These two comments have the same purpose of explaining my point of view on Star Wars Galaxies and the latest changes. The first part was written after the second in order to pin down better my reasons.
The rest is in the filth.
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It’s not about the bad timing of the publish, the bugs, the rollbacks. While these are the most evident manifestation of the problems (and the first focus and concern of SOE right now, I have no doubts), I cannot care less about them. They are completely irrelevant from my point of view because I’m looking at something else. I’m criticizing a part that was never put under discussion by SOE, nor it is now. And, still, it’s the real, but less evident, source of all this mess.
I’m not criticizing the execution here, I’m criticizing the approach. If the approach is wrong the execution can even be perfect but the result will be awful no matter what. No matter how much time they’ll dedicate to fix all the problems. Because the mistake happened on a different, previous level. What I’m pointing out isn’t about those problems that SOE already acknowledged, I’m pointing out problems that they completely negate. That aren’t questioned. There’s a direct difference of opinions here that I’m trying to underline. I’m not jumping in the bandwagon of the players criticizing the CU. I’m on a different position, a position that is nowhere popular or widely shared. A position that didn’t change in the last year and largely anticipated the problems of the game because, no matter of the dedication and restless work of the dev team, the direction was wrong.
The origin of all the rants I wrote and I write now is still the same. It’s the same crusade I carried on against Raph, against the independence of the “formal systems” from their context. This last CU isn’t probably credited to Raph, but it carries over and exaggerates his original mistake: the negation of the existence of the cultural patterns existing before you start to shape a “symbolic shared system” (like the Star Wars universe) into a specific form (like a game, in this case). The problem of the “Star Wars proper feeling” doesn’t depend on whether something was in the movies or not. It’s not a limit of references but a limit of patterns and expectations. If Lucas plans a new episode and throws in stormtroopers healing each other and casting fireballs I’m going “WTF?!” even if that’s actually “official”. There are cultural, implicit rules everywhere, they exist even if they aren’t manifest. These still represent patterns that must be respected because they are the true nature of the myth. They are its essence. Everyone knows if something fits or not depending on the coherence (self-consistence) with its own symbolic level.
There’s a technical term that, for sure, I didn’t invent: “the communicative pact”. It describes exactly these same points:
Through their cinematographic possibilities, the audiovisual language they use, both fiction films as well as documentaries can create different kinds of reality effects (realism, authenticity, actuality, believe). Since we are talking about an รข