Talk about immersion killing. First thing I noticed about SWG and something I never really heard a good excuse for. I’m can be a jedi, master the force, wield all sorts of weapons, see Darth Vader(!), but this 3-inch bit of rock stops me dead in my tracks!
This always bugged me and everyone else. Noone tolerates the lack of jumping (and innatural boundary boxes) but, despite still criticized, in Guild Wars this problem isn’t so terribly frustrating as it was/is in SWG. I think it’s because this issue is part of a bigger problem.
There was everywhere a lack of detail and attention, you could sit, but only displaced from the chair, on the thin air. There was a sitting animation but you would stand up by rotating in the wrong direction, melting with the back of the chair. The space shuttles used to fly right through the ceiling of the shuttle station, you could bring a huge pet in a tiny corridor with two thirds of the body going out of the roof, you could walk right through chairs and tables, run up and down terrain with absurd inclinations, reach every place without any limitation (if within the boundaries of the zone), the laser of your weapon would shoot at unrealistic angles, the animations and models had constant clipping issues, the NPCs were often stuck half buried in the city walls and everyone could start an impromptu classic dance as a skilled master dancer at any time. Race-specific animations, what are they?
The problem is much, much bigger and encompassing. It’s a problem of consistency.
The whole world was just generic wilderness, most of what you saw was graphic fluff, you could disable most of the “environment”. Everything was just somewhat randomly generated around you, without really “existing”. There was no geography, no roads, paths, environments. It was just generated terrain, but featureless and inconsistent. A “space”, but not space with a sense or justification.
This isn’t a problem of “content”. It’s not about a lack of POIs distributed around the world. Before I canceled for the first time I was following one of the quests for the first events and I had to walk through half a zone. A spread of nothingness, dull terrain, hills and mountains. I was a ranger so I could just walk in a straight line. The world just didn’t exist, it was a technical feature but it wasn’t there to offer something, to offer consistency or something you could relate to. It was supposed to be “pretty”, but with no substance. Even the POIs didn’t help in any way, again they didn’t help to create any kind of geography. A POI was usually just a building spawned somewhere with a few NPCs standing around it. They were dots on the world, but not “world” themselves.
These being all basic structures on which the whole game was built-up and engineered, problems that the game will always drag around, without the possibility to free itself from them.
The combat was also affected by all this.
If you ask me what was the biggest flaw in the original SWG I’d answer: lack of consistency. It is what makes the game “unresponsive”, hard to decipher. The combat was hard to figure out because it reacted in unpredictable ways. It was based on odd variables and mechanics that you wouldn’t expect and that you would find hard to fully understand and manipulate. And those who managed to get past this barrier would become invulnerable, exploiting the hell out of the system.
Everything was connected to that basic point. Lack of consistency and similarity to patterns that the players expected from the game. The lack of Star Wars-y feel and iconic classes was a drift of the same problem.
The “language” of the game felt alien, and not familiar as the Star Wars universe the players used to know (and hype and anticipate). A problem of communication.