It was more casual and more broad appeal than what the license could even handle, in some ways, and many individual features that SWG had today power entire blockbuster giant companies in the social game space (hey look, farming where you come back the next day… where have I seen that before…?). It was built with some rickety tech - and some that won awards and led to patents ( 1, 2, 3).
I’ve been told it had a qualitatively different and more powerful community than other games, by objective metrics. In the end, the game was quite profitable, it ran for eight years, and it entertained a few million people. I would have really taken our time and polished combat right so we never had to do the NGE. Nothing else even comes close to what we did there. I think we created one of the most unique and amazing games ever created in the MMO space. I would have given the game another year to develop and really polish it quite a bit. I would have made sure the ground and space games were launched all at once. Here’s what I would have done differently. My postmortem would be much like Smedley’s: They’ll cite the NGE, of course, and they’ll point out that it fared poorly against the juggernaut of WoW, despite the power of the license. It’s too big a dream, I suspect, and games like Arche Age, which isn’t out yet, Wurm which is, and of course EVE, show that there is a passionate audience for the sort of experience that lets you step into a more fully realized world and live there.
Instead, I’ll note that sandbox, worldy MMOs do not seem to have gone away despite the economic currents that run against them. I am sure there are plenty of people who are prepared to mourn I went through my own emotional arc of moving on years and years ago at this point, so I am not going to dwell on it.
The short form, though, is that the contract with LucasArts is up. You can read an interview with John Smedley about it on Massively. Star Wars Galaxies, a game I was the creative director on, is shutting down.
0 kommentar(er)
