Star Wars Galaxies: Player Made Quests Revitalize this MMORPG!

Article by Severian, MMORPGFOCUS.COM Staff Writer

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Sony Online Entertainment has always been an innovator in the MMORPG industry, and we see them innovating again and taking a pretty big risk with their game, Star Wars Galaxies, by allowing players to make their own quests in the game world.

This is risky though for a number of reasons, just a few of which are numbered below:

1) How could this affect game balance?

2) How would you prevent exploiting?

3) How would you insure that the game world retained high quality content, and keep bad player made stuff from polluting the quality of your product?

4) How would you keep players from changing up established lore and key themes?

These are just a few of the problems that come to mind, and a few of them are discussed in our exclusive Interview with Star Wars Galaxies Lead Producer Christopher Field, a really cool and smart guy, on video at Fan Faire 2009. Watch it here on our site: http://www.mmorpgfocus.com/forum/showthread.php?t=914

We will in fact have a fresh follow up to that interview coming soon, exclusively here.

For now however, the player made quests have launched, and are a huge hit. This makes it more likely that other developers will copy this model and allow for player made content to exist in game with varying degrees of restrictions.

The feature is such a hit that Sony Online Entertainment announced that fans have created over 3 million pieces of interactive Star Wars fiction (quests, npcs, etc.) since the feature launched. This is huge and shows that developers have a gigantic untapped resource for content creation that has since been overlooked: their players.

That number is even more impressive when you consider that Star Wars Galaxies has a player base somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 players. There is a rumor that one player has created 6,000 playable quests with his friends and that they have done this alone merely through hours of dedication spent over the last month or so.

One has to question though if all those 6,000 quests would be of high quality and what impact they would have on the game world. We are unsure if they are all just thousands of quests to kill 10 of a certain type of monster or if the player in question attempted to create a story-arc to accompany them.

One thing is certain though, player made content has a bright future in video games of all types, and Sony is on the forefront. Some other examples where they have utilized this is the popular online console game "Little Big Planet" and the online virtual lobby "Home", both available now on the PS3.

What is so great for developers is that this allows them to expand their game worlds without having to pay for professional development of content. The computer has a long history of this with everything from the hundreds of Neverwinter Nights missions that have been developed by fans, to different missions created for the old ID Software first person shooters.

What would be great for players is if developers allowed them to possibly charge micro transactions for their content in the future or also choose to offer it for free. I know some purists in the modding community won't like this idea, but it has a positive expected result. This way if a very skilled player-developer created spectacular content that took a very large time investment, that person could also reap a reward for the time invested by receiving, say 25 cents for each download of his or her content. This way more people would be incentivized to spend more time polishing and refining what they produce and it will also increase the number of semi-professional participants which are potential job candidates for developers.

One thing you can count on in the MMORPG genre, is constant change. Developers need to keep up or risk being yesterday's news!

Discuss Star Wars Galaxies in our forum for the game here: http://www.mmorpgfocus.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=149