house or a car. Do you expect your house to come with a maintnence crew? Do you expect your car to come with a chauffer who can take you every where? After all do you not buy a car for transportation? Do they expect you to learn to drive and decide where you want to go? Ridiculous!
I am one of those that did like BattleFatigue, the HAM system, The complex mixable professions, the 10 min shuttlewaits, it made you interact with an amazing community ingame! It was the CU that broke my game, the NGE was just the extra kick in the teeth while I already was lying down! Still miss this game.
Specially on late hour suttle waits you could witness some very naughty stuff going on :D
Yup, I used to have situations where my HAM was drained to near nothing, and would walk into a Cantina (more like drag myself in) only to be greeted by entertainers who were eager to help me get healthy again, and ask about my story of how I ended up getting so messed up. Great times. The game had life.
Just like the boats in vanilla wow
CU combat was the best update for me it has actual strategy and skill to it other then the broken afk combat of PreCU it's so weird y'all old heads wanted some afk combat game.
In the two years I played Pre-CU, I hunted Jedi, protected Jedi, made millions selling organic resources for Medic classes, made more millions buffing as a MD, chatted for hours in Mos Eisley Cantina as the sexiest male Mon Cal in the universe, making more millions through tips and Image Design, piloted a YT-1300, was elected mayor of a the second largest city on Kauri, officiated a marriage, got married, opened a VERY successful tailoring/BE shop, killed Krayts, destroyed Rancors, pimp slapped every Nightsister on Dath, constructed a jet pack, made more millions selling bomb droids that helped kill Jedi I once protected, unlocked my FS slot (only used for the ten plots, though), happily paid for three accounts, crafted BH (shit stats) armor, got three pieces of Mando armor, destroyed a set of VKs that cost me 25 million due to a mind fire DoT effect that was BRUTAL, went through the Rebel, Imperial, and Jabba "theme parks", and actually celebrated the first time I was able to unleash an ATST on a Jedi, only to watch the immortal fucker cut it to ribbons in 15 seconds.
In the three months I played NGE a few years later, I chatted with absolute shit stains in Mos Eisley Cantina and realized that coming back to hundreds of farewell emails from people who quit when I did definitively signaled the end of an era. Kauri was dead and transferring for free to Bloodfin made me realize that those who stayed through the changes weren't enough to hold back the onslaught of poisonous fuckmonkeys who had invaded the game because they were done with TBC content and were just needing something to do before Wrath came out in WoW.
The graphics were shit, the sheer amount of bugs such as speeder rubber banding that persisted through every update were beyond atrocious, the heavily imbalanced PvP combat, and Jedi silliness of first skill grinding, then Village tripe, were not enough to deter people who enjoyed the game in its near original state. No game has come close to the sheer amount of enjoyment I experienced playing SWG. Even 20 man "solo" grouping was more fun than the loot treadmill bs so common in modern MMOs where everything is min/max, queue waiting, forced grouping, fetch quests, or days of mindless grinding just to prepare for the CHANCE at something that increases DPS by .02%.
Adamurquhart I was a brawler tank at the beginning. Super strong. Always helpful in grouping and I followed the smuggler tree. I eventually began slicing weapons for people. I posted a message in my guild hall and next thing I know I had people lining up paying me millions to overpower their weapons. It was a lot of fun. The CU nerfed my battle strength but I was still slicing and dicing terminals in groups or weapons...that NGE shit sucked ass tho and I barely hung in there til finally logging in after a year away to see it go away. A couple years ago I played again on an emulator and met some cool players and it was cool for a little while but couldn’t get the bugs out and it was hard to stay at it. It would be beautiful to see this game come back in its original form with support from the devs. I’d pay $15/mo again.
I've been missing this game since it died. And I mainly played after the updates. Someone needs to get on the level of creating a good mmo like swg.
Adamurquhart ...did you say Kauri??? Damn like I lost a server of cousins or something. Rip
Robert S Yes....a thousand times yes...I miss the game, but most of all I miss the amazing times we all shared on the Kauri server
and...not a single fuck was given.
the arrogance of the management towards the fans reminds me of what is happening with marvel comics. the belief that your customers are morons might be common in business, but it is something that should never be obvious.
certainly not something devs should outright admit either
The game literally went from ahead of its time to plain wow clone, the devs failed to realized that it had a following of people who wanted a sandbox, there were people who wanted to play as Owen the farmer, you could already play as han solo or Skywalker it just took work and you grew more attached to your characters and community. A lot of mmo games ESPECIALLY a sandbox is heavily influenced by it's players. I remember I used to be part of an organization in a game called Face of Mankind, HUGE failure of a game with admin abuse and dev problems, BUUUUuuUuUUUuuT I also had the time of my life playing it meeting people I play with to this day, we were a small defensive contract mercenary faction and we were small but good enough to influence game wide wars and conflicts. I remember I wasn't good at combat so I did something else, my job was a recruiter, and oh my god it really was in that game. The starting area would be full of people trying to recruit new people. I got paid for every person I got and a bonus if they lasted. Let's just say my org leader underestimated how good I was and I ended up richer than the whole faction, they actually borrowed from me XD. We'd go on missions and stuff and we'd have a steady supply of newb grunts because of me. By the end of the game a wave ban went by because we were at war with the biggest faction in the game, SwagRats, who was led by a gm, but most of them literally didn't want to fight us so much half of them wore blue shirts and fought for us, literally the best mmo fight I've ever been in, it was like a 6 hour battle were we even weeded out a spy from our faction from those dirty EquestriaRoyalGuard. Then the big man himself, BRAD RIVERS, AND HIS STUPID GM TOP HAT, banned us all over butthurt and actually created a huge community uproar, we eventually got unbanned but the game was already dying, so me and my vast wealth went to the black market and bought as many deadly alien eggs that I could afford, which was almost all of them, and planted aliens all over Paris (one of the cities and headquarters of EQRG), it took 2 weeks before Paris was uninfested with giant alien bugs. Long story I know but my point is that you can do whatever you want in sandbox games and make it work even if it's not a perfect game but taking that freedom away from the players when you already had it is a death sentence
Man I was part of this. SUCH A LONG TIME AGO JESUS CHRIST I REMEMBER THE DAY I WOKE UP IN MY HOUSE THE DAY AFTER CU I WAS DEVASTATED.
We had one of the coolest CSR on Lowca. His name was Jason and he was really a part of our community. Lol sometimes he'd randomly switch our factions mid-pvp wars.
The complicated system for unlocking “glowing” then slowly learning and mastering Jedi class was the best feature. I agree that the CU a great move, the expansion were solid in fleshing out the full experience and improved game play. The death of SWG came at NGE launch because of 1 unforgivable mistake… the game was set in the middle of the “Jedi Purge”, having Jedi as a chosen class from the start was utterly insane. On day one of NGE there were 100,000 new Jedi running around on every planet. This flew in the face of every player like myself who worked so hard to figure it out on our own.
If they had to have Jedi everywhere, they should have at least gone with the perma-death approach to population control. :-)
The original intent for unlocking Jedi was supposed to be so much more difficult, and intended to take years before the first person succeeded (which should have happened without them even realising how they did it).
Unfortunately they didn't have time to build the complex system of randomised, hidden achievements involving a mix of combat, exploration and social activities that they wanted before SOE demanded that the first Jedi appear soon. So they initially tied it to skills, and then introduced holocrons to speed it along.
Once the first few holocrons had dropped and they all said 'learn x skill' people just systematically grinded through every profession until it unlocked for them. It meant people were playing classes they didn't enjoy, and caused most of the dancers and such who'd previously been dedicated role-players to be replaced with bots just grinding xp.
long story short:
first it was a hardcore sandbox game where people ENJOYED being "Uncle Owen". Later they converted it into a watered-down WoW clone.
Super Heroes
true.
thats pretty much it
I was actually happy the player base was limited. Whenever I play an game nowadays I yearn for the maturity and courtesy commonly offered by the majority of SWG players. Pretty much everybody I knew in game was an adult and I have hardly if ever experienced griefing or verbal abuse.
Thats a flawed way of thinking imo. Just like the maker of this video says: If this game had proper ambition and vision supporting it, it would've lasted quite a bit longer. All the core sandbox elements where there, it was just managed in a really shitty way.
I think there is a reason why there are so few sandbox mmo's: It's all about making an easy buck. And just look at how much money the last Star Wars: The Farce Engorges made.... 2 billion, even though it is a shit movie by anybody's standards. They didn't HAVE to spend effort on a script because people would have gone and seen it anyways. The box office proves my point. 4/5 people thought it sucked balls. And it's the same with gaming: Just make the next linear hallway shooter disguised as something greater (CoD) and people will flock to buy it.
