That’s No Moon

An extremely well written article.

What is not mentioned is how the release of the NGE came hard on the heels of the release of the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion, which many players had purchased in order to obtain new loot designed to enhance their professions, not knowing SOE knew full bloody well those professions would be removed from the game in 2 weeks and the loot items rendered useless. It was a bait-and-switch of monstrous proportions.

The current dev team is doing a LOT to earn back the respect and trust of the players, respect and trust frivolously frittered away by Torres and friends.

Brandon, I’d disagree.

Yes, it doesn’t delve into internal SOE politics and SWG’s design process, but save someone going public with those, that will remain the province of gossip and speculation among those who weren’t actually there. It does, however, cover the impact of the NGE on its players and the industry at large.

The emphasis was placed on Julio Torres justifiably – when the NGE went public, he was the person who argued for it publically and appeared in interviews in print and on television justifying it.

The only part of the article that bothered me was a small statement at the end about how WoW was launched when it was ready. I’ve never played Star Wars Galaxies, but I did start playing WoW about a year after it was launched. At that time, it was clearly not ready, even after a year post-launch. Blizzard built WoW the way they build all their games. They release and patch it and patch it and patch it until it becomes close to something that might be considered stable.

Am I just not remembering this? Weren’t there significant class changes even in the most recent of WoW patches? Is there a lot of history revision going on where WoW is concerned? And why might that be? Because of its phenomenal success? Because people want to believe that Blizzard succeeded because of initial merit of the game itself instead of (in my opinion, more likely) a user-base built up from previous games that simply buy up Blizzard’s games no matter what they are? I don’t ask this possibility because I dislike Blizzard or because I believe they did something wrong anywhere along the line.

Instead, I think that Blizzard’s huge fan base has been a carefully crafted asset that took a lot of hard work on their part, back in the days of Battle.Net when they weren’t making monthly income for their constant patching of Starcraft, Warcrafts, and Diablos. Certainly, there were some merits of the game itself as released, but in my experience even a year after launch, server problems, balance issues, the early introduction of the Honor System into an environment without any foundation for what to do with that Honor System and which lead to some difficult times for many players (like the neverending Southshore-Tarren Mill war) and even frustration for PVPers. All of this got worked out over time, but this was almost two years after launch when they were making drastic changes to the game.

I just find it odd that the reportage of World of Warcraft seems at odds with my memories and experience of the game during those early days (and I was by no means an early adopter). WoW may be a success story, but I don’t think that it is because Blizzard didn’t make mistakes. In my opinion, it’s because they have carefully built up a reputation as a developer that will change a game, guaranteed, until it works.

I don’t know anything about how Sony Online Entertainment works or their story or their reputation. But is it possible they haven’t crafted that kind of reputation pre-Star Wars Galaxies?

Anyone who knows more, I’d be ever so grateful for a history lesson and your thoughts on this subject, which I hope isn’t too far off the topic.

Love,

Hanna

@Hanna – The difference is that WoW was closer to ready at launch than other MMOs. There’s no such thing as perfectly ready for launch, and never has been. (And yes, there’s also a bit of revisionist history in there – the WoW servers were pretty unstable the first couple of months, mostly due to having far more players than anticipated. They probably could have done better.)

SOE’s reputation for buggy launches prior to SWG and the NGE was fairly bad, so that tends to color things as well. WoW’s major patches tend to have minor bugs that are fixed a few days later – about 50% of SOE’s major patches for EQ1 and SWG had game-breaking bugs that made large swatches of content (and sometimes whole classes) completely unplayable.

Saying WoW was “ready” at launch isn’t an exaggeration, but it’s applying a fairly low standard based on poor industry practice.

I had this big long rant re: Hanna’s WoW question, but realized about a page and a half in that I had strayed completely off the grid as it relates to the topic at hand. In succinct terms: yes, you’re mis-remembering…mostly.

If anything, the way Blizzard has actively (sometimes with a metric shitton of prodding) altered the game to suit to players instead of suiting their vision should be an example to all MMO teams not to automatically discount your customers for no better reason than they’re your customers. Like any rookie MMO team the WoW staff has made mistakes, but I’d put an honest tally of pro vs con against ANY game/team in industry.

SWG, on the other hand, is a perfect example of a team losing their way, in part, due to players being morons. I blame this on the fact that they were stupid enough to make a licensed property vs having complete creative freedom from canon and fan expectations. Raph and his group really did have some innovative ideas in the beginning. Cutting “use XP” after less than a week because a tiny (but loud) group of grind-happy fucktards bitched on the beta forums was a mistake. It’s a decision analogous to when rest XP was announced in WoW. The fan uproar was deafening – but they were dead wrong. In practice it’s one of most casual-friendly features of the game.

