Star Wars Galaxies Emulator Test Server Hits Alpha 192
- mirror one
- mirror two
- mirror three
- mirror four
- mirror five
- mirror six
- mirror seven
- mirror eight
- mirror nine
CoffeeHedake continues "This all comes after much very bad press for SOE, after completely changing the game mechanics of Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. The game has had a rocky history, with nerfs and bugs abounding, but the latest 'NGE' or New Game Enhancement patches have led to the detrimental decline in player population. SWGEMU was formed with the hopes of allowing players to 'roll back' their experiences to a Pre-'Combat Upgrade' state of the game, months before the ill-fated NGE was implemented."
"The SWGEMU will allow private, emulated game servers to be run by anyone with the hardware and bandwidth to support the load, possibly allowing customized environments, and game mechanics, as well as a 'dungeon master' control of the server, possibly even over a LAN."
"News has spread, even throughout the Sony Online Entertainment forums of SWGEMU's latest success. No word from Sony, as of yet."
Bets anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those of you weeping over this, try http://www.eve-online.com/ [eve-online.com] Sure it's nothing like SWG, but it's a MMORPG that actually seems to give a damn about it's userbase and isn't catering to the largest $$ segment of the population.... Not that I'm bitter or anything! (Rest In Peace SWG.... Rest in Peace).
Re:I'll give odds (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'll give odds (Score:4, Insightful)
"Execute Order 66. Wipe them out. All of them."
Then again, considering how the SWG game has (de)volved over the past couple of years, maybe "Do Not Want" is the appropriate snarky one-liner to use here.
Sony could do the gaming world a lot of good if they laid the smackdown on the NGE (sucky thing in current release) and permitted the pre-CU (the "live beta" that got released for the first couple of years) codebase to be emulated. They've gone on record as saying they'll never revert to pre-CU gameplay, so why not put the pre-CU game engine to good use? With decent scripting, you could make a pretty good game out of that. The reason SWG sucked donkey cock wasn't really the fault of the engine, it was that SOE never grasped (and still doesn't understand) that Star Wars is a story, not a skin for an FPS.
Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'll give odds (Score:4, Insightful)
One years salary is cheaper than a lawsuit, and does not set a precident the same way losing a lawsuit might.
same fate as bnetd? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Rebellion needs to hide the plans!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think of all the talent and passionate hacking involved in an effort like this, and it breaks my heart to think that it'll probably get shut down by lawyers.
NGE IS HEAVEN compared to the prior state (Score:1, Insightful)
Soe was MILKING the players by putting goals that is hard and far to reach constantly.
So that game was turned into a question of 'when, how, and where do i grind ?' - Nothing star wars.
The crowd that started the game in fall 2003 had already cancelled by then as the game had nothing star warsy left.
With nge, the "uber godmode" players, the powerplayers, Item sellers, sith wannabees (and they were a many of them) have lost their 'godly' status, as the grind was almost halted.
From what i understand, the poster of this article is just another biased powerplayer.
It is PLAIN stupid to come back from 8-hours long workday and KEEP ON WORKING IN A GAME THAT YOU PAY, instead of playing the 'feel' that you pay for.
Crap, in short. Star wars is way better now.
This is your second chance people... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want anybody to be able to reverse-engineer things for compatibility purposes then you better speak up right now. Otherwise this will be smacked down as hard as BNETD was.
And BNETD wasn't even substituting for a pay-to-play service so you can imaging what Lucas The Hutt's lawyers will do on this one.
You thought Vivendi was bad...
And that is Sony's entire problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The only defence I got for my taste is that it was a unique game, the above poster could have simply moved to WoW and found the game he wanted. Or even Everquest 2.
As for the grind accusation, well that is partially true. If you wanted to be a jedi pre-nge you had an ungodly grind ahead of you.
For the longest time in SWG the way to unlock jedi was to master a number of random and unknown proffession to master. This lead to a lot of people grinding to jobs they didn't want. For instance you character might require you to master chef and commando and doctor. Not exactly a logical combination.
This unlock method did give the game something unique though. It had lots of experienced players in the end game giving up their high levels in job X and starting over in Y. This made for a very dynamic game with more people in mid level then you will find in other MMO's.
But they changed this and unlocking Jedi became a pure XP grind. You had to convert your various XP points into jedi XP points at a bad exchange rate. This meant a couple of things. First nobody grinding for jedi bothered with learning new jobs. Because of various game mechanics people just grinded the easiest proffesion to master and then grinded XP like mad. They needed a truly unholy amount of XP too. Far more in fact then you needed before to grind different proffesions. And while before you got to experience different types of playing you now had to grind XP in one job.
So before to unlock jedi you played a scout, then became a dancer and then went on to craft weapons for lets say two months. To unlock Jedi after the village was added you just grinded XP in a combat class for six months. Whoo!
Ah! but you don't need to grind a Jedi at all do you? Well no, and before the village if you avoided the jedi/holo grind you could have a really fun game playing the mixed job you wanted and if you wanted a change, well there were plenty of holo grinders around to make sure that the game was very welcome of job changers.
SWG was far more a sandbox game and the holo grind that a lot of people choose helped in that aspect by supplying the game with a load of mid level players. Imagine a WoW or EQ where 50% of the players are NOT at the top level. This would mean that you no longer need to race for the top. That it is the mid level game that is most important.
Sadly SOE never managed the game well, all the "special" stuff was very high level indeed. It ain't just SOE fault, I don't really know of any MMO that adds extra mid level content.
But the NGE changed all this. It is now far more like an EQ or WoW game in that you choose a proffesion and then just ride it to the top and sit there running the same high level content until a new expansion comes out wich adds a few levels.
Offcourse some people prefer it but they are not "right" they just got different tastes. My beef with them is that they already got plenty of games for them. Why did SWG have to become another run off the mill MMO like all the others.