IQ has gone down in a rapid manner over the past 2 decades. Around 1995, the average IQ was far above the victorian era, and scientists were absolutely positive that every generation would be smarter than the previous one. But, according to IQ tests worldwide today, we have now sunk below the IQ of the average person in the Victorian age. I'm betting this has something to do with it. I blame the consumer.
wow, I think your unprovoked emotional response is a testimony enough to who is and who isn't sane. I think it's literally best for both of us if we stop this exercise in communication.
Also, they released NGE a matter of days (less than a week maybe?) after the trials of obi wan and as a result, a class action movement was enacted to get their money back on the expansion due to claims of false advertising and basically forcing people into an update after spending money on the previous game mechanics. Epic fail. Also, the attitude of "they'll get over it" just angered players and drove the ones that left even further away.
Also, I disagree about the NGE. It basically made it so that people who worked HARD to become jedi had all their effort, time, and skill wasted for a beginner class. NGE was the moron patch. They basically said in other words "We need to appeal to the broader base of players, IE morons."
The NGE turned a skill based game into a level based game and that ruined it. The best time in the game was just prior to NGE. Sure, it needed content and patches but not a whole rework. No one wanted to play a skill based game for years only to have it turn into something else. Most of the people who left went to warcraft as did I, because we figured that if we were going to play a level based game we would play a better one. SWG forgot what it was and what worked. Only 2-3 skill based mmo's were around to play at the time, and they all got ruined when people tried to rework them into something else.
I never said the patch didn't have negative aspects, I just think the game most certainly needed change. It was just mostly misguided (like the Devs).
I never said the patch didn't have negative aspects, I just think the game most certainly needed change. It was just mostly misguided (like the Devs).
NGE was better in 2011 for sure.
R.I.P.
Star Wars Galaxies
2003-20011
"It could've been great"
it died once they change the UI and combat system
Idk, If a MMO lasted over 18 thousand years. I think it did pretty well
I still play on blood fin private server a lot of people here to :)
Tyrant jones can you show me how to play?
just look for SWGEMU
"You cannot use Knock Down Recovery while Knocked Down"
You cannot stand while standing.
Man I guess I’ve been going backwards chronologically with the content on this channel, and I got to say, you have improved DRAMATICALLY with the delivery of your commentary 👏🏻
Who finished the investigator tree of Bounty Hunter before speeders? This guy. You're damn right I should get a cookie.
yeah, but no cookies, because we dont serve droids.. and they didnt make a viable chef spec in game....
I don't know I had a friend who was a grind-o-holic, he had a swordsman who was also a chef. He was a Wookiee who wore a pink chef's hat. Although once he found out about Jedi and how to achieve it, he ground out every profession until he unlocked it.
well i did say viable.. specially since the NGE update killed many classes....
I was a master bounty hunter, a teras kasi master, an architect, a droid engineer, a marksman, a merchant, an image designer, a medic, a musician... I did so much stuff!
My fave was Teras Kasi.... Loved the high DPS!
I chose the combination master Ranger/Master Pistoleer class combination from the start. I camped for so many hours to raise skills that I read multiple books while playing? the game just to be one of the first Master rangers. I then found out that Rangers were practically useless and I had to either respec or buy a second game and subscription to have an alternate character. I just couldn't respect my skills after all the work so ran a second subscription. I still have both my set of disks saved for the nostalgia factor though.
Wounds and fatigue were awesome! They gave medics and entertainers purpose! This leads to the one aspect of SWG that I haven't seen in any other game, it relied on players. The best equipment was crafted by players, the economy was decided by players, to get a mount or vehicle or spaceship you had to buy from a player. I still consider it the best game I've ever played, especially for the community it created.
Akray Bothorda it was what Raph Koster calls loose player dependency, much like PC crafters being the only real source of equipment above "vendor trash" level.
Heck yes, I used to play a doctor/combat medic combo a lot and I spent hours in the Corellia hospital, treating and chatting with the patients that limped inside.
My fondest memory was a guy that crawled in completely blackbarred and roleplayed that a Rancor ate and shit him out. During the treatment he kept asking if he'd make it, still be able to play the piano etc, it was bloody hilarious; and a situation you can't experience in games today.
agreed
i loved playing combat medic/doc..Crafting poisions and stimpacks. I made some really good stuff, spent tons of time getting all the good resources, surveying planets for those high concentration spots before anybody else gets them and then setting up harvester farms. Then spend the time to make stims, the schematics, then mass producing them in the factories and then sell them on vendor. And then afterwards go do some huge PVP guild wars.
this so much this! The entire player based reliance on the community was the best part of the game. Players also had to train each other to learn new skills and the skill tree was amazing. One of the best aspects was you didn't have to be a combat player, you could just be super casual playing an instrument in the cantina or dancing or crafting to your hearts content.
10:44 "How can you have a Star Wars game without space combat?" I'm looking at you Star Wars Battlefront EA.
Dark Jedi , you're one of a few people I've seen that says the name of that piece of garbage correctly.
TheEreder There are still space battles. Your point is invalid
i read this comment just as the video said your quote
I can't wait for SWGEMU to get the space expansion in. Jedi village is in it now though.
TheEreder No, your role and character is determined on which gamemode you play. If you're playing Hero Assault, you're not playing as CT-85715, you're playing the one and only Grand Master Yoda. When you're playing Space Assault, you aren't playing Bob the Rebel Soldier, you're playing Jimmy the Rebel Pilot.
"Players wanted instant gratification, kill get treasure, repeat." "Players wanted to be hon solo, not uncle owen." No, players wanted to work for stuff, to be proud of what they created, and they didn't want to be han solo, they wanted to be... their own character... be it a humble droid mechanic, or a world famous weaponsmith that was sought after. A slicer or an animal trainer.
I never wanted to be a hero so this guy doesn't speak for me and it seems like he doesn't speak for a lot of the other commenters here either.
I had a lot of combat ability. I would go solo to places that others feared. With one friend we once locked down Mos Eisley for about an hour. My greatest achievement, the thing I most remember, was most known for and most proud of is that I was perhaps the number 1 supplier of Lok Wheat on my server. When I read that statement from the developer I could only think "Are they insane?" That I could also be a wheat farmer and generally choose my own path was it's biggest selling point for me.
That was my biggest frustration. I never wanted to be a Jedi, or a bounty hunter, or a smuggler.
I wanted to be a crafter and make clothes, weapons, and armor for people.
Exactly...if you want to be a famous hero, you can do that in literally every other SW action game. The whole point of MMOs is being a small part of a large world.
Bronzeager apparently you are wrong as SW:G is tiny compared to MMOs now... even with the Star Wars name behind it, it was only 1/5 the size of Vanilla WoW? Me thinks you may be the minority.
The best part of SWGs was that it was social. My best memories were being a Doctor in the medical center healing wounds. Being a grumpy Doctor with my Droid. Asking how this happened, yada yada, be more careful next time. The Journey just to become a skilled Doctor was amazing. You could be unique and useful. I can see having to rely on a Doctor, Medic and Dancers to continue to play being a problem, but for me I loved staying logged in for hours for tips to heal. Once NGE launched, all that went away, made the game something it wasn’t. You could no longer be impressed by another player or your own character/profession in the same way. If it existed now, I’m sure classic servers would exist, or maybe not. CU wasn’t terrible IMO. I definitely played the heck out of NGE, it was just a different game at that point.
There are private servers of this game still going if you ever wanted to put those doctor gloves back on for old times sake. I'm enjoying the restoration server the most currently.
The NGE absolutely killed Galaxies. The "unnecessary" complexity of the game was its biggest appeal to me. Being an "Uncle Owen" was the whole point. And making Jedi a starting class? Yeah, that totally makes sense. A horde of Jedi running around in the SW imperial era...
Requiring buffs was actually a good thing. It made entertainers and medics absolutely necessary to gameplay, which brought them into the fold and strengthened the overall communal experience. Players needing each others help was a huge component in Pre-CU SWG. You couldn't just solo everything guns blazing like in modern MMOs. That was one of the best things about the game.
Doctors not medics....
The reason old-timers say the NGE (and the CU) destroyed SWG is that the NGE changed SWG from a virtual world in the Star Wars universe and turned it into another themepark MMO. The number 1 strength of SWG is that it wasn't just a silly game where you kill stuff to fill up an XP bar. SWG was built around the crafting community. The community provided content. When SWG became another hack and slash, it scared off the existing community and the hack and slash people quickly realized SWG was a terrible themepark game.
Indeed, it alienated the whole community that made it thrive from the start. The strengths of SWG were pretty much from the Pre-CU era; and it amazes me that it is being thrown off as wearing tinted sunglasses with a sense of nostalgia.
