*Reference Smed used in an interview concerning Vanguard.

But, as someone else already stated, people usually miss what for me was the most innovative aspect of the game. It was, AFAIK, the first real attempt on leaving the loot-directed-gameplay in benefit of the crafting.

EVERTHING people wore or used was crafted. Until the Kashyyyk expansion loot was nearly non-existant. You could actually be a crafter and feel that you it was your place in the game. And the skill systems leave room for adventuring skills to go out with your friends to enjoy the [few, I will concede that] content.

I enjoy crafting, and craft in every game I play, but I have never found such a complex and purposeful crafting system as the one in SWG. I miss it too much.

PS: BTW, there were some BIG fresly introduced bugs in the crafting the weeks previous to the NGE. Bugs that affected greatly the high-end crafting. This bugs weren’t fixed a year after the NGE release. They switched the focus to adventuring and forgot about crafting a bit too much.

It’s the only MMO I’ve ever played that held an illusion of true wildlife and wilderness. The creatures were well-animated, and some (like fambaa) seemed to wander. There was a strong impression of distance and untouched areas. CoH also has relatively good animations, but even they are more stationary (as I recall, anyway; it’s been a while).

The lore of the world was witnessed in action, rather than merely dialogue and art. I remember once wandering, by pure happenstance, across a battle between NPC Stormtroopers and Gungans. That sort of experience is invaluable.

Though they were not made nearly as important and engaging as they could have been, the many small factions (pirates of so-and-so, Tusken raiders, etc.) also aided an impression of a solid RPG world in which a player-character could be tied to things larger than himself. That’s a gameplay feature (not just virtual fluff)… a seemingly dynamic context that qualifies player actions and choices.

And as Kanzar suggested, the lack of jedi was good design. It would have been better if a few players had actually been able to unlock jedi slots, as was advertised (I left before the NGE, but I remember there were still no jedi after six or seven months). But, as I recall, SOE was pretty clear in media releases about the limited number of jedi slots, so players had no reason to expect many jedi (only to hope they’d be the ones to get lucky).

The crafting system put its predecessors to shame. MMO gamers still refer back to that system when discussing modern designs.

The original SWG wasn’t a failed experiment. It certainly had a number of significant design flaws, but it satisfied many gamer desires that few, if any, other MMOs have addressed. I had more than a few fun adventures in SWG, but I never expected adventures in the style of single-player games. Perhaps you were expecting more fixed, linear adventures like that? Adventures can happen in a sandbox.

Certainly, the developer can’t take a passive role in the emergence of those sandbox adventures, and SWG could have done much more in that regard… if they had re-shaped the game through additions, instead of substitutions. The original game needed revision, but nothing so radical as to prompt a move like the NGE.

I honestly think that the largest failing of SWG was placing it in the time frame that they did. Yes, at launch, SWG had a serious lack of content. Today, nearly 4 years later, it has a serious lack of content.

The problem is that the game is set in a time where you know what happened before and you know what comes next. How can you have an MMO with any real content when the ending has already been written? It becomes a design flaw and, ultimately, self defeating. It is dangerous to introduce anything that could significantly alter the flow of the story.

True, the MMO doesn’t technically HAVE to follow along with the existing story, but Star Wars fans are borderline fanatical. Any time anyong suggests something on the SWG boards that might go even slightly against “canon,” there are 20 posts that pop up in seconds linking articles, stories and entries explaining the “proper” way for the SW universe to exist.

The overall best thing to have been done would have been to have SWG take place 10 years of so after Return of the Jedi. Yes, the EU has touched upon these years, but it is still wide open. Most important, there are not any movies saying, “This is how it is.” The game could have been much more open-ended in that regard. Without the constraints of trying to fit into a period of time that many people view as sacred ground, the original development team might have been able to build something much more rich than what we had… thus (possibly) avoiding the brainstorming that lead to the NGE in the first place.