Crowfall’s Walton says we should blame him for Star Wars Galaxies’ NGE

    
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Way to go, Jedi grinders

Hey, NGE fans! Crowfall’s Gordon Walton says that the day that will live in Star Wars: Galaxies infamy was his idea.

Now, that’s oversimplifying things just a tad, but in any case Walton let fly with an interesting post on the Crowfall forums yesterday that gives a bit more insight into SOE’s decision to blow up its Star Wars sandbox in late 2005 and replace it with an alternate version that ran for another six years. He says that initially, his pitch was for a secondary game that would share SWG’s universe.

“I championed an idea to SOE and LucasArts that we build this game with a new team, sell it as a separate product, but actually share the universe with SWG,” he says. “No matter which game you initially joined, your subscription would give you access to both games. You’d have a battle game and a role playing game all together.” Of course, the money crunch at the time ensured SOE couldn’t quite pull that off, and soon it had morphed into a game-changing NGE for SWG itself.

“I participated in the early planning for the NGE, and I was told to execute it over my and many others on the SWG teams’ objections. I failed as an effective communicator in my attempts to change this course. In March of 2005 my boss came to Austin for a visit, and I told him I was going to refuse to move forward on the NGE development and launch. I had assessed that it would be a breach of my fiduciary duty to do so. I believed (and told him) that launching the planned NGE would alienate the customer base, cause at least half of them to quit and lose the company 10’s of millions of dollars. At the same time I told him he deserved to have people that worked for him do what he said, and I was sorry I was being intransigent. A week later I was terminated, and frankly I was never happier to be fired. I don’t blame my management, as I basically made them do it. Being in conflict with your management is never fun, but doing something you don’t believe in is worse.”

Of course, you all know what happened next. “[T]he customer losses were significant, and the blow to both the SWG and SOE brands was noticeable,” he says. “Destroying player persistence, the professions they’d put months or years of work into, along with their identities, to make the game “better” for new customers wasn’t a win from my external assessment. Many of those alienated customers became activists against SOE due to their losses, and the bad feelings around this change to SWG continues with ex-customers to this day. I want to stress that everyone that I knew who were involved with SWG at SOE and at LucasArts were trying to do the best thing as they saw it for their companies and for the long-term benefit of the game. I just didn’t believe then or now that it was right thing to do from a customer stewardship and fiduciary standpoint. So I feel I am responsible for the NGE, because the impetus came from an idea I initially championed, which I as unable to deflect when it was being mis-applied (in my view) to SWG.”

Among the many insights are Walton’s player population numbers (SWG briefly topped 400,000 players before settling down to between 200,000 to 250,000). Walton also lauds the SWG development team for managing to bring a feature-rich sandbox to market in a very short time. “And this was all done for under $18 million in under three years (2 years and 9 months),” Walton says. “This was and remains an unprecedented achievement in building a AAA MMO.”

Oh, and Walton confirms what some fans have suspected for years, which was that player Jedi were a huge problem and ultimately detrimental to SWG’s health. “The holocron addition and hints on how to get a Jedi ended up slowing net growth of the game and undermined the in-game community as people tried to macro their way to Jedi,” he writes.

[Source: Forum post; thanks Dystopiq!]

 

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