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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

by animex 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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/ https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/09/18/metaplace/, or this demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZiB_JcRH_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZiB_JcRH_s, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace
vkou 11mo ago
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? --- [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 11mo ago
  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 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.
  - ehnto 11mo ago
    Oh wow it was SWG? It truly was ahead of its time, I don't think any one game has come close to implementing such a rewarding group of systems and economy in an MMORPG, except maybe EVE but that is a very different game and admittedly I did not find EVE fun. The most exciting systems to me had very little to do with combat, but especially as it pertains to this article, also couldn't be as rewarding without it. It was all the player run economies, homsteads, towns and cities, player shops, craftsman and markets. The fact that materials mined had quality which impacted item stats, on and on. To get good gear, you had to know a guy who made it, they had to know a guy who'd mined good quality minerals, and that person may have found the minerals through another player who had prospected it. It made sense to be part of a player city, so you could put your house in a known market area for people to visit. It all mattered because people needed the equipment to go do the quests, and so it was a really symbiotic set of systems that made crafting and economy matter.
    - codebje 11mo ago
      The skill tree system was so nice compared to the rigid class systems of other MMORPGs, too. The fact that player towns just emerged was really cool. It was such a shame the space expansion was so ... flat. Neither space nor ground had a storyline to follow, but space wasn't an open world, and had no real element of choice in skill paths.
      - tekbruh9000 11mo ago
        PVE was indeed awful. Especially given the back drop; it should have been full of adventure across the galaxy, established characters messing with players, but was merely "run here and kill 6 kobolds". NPC AI sucked. Would love to strip from my private server, NPC generation as-is as implementation is static and does not allow dynamic responses. Replace it with modern agents to connect like players and train them to build out the world like players can. Also started a project to make a new client using video and segmentation, gen AI to recreate initial game engine entities as Godot scenes to have full control. Too little time for either, initial code has sat untouched for years.
ArlenBales 10mo ago
> 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.

by animex 11mo ago

starkparker 11mo ago

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

vkou 11mo ago

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? --- [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 11mo ago
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 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.
- ehnto 11mo ago
  Oh wow it was SWG? It truly was ahead of its time, I don't think any one game has come close to implementing such a rewarding group of systems and economy in an MMORPG, except maybe EVE but that is a very different game and admittedly I did not find EVE fun. The most exciting systems to me had very little to do with combat, but especially as it pertains to this article, also couldn't be as rewarding without it. It was all the player run economies, homsteads, towns and cities, player shops, craftsman and markets. The fact that materials mined had quality which impacted item stats, on and on. To get good gear, you had to know a guy who made it, they had to know a guy who'd mined good quality minerals, and that person may have found the minerals through another player who had prospected it. It made sense to be part of a player city, so you could put your house in a known market area for people to visit. It all mattered because people needed the equipment to go do the quests, and so it was a really symbiotic set of systems that made crafting and economy matter.
  - codebje 11mo ago
    The skill tree system was so nice compared to the rigid class systems of other MMORPGs, too. The fact that player towns just emerged was really cool. It was such a shame the space expansion was so ... flat. Neither space nor ground had a storyline to follow, but space wasn't an open world, and had no real element of choice in skill paths.
    - tekbruh9000 11mo ago
      PVE was indeed awful. Especially given the back drop; it should have been full of adventure across the galaxy, established characters messing with players, but was merely "run here and kill 6 kobolds". NPC AI sucked. Would love to strip from my private server, NPC generation as-is as implementation is static and does not allow dynamic responses. Replace it with modern agents to connect like players and train them to build out the world like players can. Also started a project to make a new client using video and segmentation, gen AI to recreate initial game engine entities as Godot scenes to have full control. Too little time for either, initial code has sat untouched for years.

ArlenBales 10mo ago

> 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.