Exploring the Marvel Universe Online 88
In the wake of yesterday's formal announcement of the Marvel Online title, Gamespot has an interview with 'Cryptic Studios' creative director, Jack Emmert, and Marvel Entertainment's vice president of Interactive, Ames Kirshen — as well as Microsoft Game Studios' senior director of business development, Frank Pape. They discuss the details of a game on Windows and the 360 (both will play in the same world), how the game will reflect the comics, and why Cryptic is involved. From the article: "Cryptic with their great pedigree, their great track record on the City of Heroes franchise — it was the perfect partner. We have access to all the characters in the history and lore of the Marvel universe to put into this game. So we're super excited. I mean this is, for an MMO player and for folks on the console that want to play an MMO and bringing in a new audience, it's as compelling a statement as we can make." And here I thought they were going to talk about that little multi-year lawsuit between Cryptic and Marvel.
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For those who don't know, This is the guy that at one point KILLED DEATH despite the objections of Eternity and all the other Cosmic beings. Then he brought her back.
You just don't get more powerful than that.
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Actually the beyonder was an incomplete cosmic cube, they were much more powerful characters in the MU (i.e. The living tribunal)
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Pure Energy or that female form, same problem. Hell, at one point the Beyonder was a Universe on his own complete with habitable planets.
However, the form he created by copying Captain America's body and Micheal Jackson's Hair combined with his ow
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> Beyonder was a Universe on his own complete with habitable planets.
A universe many times the size of this one, which has four hundred billion galaxies of a hundred billion stars each.
Those of you who dabble in physics would realize how god awful much energy that would be (the Molecule Man once hit him with a blast that would have "slagged several billion dimensions").
Then comes the worst retcon since Victoria Principle dreamed th
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Moral: You can be smart. You can be powerful. It's best to be both.
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Then the Molecule Man separated, but first gave himself a non-cosmic-cube power source similar to his old-school, no-organic-molecules power.
Then much later on, the Molecule Man got mad, forced the old Disco Stu Beyonder to re-form out of the chick, then laid some wh00p@$$ down on him,
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Or maybe not... sigh.
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So one guy could make girls lust for him even if they didn't want to, and the other could transfer his mind into a girl and go play the proverbial "stand in front o
Competing Against yourself? (Score:4, Insightful)
Jack "Statesman" Emmert claims that the new MMO will be more "story" based and tied into new comic book storylines etc and that they will continue to support the COX (City of Villains and City of Heroes) games. However, it seems to me that they must be competing with themselves on some level, even if with two separate development teams at Cryptic handling the different games. Can anyone here imagine them *not* using the same style of character creator that they have in the COX games? It is brilliantly executed and almost necessary for this type of game so I'm pretty sure we will see it in some form in the Marvel MMO. The Marvel MMO will probably have 40-50% nicer looking graphics which is going to woo a lot of people as well as full permission to use all Marvel charactes in the story which is also going to draw a lot of fans. I think the COX games have reached their peak in subscribers and once the Marvel MMO comes out, they will in all likelihood lose customers. However, Cryptic is probably making a % of all profits from the Marvel MMO so this works out well for them but not so great for long-term support for the COX games.
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Just look at DAOC after Warhammer Online was announced. I rest my case.
Re:Competing Against yourself? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, this isn't quite the same thing. With DAOC and Warhammer, that was pretty much the same team moving on to the next big thing on their own.
One thing Positron said in his letter to The Cities community [cityofheroes.com] was that the Cities and Marvel Universe will have totally separate dev teams. And with the kinds of cash Marvel and Microsoft can throw at Marvel Universe, Cryptic wouldn't have to siphon any money from the Cities' team. In fact, I doubt Jack Emmert would agree to this deal if he didn't think the Cities would be self-sustaining throughout the process.