Complaining about having to wait for a DR to tend to your wounds or give you a buff is missing the point entirely of that system. It created an environment and economy that the players drove. Don't want to wait for the best DR with the best buffs, pay for the cheaper guy and be on your way. Watching the entertainers in the cantina was another plus to a player driven world. It's not a time sink if it actually builds a community, which was the point. What other MMO has ever done this? WoW? Nope. ESO? Nope. Harvesting, vendors, player crafted weapons being BIS (SWG did it). Resources spawning on different worlds of different qualities that could then be crafted into different weapons of various quality (SWG did it). This game was never meant to be a linear adventure like WoW or any other MMO I've ever played. Waiting for the shuttle or starport actually provided a sense of realism (that feeling when you hear the shuttle taking off and you are still buying your ticket!!!!). It's not nostalgia, it's things that were done right and haven't been tried since.
Exactly StandUpAlonePro. Exactly. The freedom in og SWG has not been recreated. I'd get back into gaming if it were to be.
I basically stopped the video when he talked about wounds and healing being a bad thing. It is obvious he just did not not understand and therefore the rest of his opinion on it was to be taken with a grain of salt so why bother watching.
I’m watching all of these SWG videos and I just want to cry. I miss my years when playing with my online friends. I miss my house on the city of Rawr on the planet Talos I think it was called. I want to go back to when I was in junior high school and played SWG
The main point of a game (ANY GAME) is to be fun and entertaining.
Well pre-CU galaxies was the most fun and entertaining time to play!
Try to deny/ignore it all you want... it won't change anything.
Agreed .. hate those NGE deniers (meaning that that the NGE was the cause of it's death)
I agree it became great once player cities and vehicles were in place. Also before the combat upgrade. Before the vehicles I was really starting to think this is Starwars! Why am I running everywhere?
Agree. Player interaction was awesome and it was one of the last games where the majority actually played in character.
@Kitty McFurball It was fun to play a character, particularly since that character become identifiable with you. If you become tired of being a TK, you could alter your skills and take up pistols or smuggling or any combination, but you would still be identified as that character rather than being one of many alts (even though some did have multiple accounts to have a designated crafter/trader).
I have to agree but the CU didn't really do more than force people to do a bit of a change in tactics nothing more. Some players really do not like change at all but those do adapt, what cannot be adapted to is the attitude of those running the game. All too common in MMOs before and since but this was either the top or second worst case of it.
All it needed after CU was some freaking content and we yelled that call for months with no impact on dev plans.
TS were solid if a bit tedious but very flexible it was a good game, then well all this stuff happened...
Fatigue and Battle Wounds were the reason I talked to people. Best idea ever, made me be social with purpose all the time. Actually how I met a lot of my in game friends.
Agreed
You couldn't get away with it now days in a game but I loved the 10 minute wait between shuttles too. Met so many people in the starports while waiting.
semimad100 that's what people don't realise, SWG was a social sandbox, not just an action game. Talking to people to get wounds healed, standing waiting for shuttles, watching people in cantinas wasn't taking away the game, it WAS the game. He condemned taking out the professions, but didn't like the things that made those professions useful?
John Tinning yeah, and he seemed to act like those of us that like pre cu are talking about the day the game launched when really were talking about the game literally right before the cu rolled out usually. My favorite era in the game was when Jedi started popping up but, before it was common knowledge how to unlock them. I also wish they didn't give people free holocrons though. That killed a lot of the social aspects when half of everyone was afk grinding.
semimad100 I was there when the first jedi popped, they came outside the starport on coronet, popped their lightsaber and got pounded on by EVERYONE. People were so excited, the story spread like Chinese whispers ha. I think this guy is looking at things in a "traditional" mmo way, wanting theme park stuff in there. This game wasn't built like that. This was a huge star wars sandbox, with the Devs saying "go play". To say there was no group content before isn't true, there were things like the corvette, death watch bunker, plus tons of other POI's with things to do. In this sandbox, the players were the content, like the real world.
A little note on grouping: Grouping pre-CU was useful because the harder mobs granted tons more EXP - the most important of which was skill-exp, not combat exp (which is used mostly in large quantities in advanced professions). Also, forcing 80 high reward missions in dantooine the same direction lead to the game becoming somewhat fun :P Something like 20 rancors on screen is quite cute.
Also a second note on the waiting/healing. I think the community developed very positively due to shared waiting/healing time/crafting times/etc. For example, the downtime between combat while interacting at the cantina, or at a camp, allows people to chat. This effect has been exhibited repeatedly - queuing physically at a location in maplestory also carries the same effect, while random-lobby-queues for instances tend to lead to frustrating gameplay (people are more understanding if others get a chance to introduce themselves).
It is different for single player games - there is no-inherent community in SP games. In MP games, as the DnD series where the wound system originates from - the wounds (together with daily limits) were designed balance risk-taking and to get the players to rely on each other. When porting the wound system to tyranny (i haven't played it), it might have been OK to make them episodic (cured at end of some series of events, say a day, where the day cannot be advanced arbitrarily) - players then would have to pick their fights smartly. Correspondingly, rewards for fights should be raised, but this isn't something that most cRPGs do.
The issue with tyranny is porting wounds while making health and mana expendable resources. In cRPGs, the player's standard response is to fight (and loot) everything - tyranny avoids some of that, but the developers still retain some of that the mindset. XCOM does it somewhat better - while you might want to (or be forced to) fight everything, there is a cost and its part of the core gameplay.
---------------
CU was also a failure because it alienated an entire portion of SWG's base - the crafting side. Essentially crafters could be wiped out by single hits of Corellian butterflies, because damage scaling. This made it damn near impossible to manage any harvesters you put in remote locations, without strong metal gear solid style stealth.
"The difference between your CL and an attacking MOB's CL directly determines how much damage is dealt to you: targets of a much higher level (indicated by their con color) will do incredible amounts of damage, but those below you will receive a damage reduction."
Its implicit in many games that higher-level drops = better drops, which was not the case for SWG pre-NGE which used a randomized material system. Thus the level scaling prevents people from gathering resources, because no exp.
As you mentioned, it was also an issue of the CLs stratifying the content - this simply means that at any point in time, one can access about 10% of the available content in the game ("good-exp range"). This is generally why SWG has influenced my POV that levels are mostly-harmful.
Overall, the failure of SWG i think was trying to beat WoW at its own game and alienating its customer base in the process, with about a fourth of the resources* and 1/20th of the planning.
I think your review strongly neglected how the community development affects the perception of the game. A game with half the features and polish can be viewed very pleasantly by the players provided the community is good - SWG pre-CU had virtually nothing but a good community.
*A strong hint one should not try to play the same game.
Very much in agreement with you, BlacKeNinG.
very good comment!!!! met so many awesome people while I was waiting for healing. what a great time to game
today it is all garbage
I just found your channel this week and went back and watched this video and must say you have come a long way in improving your content and delivery! Well done.
This is an excellent video. I played SGU since launch day and remember logging into the NGE one day and feeling so blindsided and gutted. It was like someone had broken my toys. That taught me what a weird new risk you take when investing time into an MMO as opposed to traditional gaming. I'm embarrassed to admit how depressed i was for months after.
How not to talk to the fanbase and ruin your MMO in ten steps or less
Bitch I want to be Uncle Owen the moisture farmer lol
Halonoob 117 lol me
Dang it, I miss my moisture farmer.
Luke I am your..... moisture farmer.. Remember? *takes off helmet*
To be honest, the fact you state that Pre-CU was poor is something that makes me cringe.
I am one of the old players of SWG who played before Jump to Lightspeed was released and to be honest? I wasn't all for combat. I enjoyed the game as it was unique in it's own right and it was unique in a way no OTHER game ever tries to go for: It has a class-less skill system that allowed you to TAILOR your class as you wished, explore paths that others may have not done.
Crafting was something I invested in alot. I was a high-grade Mon Calamari Rifleman and Combat Medic, almost master Civilian Starships by the time CU came and ruined the party for me.
Yes, the game may be now seen as poorly designed. But I was young back then. 2002-2004 I was barely 17-19 years old and I was new to MMO's back then. Yet the complexity didn't deter me, it fascinated me, made me wish to go down different paths and see what waited for you down those paths.
Exploration was also fun, especially when I rolled a crafter alt and she was nothing about combat, just crafting and to be fair, combat isn't always 100% of the game. These days, it seems that combat is the only focus that matter in an MMO. Many forget the exploration that should come with such games.
The community was also great in the Pre-CU days, there were people who helped out new players like me. Hell, one player (whose name I sadly forgot by now, since it has been... what? 15 years or so now?) who heard that I was going Rifleman, gave me a FULL set of Composite Armor and a VERY good high-tier rifle. And that had me invest in the game and enjoy it, despite it had its flaws (although I didn't really take notice of them too hard, seeing again I was new to MMOs and it never occurred to me).
