Koster: "The web is kicking the console industry's ass"

[Dodece]

Star Wars Galaxies was one of my favorite games of all time. I adore sandbox games, and I adore skill based games. I heap praise on complex game mechanics, and having dynamic differentiated classes. I applaud the intended design for the game. There was nothing like it, and there probably won't be another game in its vein for another decade.

That said the game had two problems. The first it arrived to the market broken and unfinished. Broken classes, game breaking bugs, exploiting, broken items, and well just about everything came broken. The response from Sony was to spend a few months tying down this or that, but in the end it was bailing water out of a sinking ship with a teacup.

The second problem was that finally when Sony was forced into a corner over these issues which they fully deserved. They had procrastinated for years in some cases. Their response was to break things, or to radically redesign things which also arrived broken, and more to the point wasn't what their paying customers asked for or wanted.

The game was a massive failure not in the area of original concept which was very good, and had it been delivered in a quality fashion the game might have millions of subscribers rather then perhaps at most fifty thousand subscribers. The problem was in how Sony does business. They basically wanted customers to beta test their product and pay for the privilege. Then when those customers demanded service for their payment Sony refused, or made false promises to get around to it before the end of time. Which was in three or four weeks I promise.

I think Koster has some good ideas, and its probably for the best he isn't working with Sony anymore. However there is enough blame to go around in regards to that game. The game had so many quality issues that it did show a distinct lack of direction, or to put it this way the priorities didn't get handled the way they should have. Even the basic combat classes arrived unfinished, but you had a fully functional housing system?