IMHO, keeping the teams separate is almost a necessity. Neither team will want new features to be dependent on the other. Certainly, there will be a new client engine, since the Cities are OpenGL. Marvel Universe will run on both Windows and XBox 360, so Direct3D would be an engineering no-brainer even if Microsoft wasn't publishing the title. And, if nothing else, the inevitable rivalry between the Cities and Marvel Universe will push both teams to prove their own worth. Marvel Universe doesn't want to be seen as a mere "re-skin" of City of Heroes, with Jean Gray and Xavier's School standing where Ms. Liberty and City Hall used to be, and the Cities don't want to be reduced to one large beta test for Marvel.
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DAOC claimed that 'no this won't affect DAOC, Warhammer Online has whole different dev team on another floor of the same building'.
While this may be mostly true, any real dev investment to DAOC went downhill fast after that. Yes, they still have people fixing exploits and they are releasing a small expansion later this year, but there has been no real development after Catacombs was launched to the core game systems. DAOC has been broken as far as gameplay is concerned si
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But the Warhammer team was spending DAOC's money. Marvel Universe has two very wealthy sugar daddies.
Cryptic was a one-game shop before Marvel Universe. Auto Assault is from another studio entirely, yet their failure hit their common publisher, NCSoft, hard enough to impact Cryptic'
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Yes, they are promising the world in the next four 'issues'. Talk is cheap. Note how very very vague their plans are...
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When Statesman stepped down as lead dev and Positron stepped in, there was a sea change in the amount of information we received, and the amount of stuff that was promised. For one thing, the planned upcoming paid expansion pack was cancelled, and i
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If you start producing pumpernickel, are you competing against yourself, or are you just expanding the products you offer?
Some people will buy less white or wheat bread and to buy pumpernickel, and some people will buy pumpernickel in addition to the breads they bought already. Also, you might attract customers who never would have bought white or wheat, but want pumpernickel.
In the first case, you're competing against your
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What are his powers?
Slimier than than a raging lawyer.
More powerful than a city official.
He can pass ineffectual laws with a single signature.
Who's that on that yacht?
It's a mongoose!
It's steve ballmer!
It's Statesman!
Online World of Warcraft Style (Score:1)
I never got the "men in tights" thing... (Score:2)
Running around in tights and underroos doing good? Creepy.
Count me out.
Re:I never got the "men in tights" thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Drawing clothes is extra work. First you draw the body, then you have to draw the clothes over that body such that they appear to hang naturally.
Or you could just draw the body, and then color it to look like the hero is wearing clothes, maybe add a couple pieces of flair. It's faster, ergo cheaper. Add fifty years and maybe it isn't financially necessary for publishers like Marvel but it has basically become a tradition.
I understand there's a similar explanation for why characters in Japanese comics have crazy-colored hair. Everyone in Japan has black hair, so in B&W comics it made sense to just leave the hair blank to save money and prevent printing problems and their readers just naturally filled it in with the expected color. When they started using color printing, the artists thought why fill in that blank space with black when you could use pink or blue? This, too, then becomes a tradition.
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I did some art and it was much easier to draw nudes than people in cloths. easier than all of those is heavy armor, robots and aliens.
In those casses you can outright invent the apearance. So a munster that's only seen in a single panel of a comic is the absolute easiest thing to draw.
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I couldn't prove it, but my thought is that skin tight suits is a result of wanting to sell nudes to teenagers without getting arrested.
Draw tits. Ink them yellow. Done.
KFG
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Which makes more sense to me. Superman wouldnt be quite as cool if he was lifting a truck in a suit and tie.
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I think both WoW and their own City of Villains may have taught them that not everyone wants to be a hero.
Running around in tights doing evil? Not as creepy.
Flying around in spaceships, mining asteroids and shooting down pirates? Where my ISK is already going. It'll have to be really fun to get me away from Eve
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RPG or Twitch? (Score:4, Interesting)
The only twitch-based MMO I can think of is Sony's Planetscape (I believe). I hope they go this route, it would be fun on a console.
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They, too, could use a lesson from City of Heroes -- 3d movement built right into the game. SWG is more anti-3D movement than even WoW. The animation for "jumping while running" = your body keeps running as it moves through a geoometric arc through the air. You can't leap over anything but the smallest things you can walk up.