Then CU came along... it RUINED the game for me and alot of players. Hell the developers even blue facedly lied that the players enjoyed the CU, despite there was an outcry about it. Funny thing is, the CU came out on test servers on the 1st of April... Everyone thought the CU was a poor, poor developer joke to scare the crap out of the players. Then outrage when the players did find out that it was an actual change.
Let me ask you something: Did you play during the old days of 2002-2004, before the CU came out? If you had, you wouldn't be too quick to judge Pre-CU as you do now. Trust me, experiencing how the game was in that era is completely different than to look at some videos and then make some judgements purely because of the bugs. There was a time during Pre-CU where the game was very good, despite it had it's bugs and flaws (but they were managable, so was combat once you got used to it).
This may seem as a rant and honestly, I dont give a damn. I was passionate about this game once and it still holds a special place in my heart. I wanted to speak my mind and experience about this game, seeing I was one of the many players of SWG before Pre-CU. I did try SWG again during NGE and.... it was horrible. I could never look at the game the same way again.
GuilmonIX first sry about my english. i never read this long coments but when i saw how passionate u wrote i readed all and i must say i fell sry for u and that i never tried this game i heared many great coments (before CU). i heared that in game u rly had fealing u developing ur character into something more and rly have porpouse
i dont think the guy who made this video has actually payed pre CU.. u hit the nail on the head my friend
Call me "Token"... I played Pre-CU... I was one of many who became acclimatized to the CU and got on with it but NGE finally killed me off.
His biggest mistake in the video is equating pre cu to mean day 1 launch. No, we typically mean right before the cu was launched. The game had too many bugs at launch to really be enjoyed but most were fixed well before the cu came out.
Zoran the Zekrom you really covered a lot on what I loved about this game. The exploration, crafting, player customizations it was some of the best in an MMO as far as I'm concerned it was one of the best MMO I have played and I've played almost every major one and a ton of smaller ones. Hell galaxies was where Capt'Wes Starwind came from lol. I was there when Restuss fell. I followed that game since it was a rumor and started playing at launch and was playing on the last day. I didn't get into PvP for maybe a year or two, then I found a great guild that I ended up being GL of. We had some great PvP events. The NGE and the CU were what killed that game with each one cutting out more players rather than bring in new ones which was their idea and a moronic one at that. If all that time had just been spent on content and story work rather than 2 major overhauls I wouldn't doubt this game would still be going. They had given up with making the Jedi meaningful and that was a big end game thing for so many. The Jedi/Sith temples and all that stuff could have been improved on so much, instead of just being dropped. Maybe a major graphics overhaul could have been done by now. I'll always miss this game and hope for another like it.
I played in the closed Beta. SOE made two decisions during that beta that started them tumbling downhill.
Initially Stim Paks healed Health, Action, and Mind. But one day a developer noticed doctor characters in a medical center stimming each other for xp. The came up with a solution overnight, remove mind from stims. This took a three way, very well thought out, balanced system and completely screwed it up.
Second, there was a bug that was causing clothing to decay even when people were offline. The solution? Fix it? Nope! Turn it off.
After launch they made another huge mistake, they failed to communicate with the players. We all knew there were problems BUT we didn't know if the developers knew of these problems because they wouldn't say.
When they took flak in the media for having too many open tickets, they reduced the number of tickets a player could have open from three to one then made a press release claiming they reduced the number of open tickets by two-thirds.
The game as originally intended would have been great, the problem is the developers (I guess management) didn't understand this. So rather than fixing little bugs they scrapped everything.
If Star Wars Galaxies was to re-launch today, I'd be there. I tried to get involved and help with the emu but the leaders were just too damn viscous. Ask a question and get cussed out.
Your video is old enough that I don't know if anyone will ever read this but here it is anyway.
If people complained about repetitive actions in SWG they obviously never played any of the other MMOs like WOW or LOTR.
Join SWG awakening!
Lucas Arts made SOE release the game well before they were ready to, or wanted to release it. SOE wanted to not release it for another 6 months to a year later then when they did. It's part of the reason why the login server on release day kept crashing and no one could create an account and login was because they were planning on adding another one to handle the load, but were so rushed that they couldn't do it in time.
"Get on board of the falcon, kid, this place is gonna blow!"
And it did.
Damn i remember that bug were he wouldn't stop repeating that sentence...
Loved this game. 1st MMO. NGE turned me to the dark side. SOE is on my Permanently banned list to this day.
As a first time viewer of your videos, I need to disagree or correct you on a few points for Pre-CU and Post-CU
Combat Level: This was not just a visible representation of prior power. Combat Level determined your base health and overall power. This is not the case Pre-CU. Weapons also gained 'level' requirements. This might not seem like an issue, but it effectively removed the ability to be a hybrid character set up. Combat Stacking (A character only focused on Combat Professions, particularly ones that stack a specific defense) was always advantageous, but with enough knowledge of the system, a Combat/Crafter, Combat/Dancer, or Combat/Anything could still compete.
However, a Combat/Non-Combat build capped out at level 55, making them weaker and having less access than a Combat Stacker, who capped out at level 80. It was not just a cosmetic change, but one that punished a player for for being a mixed bag.
The queue: While I can agree this was a clunky system, there was a macro system that included a command that cleared your combat queue. Unnecessary work around by standard systems, but it was there. The Queue / Macro system allowed you to set up complicated or simple chains of commands, remove them at a moment's notice, and react to the situation. It provided a choice between tactical approaches and reactive ones.
HAM: Rifles and Swordsman may seem like the best weapons on paper, but this is mostly untrue without considering every other factor. I won't bore you with the details, but in terms of overpowered professions, Combat Medic was the best unless you had the hard counter of a Doctor to remove Mind Poison and Mind Disease. Rifles and Swordsman more or less even out once factoring in everything.
Forced Downtime: Shuttles, battle wounds, and etc. I understand why this is a negative. However, the forced down time is mitigated by the fact that the game was at its core a social game. You depended on other players, not because a dungeon has a mandatory party queue, but because you need things you cannot supply for yourself completely. Other players healed you, crafted for you, buffed you, provided hunting services, escorts, surveying resources. This is a mixed bag, but in my opinion this wasn't a terrible choice. Instead of jumping around Ironforge shouting Thunderfury, I sat in a Cantina talking with people or teaching people the intricate parts of the combat system.
Jedi in Pre-Village, Pre-CU: Overpowered, but only about 1 or two Jedi per 100 players.
Jedi in Village, Pre-CU: Jedi were upper echelon, but were possible to fight in smaller groups. I could regularly hold my own as a Teras Kasi Brawler against any Jedi, as well as killing the less experienced ones with little issue.
Combat: This had a subtle level of depth that separated spammers from killers. This is most apparent in the PVP, while PvE was largely about hitting magic numbers (Not all that different from now).
Technical Shortcomings: No argument. By standards today, Pre-CU SWG is a hot mess of a game. It was still way ahead of its time for the approach to crafting, character building, player settlement, the oddly chaotic but satisfying group PvP. I won't pretend I would go back and play it again, it required more time than most of us can spare these days, but the rose tinted goggles are well earned.
The only disagreement I have with your comment is your defence of HAM. Everyone became a sniper or swordsman, which became boring. I felt it was better when all classes had a balanced chance of victory. Otherwise, agree with every other point you make.
Akray Bothorda I played from Beta to NGE, and my main was a Carbineer, and my alts were mostly non-combat or dabbled pistols or carbines. Although I did have one Rifleman, but it never made me want to change over any of other characters to that.
Akray Bothorda I won't defend that Mind was the best attribute to attack as a Medic dab could greatly hinder hitting Health or Action.
There are many factors though that come into play with how the old system worked.
A few being: Ranged weapons took bonus damage from Melee, with Rifles being the worst in that category (Suffering a staggering 2.5x bonus damage from melee, making even great composite armor an inconvenience rather than a wall)
Swordsman also had the second lowest 'Toughness' stat of any melee, with Fencer being the lowest. This means despite the higher base damage on weapons, Swordsman dealt roughly equivalent damage before Armor Penetration was 'working', and even then, the slower speed multiplier kept things from being absurdly in their favor.
Ranged builds, like Rifleman, usually couldn't fit Master Brawler in to them, and Master Brawler was one of the strongest supporting professions for any Combat build.
Targeted Attacks also had a significantly lower damage modifier than non-targeted. You're always hitting the same area, but for less than the 'Strike 3' variants.
Rifles also were the only profession other than Commando who didn't hit the attack speed cap and had no way to do so outside of extremely rare skill tapes.
