Bio Engineer Archive

i've posted this a few times now, but an excerpt from a dialogue with john smedley:

"People assume that 'accessibility' means 'dumbing it down' and it means nothing of the sort. 'Accessible' means that it's understandable and intuitive and there's more rewards sooner. We're trying to take the grind out of it and do that in a way that makes you feel like you're a part of the Star Wars universe. There's a quote about the original design of Galaxies that says it was too much like living the life of Uncle Owen (the moisture farmer) and not enough like the life of Luke or Han Solo. We want to deliver more of the heroic Star Wars experience.

"One of the nice things about the changes we're making is that the platform for the game will be stronger and be giving the game more longevity. We're going to be doing graphical enhancements and other enhancements. We want to make sure we're building this game to last another five to ten years. For some of the stuff we have planned, we really want to see more people getting involved. We want to really have large scale galactic civil war, and not the small skirmishes we're having today."

my question: will, or when will, a game with the depth of possibility that this game has had, up until this point, be commercially feasible?

i suspect one day a profession like BE, and perhaps much a more complex BE, will exist... but it will need to shed the weight of a franchise.

it will need to be small. and i would guess it would have to be, at least partially, volunteer-run.

perhaps based off the code of a dead game, such as this.

i'd like to think other companies would learn from this game's "mistakes", but a big part of me is skeptical of that.

i'm wondering if the trend started by blizzard is going to propagate, especially now that SOE has taken the bait.

It was commercially feasible.

Just think about it. They opened lots of servers in the US, then they decided to open the european ones. Was this for a business that was not working? That's a lie, the management would have never accepted to extend a game that was already not working. on the contrary they were earning lots of money and they thought they were able to make more. They extended the game to Japan then. Can you imagine the expenses? WOuld the management approve such investment without good auspices? Come on.

It's true the CU has shaken seriously the community and lots of people cancelled. But as everybody inside the game could have seen things were getting better. New content added, professions revamped, buges fixed. Not all prfessions re-gained their depth, not all bugs fixed, techincal support never was what it should be. But still people came back to the game, and Eisley was at all times full of newbies, and not all of them alts of unlocked jedis.

What they didn't get was that once you hurt a community it heals slowly and they pushed the NGE based on the data comming after the CU but the game never was a failure. This could be tested on the trade forums too. Market has fallen appart by inflation during the big unbalance, then it iced during the immediate period after the CU, in the last 2-3 months the market was again high. People wanted things, bought them, crafters made things offered them, fighters looted things and sold them all the time, the life in each galaxy was starting to improve...and with it the cas SOE got.

Saying about the best MMPORG (read amazon.co.uk, there you can still fidn the old reviews) on the market that it was a failur is cold blood lie.

you know what, Arfindel? you're right, and i'm letting things confuse me.

you are right.

i've been thinking about maybe aglobal, multi-contributor, open-source project that would be hosted by whoever that could ... i know there must be enough talented individuals that care passionately to make this possible. I don't know if it would work tho.

Dor