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Really? What do you consider hardcore RPG elements? I ask this out of honest curiosity; I've played roughly as many RPGs on consoles as I have on PCs, and I don't see it. But I've never played an MMORPG (unless you count MOOing, which you shouldn't), and the RPG has never been my primary game genre.
What does an RPG have to do to make it hardcore that is infeasible with a console controller?
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It's interesting that the most action-oriented of all MMORPGs I've ever played (which includes EQ, DaoC, AC, Horizons, SWG, MxO, WoW, and Co
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I can see the message boards now. "Hulk punched Wolverine, stripping his flesh off his skeleton, then busted the "indestructible" skeleton since the Hulk has Adamantium Busting Rage as his Rank 9 power. NERF!
Yeah, I can't wait for the "strong guys" to whomp on casters and the casters not only not insta-die, but not even have their spellcasting interrupted.
Won't fly (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, they relesed an expansion, that copypasted half the powers from Heroes side, and dropped another pile of nearly contect-free stuff and told people to go level again from zero.
Also, a superhero game with a license is the silliest idea ever. Either you have 200 spidermans zipping around (beyond silly), or you can't allow players to play 'name' characters, at which point the whole point of a license goes out of the window. People play license games to 'be the hero' so to speak, and that doesn't work in a MMO. The concept is just broken out of the gate.
Expect a weak ripoff of City of Heroes with marvel (tm)(R)'s added all around, with some weak license-tieins like 'name' heroes giving missions to the player characters, and maybe villains as bosses to whack. With zero endgame gameplay at launch and nearly zero post-launch content.
MMOs live and die on the _gameplay_, not any license or logo, and while Cryptic did prove with CoH/CoV that they can make a workable superhero combat system that's cool for roughly two weeks, they also proved they couldn't design their way out of a paper bag beyond the combat system. All the bolted-on stuff has been broken - PvP was riddled by extra rules and special pvp nerfs to powers, base system was so badly designed it was unusable to most of the playerbase and the 'crafting' introduced in CoV was so bad it makes EQ2's crafting system look great in comparison.
WoW upped the bar on the amount of content and gameplay required to keep people hooked on a MMO. And even WoW faces constant whines how there's not enough to do. I can't blame people for trying, but I sincerely doubt Marvel Online will be a success - if it even gets out of the gate (Microsoft has a tendency to kill off/sell off MMO projects when their beancounters get the willies during development)
It could work (Score:4, Interesting)
Expect a weak ripoff of City of Heroes with marvel (tm)(R)'s added all around, with some weak license-tieins like 'name' heroes giving missions to the player characters, and maybe villains as bosses to whack. With zero endgame gameplay at launch and nearly zero post-launch content.
If Spidey and Wolverine are just hanging around handing out quests and tossing out catch phrases, it will be stupid.
However if they involve these characters in the actual gameplay, it could be pretty fun.
Imagine taking your original hero character, working your way through the ranks, proving your mettle, such that you become a full-fledged X-Man and get to go on missions with Wolverine. Would that satisfy the desire to "be the hero"? It sounds like it to me. Best of both worlds: My own creation, my personal avatar, I am a bad-ass super-hero, and look there's my favorite Marvel characters kicking ass beside me!
Of course practically speaking I'm not expecting anything that involved. It will probably be as you describe, and be crappy. Yet it is possible, if Marvel decides to give Cryptic a serious up-front cash injection so they have enough developers to handle it. Hopefully Cryptic made money of Co(H|V) themselves and can afford more developers. If they take it seriously, spend the money, and do it right, a Marvel MMO could be great.
I'll start holding my breath right... now.
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Therefore I predict this power will be a pale imitation of either Quake or the Spiderman comic. Ooh, I'm "webslinging" at 14 miles per hour, with some bizarre air control that has little to do with normal momentum-and-gravity physics.