Access to Posture Change effects were also more limited and less potent than those of Melee (Knock Down, force Kneel, force Prone)
Again, Mind was certainly the best attribute to attack. No defending that, but there were enough downsides to both Swordsman and Rifleman that kept the other combat professions on more or less even footing.
Excellent retort. I too have a more different view of SWG than some and vehemently disagree with nerdSlayer's analysis. In particular, I still believe to this day, that SWG could have existed and been popular if the devs. had focused even less on the space mode of the game. The added development resources could have been used to bolster land game play, enhancing what worked well and ultimately incentivize that which brought players to the game in the first place: immersion.
the community was the strongest part of the game by far. its hard to describe. idk if it was the game itself or maybe the time period. no other mmo community can even put a scratch in it.
"This is not what our players want"
"Yes it is, you're fired for saying otherwise"
"Hm, this wasn't what our players wanted"
Fucking amazing logic going on there. A wonder the game didn't tank completely day 1 with that kind of decision making involved in development.
Very nice video, well delivered. I only started playing after the CU and was having an absolute blast. It was buggy, dated and ugly but I loved it. I remember the first time I logged in after the NGE, very confused at the mangled mess of a UI and wondering why I had to become a set character type rather than continue to mould my own custom character to my desires. I remember the guild chat, usually about 15 to 20 people online at a time, all of whom asking the same questions, bewildered at what had happened to our game.
I logged on periodically for a few more weeks, tried to get in to the game again, basically starting from scratch or hoping in vain that the changes would be reverted. Fewer and fewer people were logging on and I remember the last time I logged in and said hello in the guild chat and nobody was online - that heartbreaking silence is what hurts me the most when thinking back to SWG.
The town we'd built was deserted, the hub cities had far fewer players in and about 75% of those logged in were running around with lightsabers and that was enough for me.
I remember when I was kid I saw stuff about star wars galaxies and it seemed like the coolest game ever. I wanted to create a bounty hunter and travel the galaxy hunting other players who had committed crimes for cash. Of course as a kid I had garbage computer and dial up internet. Years later when I finally had the ability to play the game it was shut down and that dream died. Yeah I had fun with many other games(including SWTOR) but I never got to play that dream game.
It went to shit after the CU anyway.
Seriously, forget what this guy says in his video, Pre-CU was the best time to play Galaxies. If not for that first year, plus Jump to Lightspeed update, the entire game would have been a complete failure.
The CU was the much needed upgrade. It saved the Commando skill tree. Until then, Combat Medic was the skill tree of choice, with its mind bombs.
PixelProfessor I agree. I never had an issue with CU. What I really hated was NGE. I only reluctantly returned to play NGE to fill my SW needs. I miss my force sensitive MBH. sad panda.
me too man :(
I'm sorry to make it worse for you but bounty hunting in that game was absolutely amazing. You'd pick up a bounty, send out a seeker droid and it would give you a waypoint right where they were. One time I caught a roleplayer with no armor on in a player made guildhall, sitting down. I came around the corner and lit him up. Best game of all time
"We wanted more instant gratification." -- That was the mistake. It is always a mistake for mmorpgs.
I played because I wanted to be nobody explore and be part of a star wars universe as a friggin moisture farmer! it made the game amassing, I do agree that you should be locked into one craft class.
Kinda miss MMOs were you AREN'T several thousand world saving heroes and are just 'some guy'.
Yeah I agree. What made the game so unique in the beginning was that almost no one was a Jedi. You were just a person living in the Star Wars universe. You could be a Mercenary/Soldier/Bounty Hunter if you wanted more action. But you could also just be a businessman or explorer. This is something that MMO's completely lost once everything tried to clone WoW.
Agreed Jav253, and currently only Elite Dangerous, and even more so Star Citizen, hold the possibility of something like this.
Most MMO's don't get that the point of a massive multiplayer community is to feel small, not weak per se but to give the illusion of discovery and a sense of freedom without having the pressure of being "the chosen one"
I was talking about Tamriel Online but yeah who would want to be Jake Lloyd lmao
2019, I'm still crying over the death of this
~pre-cu
I remember that after the NGE there was a discussion about the prior Scout skills and how players hated losing some of the skills. Most noteworthy was the loss of Camps, which acted like decorative, personal outposts. One of the lead developers asked “You liked just sitting around?” and the replies of “Yes!” eventually drowned out any further replies.
this game was so good before that infamous update :(... I miss that game
Dragonis4 you can still play it on swgemu
the only problem I saw was Jedi was a starting class
Gotta love the crap NGE that brought us that.
NGE is easy to hate, but it also added some pretty cool features to the game.
nerdSlayer It did, but it ruined the uniqueness of the game. Personally, I loved the Combat Upgrade they did just a few months prior.
I think you take the CU and add some of the features NGE had and you have a really good game.
After they added they added that Jedi village the number of Jedi increased by such massive numbers that it might as well be a starting class. The original concept of them being rare but overpowered with perma death wouldn't work anymore.
I have to disagree with you on your assessment that NGE didn't kill Star Wars Galaxies. You basically say "NGE didn't kill Star Wars Galaxies; just everything that it represents did." Pre-CU was not perfect by any means, But the fixes that it needed were not personified by the CU or NGE.
Anyone else just binge nerdSlayer's entire Death Of A Game series lol?
I'm working on it
@@SaltyShaun me too
Game failed because it had no PvE content and was buggy as hell. It's a testament to how good the social aspects of the game were that it even did as well as it did. They sacrificed their social base (their only base) in hopes of luring wows PvE base. Damn fools. No ones going to leave a massively popular MMO for an old game with no players and no loyalty no matter what changes you make.
The social aspects of SWG were light years ahead of games still to this day. Developers seem to think these aspects aren't valued by players but they are. The issue is they aren't enough to carry a game, they still need to be married to a successful PvE/PvP core.
I totally agree with this. PVE was silly but I enjoyed the PVP. It was awesome to be wandering the countryside and come across a Rebel...he switches weapons and pulls out a rebel npc, I pull out 2 or 3 (can't remember) stormtroopers...he runs.
agreed the non combat class's the crafting. One of the best crafting systems to date. If they took the base game of star wars galaxy and mixed that with lord of the rings online it would have been the perfect mix of a game. The early days of lord of the rings had some great PVE content. You take that content level with the community and class's of swg you have the perfect game to be released.
My experience differs. Many of the groups I was a part of created our own campaigns and stories just by playing. One PA pissed off another and is now going to war? Awesome, let's get paid to merc for one side.
The players ran the show and didn't wait for devs to hand them the content.
I left when there was crafting shops everywhere selling everything I sold. Made me think why the hell did I spend so much time crafting.
I was a master doctor in Pre-CU that had a buff line. When the CU was coming out I found out in the test server that buffs I owned were becoming useless. I decided the last few days to give out free buffs :`(
No game will ever compare to SWG.
Star Citizen will
Insert Watto..."No...it won't!"
I really hope Star Citizen does come close. It has a lot of the same simulated life in a future space faring universe concept to it. If they ever let you make your own player towns it will be close. All it will need is a good crafting system but then they have not shown much interest in doing that aspect at all.
Star citizen cannot do a good crafting system simply because they have been selling ships for thousands of dollars. They would have to do something like "craft everything but ships" or "craft everything but ships and cosmetics" (or integrate cash shop materials into crafting).
+Jav253
I want player housing in SC as well. One thing I loved about SWG was being part of a player owned/run Town.
Being able to build a little city wherever you want, own a shop, have actual neighbors, build turrets and defenses... it was wonderful.
The HAM system was great, fun, unique, and deep. Raph Koster said that buffs were not meant to be so powerful. That was the real problem with the game, it caused the balance to be off for combat and armor and professions. They should have balanced that and added a more gentle introduction to the system, such as having the basic profession's skills not drain your HAM and the basic enemies not damage your A or M. Basically it needed more time, and Raph should have been more realistic about what he could include in the launch. You hit it on the head talking about arrogance of the people who brought in the NGE.
I'm only 2 mins in and in very impressed by your presentation. As some who is getting back into the game, the nostalgia really overrides my stance on game as dated as this. There is so much to unpack and the macro/modding community for this game is so expansive its almost daunting wanting to jump back in. I know finishing this video you will have a very well thought out conscience on how this game should have, but didn't, prevail.
-an instant fan
I don’t think any SW game has ever brought me the real “Star Wars Experience” than SWG. I remember starting on Tatooine and meeting a Rodian named Feeto, that then spurned into a long friendship with TONS of adventures that followed. We joined guilds, had wars, and explored for years. There’s just too many moments to list.
