Do Licensed MMOs Inherit A Disadvantage?

Thanks to Stratics for its editorial discussing the problems faced by the licensed massively multiplayer game. The author points out: "Star Wars, The Matrix, Middle Earth - these are just some of the pre-existing worlds that are making the MMOG leap", and goes on to lament: "One of the problems is that you have to create an entire believable, explorable world. This is hard enough as it is, but then you have to cater to pre-existing notions of that world. Fans are your main target group here, and they have that world all locked up tight in their heads. Prepare for Foaming-at-the-Forum disease, my illustrious developers, prepare well." We've previously covered other aspects of this dilemma, but do licenses bring excessive expectations to a persistent world where everyone wants to be the hero?

Re:But they are the shape of things to come.

[Mprx]

Such a game already exists. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates [puzzlepirates.com] is completely skill based, with no real levels (levels exist but have extremely minor gameplay effect), and does not require any great time commitment. This is an ideal game for casual players, and still has enough in-depth content (eg. player run economy) for the hardcore players. It's also written in Java so it's crossplatform, and it doesn't require great hardware or internet connection. You can try it for free and subscription isn't too expensive.

Asheron's Call 2

[cgenman]

I have it on good authority that Asheron's Call 2, while not a tremendous success, did break even. The company who created it, Turbine, had enough free cash to buy back the rights to Asheron's Call 1 from Microsoft, which should be considered a very successful MMPORPG (still going strong after all of these years, first MMPORPG with larger, ever-changing story archs). They've even announced an Asheron's Call 1 expansion.

These are now the people working on LotR and DnD. They've learned that a flexible presentation in their engine allowing for tremendous dramatic plot changes is far more important than having the highest resolution textures (At one point during development they bragged that the texture on the wall of one of the houses was the size of Asheron's Call 1's entire displayed texture budget). While they may not be able to do anything dramatically different with LotR, this should give great freedom to the DnD team to come up with original experiences for players. Like when they teleported 1/2 of the Asheron's Call 1 players into an undersea disco for an evening of boogying down, then denied any knowledge of having done so. Or the giant menacing figure that appeared in the sky one day, only to land a month later.

I agree that action-based MMPORPG's are the future. Lag isn't as bad as it once was, but it continues to cripple our designs. There are, of course, ways around lag. You could have players enter an X like shell when attempting to fight with another, effectively going from a MMPORPG to a somewhat lag-free standard FPS and back again. X, in this case, referring to the Anime. You can offload more of the processing to the client side, allowing for more cheating (at least you have a game worth cheating on). You can predictively process on the client, and Re-synch the game world as needed. You can limit movement to a square-by-square tile world, making processing calculations very simple.

Yahoo's Puzzle Pirates is a good example of where the genre is going. Light games somewhat divorced from the click-click-click nature of their predecessors, removed of the 3D graphics which can easily sink a project, and (so far) tremendously successful. Gunbound, ostensibly a MMPOAC (Massively Multiplayer Online Artillery Clone), is really just a Artillery Clone with a good lobby.

Point and click isn't the future. Drama is the future. Gaming is the future. Lag? Lag is the rural electrification on the phone bill of the MMPORPG designer's notebook.

Re:World Design

[bluemeep]

No, I'm pretty sure it's the "World Builder's Guidebook [amazon.com]" he's talking about. Which really is a pretty darn handy thing to keep on-hand if you need to build a believable kingdom/town/planet every now and again.

Re:Asheron's Call 2

[Mprx]

Three Ring's Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, not Yahoo's. You're not the first person I've seen who misread the name, maybe they should rename it to just "Puzzle Pirates".