The theme for this week’s Escapist is gaming oopsies. I’ve got an article in it, with boobs!

The Breasts That Broke the Game

Halfway through 2006, a huge story went unnoticed by game journalists. Barely a cursory glance or raised eyebrow marked its passage. Early in May the Entertainment Software Rating Board quietly changed Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s rating from “T” to “M,” forcing a recall and re-labeling of the game, and costing Bethesda a fortune. The problem? Bethesda had nothing to do with it.

Much more interesting? A great loaded look by Allen Varney at one of the biggest debacles in MMOGdom: The SWG NGE.

As WoW barreled toward 5 million subscribers, SOE launched SWG’s Publish 25. The NGE replaced the combat system with a shooter-style twitch game, reduced the value of crafting and entertaining, and collapsed 34 professions into nine classes. Jedi Knight powers, once obtained only after torturous grinding, were now widely available. Creature Handlers and Bio-Engineers, previously stunted by the CU, vanished.

The launch, like the original game’s, went horribly: awful bugs, broken quests, lag. But these paled beside the main problem. For an unexpectedly huge number of players, the issue – the overriding issue that has burned in their heart down to, lo, this day and hour – was betrayal.

edit: After reading some comments by Raph over on his site, I went back and read to the end of Varney’s piece more carefully. He starts off fairly strong, but strays into the realm of fantasy. Smed’s apologized about a billion times for the NGE, for starters. Bad play, Varney.

edit2: And again, they still will not let it go. Sorry Jeff. “Flunky”? You should complain. I’ve got email addresses if you want em’.

The official patch notes for the Chapter publish are on the SWG site, and today would be a really great day to hop in. Not only do you get your Chapter gift, as well as the 30th anniversary poster, but the anniversary bash stuff at Nym’s is kicking off today. Good times. If you’re going to be on Starsider make sure and give Amakdes a ping.

I was on last night very briefly before I went to bed, and I have a few quick impressions to related:

• The prep materials they put out made it really easy to understand what do to. Sampling DNA, getting incubator materials, etc, all very straightforward.
• The Storyteller stuff is just as awesome as I’d hoped. As an old-school player I have a ton of money hanging around, and this now essentially means I can add ‘Star-Warsyness’ to the game in any old manner I see fit. As a wealthy fish, I plan on having Super Battle Droids guarding my home from now on. Beware!
• There are definite signs of life on the server. I didn’t make it to Eisely, which is (I assume) where everyone was last night, but even in Theed there were hints that there will be at least a short-term uptick in players online. One of the surest signs: I got really really bad rubberbanding working my way across town after resetting my expertise. Takes me right back to the old days … though I could have done without it.

If there are any Starsider crafters reading this … WTB incubator? PST? ;)

It’s so nice to be able to talk about good Galaxies news again. A bunch of things today:

• A State of the Game Address for this month, an exclusive over at SWG Warcry. Dolled out by Jake Neri (Producer, LEC) and Thomas Blair (Lead Designer, SOE), it talks over the Beast Mastery points again, and a few hints about things to come. “Combat will have new features, both PVE and PVP will be enhanced by the Beast Master, and groups will now have a new class of player that they can include and use to their advantage. We are looking forward to seeing the system grow over time and we will look for ways to leverage it later on in development. With Heroic Mobs being on the drawing board for sometime this year, perhaps we’ll even see some new creatures introduced to the game that we will bring into the system. As always, we’ll be watching our players to see just what we can do to make sure people are having a great time in-game.”
• As part of the 30th anniversary stuff, they’re doing in-game tie-ins with SWG. It’s also just about Galaxies’ fourth year anniversary (which means I’m getting oldish), and they’re rolling out the four-year veteran rewards. Excellent. “Nym is throwing a party and everyone is invited! Join the festivities at Nym’s Stronghold from May 23 to June 25. Dance the night away to the melodies of Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes band, socialize with friends, and browse the complimentary wares of Nym’s Anniversary Quartermaster. No party is complete without punch and cake, so visit the Quartermaster to take a swig of Lokkian Booster Blast, taste the sweet Anniversary Cake, set off gigantic fireworks, and more! The Quartermaster also offers a rare painting commissioned to mark this historic occasion. Hang this one-of-a-kind painting in your house to let everyone know that you attended the party of a lifetime. You can find Nym’s Anniversary Quartermaster in Nym’s Stronghold on Lok, the Restuss Starport on Rori, the Coronet Starport on Corellia, the Theed Starport on Naboo, and the Mos Eisley Starport on Tatooine. A unique badge will also be given to all players who attend Nym’s Anniversary Bash, so be sure to stop by the social event of the galaxy. ”
  
• Speaking of Beast Mastery, the state of the game letter links to a Comprehensive Guide on the new system. Nice work, KrackenOne.