Who else remembers the countless fan made movies & creative content SWG inspired here on YT? I’m glad I was too young to understand the Sony drama back then, because I had a grand old time regardless. I still miss it :(
Star Wars Galaxies was a great game before it fucked. Back when Jedi were rare like it was supposed be.
G Alex.Games I miss the days when becoming a Jedi seemed like an impossible goal. When they made it to where everyone and their mom could start as one....it killed the game for me. SWG was the game that got me into mmorpgs
yeah, they fucked it by letting everyone have a jedi
Dont forget the satisfaction hunting a jedi. :D
The only real point I 100% agree with NS on is SOE's imbecilic
mishandling of their player base. Bliz at least talks to their players
before they ruin their game. [Ruin is used for hyperbole, WoW is still a fun game]
Choice is what made Galaxies good pre-MCE. Everything I did was my choice (mostly). I could spend a month outside Mos Espa prospecting for minerals before going to town to join up in a posse to dance with Oola. Then a day later fly to Naboo to stop a rebel incursion on theed. MCE stole that choice from the players.
Every other MMO I've ever played says, YOU ARE THE GREATEST HERO EVER!!! Now do these household chores on my to do list. The list 99.5% of the time is; go to Y, to do X. It's not my story at that point, it's just the narrative of the author. That's fun in it's own right, but I didn't invest myself.
More thoughts on Galaxies available upon request as replies.
Gozokukolat tell me more
Come on man, tell him more.
Alot of people fail to understand how much power/influence in the community Jedi had. I ran a guild of nearly 400 people. We had a huge city on lok. We organised events and battles with rebel guilds and we had our own Galactic civil war on chilastra . I spent billions of credits and Imperial influence on such events.
The CU started to kill that off and the NGE destroyed that. The crafting and buffs were huge parts of the social interaction and created an economy and a fantastic inter connected community. Coreilla had ques of people lining up for buffs.
When my Jedi was nerfed I lost some interest, when the economy was nerfed I just stopped playing.
SOE never understood or listened to its player base and the majority of devs like smedly and torres were absolute retards( thats being kind). They also sold the trial of obi under false pretenses and they blatantly lied after. You have no idea how much anger that caused.
The game was basically closed down by individuals to save face so they can pretend it never happened, but I will not touch another SOE/Sony game ever again as they are a lying bunch of scumbags.
AngryTech what was your name? Kauri and ahazi were my main servers. My kauri guy was named Spetoba. Was a mainly rebel wookiee tkm mdoctor. Briefly went imp when the guild TKA recruited me. Couldn't play the game without raiding theed every couple days so I had to go back.
It really wasn't SOE at all from what I gathered over the years. The decision to change up the game came from Lucas Arts. Lucas Arts held the Star Wars license. I have zero doubt right when WoW was making billions for Blizzard was the time when LA pushed for first the CU as a compromise and then full blown NGE. And from what I gathered I wouldn't doubt the push came from Lucas himself.
AngryTech Chilastra for life! SSA!
I feel you, and totally agree, i think i stoped playing in 2005 or 2006? cant remember, but it was 1 week after NGE was released. And to this day i have NEVER EVER bought anything that has a SONY log on it, not only games, but everything with a sony logo...im a computer technician, and firends, customers and family regulary ask questions about what TV to buy or stuff like that, and i have always make sure that they never get any SONY products... so even though i know a few TV's here or there dont make a difference, im satisfied knowing that to a tiny degree im making SOE pay back with $$$ the insloence of NGE :)
My main char which wa a pre cu Jedi was "Fighto"
I was mostly ok with CU but NGE did kill it for me, even after all the later fixes it didn't change the fact that having jedi as a starting class destroyed all immersion I could have for the game when the Star Wars universe was only meant to have a couple to a handful of jedis left at that time.
Oh man, watching this for the first time after watching all the other videos, your voiceover work has gotten SO much better, like wow. Amazing.
Ahhh the memories! This was my FIRST MMO. I was a member of the Central Imperial Order (CIO) on Eclipse Server. Great bunch of guys and I miss running Heroics with them. Where ever you are guys.../salute -Iagrid
Star Wars Galaxies made it to the Guinness Book of World Records. "Longest time an in-game corse was unattended", or something along those lines.
Corpse of Icir - Bloodfin. Corpse of a player that was there for YEARS!
o god i remember this ...im old :(
Holy cow, I remember a character on BF, Delz Nope .... in TR if I can remember? or the rival guild of TR on the rebel side? I remember everyone bought weapons from TR's main crafter ... Enot was his name???
:) , TR's rival. I joined TR a lil bit for wow, ran raids for them late in vanilla. Yea, Enott was TR's weaponsmith, I traded krayt tissues for weapons, then sold the weapons for double the price in theed. Thanks for making me smile man :)
FIGHT! That's right! Bestine was full of imps and Anchorhead had all the rebels and each would come to each city and pvp to try and take over. I remember seeing you often, most memories I have was people farming at fort Tusken and you used to duel people and they would get so pissed off loosing. Think you were a fencer. This was pre cu. good times.
One of the problems with SOE was the arrogance of the developers, specifically Torres and Smedley. I beta'd every expansion and change, specifically the CU. We told them that the CU was going to go over badly and that they were making changes that the player base wasn't asking for. There was upwards of 75% negative feedback amongst the CU testers, but SOE lied and said we all thought it was great. Then there was the NGE, which I personally thought was a garbage system. The suits at SOE were fine with losing the existing playerbase, because they actually thought they were going to recoup their numbers through new players, not to mention the class actioj suit over ToOW, where they teased that awesome creature handler necklace to get people to buy it, only to ditch that profession 2 weeks later. The NGE hit so quick, they had have been developing both the CU and NGE systems concurrently as the CU was only around for 5 months.
Actually SOE didn't even poll you guys. Lucas Arts polled "private control/test groups". SOE admitted to not doing their own polling...how terrible is that?
+nerdSlayer Just another example of poor implementation. I think had SOE given the testing a couple more months and actually listened to the testers, the CU may have been better received.
SOE would often ban people providing feedback on the official forums. SOE had very poor relationship with their customers, and the NGE was the straw that broke the Nerf's back.
I hope these devs never open a restaurant.
"Its a PIZZA, wrapped in a TREE TRUNK, covered in MARSHMALLOWS AND LIMA BEANS"
With your top tier content. I would love to see you remake this, but you did a great job in making this
imo, terrible analysis of the "failure" of the game, thing like needing a doctor or a dancer to heal you before playing is what made the game sociable and unique
I agree. I made many friends in the Cantinas. And spied on enemies for our guild. Performed a marriage. Huge pvp battles. Being able to have 3 npcs to help you in battle.
Agreed, he was rational but his arguments strayed a lot of key features that the game had Pre-CU that defined that claimed golden age.
agreed, he failed in his analysis.
He Smedley'd his analysis.
There was nothing like being in a cantina at 3am chatting with 20-30 people at once with dancers and medics around. Go defend a base from a raid to blow up your 40k factiton point base out in the middle of no where. The non combat class's is what made the game great. They could have added on that. The crafting class's is what made this game great.
I stopped playing SWG when they brought out the Jedi as a class, I had spent ages leveling up through my holocron... Felt I had been cheated.
Angry Man I spent years grinding out the path to Jedi. I know exactly how you feel
All fairness you can't randomly be a force user but simply studying and grinding out missions or what not in the star wars universe.
Now if you was a force sensitive and wanted to be a sith or jedi then yea make a bit more sense with a few changes.
This is really just in terms of lore and what overall makes sense.
Also who the hell wants to waste a lot of time on something like that. Don't have to exactly easy just make it tougher not tougher in terms of play time.
I didn't play SWG, but I was paying attention to its development. Aren't you forgetting the part of early Jedi implementation that while yes, Jedi were the most powerful class, they would die permanently if they were killed, whereas non-Jedi could respawn.
Until they were made commonplace due to that whole "instant gratification" streak they were on with the game's updates. According to at least one senior dev for the game back then, that was the beginning of the end - taking a mysterious, hard to obtain, risky character and then watering them down to the point where they were just a "super class" of any regular character.
I'm honestly impressed by how much Star Wars music you were able to put in your video and still keep the video up with the audio intact. I had to stop uploading Battlefront gameplay because the videos would be either muted or removed the same day of the upload. Sometimes even within the hour. x_x
Played pre-cu and post-nge. It’s not even a comparison how much better pre-cu was. This was suppose to be a sandbox mmo where you could be anything you wanted. And NOT be the hero. You are the hero in EVERY OTHER game. The community in this game was unmatched. Features like the wounds/battle fatigue encouraged community. My best memories are just hanging around socializing at a cantina, then going out on a giant hunting party to hunt. The guy who made this video sounds like he just wanted to play WoW.