But at least the "tanks" will be among the most heavy hitters. No "Hulk" standing
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Bah, the Quake I grappling hook was crap on a stick. Thank god most of the mods that made use of the grappling hook had a version that didn't. CTF servers were mostly grappling-hook enabled, much the pity, but normal Team Fortress didn't have it. Mega TF did use it, but Mega TF was also a crapfest in a variety of o
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Also CoV/CoH was badly overinstanced.
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So you skipped it.
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You need to show some imagination. What if players are all bands of x-men or avengers? Also, it's not just the heroes, now I can
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I suspect that the signature heros will spend most of their time just handing out missions/task forces however. Cryptic has never shown much initative for moving past the bog standard MMO gameplay elements however, so don't expect something radically new and different.
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Either you have 200 spidermans zipping around (beyond silly), or you can't allow players to play 'name' characters, at which point the whole point of a license goes out of the window.
Actually there are more options than that. The one they will probably take is that you create your own character, then, rather than fighting 'with' marvel heroes, you'll be fighting against marvel villains. In other words, you can't fight as Spiderman, but you can fight against the Green Goblin, Doc Ock, Mysterio ... etc.
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No. MMOs stay alive by making the player do boring repetive tasks, and make him somehow believe that what he is doing is gratifying (zomg I leveled up!!!!!1), so he'll get addicted and keep paying for his subscription as long as possible.
But gameplay? LOL. MMOs aren't about interesting gaming experiences.
omg multiplatform!!@#$%^ (Score:3, Funny)
Clones everywhere (Score:1, Redundant)
I'm guessing we'll see 10,000 wolverines and spidermans r
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Only Leroy Jenkins can determine that.
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"Rick Jones!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11"
"NO! Ahhh, *$@%*@&!"
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Two Reasons Not To Support This Title (Score:2)
2. Microsoft is evil. I don't think explanation is needed in this regard. The fact that a Microsoft lobbyist is now the ambassador to the EU and is lobbying them to 'be nicer' to Microsoft proves that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Now take these two companies with little to no moral values and put the
Yeah Right! (Score:1)
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Power levels (Score:1)
For instance, you've got guys like the Punisher, who may have really big guns, but he's just a guy with guns, so he's sort of on the "normal guy level. Then you have guys like the Silver Surfer, Galactus , Quasar, etc. who are all on the "cosmic" level. Then there are guys on the mid level, which includes most mutants save for the super powerful ones (Magneto, Professor X), and then the REALLY powerful but still mostly just o
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Raidspeak: Wolferine: u kan lik my ironbllz, dragonlord
Raidspeak: Josephus the Ironbottom: Also, please don't use raidspeak for anything but listening to or responding to raid instructions
Raidspeak: Dragon Lord Frankie: eat me wolfie
Raidspeak: Josephus the Ironb
What would be interesting is if... (Score:1)
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At least the "claws/regen" scrapper should be there, thank god. I cannot stand "fighting classes" in other games now that the scrapper has appeared on the scene. Standin
W0lv3r1n claws you for 4 points (Score:2)
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http://www.joystiq.com/2006/09/28/joystiq-intervi
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All games suffer from this. And the solution is identical: get in a group
And, ironically, this game suffers from it the least since once in awhile you encounter someone who does realize a hero would help another hero, roleplaying-wise.
> Oh look, that lady is getting her handbag stolen! Oh... nevermind,
> the bad guy is too low level for me to get anything out of it.
And, to quote The Oracle, here's what'll reall
Begging the question...? (Score:2)
Cryptic - maker of City of Heroes/Villains - is helping Marvel make Marvel MMOG.
That's like Blizzard helping Hasbro make D&D Online.
WTF? How could you have a whole interview and not ask ONE QUESTION about that teeny little conflict-of-interest thing?
I can't see how they can do this and keep CoH/V alive.
Hoping for different gameplay (Score:2)
Hopefully this Marvel game is a chance for a fresh start in terms of game mechanics, player-to-player dynamics, and engine limitations. I enjoyed CoX but cancelled after exhausting it. I look forward to more from Cryptic.
And I loved Cryptic's attitude toward its community. They're open and frank with their