So What Happened to Star Wars Galaxies? ⇒
26 July 2006, the wee hours
This article is fairly long, but quite interesting. This link was found via Kotaku.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
This is really interesting reading. The article linked in the comments on how Sony mucked up the game when trying to rework it is also quite good. It’s scary how clueless people involved in the game industry can be.
by ramanan on July 26 2006, 1:58 pm #
It sounds like they weren’t going to lose those hardcore fans though. It sounds like casual players were leaving because the game was buggy and lacked content, not because the game was too difficult. (I recall early complaints of the game involved there being nothing to do—no quests and things of that sort.) It seems rather then remedy that, they opted to turn the game in to a 3rd person shooter. Anyway, it’s hard to compete with the monster that is WoW I suppose.
by ramanan on July 26 2006, 8:09 pm #
I think Sony actually lost a lot of players in this case in protest. If you read old slashdot threads on the topic there are tons of posts saying as much. Even the comments in the threads linked here seem to suggest it. The real question is whether they would have stuck around had WoW not been around.
What did FFXI do to try and combat people leaving for WoW? Patrick makes it sound like people who played FFXI wouldn’t enjoy WoW.
by ramanan on July 27 2006, 1:29 am #
You often read complaints from players that don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to play the raid games, which makes getting to level 60 a bit of a let down in WoW. The new expansion may change that however, as you’d have 10 more levels to quest through. (And reports indicate the time to get from level 60 to 70 should match the time it took to get from level 1 to 60.) Gary is level 60 now, and likes it a lot. I’m not sure how big an adjustment it was for him to go from the regular questing to the raid content. (Normal party sizes are 5 people, where as the end-game raids are 40.)
I think the lack of requiring a group to level is a bit of plus for people like myself. (I don’t know anyone who plays on my server at my level, and though I play fairly often at the moment, I can’t really commit to playing at a certain time on a certain day.) I bet this is part of the reason WoW has such a broad appeal.
Patrick’s complaints with WoW were pretty much what you pointed out. He also felt the community of players in FFXI were better than those you find in WoW, though I haven’t had any real problems with the people who play WoW. (Well, that’s not entirely true: there are way too many 14 year old boys on my server, or at the very least people that act like 14 year old boys. It’s worse when you play PvP.)
by ramanan on July 27 2006, 2:32 pm #
They are adding new talents in the new release, so that would be of interest to upper level players. The different paths you choose to take in the talent trees are what will produce different sorts of Warlocks, Rogues, Priests, etc. I think the bulk of the changes are new content; they are adding a new world, and adding new dungeons and things like this. So it may be 10 levels of grind, but I suspect Blizzard will do a good job with it.
Gary would probably have more to say about the mechanics of WoW once you get to higher levels, and the dyanmics between players and what not, but I’m not sure he reads my site regularly. My brothers friends are all level 60 on a PvP server, so that is probably a very different experience as well.
by ramanan on July 27 2006, 4:06 pm #