I would like to say that Pre-CU was a sandbox in the way you said, but being a hero *was* possible. But it wasn't some stupid reward the game would give you. Your heroics came from your place in a community, and to me that was far more rewarding then some "vending machine" of a game spilling out tokens to my own ego when I did nothing to earn it. I wasn't a very important person in the game's community, and I was completely ok with it. What I am trying to say is, there were players who belonged to powerful guilds which were well-known and in fact, did become someone special to the community. That is where I am going. The game doesn't force it on you, you can choose to be a lone wanderer in seclusion, with a selection of a few friends. But it being a sandbox that was player-driven meant that really you could evolve socially into a figure. It did happen. That is one of its strong points in fact, but the game wasn't demanding it from you. You were truly free in that sense to define yourself through your own conscious decisions. There were not so automatic by game scripts or level ups.
As a post 9 player. I never had the true path to jedi, but the village grind was months on end like a full time job. That being said, SWG was my all time favorite game, and nothing will ever compare to it again. I loved how you could mix and match your skills so you didn't need to group for everything, then nge ruined all that. Now, no online games allows you that kind of freedom.
JTL was in my opinion one of the best space sims ever on the market. I like being able to upgrade equipment, and reverse engineer for the best possible results. Add to the fact it was part of SWG and your invested character was still usable made it even more of a win.
What bugs me the most is how much of my life was invested into a game that ended up being dumbed down for a new market and ultimately shut down.
yeah, I have it installed, but its just not the same. I had so much invested in my main character, it just makes me sad when i try to log in and start a new guy from scratch knowing i'll never have anything near what I once did.
You made a great video here, but I want to point out an inconsistency. You said the game was doing really well at 200k-250k subs. After NGE hit, it tanked hard at 100k subs. How can you sit there and say the NGE didn't cause the death of SWG? If SWG was pulling great numbers, there is no doubt in my mind that it would have stayed active even through the launch of SWTOR.
However, as you correctly stated, the suits wanted MORE. There is no doubt in my mind that if the powers that be were a little more realistic with their numbers, they would have seen the game as a success, but LucasArt/LucasFilm pushed too much too fast. I don't think you lay enough blame at the feet of George Lucas either. That man is an absolute tyrant when it came to his baby, the Star Wars IP. As soon as you start deviating from his Star Wars, meaning the movies, he becomes an insatiable baby. SOE didn't want to make the game in during the Prequel Era, but he made them do just that.
Also, you say that players see pre-CU SWG through rose tinted lenses. That is just not true. I was there at launch, I was there and unable to log in for several days after release. I saw how absolutely BROKEN the commando class was, to the point that you couldn't gain commando exp outside of using a launcher pistol (which took weeks to figure out). I saw how busted the BH class was and how you begged people to let you train them in Combat I over and over so you could get the Master EXP needed to reach the master box. I was there before the Jedi/Holocron grindfest. Most people just wanted to eke out a living and be some no name dude part of a larger group.
It's a sandbox game, and one feature of every sandbox game out there from SWG to EVE Online to Minecraft to Black Desert Online - you make your own content. The devs give you tools, it's up to the player to use them. We scheduled mass battles with Rebel Guilds, everything from in town brawl and raids to using the battlefields. A group of us would go to Moenia on Naboo and rid the cantina of rebel scum and hold it down and wait for the reinforcements to come and try to clear us out. Sometimes we won, sometimes they won. It was great though, no matter results. It is by far and away the best time I ever had. Didn't feel like battling with imps? No problem, log onto my crafter and harvest resources and make cool stuff for others to buy.
Most of the major issues at launch were solved and patched by the time JTL launched, and the game was shaping up to be amazing. Did it release prematurely? Absolutely, you won't find a sane person to say otherwise. Did it have a ton of problems at launch? Of course, no major MMO has ever had a smooth launch. Did it bring the Star Wars universe alive for thousands of players? Absolutely, it let us live and breath how we wanted to. Did you want to become a galaxy-renowned smuggler? Do it, even if that is an oxymoron. Want to be the most fear bounty hunter rivaling even Boba Fett himself? Go ahead and try. Want to become the next Czerka Industries and mass produce weapons, armor, and droids? Buy as many accounts as you can afford and get to work setting up factories and harvesters.
We don't look at it through rose-tinted lenses; we made the most out of our time spent in the game. We did whatever we thought was fun, and if it wasn't, we didn't do it, nor did we have to. Now, if I'm playing a game and I don't like what I'm doing, tough shit, muscle through it until it's over. I've never belonged to a better community than Y1 SWG. We laughed, we cried, we made fun of the game that we all sank far too much time in. It was no where near complete, but we took what we had and ran with it. That's why we love the game before the changes.
Event though i didn't know the "pre-cu" time I played for quite a while during the CU time and I have only great memories... NGE is strill a trauma for me decades later. I was never able to find any mmor or game that gave me what SWG gave me at the time. The community, the freedom, you weren't on rails. There was no push to do anything or to absolutely farm, you could just RP and be a politician in your Guild's City... Great memories. And yes as you said we were aware of issues and limitations but nonetheless I don't think we overate the game when we said it was brilliant and one of the best online experience ever...
Good video, but you really need to work on your cadence and presentation. The entire video just sounds like you're reading off of a piece of paper (which I'm assuming you are, of course).
Do multiple takes, don't just go with the first one. Work on sounding more conversational and less like you're reading a book report. It'll help a lot.
Thanks for the feedback.
And speaking just tad too fast in places, like you're speeding through it. But loved the video and history, thanks muchly! Subbed
who cares. it was a good video.
If I were to create an mmo around the Expanse, I would take a lot of inspiration from this game. You wouldnt have to worry about any Jedi.
"Jedi were unstoppable juggernauts" Tell that to the TKM BH's that forced many jedi to remain in hiding
At the very beginning they were overpowered when there was permadeath, but over time they were balanced with the other classes.
Hehehe mandalorians make jedi go boom
SWG....the only game that was "improved" to death....
runescape tho
Most games*
I remember the first time I logged in SWG. It was my first real MMO I ever played. I was so thrilled. Back then, it was also one of the first game I played where character customization was so deep. Literally spent hours trying to recreate myself in the game by just looking at myself in a mirror or at pictures. Me and my friend bought the game together and did a lan party for our first time. Didn't take us long to be sent to Tatooine. And man, were we confused! ended up getting lost in this world that was larger than any frikking game that ever existed yet. We kept walking in the mountains, not sure of what we were doing and just making sure we stick together to protect one another.
Then out of nowhere, some guy passed by, stopped and asked if we needed help. Yay! After telling them we were noobs (I guess our starter gear gave us away), he guided us back to the nearest city (think it was Mos Eisly), and started showing us the ropes of the games, helped us with some better gear, showed us how to do terminal missions, and even suggested we could join his guild, and be invited to live in their player owned city!
This was the start of the best social gaming experience I have yet to be part of again. Yes the game had it's many flaws. But no other game as ever forced me in a good way to socialize with people. I literally felt SWG was my home away from home. Even to the point where most people were logging in and off from their home, so that when you logged in the morning, you would see other early birds login in, almost giving you a feel of crossing path with your neighbor before going to "work", often more than not, leading to asking what that person was off to and if we could help each other.
The health injuries and buffs, while I admit being a bit annoying, DID force you to go to social hubs where you had nothing else to do but to interact with other players. You literally had to talk to a medic or a dancer for heals and buffs! The whole economy was also amazing. Everything was player made, and everything had a quality to it depending on the materials and skills of the crafter ,meaning over time, crafters and vendor would literally become famous by just being reliable business people. It's the only MMO as far as I know where you could play the entire game and have a blast without ever needing to fire a single shot. you could be a politician for crying out loud! I remember this woman in our guild that had played the game for over a year without even knowing HOW to actually use a gun! All she did was dancing and being a musician, and she had a blast, cause it gave her people to talk to all day long.
This is where the real strength in SWG was. Not in the game combat, or quests, or what not, but in the social. Nowadays, you can play most online games without ever needing to talk to a single soul. Everything is made so that even in an MMO, you can just solo everything without ever needing to interact with anyone. No other game ever gave me that feeling of belonging with a group of people. to feel that bond with your guild mates and this need to just want to help out whenever you could.
Plus, what can beat the fun of having a building-sized Kimogila as your personnal pet? :P
dude battlewounds are a great way to give a non combat player a job and players a place to reunite, group for misions .. i think the mechanic was great
Not really, because players got cities and then got alts/bots to buff/entertain people for the buffs. The mechanic has to be more useful than just granting a buff, which is why it was exploited.
nerdSlayer in the beginning it wasn't exploited. 1 character per ACC. dancers and doctors actually talked to thier tipers. most games people find things to exploit.
but over time exploits are found. so while it might have had good intentions, it ultimately quite easily was take advantage up. The lead dev on the game never meant for buffs to be so powerful.
