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Star Wars Galaxies Syndrome
Lucascraft
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This is not a thread specifically about Star Wars Galaxies. This is a thread about games with wasted potential.
One of my good buddies in real life and I have coined a phrase which we apply to games which have a really good concept but poor execution. This phrase is "Star Wars Galaxies Syndrome" or SWGS for short.
He and I feel that Star Wars Galaxies, back when it came out, had the potential to be an incredible MMO. It had a license for what is probably the most popular IP in America. It had a fantastic crafting system, and the original class system was really cool too. The leveling flow-chart box thing was a great idea. It allowed for people to really customize their characters and create some really interesting hybrid characters.
Additionally, player cities and in general the whole "sand box" thing would have been a great framework on which an incredible game could have been built.
Unfortunately, the game engine and all the potential was squandered. The game had a very big lack of things to do. Basically, the only thing there was to do was go to a mission terminal and run creature killing missions and amass huge quantities of credits which served no purpose. Class balance was a huge issue, some classes such as TKM and Carbineer were amazing, while others such as Ranger and Smuggler were downright awful.
The game had no real quests to speak of. It had a small quest chain to gain access to Jabba the Hutt's throne room, but once you got there, there was nothing to do.
Then they released a couple expansions with content that people didn't want. Rage of the Wookies might have been the most ill conceived expansion of all time. The whole ploy was that they were adding game content that was from Episode 3. But nobody really liked Episode 3 so nobody really cared about RotW.
So that's the topic. Games that have a whole lot of potential, but don't take advantage of what they've got. I'm gonna go ahead and follow this OP with my own second example of a game with SWGS.
One of my good buddies in real life and I have coined a phrase which we apply to games which have a really good concept but poor execution. This phrase is "Star Wars Galaxies Syndrome" or SWGS for short.
He and I feel that Star Wars Galaxies, back when it came out, had the potential to be an incredible MMO. It had a license for what is probably the most popular IP in America. It had a fantastic crafting system, and the original class system was really cool too. The leveling flow-chart box thing was a great idea. It allowed for people to really customize their characters and create some really interesting hybrid characters.
Additionally, player cities and in general the whole "sand box" thing would have been a great framework on which an incredible game could have been built.
Unfortunately, the game engine and all the potential was squandered. The game had a very big lack of things to do. Basically, the only thing there was to do was go to a mission terminal and run creature killing missions and amass huge quantities of credits which served no purpose. Class balance was a huge issue, some classes such as TKM and Carbineer were amazing, while others such as Ranger and Smuggler were downright awful.
The game had no real quests to speak of. It had a small quest chain to gain access to Jabba the Hutt's throne room, but once you got there, there was nothing to do.
Then they released a couple expansions with content that people didn't want. Rage of the Wookies might have been the most ill conceived expansion of all time. The whole ploy was that they were adding game content that was from Episode 3. But nobody really liked Episode 3 so nobody really cared about RotW.
So that's the topic. Games that have a whole lot of potential, but don't take advantage of what they've got. I'm gonna go ahead and follow this OP with my own second example of a game with SWGS.
Lucascraft on
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Using GTA as the prime example of an open world console game, the GTA series has a whole lot of variety in the gameplay available. You can follow the story, which usually involves a healthy mix of driving missions as well as foot missions. Or you can run races. Or in the older games you could do Taxi, Ambulence, or Vigilante police missions. Or Pizza Delivery missions in Vice City. On top of that there is Pool, Bowling, Dating, buying property, doing stunts, finding hidden shit, running over pedestrians and a whole wealth of other random stuff to do.
Sadly, Assassin's Creed fell into the trap of SWGS and did not deliver as much as it could have or should have. Just imagine if AC had other things to do beyond the same repetitive formula of Scout Things from Towers - Pick Pocket a dude - Beat a guy down - and then go in for the kill.
Just imagine if finding all the flags in the different areas got you cool toys in your base like the hidden packages in GTA did. Just imagine if there was a reason to hunt down all the 50 Templars other than a measly few achievement points. Oh and if you own AC on the PS3 you don't get achievements so the Templars are 100% worthless. As are the flags.
Not to mention the fact that the friendly monks and the angry mobs that help you out are almost completely wasted tools since its much easier to go on the rooftops than on the city streets. The framework is there in AC for a great game. The devs just needed to give the player more side-shit to do and make the primary missions less repetitive.
haha, just kidding
Black and White could've been good
it wasn't
Deus Ex 2 i guess, but it was still pretty fun
Armed and Dangerous?
I didn't play much of it., but hey, shark gun
SE++ Map Steam
hey satan...: thinkgeek amazon My post |
as a sequel to DE1 ?
yeah, shameful
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Spore.
snes or sega?
i loved the snes one
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You...
Wasted potential? The game was excellently put together, a superb amount polish.
@hoodiebear.bsky.social
except the content was crap
it was a finely polished turd
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/16-Assassins-Creed
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Me?
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you're joking?
the genesis version is clearly superior
clearly
well, i never played it
i just know it exists
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This game sounded so awesome on paper.
Sure it was hell of a lot of fun to sandbox around in but some more varied missions would have been delicious. Here's hoping that sequel is really on the way.
Of
Orion
Three
this. holy shit this. i really liked it until it became the same shit over and over and over.
I guess I would say eve. The only thing that makes that game really fun is the metagame between allicances. the game itself is incredibly boring.
8-)
Some people say that it was a well-polished piece of crap, but I think of it as a good game, diluted in lots and lots of nothing.
They created this gorgeous game world, and gave you a really cool way to explore it, and most of the actual assassin missions were pretty fun, but there was just so much repetitive busywork in between.
I filled in my Assassin's Creed second post with an explanation.
It looked beautiful, was very in depth, the ship-to-ship battles were awesome, but in order to participate in the crafting you had to log on for at least a half hour like every fucking day and the H2H combat - urrgh. Just terrible. There's no collision between the units, and they sent you in with several AI-controlled shipmates who always did the exact same fucking thing: run at the center of mass of the nearby enemies. Two groups of six fighters would just rush towards each other and become a blinking, flickering singularity of pirate anger towards which you could only throw a few limited moves in the hopes that you were hitting into an area the server recognized as occupied by an enemy.
Also the Conan MMO.
While I wasn't as disappointed with it as I was with SWG, I expected all this emergent gameplay and it was so locked down into the individual styles.
The space game was where it was at.
I hear they used this shit in Guantanamo. After the 5th time stabbing someone and being completely disorientated by the shitty cutscene, they revealed all the secrets of Allah.
Fucking garbage..
If PotBS was just the economy game, I would have played it forever.
As it was, I got tired of sailing around to transport oak timbers.
really?
Did you really just type that?
hey satan...: thinkgeek amazon My post |
why's that?
is it because it is impossible to make a character not look like a mongoloid?
Plus you couldn't kiss boys.
Plus the character generator could only make Downs Sydrome sufferers yes.
I would have kept playing in a guild and just followed the instructions of whatever spreadsheet-wielding neckbeard happened to be our resident economist if it weren't for the HtH combat. They probably should have cut it from the game entirely.
really he just wants to have mansex with kaiden
i actually agree with him on this point
That is the only legitimate argument you make in this post. I was going to glibly say something about how you probably don't like it because you like mansex too much but now I realize that's actually true
Not that that's unreasonable, but there was lots of galaxy to explore and plenty of good writing.
No wonder I didn't stick with it. I only had the spreadsheet, not the neckbeard.