What do you need spells for if you got a decent Blaster Rifle?!
According to this forum post on allakhazam.com, the result of Lucas Arts Focus Group discussion about the future of Star Wars Galaxies most participants yelled for a server rollback pre-NGE in unity.
Star Wars Galaxies suffered a huge loss of players in late 2005 because of the NGE total game damage that a certain Julio Torres who thought he might be funny came up with (dataleak reported). Obviously the royals at Lucas Arts and Sony Online Entertainment were envious about the high sale counts of other MMOG’s (WoW) and tried to make Galaxies conforming for dummy players. But somehow Fantasy themes are much more popular than the Star Wars Universe (something I personally will never understand).
Though there is alot of false publicity from SOE and Torres striving in the wild of the official boards and gaming sites about how well the NGE was accepted, it was obvious to them that SWG went nose-dive after the NGE was published. The damage was done!
The question for them is: what to do now? Many of the players left SWG and went over to other MMORPG’s, some of them are happy with it, others think they are a poor replacement for SWG and wish that SWG would come back like it was pre-NGE or even pre-CU. The SWG servers are yawning from emptyness with too few players on them. My once shiny bunker house that I got when pre-ordering Trials Of Obi-Wan surely has thick layers of dust in it’s vaults! How many players would come back to SWG if it would be rolled back and how many of the new post-NGE players who are fine with the current game would leave because of a rollback?
I have managed to not play SWG since the NGE came live (4 months now) but I would resubscribe without a second thought if the game was rolled back, simply because there is no other MMORPG that has the amount of complexity that SWG had before. If I wanted to play a no brainer shooter, I’d use any of the FPS’s out there. WoW is too simple for my taste, the graphics are inferior and the population too childish and besides I totally don’t dig fantasy.
I am happy to announce the opening of the Flash Game Programming Wiki, a Wiki that is dedicated to the development and programming of games with Flash! The idea for it raised a while after I discovered the Game Programming Wiki, a site that is dedicated to general game programming but doesn’t mention Flash or ActionScript at all.
The FGPWiki is still brandnew and fresh and therefore needs your help with filling it with content. So if you’re one of us Flash game programmers and like to submit, feel free to do so. I will update the site more and more over the next couple of weeks. I hope this will become a huge and freely accessible pool with lots of valueful information for all (aspriring) Flash game writers!
Or how to completely destroy a popular MMORPG
I’ve been a Star Wars fan for a long time, I remember since 1983 when I still was a kid and went to the movie theater with a mate to see Return of the Jedi. I wouldn’t say I’m an overly fanatic fan but I always liked the sheer depth and complexity of the expanded Star Wars Universe. Every other Science Fiction looks like bland second class compared to Star Wars!
So when I first heard about the news of a Star Wars MMORPG in development some years ago I was hooked! In late summer 2003 Sony Online Entertainment let their Star Wars Galaxies go live and I’ve ordered it one or two months later. The game already offered a lot in its early time but it also has been a problem child since the very beginning because of many bugs and gameplay flaws. SOE released the game into public with many bugs not being fixed and this method went on for most of the time when they published a new update or expansion for the game. After a while you could be sure that with every major publish a bunch of new bugs came into the game. A MMORPG is a complex matter with many server/client relations where unprepared issues can occur but some of the bugs were so absurd that I started to wonder how the coding organization looked at SOE. Either they didn’t follow a well planned object oriented design or their organization structure was simply chaotic.
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A development blog about a racing game done in Flash! Some interesting posts there, one about AI for computer controlled racing cars. It seems they will update their blog as development progresses so I will put it on my watch list. I still keep the idea in the back of my mind about writing a ‘view from above’ racing game like Super Cars or Micro Machines.
I’ve bought myself an iPod Shuffle finally after pondering about a couple of mobile players. This device is the second best thing after sliced bread.
I don’t wanna dig to deep in details here so I make it short, here are the pro’s of the iPod Shuffle …
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The coolest commercial I’ve seen since a long time …. http://www.bigad.com.au/! No, it won’t hurt your system, despite the security warning that shows up eventually, but this is so freakin cool!
As a one-man-game developer of worldclass (exaggeration intended!) it’s good to have a bunch of tools at hand that help with the tasks for creating games! In this series I will introduce helpful ‘nice to have’ or even ‘must have’ tools that make a game developers/designers day easier. In this part I will cover Alias SketchBook Pro …
I’ve bought myself a periphery some days ago about which I was pondering to buy for a long time already, a Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet! I choose the smallest version 4×5 since I’m not a drawing pro and have limited desktop real estate and the smallest one suffices pretty well for just some sketching.
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Alcon is a lightweight external output console for Flash ActionScript that allows developers to view debugging information without relying on the Flash IDE. SWF files can be debugged and monitored no matter if they are in the web browser, Flash Player or a standalone executable. While that Alcon tries to keep inclusion into projects as simple as possible. In fact all that needs to be done is importing the Debug class into a project and you are ready to send debug information to the console with a simple Debug.trace() command.
Included into a project Alcon keeps a small footprint and takes less than a Kilobyte of filesize while still offering some other helpful features.
More funny stuff from the GTA front, check out www.videogamesareevil.com! Aah I love it when people get cynical! And if you are up to more fun in the same direction, watch the vids at www.purepwnage.com, for example Meet FPS Doug!
Cats are just cool! They are most independent from us humans but sometimes they let us get closer to them. If that is happening, it is also sometimes possible to use them as a storage space for all kinds of things from pizza boxes to babies! Yes, cats are actually more trustworthy than one might think! Here is the witness: stuffonmycat.com! It’s even better than the Infinity Cat Project, an endless loop of cats sitting in front of computer screens and seeing the photo of other owners cats who are sitting in front of the screen. It makes me want to have a cat again because cats simply rock!
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