I was a doc so I liked buff lines. Top 3 buffs on starsider. Used only the best ingredients. Chasing resources and janta blood was fun for me. The buffs were needed for pve. Kraytt, lizards, rancor. In the early days. Overpowered for pvp, maybe. Every game has issues with pvp. Constantly nerfing or fixing classes. Money spenders buy the best armor. There are always issues. nge at the end put in cool stuff. I liked the houses and the new be build. Good video but everyone's experience was different. There were six many reasons for the game dieing. I would have been happy with 300k to 500k subs. Tweeks were needed but the game would have survived.
At 14:40 I think that you entirely miss the point of combat fatigue and wounds. Why do Entertainers and Doctors exist? To heal combat fatigue and wounds (and buff). SWG was built on the fact that you don't need to be a combat profession to play the game and have fun, and everyone relies on each other. Completely player-driven.
I think you missed the point clearly explained in the video...which is that these positions were automated. Cool concepts, not the best execution.
@nerdSlayerstudioss At that point of the video you state it’s a bad game-mechanic. I’m simply responding to that statement. Maybe it could have been executed better, but battle-fatigue and wounds are not inherently the “problem” of the AFKing you refer to. I wonder what could have been done differently to incentivize non-combat players to be ATK…
I played on Sun Runner. as a jedi at first after the SOE capture. I loved the game, and met so many good friends that I wish I still knew today.
I miss them all dearly.
As someone who experienced the NGE first as a later player (via free trial in it's final year), then went back to the pre-cu via the SWGMU, I prefer pre-cu. The only thing it lacks is the content and stories as you say. But the system is superior.
Currently playing on EIF (Empire in Flames) which is making improvements to the original game, some of the downfalls you spoke about the Pre-Cu. The server has many RPer focused but is also great for PVPers (as we have a new PVP system known as GCW, which revolves around taking over other planets) and those who want to play pre-cu SWG but with an improved system, making SWG even more into what it was loved for. The class system etc, making more variety. Worth checking out for anyone interested.
Fun fact: J. Allen Brack who was exec near the end just got shit canned from Blizzard
This game was my favorite. I was there since about 6 months from the beginning.
I stayed on until CU hit. Man those were good times, Pre-CU that is. I went back on to try NGE years later but was not on for long at all.
The problem with your defence of post NGE is that it can be summarised by "too little, too late." Yes, it added loads more stuff, yes, it improved, but by the time this all happened, players had so little faith in SoE that weekly polls on when SWG would die would show up in the forums, and pages of threads were dedicated to organising which game everyone would move to next.
i was a beta tester of the game and let me tell you the game was not ready to launch when it did. it was plagued with bugs, glitches, and totally unbalanced. i ever emailed the devs directly saying that but my responses fell on deaf ears
I feel your pain. Tried to save Mighty Number 9 myself... and people know all too well that a single tester's voice didn't save the princess in both our cases. RiP gaming industry. :P
This game died trying to copy WoW other then doing it's own thing. But that is only the main reason.
not really, even with a WoW similar combat, the game was still very unique, the main reason it died was because of licensing but it still had a really strong player base, people just didn't give 2011 NGE a try.
DJ Serpent face it most of the existing customers *liked* the sandbox nature, causing a mass alienation of the pre-NGE players. Furthermore, by copying WoW it was while the base was still quite novel it meant it had to compete directly with WoW and most people only have time to play a single MMORPG at a time.
Areanyusernamesleft ehh? SWG was still sandbox the only thing they changed was the combat system lol. WoW = / = NGE SWG
DJ Serpent it wasn't during the initial rollout of the NGE! :p I was actually willing to give the CU a chance and thought on balance it could have been made to work, although as stated in the video it never got a chance before players were blindsided by a complete shift in far more than just the combat mechanics.
Edit: Oh and even after they added back some of the crafting, etc... it was still fair closer to a theme park than a sandbox.
Areanyusernamesleft they added everything back, including spices, and added so much more content lol, I am currently waiting for ProjectSWG to finish, 2011 NGE was pretty hype.
One of the takeaways from SWG for me, as someone who played for its entire run, and as someone who has played a large portion of the available MMOs over the years, is it was refreshing for me and many others because of its complexity. Many developers seem to think simplicity is what all players want, but there is definitely a niche that enjoys a much deeper experience than that offered by the likes of WoW and post-NGE SWG. I worry that the failure of SWG taught developers the false lesson that it was too complex and too ambitious to succeed.
Well wow actually took some dedication and skill too before the developers listened to the casuals 🤷♂️
But the casuals loved seeing someone in rare gear they couldn't get and you'd have twenty casuals following you around when you got a new weapon plus they could do all their RPing and stuff that they like and it didn't hurt anyone...
Very good video about a game and topic that meant a lot to me. I will disagree on one point, though. NGE did kill the game. it was the final straw and proof when they sold an expansion and didn't tell you the game you were playing would be completely changed without community input. they had slowly stopped listening to it's community and ended with a massive deception. I put up with all the flaws including no content and gave them ample time and my sub for years in hopes of improving the game I chose to play but, unfortunately, they made the wrong decision in the direction to go with it. ... maybe, they were aware and that's why the changes were kept a secret. Sometimes the boss just won't listen even when you try to warm them.
nerdSlayer This is my favorite SWG related video on TH-cam. You hit SO many really good points that other videos didn't elaborate much on. NGE eventually introduced great content and didn't solely kill the game. All the profs compressed down to 9 did suck tho. Like you said, it was "mismanagement" in every sense of the word. Your video is helping to inspire an upcoming video that I'll be making. I've been hesitant to do it for a while. I'll definitely be referring your video since I'll be focusing on personal experience of 4 years playing SWG. Thanks much, sir! You're brilliant! Damn I miss the old SWG community so much. See you soon, SWG Legends!
-Wesker Doodle, Sunrunner server, 2005-2009. TRM, J-E, StWr, and HA guilds.
A fantastic video on this classic MMO. Great Work!
NGE did kill the game, There was no cross-server auction house so don't understand where you got that idea or how you think the NGE saved crafters. The NGE or CU removed condition from items thus killing the whole economy of the game, the only time traders were viable after the NGE was with each content patch for about 5 minutes to build whatever the patch added then fell back into redundancy. Despite all the GREAT content we got after the NGE the population was still in complete decline, not to mention what the NGE did to guilds. Are you sure you even played SWG?
and the respecs! constantly changing to FOTM. Julio torres fucked the game.
Auction house changes came before NGE, but try again telling me I didn't play the game :).
Liam Morris Julio Torres didn't fuck up the game. He was the assistant LA producer in Pre-CU. apparently he liked the dancer class which was a funny/joke class (yet innovative) apparently from the creator, Raph Koster. Someone at the very top of LA wanted the billions that WoW was making. Lucas ended selling Lucas Arts anyways for 4 billion dollars just imagine how much more he could have gotten for the franchise if they had a WoW caliber MMO.
The auction house change was the best thing done to that game! You didn't have to actually travel to the players house and access a specific vendor in order to buy that item. Not to mention, miss out on something with better stats because you weren't online while they were spamming their vendor location! Also as a seller, you didnt have to sit in town and spam your items\vendor so people would buy your stuff.
SWTOR is going down the same path.
the devs are taking a huge shit on the player base with their arrogance.
Yeah, I played SWG up until the CU ruined it... And I also played SWTOR up until it went F2P. I kept my TOR membership active for two more years, but never actually logged on. I finally canceled my sub in 2016.
Now I have about $10,000 put into Star Citizen.
$10,000...? That's when you need to realize you have an addiction. lol
Worse things to be addicted to in the world.
i enjoy SWTOR a hell of a lot and still sub to the game since i have a lot of fun (would i take SWG back over swtor? in a heartbeat! but i still love swtor)
You still sub?
For what? Endgame is over-done, the new content is just story (u can get that by subing once a year). Gearing is one big LOL since rng. PVP is well super-over-done.
Youre just wasting money dude.
nobody said pre cu swg was perfect. It still is the best part of the game. It had a good solid foundation. They needed to fix broken classes and bugs also give a better new player experience so they learn the game better. I dont see how swg was a complicated game. it wasnt. And pre cu combat wasnt boring. thats an opinion.
You should make an updated version of your old videos cause I would definitely love to see a death of the game of star wars galaxies in your newer style
So many good memories in my first MMO. I died to a butterfly outside Coronet the first time I played. I loved tweaking your "spec". My favorite was my BH who had doctor and fencer and some other stuff with dodge so I could hunt Jedi.