Imagine if I said that America Football would be better if you couldn't touch the balls with your hands, except the goalie, and the goals should be smaller and the balls should be round. Would you not say to me, go play soccer?
SOE turned SWG into a WoW wannabe probably because they wanted the WoW subcriber numbers. That is understandable except that it didn't work and never could work. First of WoW is already WoW and trying to out WoWing WoW is as likely as say out Coca-Colaing Coca-Cola. There is a market for clones but if you really want to stand a chance you usually are better of making a product that is unique or at least offers a safe heaven for people who do not enti
Pre-CU SWG was the game with the potential (Score:5, Insightful)
In Pre-CU SWG, you could NEVER SPEND A MINUTE in combat and still be just as vital a part of the game community as a Jedi Master. It had a combat system and UI that was awesome, you spent time on strategy, not toolbar watching and button mashing. It had no levels, only skills.
The CU took the heart out but left the body mostly intact. It was a boring and slow combat engine and nerfed player power to the point of requiring a group to do mundane things like level grinding. Non combat roles got marginalized at that time as anti decay kits and uber loot rewards from the expansions replaced crafted items.
The NGE then destroyed the body, taking away the skill system completely and reducing 32 mix and match professions to 9 static ones. Jedi ceased to be a long term game aspiration and became selectable on startup. There ceased to be anything at all to work towards.
Throught ALL of this we have been screaming for classic servers, which would make the pre-Cu vets like me very happy. No, says SOE, play THIS or else.
Well, even John Smedley admitted on the SWG forums that SWG players have been voting with their feet and that subscriber numbers have been falling since the NGE. Their response has been to shove half assed versions of stuff taken away since NGE back into the game slowly but surely. Rumor has it after the latest combat revision (yes, they are STILL changing the combat system every 6 months) that subscriber levels dropped even more, and consequently, the lead developer recently posted about bringing back turn based combat with a target lock (like all other MMO's use).
So now we have the pre-Cu emulator. The time has come for SOE to either give us our game back, or else, we will take it out of their hands. The Emu project is about to go open source, and no matter what they do with lawyers, just like DeCSS they won't be able to stop it once that code is out there.
Re:The Rebellion needs to hide the plans!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'll give odds (Score:3, Insightful)
At least they can be used to analyze already finished code, and debug or change it. Which is very important.
You're taking it too seriously (Score:3, Insightful)
Now OK, I know that US constitution amendments don't apply to Sony's private property, but it's hard to not draw some parallels, especially (like the GP post was doing it) in a sarcastic way. It's perfectly valid to say that someone is acting in a dictatorial manner, or compare them to a dictator (e.g., Palpatine), especially in a parody context, if they did half the shit that SOE did. Even though, technically, they're not the ruler of a country or galaxy, so they can't technically be a dictator.
At the very least, Sony shows the same respect for other people that Palpatine and Darth Vader showed. Sure, they're not in a position to physically murder anyone (and get away with it), but they're just as sociopathic anyway. The only difference is that it's the corporate kind of a psychopath rather than the axe-murderer (or red-lightsaber-murderer) kind. But that's pretty much it.
They probably ARE full of shit (Score:3, Insightful)
They probably _are_ full of shit. It's just some funky way of bragging that their game is too complex to be emulated. And, let's face it, bragging is half of what the SWG team is all about. They're too busy polishing their own statue to even fix the damn game. So whether they'll actually make a job offer or not is pretty much irrelevant there. The main point was just to brag.
Mind you, with something like this on one's CV, one can probably get hired anywhere anyway. So it's not like SOE is their only option, or like that dev was saying anything we didn't already know.
I can see SOE trying to hire them just to give them a non-compete aggreement that makes them stop working on the emu, though... Then again, nah, that wouldn't be Sony. They'll just try to sue them into oblivion.
And finally, even if they did get a job at SOE, don't set your hopes too high. It's not like some netcode programmer will be allowed to give much input in game design issues, especially issues that would require getting past some continent-sized egos there. I just can't see it going too well, trying to tell them that you know better then them how to design a game that player would like.
I don't know... I've never worked for them, so I can't say first hand, but seeing the kind of half-arsed run-of-the-mill stuff they churn as content, SOE doesn't strike me as the kind of company that values personal creativity and vision. (And if you read some Penny Arcade rants about EQ2, they seem to be left with the same impression, albeit in their case about the artwork.) Their games are chock-full of such mass-produced illogical crap as getting bone by chopping wood (EQ2), killing deers and bears to find which of them stole a manuscript (EQ2), a sniper scope for a sword (SWG), and other stuff that just makes you wonder. I just can't see someone implementing that kind of idiocy unless they're (A) completely retarded, or (B) just a jaded cog in a corporate machine, that gave up long ago on trying to make sense or to "rock the boat". And it's probably not A.
I mean, seriously, everywhere else you'd get the scripter implementing that coming to the designer and saying "excuse me? did I get this right? I'm supposed to code a quest that has a sniper scope for a _sword_ as a reward? And how? We don't even have the code to attach anything to any weapon." That they went and just coded it half-arsedly as a strength potion that just looks like a sniper scope, makes me really think about it. It's the kind of half-arsed job that people usually do when they're just jaded about their work, and gave up on trying to be anything other than a brainless slave to the wage. It's the kind of half-arsed job you do when you realized long ago that noone gives a damn about your input, thinking isn't rewarded, and you just want to get it over with and set that task as "completed", go home and forget about it all.
Re:Ohh, No! Stupid, stupid, stupid! (Score:1, Insightful)
Not everything in a game is about code fellas.
As to SWGEmu, these guys may or may not release code, which if they don't IMHO doesn't make them any better or more trustworthy than SOE.