SWG could have been great and one like it still could be.

[Badlander]

Now i am not saying this would be a Star Wars game but.... If someone made a sandbox game like SWG with...

 

1- SWG style pre CU crafting.

 

2- A better game engine than SWG had.

 

3- Full open worlds like SWG had.

 

4- Player housing and player Cities like SWG.

 

5- Pre CU SWG style combat ( with better balance ).

 

6- Player driven economy like SWG.

 

I think you all get my point. A pre CU SWG with a better gaming engine and updated graphics would rock.

Would not even have to be Star Wars. No instances that require 4 hours of raiding just tough, nasty get the guild together world bosses that drop CRAFTING stuff/mats not loot.

That way player driven crafting economy would be the way to gear up.

 

Add in great world pvp like SWG had where guilds and players could put up bases and cities which others could attack and you could attack theirs.

 

Just so many things you could do for a well built sandbox game. I really am sad to see

gaming companies have gone so much with themepark type games.

Edited February 1, 2012 by Badlander

[Wolfninjajedi]

Your missing the part where players QQ about how bored they are because theres no content for them to do. Then when they realize they need to make their own content, they are gonna QQ even more. Oh...sure some might be ok with it, but some won't be and instead want things given to them because they have nothing else to do. Really though Sandbox mmos are like Themepark, the only difference is....with a sandbox theres more room to do stuff.

 

At the end of it all, no matter what you are going to be doing the same things over and over again eventually. Oh sure you may go from combat and then right into crafting, but the point is...you will eventually notice that it gets stale and you realize that your doing the same things over and over again. Its more like sandbox mmos makes the illusion that you are doing all this stuff, but reality will catch up to you and you will realize that you will be doing the same things over...and over and over again.

[BrandonSM]

I hated SWG

 

Crafting was Ok.

 

SWG had no story, no one ever did quests. And people just hanged out in their player cities spending hours and hours customizing it. The player Driven Economy is probably the highest aspect of SWG.

 

Stated by so many before me, SWG has Nostalgia.

 

Most have played SWG and most thought it was OK but after it was closed it suddenly became the most Overrated SW game.

[Jmannseelo]

I prefer SWTOR as it is to SWG by leaps and bounds, and TOR will only get better from here. I'm not opposed to borrowing a few elements here and there, but I don't miss SWG at all and I'm happy to leave it as a distant memory.

[FatherOblivion]

Agreed. I would like the skill system that they had in place to be present as well. Not necessarily exactly those skills, of course, but not a class and level system.

[SeanC]

With all those "great" features, most of it would be ingored by most of the playerbase crying on how there is no content, and nothing to do. Edited February 2, 2012 by SeanC

[Foxfirega]

It's worth noting that the only other sci-fi sandbox game (that unless CCP continues to be retarded won't be dying off anytime soon) still has an endgame.

 

Level 4 missions, unexplored systems (I quit just as that was being added in, I forget the exact term), and null-sec.

 

Moral of the story: Even a sandbox needs an endgame. Even if that endgame is almost entirely 'dungeon' grinding and PVP.

 

One of the more common complaints I've heard about SWG is... it very little real content.

 

I agree a sandbox game could work, but maybe first we should see how some other things work out (Guild Wars 2's 'open quest' system, Wildstar's tri-levelling system) before we go back to the drawing board and learn from the market instead of just shamelessly piking off one game that was admittedly sort of a flop (all told - the only people I ever hear saying that SWG wasn't a flop are dedicated fans, and therefore I have only two biased sections of opinion to base my data upon, necessitating analysis purely by volume).

 

If we must pike off the work of others, let us be proper pikers about it and do so properly.

[JacenHallis]

I'll just remark on your bulletpoints below:

 

1- SWG style pre CU crafting.

There are many types of crafters. There are people who don't want to mess with it, people who want to devote every waking moment to it, and people in various stages in between. I had one and a half crafters in SWG. My smuggler crafted spices for use by people in the guild, and I had another full-time crafter. SWG crafting was a full-time job. It favored people who could log into the game at any time, day or night, as those were the people who profited most from resource shifts. Those people are few and far between.

 

Just FYI, this crafting was the same after the CU, too. It was the NGE that changed it. The CU actually made the lower-level items desirable, as not everyone wanted T-21s and composite armor anymore.

 

 

3- Full open worlds like SWG had.

