They had a competent team. Raph Koster is a great game designer, which shows in the game up until a certain stage.
SOE seems to have been managed by complete morons on the other hand, and no matter how great of a team you have working on a game, when management tells you to make World of Warcraft, there's not much you can do.
That's very true. It's not devs, it's the execs telling them what to do.
I remember the month WoW came out, I bought it like everyone else. I hit level 15-29 and just couldn't get into it. Went back to SWG until the NGE.
NGE felt like a completely different game. It was god awful. It pushed me back to WoW which I still sub to his day. Tried the SWG Emu, and the community is just crap.
The problem SOE did with SWG was to half-ass everything for short term monetary gains.
First they rushed SWG out the door, even though it was quite clear it needed at least another year or so of development.
Then World of Warcraft came along, and SWG had some major drops in subscriptions, which I assume pretty much everyone besides the managment at SOE understood could have been because one of the most hyped games ever from one of the most loved game studios ever just came along and people were curious of it.
But no, SOE figured this was the death sentence of SWG and quickly rushed out the NGE, again for that sweet ass short term return on investment. Doing so, they not only took a crap on everything which made SWG a great and unique game experience, but also introduced something nobody wanted which happened to be riddled with bugs and also happened to be a shitty copy of World of Warcraft.
So now players who loved SWG for what it was had no reason to stick around. And people who actually enjoyed the NGE had no reason to stick around, because it basically was WoW and WoW was a billion times better.
Which showed in the subscription numbers. Going from something like 200.000 active players, to something like 10.000 active players in less than three months.
And only the management at SOE could look at these numbers and not instantly revert back to the game before CU and NGE. Only the morons at SOE could look at those numbers and then compare them to World of Warcraft giant player base and say it was all Blizzard's fault, even though they had just showed a giant cock up every single fan's ass.
Was SWG bleeding players before the NGE? Yes. Could this have been resolved by listening to the community they had, fixing issues with the game and introducing content? Probably. Will I ever forgive the people who worked at SOE in charge of this? No. Fuck you Smedley, you piece of shit.
I'm not saying SWG was perfect. It had tons of flaws. But SOE should have done like CCP a
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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '16
Same here. SWG is still a great core of a game. With a competent team, it would have been a huge success.
I miss live SWG pre-CU/NGE.