Making changes contrary to your vision because your players make COGENT POINTS supporting said change is good. Making changes to your vision because people are bitching about something on the forums and you don’t know why is bad. It’s a pretty easy test, actually.

I wonder – but not too often – if SWG is the reason I don’t play any MMOs anymore. Aside from some experiences with MUDs in the dim distant past, SWG was my first real encounter with the the more modern incarnations.

It was flawed, but interesting. I played CoH for a while in parallel, and tried WoW but they were unsatisfying – like a fizzy drink once it’s flat.

The NGE was.. Actually it was an interesting idea, but it pretty much killed the game for me – flushed away those who were ‘hanging on’ hoping for something better. The game play got boring after a two or three months.. I just had no real reason to keep playing.

A year or so playing SWG, a few months on CoH and a year on Eve. I view none of the upcoming (or recently launched) MMOs with any anticipation. It would be rash to blame this on the NGE, but equally – I don’t think its entirely unconnected.

I still like the idea of MMOs, I just feel increasingly cool to the reality I’ve seen.

My take on the article is over here: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/06/12/tired-of-hearing-about-the-nge/

I agree with Raph, although for a different reason. I’m tired of hearing about the NGE because all that is ever talked about is the development mistakes. The NGE broke the original game and tried to make it into a new one and players didn’t like it and left. Ok, we get it. That’s not news, it’s been said enough times, and in fact I do think it has been a lesson learned, both inside and outside of SOE.

To me, the lesson that hasn’t really been touched on enough is the communication errors made leading up to the NGE. He mentions it briefly in this article, but it’s glossed over. It shouldn’t be. In many ways, the NGE struggled just as much because of how it was communicated as it was implemented.

The expansion pack should have been the NGE. It should have had a full communication plan, lasting at least 4 to 6 months that focused on explaining the changes, taking feedback, and working to “sell” the change to the players and the press with a positive message that reinforces the reasons behind the changes. Almost none of that happened until it was far too late. If you as a developer don’t take the time to create the message, someone else will create it for you – and that’s never a good thing when you’re talking about a controversial change. You don’t want to spend your time post-launch writing reactionary posts to player concners, you want those messages written and posted well before the launch.

The truth is most players wouldn’t have quit over an announcement taking place 6 months before the launch. In my experience, people generally don’t leave games over announcements. They leave after the change takes place. That gives you six months to set expectations, create public evangelists, tweak your design, and do whatever you can to prepare people for the change. It can be done.

It’s not like no game has ever made a sweeping change to their world. UO did it with Trammel. Sure that wasn’t as big of a change, but Trammel had a dramatic affect on the way UO was played by virtually everyone involved, PK or not. The difference is, we communicated about it, we got people on board early, and we sold the idea. UO’s subscriber numbers didn’t decline at all when we announced Trammel. Even those who hated the idea continued to subscribe as they gave us feedback and waited for the final implementation. We worked with the players and the press to create a sense of excitement over the expansion, not a sense of betrayal. You can make the arguement that Trammel was a “good” change that most UO players wanted, and I won’t disagree, but the fact remains that without proper communication it coud have backfired terribly.

Again, I’m probably biased because of my background, but I really do believe that the NGE’s troubles had just as much to do with communication as it did development and not near enough time is spent talking about that. I wasn’t there when it all went down, so I can’t say the why’s or who’s (and wouldn’t waste time with that anyway), but somewhere a decision was made not to communicate this until the last minute and I think that, more than anything, backfired badly.

All MMOs are Sandboxes, it is simply a question of the quality and depth of the sand.

All those funny WoW videos, all the angst and drama, all the guild posturing and politics, all the forum whoring, whinging and campaigning – all sandbox aspects.

Shallow sand works well for certain game designs because it works will with leveling and raiding, deep sand works well for RP and explorers.

IMO SWG had relatively shallow sand when all is said and done – but it didn’t have much leveling and raiding, so it got a little perplexing what to do next for a lot of players. What was usually left was the social sandbox all MMOs have, but with slightly more advanced tools.

I’ll refrain from adding opinion or observations, as I did last year, when I filed my report from AGC: “The Market You Have,” quoting two people who were very much involved in the decision process behind NGE, one of whom has since departed SOE.

And the NGE takes another victim…

This isn’t the script you’re looking for.

