[animex]

Raph was the lead game designer on SWTOR a game that was way ahead of it's time and one of the most enjoyable sandbox mmorpg's I've ever played. I'm working on a new game that will take inspiration from lessons learned there.

[starkparker]

I remember when Raph was working on Metaplace[1], which was a kid-targeting, programmable (Lua dialect), virtual world/user generated content factory that was contemporary to the launch of Roblox ca. 2006-2007. I wonder quite often what things might be like if Metaplace had gotten to the scale and scope that Roblox wound up achieving.

1: https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/09/18/metaplace/, or this demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZiB_JcRH_s, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace

[ArlenBales]

> Raph was the lead game designer on SWTOR a game that was way ahead of it's time

I think you meant Star Wars Galaxies, which was definitely ahead of its time and few MMORPGS have replicated its sandbox MMORPG since.

[vkou]

What was interesting/worked about it's design (and why did the players care?[1])

Was it resilient to the, uh, many, many well-documented problems that the genre pushes players/itself into?

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[1] There's a lot of ideas in this space that sound interesting on paper to nerds bikeshedding, but often fall flat in actual implementation. I'm curious as to what were the ones that worked.

[tekbruh9000]

Game was SWG, not SWTOR. Launched in 2003 and was sunset in 2011 when SWTOR launched.

SWG set out to be something like Dwarf Fortress in terms of depth to the worlds physics; for example, gunsmiths could tinker on all parts of a gun and maybe get a lucky roll to unlock +N more damage or -N recoil. Same with land vehicles and bioengineered animals, droids. Parameters to noodle all the way down. Some under user control, others random to foster sense of a chaotic physical world.

As the in game object economy was entirely propped up by crafters this fostered economic PVP.

Lucasarts of 2000-2003, when the game was developed, did not understand MMO, and 3D games take much longer than 2D adventure games and shoved it out the door 2 years too early.

It also suffered from 90s OOP heavy software development patterns. Devs had difficulty managing it and updating over the years.

Ultimately it failed at being a Star Wars game. PVE was just "kill a nest of bugs" and failed to leverage storylines and characters. Players with nothing else to do ended up ruling the economy or whatever. Could have made them compete against Star Wars power brokers, IMO. Jabba sabotaged your factory, or something. Once a player was kitted out they had nothing to do.

Some have spent the last 10+ years implementing a server emulator, various tools and mods. An emulator built around the original release is here: https://github.com/swgemu

I tinker on a modded private server now and then. Initially added in random world events, to generate things to go do and replacing odd design decisions like mission terminals with NPC models to talk to in that seedy back alley, to foster more in world RP vibe.

When WOW launched SWG was redesigned to play more like that. Typical MBA "copy paste what they are doing" project management.