Otherland MMO Announced

Eurogamer breaks news that German games publisher DTP Entertainment will be making an MMORPG based on Tad Williams' Otherland series of books. As anyone who has read the books will know, this could be an interesting new spin on virtual worlds. Quoting: "For want of a better soundbite, let's call it the first cyberpunk MMO: a virtual world about virtual worlds, in which your avatar is an avatar, the NPCs play NPCs, and you explore a multiverse in which you might be in realistic historical surroundings one minute, and cartoon fantasy ones the next. Everything changes, even your own appearance, and nothing is even pretending to be real. ... You start the game as one of those consciousnesses in a place called the Land of the Lost, a nightmare scenario which you're trying to escape. You'll run, be killed, and reborn in a 'baby' state as a simple, low-rent sim (though we suspect the game won't be using that term, for obvious reasons) - a blank, featureless avatar that can be male, female or even neither."

Reminds me of an Onion piece

[Facegarden]

The onion did a piece on "World of World of Warcraft", where players play a character sitting in a lonely basement playing warcraft. The "your avatar is an avatar" part reminds me of that, though technically they imply different things... and actually that statement doesn't imply much...

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/warcraft_sequel_lets_gamers_play [theonion.com]

-Taylor

Re:Brainstorming session gone wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I love you.

Re:Sounds interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Otherland series is one of the best I've read in the virtual world genre. Not quite sure if it counts as full on cyberpunk though.

I've been waiting for someone to make an MMO from this series, it begs for it.

Re: Book or Four!

[TaoPhoenix]

I will be replying the daylights out of this thread since I really liked the series.

It is a tetrology of 4 books, all gorgeously detailed! I really liked that a crucial feature is two AFRICAN characters as lead heroes! One from a modern province, and one a classically trained Bushman.

Tad W. does a brilliant job of showing how the Old Bush Ways could provide crucial insight into our modern era.

I hate MMO's, but I'll probably have to get my own little corner of this one solely because of the books.

Re:But will it be a WoW killer!?!?!?

[orclevegam]

I think we need to have something cleared up. I keep seeing people refer to the "lore" of Otherland, but that kind of misses the point. Otherland doesn't really have "lore" in the same way that things like WoW, LoTR, Warhammer, or even StarTrek do. The basic premise of the book was that the internet has evolved to the point where everyone interfaces via a direct neural interface and it's experienced as a immersive 3d world with avatars etc., but that something weird is happening and some people are getting "stuck" in the virtual worlds. This is similar to the premise of .Hack, but very different in other ways. Anyway, there's really only 2 bits of "lore" I can think of from the books that could conceivably be brought across. The first would be the major antagonists from the book, which is a fat man and a skinny man that hunt the characters across the various virtual worlds (always wearing an avatar that matches them in some way, for instance the fat man as a toad and the skinny man as a praying mantis). The second item would be the use of certain gestures to perform various actions, such as moving fingers in a very specific pattern to open a portal to another world. It's important to note however that in the books when the characters get sucked into the virtual worlds and lose their ability to log out, the worlds also stop responding to the standard gestures.

Anyway, the important thing is, that for the purposes of something like this MMO, Otherland isn't really a single world with lore, rather it's more of a meta-world in which the players randomly get dropped into one of many worlds each with their own lore.

Re:Why Otherland?

[Bieeanda]

Because, unlike the other properties you list, Otherland is strongly focused around the kind of ultra-immersive MMO that some gamers have been slavering for since Bill Gibson coined the term 'cyberspace'. They're basically trying to take an extant virtual world, and create it in real life, without having to go through all the annoyance of sorting out what canon bits to put in.

...Which is why it's going to fail spectacularly. The novels are a decent read, but the 'cyberspace' aspects of it are as shallow and cliche as marketing blurbs.

Re:But will it be a WoW killer!?!?!?

[orclevegam]

There is, but all that occurs outside of the virtual world this is going to be based on. The storyline is also not applicable, as in the books the main characters are investigating why people are getting trapped in the virtual world and once they themselves become trapped attempting to work their way out of it. As several others have already commented, the virtual world parts of the book are really very shallow because it's mostly about them attempting not to get killed long enough to make it to the next world. I would say it's comparable to trying to convert something like Portal into an MMO. There's a story there, and I don't think anyone would argue it's a pretty good story, but it's sort of a one shot thing. Sure the gameplay mechanic could be carried over, but the story itself is no good for an MMO setting. Likewise the over-arching story from the books, what made them good, is no good for an MMO setting.

Re:Why Otherland?

[jefu]

Otherland is set in the near future and the characters in the novel enter a set of virtual worlds in order to combat the bad guys. So you have not only possible play in a virtual "real world" but also play in any of a number of (related) virtual "virtual worlds".

Disclaimer: I read the first book in the series and decided not to go any further and in the first book the main characters are just getting going in the virtual worlds.

Re:But will it be a WoW killer!?!?!?

[fireboy1919]

The basic premise of the book was that the internet has evolved to the point where a few people can interface via a VR interface and it's experienced as a immersive 3d world with avatars etc., but that something weird is happening and some people who are connecting to a very specific location, eventually dubbed Otherland, are getting "stuck" in the virtual worlds, even though they aren't using neural interfaces.

Fixed that for you. Did you even read the series? Your description is way off.

Otherland isn't really a single world with lore, rather it's more of a meta-world in which the players randomly get dropped into one of many worlds each with their own lore.

You're missing the most important bit - Otherland itself. Each "world" within Otherland has it's own masters who have ideas about what that world should be, and created it as such. The rest are mostly just fronts for something similar to the internet. It would be foolish not to include this concept - and perhaps some of the neat worlds that Tad Williams envisioned - in such a new MMO.

It should also be noted that the rest of the net is small by comparison to Otherland - which is the only place that people are actually creating *worlds* instead of just *sites*. I can't see why this wouldn't also be true.

Re:It was a decent story

[stefanlasiewski]

It wasn't a dream. It was a nightmare. Then another one, and another one, and another one. Then you got separated from your friends. Then the devil seized control of the system and it got worse. No rest for the weary.

And then they charged your credit card.