At the SOE Gamer’s Day event in LA the week before last, I spoke with a couple of fascinating people. Getting to nerd it up with Scott Hartsman about the class balance of Inquisitors may be the most fun I’ve yet had covering a games media event.

John Blakely, head of the SOE-Austin development house, was onhand at the event and a nice enough guy to put up with my nattering questions about Star Wars Galaxies. It was, of course, all we had to talk about … he staunchly withstood the temptation to talk about DC Online. (Curse your Will Save, Blakely!)

Here are my notes from our talk, which I (for reasons I can’t comprehend) didn’t record:

• The Galaxies team has been stripped down to just about 20 people. Their aim is to be agile, flexible, and focused. IE: The whole group turns on a single project, attacks it, succeeds, and then moves on to something new as soon as they can.
• The folks that are there now are dedicated and passionate. They’ve learned a lot of lessons from the last two years, and all they want to do now is shut up and make the game.
• Despite my best efforts I couldn’t get any hints about what Chapter 7 will be about. John said that what they like to do is take some time every few months to do some ‘bug squashing’. Once Chapter 6 is stable on the live servers, they’re going to make some time to get on their list of outstanding problems. They essentially take the list of known issues, prioritize them (with input from the community), and then knock em off starting at the top and working down.
• We spent a goodly amount of time talking about the company’s relationship with LucasArts. He was reluctant to place blame with their group, but he did admit that SOE and the house that Skywalker built have occasionally had rough patches. His statement was that, if you look at the project’s history it’s possible to see where there were problems based on how the game was doing. Problems in SWG probably equated to problems between SOE and LucasArts.
• Mr. Blakely took pains to note that, while they have had problems in the past the relationship between the two companies is probably stronger than it has been in over a year. He also shared a bit about their process. Every year SOE-Austin meets with the folks at LucasArts to decide goals for the coming year. The tacke the queue of ideas they’ve built up over the previous 12 months, and use feedback from the community via boards, IMs, conversations, and player events to prioritize what needs to be done first.
• This year’s goals are exactly what has been said in public: no expansion this year, just lots of free content, making the game great for the players.
• Now that the profession expertise systems are all in place, they can start turning their attention to more ‘pure fun’ additions. He said to expect a lot more new content into the summer and fall.
• The one thing I could wrestle out of him is that … eventually … they are going to be expanding the Legacy quest series. They’d love to just be rolling out additions to the quest line all the time, but one quest is a not inconsiderable amount of effort.
• The problem is one of time. We talked at some length about the problems facing designers the simple act of adding a quest to the game. SWG was not designed to have quests added on a regular basis; SWG’s sandbox concept when the game launched is still working against them. As a result, the tools they’re using (to this day) are awkward and clumsy when you consider the amount of information they’d like to add for a given quest. It’s something they’re working on.
• When they work on systems in the future, they’re going to get a ‘big slice of the pie’ as they’ve done with the new version of creature handling going in with Chapter 6. If they spend time working on new systems, they essentially want as many players as possible to have access to those systems. Mr. Blakely didn’t rule out the possibility of more expertise systems, like creature handling, in the future.

Thanks again to Mr. John Blakely for his time at what was certainly a busy event.

As I’ve been playing Star Wars Galaxies over the last few days, the back of my mind has been cataloging what is still wrong with the game. I think it’s fairly obvious that the game is still deeply flawed. There’s still a lot of bad blood in the player base, and past/non-players see it as a kind of a joke. With personal positive experiences in the game now at the forefront of my mind, I see Galaxies as being in kind of a special moment right now. The game is finally stabilizing under the team, and they can start to move out of ‘fix-it’ mode. Tweaks to the combat system aside, it seems like they’re finally starting to move ahead with content in the game. A lot of onlookers (possibly even LucasArts) thinks that the game has already failed.