And once again Abalieno butchers what was almost coherent use of an 800-point SAT word.

I think Hanna’s comments above are partially accurate, myself. I think people here are talking about two different issues.

Most people are talking about content, and WoW did do an exceptional job with that. The low-level quests were complete and bug-free for the most part. I didn’t run into obviously unfinished content, such as places that simply weren’t itemized, until I got into the much higher levels. WoW had an impressive array of content at the beginning, and that is where it always shined over other games. Especially at launch. This was WoW’s tremendous advantage.

But, what Hanna mentioned above was class content. As someone who played a Druid at launch, some classes at launch were hardly exceptional for the most part. Druids in particular had very little to define them as special compared to other classes, and while the developers said that Druids would be flexible, they became second-rate healers for the most part when I was playing in PUGs. It wasn’t until about 2 years later with some major revisions that Druids became much more flexible rather than simply being a mana battery for priests at the high end. Of course, the saga continues as people report that now Druids can be better tanks than Warriors and better healers compared to the many Priests who are shadow-specced. The wheel of fortune keeps turning as the eternal quest for something resembling “balance” is sought. However, I think I would agree that this is a lesser consideration in the overall quality of the game.

I also think Hanna brings up a good point, too, that a lot of Blizzard’s success came from what they did before WoW launched, too. Part of this was knowing how to polish game content exceptionally well, and that they had a lot of very rabid fans. Keep in mind that Diablo 2 had presales over 1 million units, which is mind-boggling for a PC title (and pretty exceptional for console titles, even). You can’t tell me that some of those D2 pre-orders weren’t people that simply love Blizzard games. (Hell, I bought the collector’s edition of D2 on launch day because I knew I’d probably enjoy the game tremendously even without playing a beta.) I don’t think this can be underestimated.

My thoughts.

Players of just about all classes from at-launch WoW have a bit of wonky built in to them. Paladin’s were completely changed less than a month before launch and we were able to provide very, VERY little testing and the only feedback we gave was shrugged off as “it’ll go away when you’re used to it” spam.

ALL classes were very shallow at launch. Warriors only became truly useful post-40 when the itemization skills equation ramped up to reasonable stuff. Most classes were very lucky to be good at one thing, let alone have flexibility.

Months ticked by, things changed. Some fast. Some slower. While some folks can (and will) argue, Blizzard has done 100x the job of any other MMO I’ve played to find a balance that works with “big picture” of the game as well as the desires of the players.

My pool of Karazhan raiders contains shadow and holy priests, protection and holy paladins, feral (tank and DPS), boomkin and resto druids, marksman and beastmaster hunters, assassination and combat rogues, fire and ice mages and destro and affliction locks. All have a place in raids and properly managed (that would be my job) I can put together min/max’d groups for various fights that give us the best possible chances for success without telling ANY player that they need to respec before they can go. That’s pretty damned great.

@Kylrathin: Crafting WAS great. Use XP, use XP, use XP, use XP, use XP, use XP, use XP. Once that was gone it was a grindy, fucked up mess. Point A -> Point B was all that mattered because nothing short of skill mastery was all that really mattered because no one wanted your gimpy Novice Architect garbage. Ultimately that’s why I left the game. Trades were 5x more complex than any other game but still demanded grinding so I just gave up as I didn’t WANT to grind. That pushed me into doing nothing but combat, which was about as deep as those plastic kiddie pools. SWG was the first game I actually uninstalled with more than a month left on my sub I was that sick of it…

I miss SWG

So many experts talking about SWG, SOE and the NGE from so many different angles but all of them, all of you, either only know half the story or else are only able to tell half the story – and each half is from their different position on the astrolabe.

Despite the passage of two years, no-one seems to know or, at least, no-one seems to have told, the complete story.

Here are questions that do not seem to have been answered conclusively yet;

1/. What was the nature of the SOE relationship with its licensing partner, LA?

2/. Who within that relationship originated the the idea of the NGE? Sold the idea? Rode herd on the idea until it launched?

3/. Who – if anyone – opposed the idea? Or changed the idea while it was in gestation?

4/. What was the calendar of the NGE? When was it originated? What resources were allocated to it? Which areas were neglected because capital and manpower were denied them?

5/. What was the fallout within SOE and LA? Who was promoted and who, faint hope, punished for NGE in action when its implications became clear?

I ask these questions not because I have any stake in SOE or in MMOGs or in the wider industry – I don’t – but simply because I once played the game, enjoyed it and am interested in what happened to it?