The reason why the general consensus is so negative is not necessarily deep-seated hostility to the design ideas behind it. Almost everyone with any knowledge of SWG has been watching the NGE with horror after it has gone live. It looks bad (certainly it doesn't look 'Star Warsy') and at the moment plays worse: it's not a FPS, it's not a MMOG, it's not anything. Speeding up the combat and movement, for example, sounds like a good idea until you actually see it, in tandem with the new UI. The new version of the game is evidently a bubbling stew of bugs, incompatibilities, indigestible chunks of the old design and mechanics, and very poorly thought out implementations. The NGE as it stands makes the bugginess of SWG just after its launch look relatively tame by comparison. At the least, it might actually have gone through a reasonably good process of design and testing.

Which might actually have been an interesting approach to designing a Star Wars MMOG if it had been taken back in 2001. Now it's the least world-like, rather more like Planetside in its conception. My critique of SWG in the recent Game Studies was written before the combat upgrade, and so in many respects was obsolete, but the one thing about it that I thought was still current was its assessment of SWG as the most 'world-like' of existing MMOGs. In essence, the NGE removed the 'virtual world' portion of the game, the one continuing virtue that the old design still had, the one asset or accomplishment of SWG that drew what was left of its player base. Though crafting is technically still part of the game, it has been in effect deleted as it no longer matters in any respect. Combat and movement have been dramatically speeded up. Combat has been remade into a twitch-based FPS style, more like Unreal Tournament than a MMOG: character skills and quality or type of weaponry and armor matter very little now. In essence, what the NGE did is collapse the existing quasi-skill-based profession structure into nine 'iconic' classes designed with the films in mind, any of which can be chosen at character creation (including Jedi). The basic scheme of the NGE aims to grapple with some of the longest-standing criticisms of SWG, many of which I've agreed with since the game went live: that the game lacks a compelling connection to its licensed fiction, that its sprawling design is hampered by serious game-mechanical contradictions, that its content is threadbare, and so on. In the case of SWG's NGE, though, there are really only two possibilities: that there is a deeper agenda or that the live management team is well beyond cluelessly self-destructive, out in some outer void of fecklessness. I'm normally deeply suspicious of conspiracy theories. Or did they ignore it? It's just possible that SWG's latest flaming car wreck resulted from deliberately driving over a cliff. Never more so than with the NGE: whatever it is conceptually, in practice, it's roughly on par with an alpha build of a MMOG. Unfortunately, the live management team seems to have ignored another long-standing criticism of SWG by many observers: that their design and implementation process is a disastrous mess. I was closer to the mark than I would have guessed: the live management team recently and with breathtaking suddenness announced and then pushed to live a massive overhaul of the entire game, the so-called 'New Game Enhancement' or NGE. In fact, I predicted on the official SWG forum that any serious attempt to realize the ambitions of the combat revamp was going to take a major rethinking of the entire profession system and crafting along with it. I couldn't see how they planned to change the rest of the game at the same time as the combat upgrade, given how tight the interdependencies of the game were. The live management team for Star Wars: Galaxies set out to prove me wrong with their 'combat upgrade' and 'Jedi revamp' a while back, and I watched with some interest.

Some time ago, I wrote here at Terra Nova that MMOGs really don't get a 'do-over', that later changes to the game almost necessarily sit on top of old mechanics, that design is cumulative.

Ign darkstar one broken alliance