This is great, but to what end? Are they empty? Full of bad guys to kill? Empty space is wasted space, if that space has no real purpose. It should also be mentioned that SWG's worlds were largely flat, boring squares of land, with very little terrain to speak of. This was by necessity, as those worlds had to support player housing. More on that below.

 

 

4- Player housing and player Cities like SWG.

Out of all the games I've played with player housing, SWG's was by far the worst implementation of the idea. I can't count the number of times I was speeding along Tatooine/Corellia/Naboo/Lok/whatever and suddenly ran into a group of buildings. I also can't count the number of times that I accepted quests only to go to the location and have the lair spawn inside someone's home.

 

I prefer EQ2's implementation of player housing. Everyone lives in the city, and the doors go into private instances, which the PCs owned/rented. Combine this with LOTRO's neighborhood design (but not their "slotted" house decoration system), and you have the perfect player housing system.

 

Don't even get me started on the kilometers of extractors on Dathomir that served as advertisements for player merchants and crafters. It was obnoxious, to say the least.

 

 

5- Pre CU SWG style combat ( with better balance ).

Before the CU, SWG played horribly. The ability queue was the major contributor here. Chain up 20 abilities in the queue and let them go off one after another. There were no tactics or strategies. Just chaining the most powerful attack you had. And even then, if you were in PvP, you needed to be a Rifleman, bounty hunter or combat medic. CMs shut down entire armies of people with their poison/disease grenades that they could throw farther than anyone could shoot a gun, and riflemen and BHs could target mind, which was the only HAM pool not healable in the field (you had to go to a cantina to heal it). Since you said "better balance" I won't harp on it too much, but it goes to show what the purpose of the CU was:

 

The CU brought about a more balanced combat experience. Pistols, carbines and rifles were nearly equally useful. CMs found their diseases and poisons weren't quite so immediately destructive as they were before. Some skill sets favored different armor types, which made people want to use armor other than composite (my favorite was Mabari armorweave). That said, the game still played like crap.

 

After the NGE hit ... well, the game played even more like crap, and people quit in droves. I stuck around for a while after that, but eventually, I just couldn't stick around. I stayed for my guild in spite of the game--not because of it. And that mentality kills MMOs.

 

 

6- Player driven economy like SWG.

This can be both good and bad. it should be noted, though, that all MMO economies are player-driven, unless the players literally cannot trade with each other. Players determine worth of items, even if they don't make them.

 

 

"I think you all get my point. A pre CU SWG with a better gaming engine and updated graphics would rock."

It would, like SWG before it, be a niche game. However, is it a bad niche game like SWG was? Or is it a good niche game like Eve is? One can be profitable, and the other would not.

 

 

"No instances that require 4 hours of raiding just tough, nasty get the guild together world bosses that drop CRAFTING stuff/mats not loot."

Never did DWB, did you? If you were just moving through it to experience the bunker itself, it didn't take too long. A couple of hours, maybe. But if you actually wanted Mandalorian armor, it could take days of constant grinding to get the pieces your crafter friends would need to make the stuff. And, unlike a raid in WoW, EQ, EQ2 or TOR, where you can strategically deal with things like incoming damage, healing and the like, mobs were just big bags of hit points with no real threat mechanic other than a simple hate list made by damage, and most people went into the Bunker expecting to die numerous times. We carried extra sets of armor so that we'd have some to change into when the durability of our armor got too low from so many deaths and so much incoming damage. That's not a game many people want to play. I certainly don't.

 

 

"Add in great world pvp like SWG had where guilds and players could put up bases and cities which others could attack and you could attack theirs."

Again, this really comes in with whether or not you found the game fun. There was a certain charm in a base assault. There was a certain fun to be had in PvP once the skill sets were roughly balanced in the CU. But, I always viewed buying and setting up bases as wasting money. It was like I was just setting out a few million credits that I felt like I didn't need anymore.

 

 

Just so many things you could do for a well built sandbox game. I really am sad to see gaming companies have gone so much with themepark type games.

My personal line of thought is that I'm not paying $15 a month so I can make up stuff to do. If I want to just fart around in a virtual space, I can go to a MUCK for free.