As a result, I’m quite optimistic. Weird, I know, but here’s the deal: what do they have to lose at this point? I think Galaxies needs a number of incremental improvements across many elements of the game both to satisfy current players and lure back curious old ones. Far from the shlock that McQuaid is offering about Vanguard, I think the view the SWG team should take at this point is one of long-term improvements. Who cares if no one comes back? Who cares if the game succeeds in the long run? Right here and now, they have a chance to work on a game that is once again filled with potential.

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Some weeks, I wonder what the hell it is about these damn games that makes me like them so much. Some weeks I just want to turn off my PC, sit in the living room, and play Halo. Then, there are weekends like this past. I had fully intended to write more about Sigil’s Future or the formation of Colony Studios (which sounds fascinating) … but instead I just played a game.

I played one Massive game essentially from the moment that I got off of work on Friday until I went to bed on Monday night. This past weekend, a Massive game reminded me quite painfully how powerful these things can be if the right combination of circumstances present themselves. For the first time in a long time, a MMOG picked me up by the lapels and shook me like a dog with a chew toy. It was freaking awesome. Last week also marked the first week that Netflix decided to gift me with their Watch Now feature, and I spent the time whiling away the hours questing and watching Red Dwarf via streaming video.

I’ve been studiously avoiding saying the name of the game, and I’ll admit it: there’s a certain element of shame here. I couldn’t even tell you if I think the game is any good today, but I have to cop to playing something like 30 hours worth in the last three or four days. It’s not LOTRO; my Minstrel is still sitting at the edge of the Shire waiting for me to move on to new lands. It’s not WoW; my account is actually cancelled at the moment. It’s not EQ2; I really only play that on Wednesdays other than the occasional crafting fit. No, it was my achilles heel acting up again: This weekend I put back on my fish suit and played a ton of Star Wars Galaxies.

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Do you read Ole’ Bald Angus? I know you do.

Just in case you don’t, though, I wanted to point out his series of recent posts on SWG. Because … oh, the ‘day’.

• Classic – I made me a wanna-be-boba ’cause that’s “okay to play” for some reason in this Star Wars Game Where Everybody Hates Jedi But Still Plays One heh. Yah I don’t wanna upset all the jedi standing around the star port trying to sell me stuff by making another jedi but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna be a moisture farmer just to make those self-hating dweebs less unhappy ahaha.
• Just Blame Raph – I always blame Raph for everything, y’know, just ’cause I saw another guy doing it a long time ago and it looked like it was really fun (AHAHA), but sometimes I think he actually deserves it.
• The Dramamine Twitch - And a lot of space guys can’t stand the ground game, I mean, I personally thank the gods there are dudes willing to waddle through all that eyebrow lag in their underpants to dig in the mud and harvest resources and build us ships and ship parts, ’cause that’s the frickin’ tortures of the damned in my book, those ship-builder guys are freakin’ heroic heh.
• Beautiful Snowflakes – Pets are coming back to SWG, complete with a bunch of machines and stuff I’m never gonna figure out heh. And they’re adding some kinda player-created-quest thingie, and even in the worst-case-scenario that’s still interesting on a purely scientific-curiosity level.
• Player Vs. Everything – Yah, I called it Players Versus Houses, PvH. And I thought it’d be the perfect moment to unfurl the firepower of a fully armed and operational AT-AT, towering over the smoldering ruins of all that urban blight like an ancient god of lawnmowers.
• SWG Guid To the Dark Side – Yah, and so you get stuck in a way where you can’t proceed through the rest of the Legacy Quest, and you can’t delete the quest and restart it or fix it by logging out or anything, and apparently the CSRs can’t help you with it, and its been that way since December of last year (it was broke in other ways before that heh). And the solution is to delete your character and start over and make sure you are at least level ten before you leave the tutorial, you dummass newb.
• Fresh Off the SWG Forums – Nostalgia-laiden videos for old players. Give it a watch.