E308: John Smedley on Star Wars Galaxies, reconnecting with players
Our lengthy discussion with John Smedley yesterday focused primarily on Free Realms and the possibilities in SOE's future. We also chatted briefly about the newest surprise from the company - a collaboration between the Austin and Denver studios called Champions of the Force. Here Mr. Smedley discusses his view on the TCG, Star Wars Galaxies in general, and how reconnecting with the playerbase is really great for the company.
It seems as though the reaction impression from a lot of SWG players is that it's surprising that the company put all these new assets and resources into the game.
I think people have the wrong impression about Star Wars Galaxies. We still have a very active live team. We have a bunch of new content just out, and a bunch of new content in the pipe. Have they talked to you about what's coming? Vehicles in battles on Hoth? It's amazing. It is expansion-pack level content, and it's going to be included for free as part of the release. We could have done a straight-up expansion pack but we decided not to do it that way because of the history with the game and expansions. We want to focus on the content. I think it's a really good game now. We think the content is there, the polish is way up.
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The lesson we've learned from Galaxies is, "take the time." We haven't released an MMO of our own in three years. We helped out with Pirates of the Burning Sea obviously ... looking around the room, I think you can see the level of polish we're reaching for. We've taken this up about five notches. You learn your lessons in life ... what I'm happy is that we're still making games, having a good time doing it. There has been some downsizing in our industry of late. We've been kind of on the upswing, it's a good time in the company right now. We've even got some unannounced projects that you folks haven't had the chance to hear about yet.
That seems like it has an obvious connection with Living Legacy. There's an element across the company that we don't think has really been played up. You're essentially letting anyone that's ever held an SOE account get back into their game this summer?
Yup!
Where did the inspiration for that come from?
One of our strongest assets is that we've been around for so long. So many people have played our games that there is a lot of nostalgia surrounding them. EverQuest, EQ2 ... EQ has a huge number of folks who look back at that game fondly, and I've been shocked by the number of people who are jumping back in to try out the game. There are a lot of games to play this summer, a lot of MMOs, and we're trying to make sure people keep us in mind. We've got feature titles coming, and so it's a good time to touch base with our players.
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