I have been attempting to write this post for, well, the best part of the whole of November now. It was my view, opinion and comment about SOE’s recent overhaul of SWG with their “New Game Experience” or NGE (offically announced here.)

The whole event, in my humble yet ever so loud opinion, can only be fairly described as a complete and utter fiasco. That’s not to say that the changes aren’t needed nor, indeed, to say that the concept of the NGE is not a welcome one. I’d go so far as to say that in principle, I thoroughly approve of the changes. A new non-turn based combat system is potentially more involving and more exciting. Reducing the number of classes can only mean that less development time is spent trying to revamp/balance those classes and more time spent adding new content and fixing the not inconsiderable amount of outstanding bugs. But in this case, SOE’s implementation of the new system was hampered by PPP; Piss Poor Planning.

The announcement came a matter of days after the official release of the latest expansion pack and the player community was informed that there would be a fortnight of public testing before the changes went live. Now, I may not know a lot about game programming per se, but I’m not naive enough to believe that they developed these sweeping changes in a matter of days. The new expansion pack was announced in August (with screenshots) so must have been in planning for at least a week or two (yes, I’m being supremely conservative with these estimates) before that and yet was scheduled for release up to nearly three months later. With hindsight, there were many tweaks and changes (most of which were stealthily implemented and never properly acknowledged) that paved the way for the NGE and some of these happened as far back as May (shortly after the initial combat upgrade). But rather than announce their intentions (in keeping with their “development and communication” process), they kept stumm. It also seems that this overhaul wasn’t even communicated internally because part of the marketing of the expansion pack focused on new content that would be made redundant with the introduction of the NGE. SOE have subsequently had to offer refunds on the pack to people who pre-ordered it for this reason.

Keeping quiet about the intended changes is, to be fair, SOEs perogative. But, to my mind, it is not good business sense. For a start, it’s likely to alienate the player base, especially those who have remained loyal through thick and thin by playing since release. Secondly, it means that anything they say or promise in the future is going to be received with a considerable amount of scepticism. The goal of the NGE may be to open it up to a far broader playerbase than SWG currently has (compare the rather static figure of about 200k subscribers to the 3-4+ million that World of Warcraft has) but the word of mouth that SOE is not to be trusted and are likely to overhaul the game without any announcement at all is not going to have the masses flocking to sign up.

But more than this - and bearing in mind that I welcome the proposed changes in principle - the NGE has been implemented before it was ready, in my opinion. The playability of the game has been overly simplified (there is no variation in class progression and no possibility of making your character unique) and the combat system is far from complete, having no substantial collision detection, poor targeting, overpowered and imbalanced enemies and resembles, at best, a poor, pre-Wolfenstein 3D first-person shooter, albeit with higher resolution graphics.

Part of this upgrade included the release of the SWG “Starter Kit” (and therein lies another story) designed to introduce prospective new players to the world of SWG. My opinion is that the game is in such a state at the moment, any new players are going to be put off and won’t consider coming back as and when it is ever “fixed”. And once again, word of mouth will have an adverse affect on potential future subscribers.

It didn’t have to be like this. Better planning and better communication (as well as aiming to release a “completed” game rather than hit a deadline) could have made this upgrade a success. As a player, I’d have rather they spent more development effort making sure that the NGE was playable from the start than working on many of the recent features and content that is now redundant. I should also add that it is easy to point the finger of blame at SOE but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the game is ultimately dictated by Lucasarts who, I’m sure, are the people dictating the deadlines and game plan.

So there we are. That is the summation of several weeks worth of trying to get this out on page. There’s so much more that I want to add to this including, amongst other things, thoughts on classless character progression. Meanwhile, for more opinions, perspectives and rants about these changes, have a look at the following sites:
Terra NovaIconochron
Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey
Utopian Hell
Psychochild

I’m off to find temporary solace in WoW!