Firefly MMORPG Announced

bishiraver writes "Multiverse has announced that they have gained rights to a Firefly Massively Multiplayer Online Game. Multiverse is a company started by several former Netscape employees, and they have developed an engine/network that works for all of their games. They intend to break into the MMO industry by being an MMO publisher of sorts. By standardizing, they can provide a less expensive alternative to the tens of millions of dollars and several years it takes to currently develop an MMO. They have said they will hire out a studio to build the game for them. Corey Bridgets, Massive's Executive Producer, says: 'If you're doing science fiction, you have to really think it out and create an incredibly rich environment that is compelling in its own right, and worth exploring and going back to week after week. That's what Joss Whedon did with Firefly.'"

Re:Because it did so well.

[Cameroon]

But how could it ever have generated interest, Fox refused to let it play on ANY regular schedule. Only people who were hooked on the first or second show made the effort to figure out when Fox might next play another episode. It was ridiculous. NO show would survive what was done to Firefly.

Re:Because it did so well.

[QuantumG]

Blah, that's a screenshot from a tech demo. The technology being demonstrated is the network engine, not the graphics. Multiverse intends to contract a studio to make the actual game using their middleware.

Re:server written in Java?!?!

[kherr]

I've had plenty of success writing Java servers. With proper threading they can scale rather well. That said, it'll take some doing to scale up to WoW numbers. But I'll bet a server written in Java running on a unix platform is going to be a hell of a lot better than C-based code running on Windows servers. I was horrified to realize SWG servers ran on Windows, but I'm sure lots of these games do.

Re:Because it did so well.

[OrangeTide]

There is a lot of noise going on in the development community to have like an MMO SDK. Small companies are scrambling to put out some sort of SDK to license to larger companies. I think the idea of running a Firefly MMO is to have more of a product demo of your licensable technology. Doing the servers for an MMO is actually pretty difficult and can be costly to develop. it is entirely possible for a tight team to engineer a really good MMO architecture that can be applied to several different games. it just hasn't happened yet. People used to say the same thing about "mass-produced" 3d engines, but now they are the norm.

Re:Because it did so well.

[rkcallaghan]

Lord_Dweomer wrote:

With games like WoW and SW:G and CoH and GW etc, does ANYBODY think these guys can succeed with a mass-produced MMORPG engine?

Three of the games you named make up less than 3% of the mmorpg market combined. World of Warcraft and Lineage I/II are the only signifigant forces. (source MMOGChart.COM [mmogchart.com])

So yea, there's plenty of room for more competition and plenty of low marketshare games to cannibalize. Whether it can happen with Firefly, I can't say. Someone can and will, though.

~Rebecca

* Operating System: Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

MULTIVERSE FAQ

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions. If you have further questions that are not answered here, please send them to us at [e-mail], and we'll add them to our FAQ or other pages at our site.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Q: What are the minimum system requirements?
A: The Multiverse Client requires:

        * Operating System: Windows XP
        * Processor: Pentium 4 with 1GHz or greater (2GHz+ recommended)
        * RAM: 512 MB (1 GB+ recommended)
        * Video Card: DirectX 9 compatible. Pixel shader and vertex shader compatible hardware with 128MB of texture memory (256MB recommended).
        * Sound Card: DirectSound compatible audio hardware

Important: The most common problem with running the Multiverse Client is not having the proper graphics card. See Multiverse Client Release Notes for a list of supported graphics cards.

Q: Does Multiverse support 64-bit Windows?
A: Yes, the Multiverse Client now supports 64-bit Windows.

Q: Does Multiverse support localized (non-English) versions of Windows?
A: Yes, the Multiverse client and tools now support localized installations of Windows.

Q: What type of Internet connection will I need?
A: You should have a broadband connection, such as DSL, Cable, or better.

Re:OMG! Firecrack!

[jtwronski]

http://eve-online.com/ [eve-online.com] is what your lookin for. I just got done with the free trial today, and I found it to be quite a bit of fun. Its different than any mmog I've played (evercrack and ffxi) in that pvp is available and encouraged.

If I had a box at home that could run it, i'd ditch ffxi for it right now.

Re:Because it did so well.

[Eivind Eklund]

Firefly popularity was to a large degree messed up by semi-random ordering of the episodes and semi-random playtimes on Fox. So treating the cancellation as lack of interest due to internal issues is not really appropriate; there were external factors heavily influencing this.

Eivind.

Re:But...

[ajs]

It was obviously an error, but I did like the cover in the books. If I recall correctly, the books described the Kessel Run as a sort of gravitational obstacle course around one or more black holes. Speed would obviously be a factor, but so would navigating the shortest distance (hence the notability of having accomplished the race in some number of parsecs).