 

I certainly think there is room for sandbox gaming in the MMO space, however. I'm just not sure SWG is the inspiration to which one should look. A game that plans to be successful for a long period of time like EQ and WoW before it needs to have a balance of theme park and sandbox elements. Too much theme park, and your player base gets bored after they devour al the content. Too much sandbox, and your playerbase gets bored because there's just nothing to do in the first place.

 

I think a game like TOR, since we're on the TOR forums, is a great base for a game that wants to be the next EQ or WoW. But, the developers need to start supporting the sandbox side of the equation for balance. We need more choices when leveling (like, for example, choosing Taris OR Nar Shaddaa, Tatooine OR Alderaan, and so on). There need to be places for the roleplayers to hang out (and no, I don't mean like Goldshire). There just needs to be more to the game than ... the game. It's a solid game, but it could be more.

Edited February 2, 2012 by JacenHallis

[Cegenaus]

Now i am not saying this would be a Star Wars game but.... If someone made a sandbox game like SWG with...

 

1- SWG style pre CU crafting.

 

2- A better game engine than SWG had.

 

3- Full open worlds like SWG had.

 

4- Player housing and player Cities like SWG.

 

5- Pre CU SWG style combat ( with better balance ).

 

6- Player driven economy like SWG.

 

I think you all get my point. A pre CU SWG with a better gaming engine and updated graphics would rock.

Would not even have to be Star Wars. No instances that require 4 hours of raiding just tough, nasty get the guild together world bosses that drop CRAFTING stuff/mats not loot.

That way player driven crafting economy would be the way to gear up.

 

Add in great world pvp like SWG had where guilds and players could put up bases and cities which others could attack and you could attack theirs.

 

Just so many things you could do for a well built sandbox game. I really am sad to see

gaming companies have gone so much with themepark type games.

 

/signed

[AshenK]

I'm not going to list everything but well here's the thing the Pre-CU game? It didn't work. If it did chances are we would have had people trying to copy that rather then trying to copy the EQ's and WoW's of the MMO world.

 

Yes the crafting was nice, but it was the only real way to get good gear and well I can't see today's raider being happy if they got something from a raid and had to take it to a crafter to get it made. The open world? Everyone talks about this and really it wasn't 'open' it was just a big map that yes did have areas that didn't look the same but most of the area's looked the same. Player Housing? It wasn't the worst idea however that open world you talked about? It got ugly when you had 90 Player Cities on a planet or housing dotting the land. It was even more ugly on Ultima Online.

 

The combat? There was no real way to balance it and wanna know why? Alpha Class Jedi. That would have always hung over SWG's head, and after removing Perma-Death from it well look at what happened. You had more and more Jedi coming into the world, you had PvP in the end taken over by Jedi, and with more of the game being an Alpha Class all the content coming out would have had that class in mind. Not only that it was the little things that kinda killed combat, as much as people say TOR is clunky SWG felt clunky with it's combat. And the HAM bar system and Armor system are two things that had to go.

 

As for the Player driven economy it didn't work. There was no real big way to get money to leave the economy. Thanks to credit farmers you had more and more money coming into the game. Prices started to shoot up every month on items. Wanna see what SWG's economy would look like if it was fully player driven? Go look at EVE online where a smart player can wreck the economy by taking time and understanding the system. I will however give you this much the Engine SWG ran on wasn't really 'good'. Everything that came out almost a year later looked 'better' then SWG did. The game didn't have things like the third axis so no jumping over pits or little things like that. And if I recall the Pre-CU code wasn't the most user friendly code to work on.

 

Still all of that said SWG Pre-CU just didn't work. The big thing that really didn't help the game out was something that a friend of mine said once after he did the 10 free trial. "This feels less like a Star Wars game and more like Raph Koster's Space Colonization Sim-Online." He was right about that, I as a player get much more doing my storyline quests over here on TOR then I did doing a theme park on SWG. The combat feels more in line with combat in Star Wars, namely it's fast not something where I hit my keys and wait for whatever special to fire off in the order I put them in.

 

And really and let me just throw this out here again, if SWG Pre-CU was so great then why hasn't anyone gone and made a copy of it? Why did they change the game in the end? And don't tell me "Cuz WoW was doing great and they wanted that!" I've also heard people say if the Pre-CU was fixed it would have been pulling in much bigger numbers. And lastly if the Pre-CU was the greatest thing ever then why was the games player peak 250k? A number that Ultima Online pulled in at it's player peak in 2003. And why was the game bleeding subs?