I\’e2\’80\’99d have loved to have the full-blown vehicles you describe. But please remember when we came out. Nobody had those vehicles, from a technical point of view, until Planetside.

And since Planetside came out slightly before SWG, and much longer before SWG vehicles, that excuse is insufficient. A better excuse would be “full-blown vehicles would have been nice but they didn’t make the feature cut” or some such.

Aside from that, SWG failed because Sony only shipped half a game into a no-longer-new market, and that half of a game was buggy, unbalanced, and largely devoid of content. That happened at least partly because the devs, the suits, the beancounters or all of the above fell for the old line that PvP = player content = less need for all that expensive hand-tuned story/quest/content stuff. Contrast that with WoW which released in a polished state, with few critical bugs, reasonably well-balanced gameplay, and oodles of content virtually all of it bug-free and playable from beginning to end.

I really can’t overstate just how important that last sentence is to the success of any software product, but especially one where the financial balance sheet is dependent on customers paying over time. Unlike most software, the MMO customer isn’t really paying for the product up front, they are just making a down payment. And they have the option of cancelling their subscription and stopping all further payments at any time. If you want to attract and keep a customer long term (ie, keep him long enough to pay the development and hosting and marketing costs and maybe even make some profit from him), you must deliver working software. Every time your software product fails to do something the customer expects of it, or worse yet outright crashes or causes the customer to suffer a direct loss of his invested “work”, you give that customer another reason to reconsider if it is worth investing more of his time and money in your product.

So the moral of the story is, don’t ship buggy, incomplete software. If you aren’t going to make your deadline, and you can’t delay release, then you have to be ruthless with the feature set triage hatchet, making early and honest (and conservative!) evaluations of what you actually CAN get completely implemented by your ship date, and strip everything else out. If by some miracle you finish the stripped down product early, then you can start adding in the other features. And strangely enough, the more stable, well-designed and well-polished the core product is, the EASIER it is to add all the other bells and whistles to it!

And now, back to the real world where only Blizzard actually lives up to the motto of not shipping until it’s done, and everyone else whines about how unfair it is that Blizzard has raised the bar so high by actually delivering something that was completed before it was released.

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Star Wars was a bad license for a MMO.

Seconded. If you want a good licence, you’d need:

a) a story that adapts well to having thousands of people doing little things rather than a three people doing big things.
b) a pre-existing fanbase comprised largely of gamers instead of a pre-existing fanbase comprised largely of movie-goers.
c) hot elf-chicks.

I’d have loved to have the full-blown vehicles you describe. But please remember when we came out. Nobody had those vehicles, from a technical point of view, until Planetside. That’s why instead we made the AT-STs hirelings, because we still wanted that sense of warfare.

You are correct. Player cities and mounts were introduced in the same publish. Vehicles followed in another publish.

I also agree with your assessment of the setting, 5 years after RotJ would have made more sense as you said. But if I play devil’s advocate, it means you are tying the game to the original trilogy only, making it even harder to tie to the new trilogy. While you and I may not care, LucasArts did, since they wanted to leverage marketing opportunities around the new movies and the other games based on the prequels.

Seen as nothing more than speedy transport, I suppose player cities are more important. But that always seemed silly to me.

And vehicles may have come first but I seem to think mounts were first, then cities, then single-slot vehicles. Could be wrong about that, though.

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Devs do stuff that they know best. Raph just brought in his pet UO concepts and wrapped SW:G around them. Next up is Vanguard, Brad’s idea of hardcore EQ1 without the casual whiners.

In the end, neither one actually made the cut for launch, and vehicles went in before cities, as I recall.

I didn’t get a choice on the timeframe.

Perhaps most importantly though is the timeframe flies in the face of what seems like what is important to Raph–the players have a sandbox they can’t change. You have a game about a war that nobody can win nor can they even significantly change the balance of power. Even DAOC had more for its factions to fight over than the Rebels and Imperials did. SWG was basically “go build something but don’t change anything”.

That’s not to diminish other screwed up stuff in SWG, like crafting and combat. But the fact that Raph stayed on for one of his babies, player cities, just goes to show why he was such a poor fit for the project. Who the hell wants to be given the chance to enter the world of Star Wars and says to themselves: “you know, what I’d really like to do is go build a town–get involved with the bureaucracy and all that”. Player cities didn’t belong anywhere near the top of the priority list but that’s what we got. Raph and friends were making a game (or a world or whatever) but it wasn’t a Star Wars game and, creatively, didn’t draw from the license at all.

If it had, there probably would have been a way to get around other than walking at launch. (Because walking was a big part of Star Wars, just like watching dancers was a big part of the healing process.)

Let’s see some *Mush gameplay!