Combat and Experience in SWG

Star Wars Galaxies is designed to be a casual players game. So combat is a relatively simple affair, and requires a lot less skill and cooperation than combat in Everquest. For people with MMORPG combat skills acquired in other games, SWG combat is downright TOO easy. There is an automated system telling you how hard a monster is with a color code, from green for most easy, over blue, white, yellow, to red. From the /consider command that gives you the same information, this color code is called a "con". A red con is SUPPOSED to kill you 95% of the time. But there are many monsters that con red to me, but I can kill them easily without breaking into a sweat. And I never considered myself a power gamer.

Part of this is due to the fact that you can easily heal yourself during combat, using just novice medic skill. So you don't need a team with some fighter types and some healer types, you can do all of this yourself. Another thing are pets, creatures you can control to participate in the fight. This doesn't need any skill either (but there is a creature handler profession that can use much bigger pets.) And finally combat is made easy by the fact that money is easy to get with missions, so buying the very best armor and weapon is not a problem.

As crafter I am relatively lucky in that I can often use the hides or bones I can harvest from a dead creature. Because other than that, SWG doesn't have much loot. Humanoid NPC enemies, who don't have hides or bones to harvest, occasionally have minor items, like a newbie pistol, but often you find just a handful of credits. Even quests don't give any good items as reward yet, although the developers are thinking about it. On the one side the lack of good loot from a specific target prevents the "camping" from Everquest. But on the other side, it makes you indifferent to what you kill. In the first monthly story you had to kill humanoid NPCs and loot them to find 4 parts of an encoded disk. But that was completely random, with a 1 in 100 chance to find one part of a disk, so people were just mass killing low level NPCs.

But loot is not the only missing reward. After some time, you stop getting experience points. In other games, experience added up, and with them you went up in levels. In SWG you earn xp only to spend them. And once you have reached either the highest skill level in a certain experience type, or the skill level you have chosen in your character development template, you can't spend the xp any more. I'm not far from reaching master armorsmith with all the skills I wanted to have for my 250 skill points. But from that moment on, I can't spend any xp on learning anything new without "forgetting" an old skill. So if I wanted to become a master creaturehandler instead, I would have to forget master armorsmith, which would be a tough decision.

I call it the "now what" aspect of SWG. Once you reach your goal, you say "now what", because you find that there is nothing left to do. Again, master crafter is the least bad option, because you can make master level items and have fun building up a shop and a customer base, still hunting for good resources. But as a master in an advanced combat profession, you can only kill monsters for money, there is no loot, and there is no more experience. You could start engaging in PvP (player vs. player) combat, but SWG doesn't really have a very good PvP system, and there is no reward in that either.

Capitalism shows us that people are motivated by rewards. Loot and experience are very important to a MMORPG. And I'm afraid that SWG combat doesn't have enough rewards in it to keep people playing this game for years. Lets hope the developers will still improve the rewards aspect of the game, otherwise they will run into a problem with customer retention.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:25 AM Permanent Link