Star Wars Galaxies Editorial

The folks at Terra Nova have written up a scathing editorial about LucasArts and SOE’s “New Game Enhancement” rollout to Star Wars Galaxies. I still can’t believe that an MMORPG based on one of the most popular franchises of all time continues to receive so much negative press, but apparently I stand to be amazed. A snip:

The problem is that SWG’s chief problem from the beginning has been poor implementation, poor communication, poor service. Koster’s design ideas went wrong when they got awkwardly stitched in late Beta to counterposing designs, when the center could not hold. They went wrong when they went live in a horribly unfinished state, with an underresourced live management team desperately trying to keep a very leaky ship afloat. The NGE doesn’t reverse any of those problems: it exacerbates them a thousandfold. A massive change to a game whose remaining loyalists were mostly devotees of the “virtual world” aspects of the design was pushed abruptly and brusquely into live in a state that’s almost non-functional. And as usual, the corporate talk emanating from SOE about the consequences of the change is mindlessly, painfully out of touch with the reality. “Only a small minority of forum die-hards are objecting to the change” is the mantra at SOE. “No, we’ve only lost a few subscriptions”. This I think, I have to believe, has got to be a lie, or at least a Bill-Clintonesque legal parsing of the word “few”.