ZombieGenesis said:
As I've said before, Star Wars isn't a popular brand any more in gaming- its actually pretty infamous by this point. Best choice they made was to call it 'Old Republic' which of course reminds us of the only good star wars games. And not the LAST MMO that Star Wars tried...
Sadly though, for reasons we all know, they aren't going to hit big numbers. Sorry EA, sorry Bioware, but you'll have to settle for a bit of loss with this one.
Well, I'm going to have to disagree here to some extent. For all the criticism they have gotten the "Force Unleashed" games *DID* manage to get a bit of a following, Starkiller became iconic enough to be recognized at cons, and have people cosplaying as him and such. While it wasn't an "OMG" success, it was by no means a failure either.
The "Old Republic" games were of course excellent, but don't forget the "Battlefront" series had a decent following. "Lego Star Wars" was enough of a success to see the idea spun into a variety of lego titles.
I think it's just that there are a lot of bad games that stick in people's minds.
Star Wars "Galaxies" was also hardly a failure. It did a lot wrong, but it's run for a long time and seen numerous expansions. It's also an MMO that nearly everyone in the MMO community seems to have played in one of it's iterations, which is why so many people can use it for examples. Saying that it didn't hold interest, and that there have been better games would be fair, but calling it a disaster is going too far.
It's also noteworthy that "Galaxies" can be considered a part of gaming meta-history, if for no other reason because it saw the first real *successful* MMORPG protest march. Since then safeguards have been put into a lot of games (along with draconian GMing policies when pushed) to prevent similar things. During it's heyday when it had a lot of players, there was an issue with Wookies not being able to use armor, in the original set of mechanics armor pretty much WAS your combat since your abillity to take damage was all important, if you weren't armored you got shredded like tissue paper. All these big, strong, wookies walking around naked like in the movies basically meant that they were unplayable even for fans because they would die if sneezed on by just about any monster of note. The player base pretty much conspired to all congregate at the same shuttle port on all servers and spam to bring them down and get attention. It actually worked, and shortly thereafter we DID see
the armor designed and put into the game.
It was a bigger deal at the time, sort of like the first real massive ISK heists in "EVE Online", however for good or ill it had an influance on how MMOs are managed, and is one of the few cases where we've seen something akin to player solidarity on an issue
The very fact that most serious online gamers at least know what "Holocron Grinding" is and what it refers to sort of shows that SWG wasn't that much of a failure. It just didn't inspire long term love from a huge group of people, and wound up poisoning it's own player base due to going through a total game overhaul that was worse than the broken system it was replacing (and SoE just did not seem to get that).
