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?

But they are the shape of things to come.

[will_die]

The big licened MMORPG are the things to come after SWG. Here you can release an extremly poor MMORPG with extermly stupid design(thanks raph) yet sell 300,000 because of the name attached. Then you can expect to keep less then 1/3 but while you are being paid to develop the game after which you try to get people to sign up.
As for how to do it, you have to set up a world that feels like the movies or books and allows them to interact with areas mentioned in the book.
Middle Earth looks like it is taking a good view of it, they have said that the areas from the movies will be in the game but after the ring bearer or whoever the important person/event passed through/happened so that you cannot modify the even of the story, and no climbing over the characters.

Re:Not just with licenses

[Ayaress]

It's a different kind of problem, though. This isn't just about expectations in gameplay and quality that hype builds up - this is expectations in the game design and content that years of reading books, watching movies or TV shows, and following an immense existing body of "knowledge" on how Middle Earth or the Star Wars universe or the Matrix works.

When we first heard about, say, the Elderscrolls games, or everquest, we had no preconcieved notions of how the world behind the games functions, because it's new to us.

With non-MMO games based on licenses, there's a step up. Fans of the previous works already have some knowledge of the game world, but a single player game is easily constrained in ways to make it work.

Now, the step up to a licensed MMO game. First, you can't constrain them, since the game world has to be functional. Second, you have to have a LOT more content in the game, and it still has to fit the existing concept of what the world is like. Star Wars is probably the worst of them, since the book series has set forth a storyline from before Episode I until several decades after Episode VI.

Plus, in these game worlds, the fans have always known them through the eyes of the Great Hero. That works good in a single player game, because it's ok if you have 50,000 players out there all playing as Legolas or Luke Skywalker in that case.

But an MMO game takes place through the eyes of a slightly above-average person for the most part. Who the fuck is this Wookie named Sheyan, and why is he dancing? Everybody wants to be the hero, they all want to be Jedi, but that's not the way MMORPGs work.

Re:intellectual property owners have the last say.

[notamac]

I think the best example of getting around this kind of stuff is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Whilst not an MMO at all, it was still a decent RPG in its own right, and it was interesting because it placed you as a major character in the Star Wars universe... just not at the same time as the trilogy (and its lacklustre prequil trilogy) occured: instead it placed you 4000 years before hand.

In doing so, it gave the game designers great freedom in how the developed characters, whilst still holding true to everything that is Star Wars (the force, light side, dark side, sand people, jawa, etc...)

Methinks this is the way that future MMO's should go in adapting licenses to games.

World Design

[xanderwilson]

There's an great old AD&D book, called "World Building" or something like that, and it helped me immensely as I was doing stuff like this for fiction. It talked, I believe, about the difference between top-down world creation vs. "create as you go" creation. It's easier to create exciting and new landscapes and situations when you use the latter, but you might run into problems. You eliminate those problems by creating, say, the ecosystems and weather and geography first, and then the politics and histories, etc. But that might lead to less exciting stuff at first and it might be a lot of work in vain if you never get a chance to use more than a small patch of grass before you realize nobody's interested.

Alex.

licences

[Anonymous Coward]

remember all the hype for star wars? the frothing fans? how much do you hear about it now?

in many cases a licence is a development roadblock. look at the numerous movie to game conversions. take that already difficult senario and add thousands of players, and economy, government, social system, and hundereds of items and you have a train wreck waiting to happen. add to that the players preconceived notions, and it turns into a snowballs chance in hell situation. i'm amazed they have done what they have, but they won't come close to the leaders in the genera.

it would probably take and effort 10 times or better than the famed goldeneye to game conversion. i don't envy these designers in the least...

Villainy

[1WingedAngel]

"[D]o licenses bring excessive expectations to a persistent world where everyone wants to be the hero?"

Actually, from what I've seen, the difficulty would lie in the number of people who want to be the villain. It is a very popular role, but, unfortunately, one that the game developers never really flesh out. Villains, by nature, do dastardly, nasty, things that game developers (and the companies holding the license) don't want to give the characters freedom to do.

Re:Just don't be the hero.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude - that sounds as boring as hell. Why don't you just work at McDonalds doing the exact same thing and make actual real-life human dollars?

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

[Dragoon412]

So the action-based MMOG genre is zero for one. What's the boring non-action market?

See, I can understand why Planetside's comparitive failure is off-putting for some (stupid) investors, but what's the success rate of EQ-styled games? For every one successful game, a handful of others tank. The only ones that've enjoyed any real commercial success at this point are Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Dark Age of Camelot. That success can be mainly attributed (at least it would seem) to being the first MMOG to the market, being the first 3D MMOG, and being the first MMOG to feature organized PvP, respectively.

AO's barely hung on, and its spectacular failure of a launch nearly destroyed it. Horizons, Asheron's Call 2, Earth and Beyond, Shadowbane, and many other games have been major losers.

Others, like SWG and Asheron's Call have been moderately successful. And then there's Final Fantasy XI, which, while doing well worldwide, is not exactly a sweeping success in the United States, and has a freakishly high rate of cancellations (anecdotal evidence: I started playing with a group of 30-some people on release day, and currently none of them have active subscriptions anymore, and haven't for months).

The risk isn't necessarily greater with action-based MMOGs than traditional MMORPGs. Certainly there have been more flame-outs amongst traditional games. And on top of that, the potential revenue from a very large, untapped market is much greater than the current, competetive market.

Besides: think of it as a good thing. The supposed risk will frighten off the likes of EA and other penny-pinching investors that are more interested in rushing some shovelware EQ clone out the door. When such a game does get made, it'll most likely be free of the types of people responsible for bug-addled crap like Horizons and Earth and Beyond.

MMO != best use of license

[t1nman33]

The MMO is a good format for a game, but it is not always the BEST way to get large numbers of people playing together at one time. MMOs are best-suited to worlds where there is little or no prexisting fiction, where players themselves create the epic battles--like the recent Everquest adventure when players banded together to kill an unkillable monster.

Part of the problem with games like SWG is that everybody wanted to play as Boba Fett, or Luke Skywalker, or Han Solo. Nobody wanted to play as Stormtrooper #4 or Rebel Soldier #17 or Young Shopkeeper or Man on Bantha.

The action revolves around a few heroes. Why should players go through the trouble of inventing backstory and drama and their own adventures when those things have already been created for them?

IMHO, if the same framework for SWG had been used as the framework for an anonymous Sci-Fi MMO, with none of the trappings of Star Wars, I think it would have been more successful. There are GREAT tools in that game for creating communities, for making up your own adventures, for running a fun, playable world.

But when everybody knows that the "greatest" adventures have already been had--the Battle of Yavin, etc.--there's no incentive to try to do better, because the fiction has already established that it can't be done. In this situation, then, the fiction turns out to be a limiting factor, not a building one.

I can't help remembering...

[freeBill]

...all the people who said this same kind of thing about "The Lord of the Rings."

Even Tolkien himself suggested that all the fans had their own visions of the trilogy in their heads and any attempt to put it on film was going to fail to meet those expectations.

Then along came a guy named Peter Jackson.