Why didnt PS make it big?

[DviddLeff]

PS quite simply never made it, it almost did as it certainly had some decent reviews at release and all of them were talking about the potential the game had to develop.

From my experience many people tried the game, but left after a few months and the retention of players was poor due to the shoddy Core Combat expansion followed by the BFR disaster, not to mention the lack of content bar the Skyguard and Liberator, and then recently the Gal Gunship, Phantasm and engineering certs, which were 4 years in the making.

I believe that SOE thought it would be much bigger at release; we had 5 servers which never got filled even at launch and following that they slashed any development funds as the game had not made the impact they had hoped.

But why didn't it make it initially? I think it boils down to a few reasons:

1. Graphics were sub standard for the time, not by much, but enough to discourage the FPS market that it was aiming for. This is however a sacrifice that must be made to allow the massive scale of battles.

2. Game play was substandard when compared to its nearest rival, Battlefield 1942, which was released a year earlier but had a proper recoil system, head shots, decent flight physics, etc. Again this is a sacrifice that seemed to be made at the time due to the network demands, however many of it now seems to be due to poor design choices (BFRs had multiple hit boxes, so why cant players?).

3. FPS players are not used to subscribing, which was a massive turn off for many. Yet Guild Wars has proved that a different method can work, and PS has now proved that there is a core that will subscribe for an FPS.

4. Too much competition. SWG and EVE were both launched in 2003 along with PS, with SWG drawing many bored MMO players into the fold.

5. Not enough variety. Bases, towers are always the same, 5 different base layouts is no where near enough, making people bored very quickly.

6. Too much downtime; 15 minutes for an uncontested base hack is way too long to sit around defending, as is spending 10 minutes travelling just to be killed by a tank; back at launch there were very few AMS drivers (or drivers at all) so it was a long way to travel every time you got killed.

Those are the main issues I see that need addressing, in addition to the obvious like lack of post release development and support, and disappointing expansions.