This Week In MMO: Night at the movies edition

@Ren54 it's Friday.

I really think Mass Effect is the ultimate IP for a sci-fi MMO, it's got the guns and the gears, the cool looking pilotable spaceships, the lovable characters and companions, the odd looking galactic species, and the potential to have an infinite number of planets to explore, but these are just the basis of any good quality sci-fi MMO.

More importantly, the ME universe has under its futuristic facade a gritty and brutal world that is brewing with racial/species tensions, slavery, civil unrest, corporate intrigue, military coups, and of course there are the reapers. All of which are perfect materials for writing interesting quests and stories. Besides ME is already a pretty massive rpg game to begin with, uping it to an MMO just seem like the logical next step.

This is also why, for all the reasons above, James Cameron's Avatar is not a good idea for an MMO. As much as i liked the movie, the scope of the Avatar universe is just too small, and there doesn't seem to be enough materials for quests. However, if James Cameron were to make an MMO, i would love to see him making an Aliens MMO.

According to the film, in the Aliens universe, corporations control everything and even have their own private army, and battles are fought between rival corporations for the control of natural resources in the galaxy. This alone sets up a pretty interesting multi-factional system and allows for territorial/planetary control and corporate intrigues to play a major part in quests and stories. The players would be buying their own spaceship and outfitting it with armament, flight as well as ground crew/vehicles and so on to carry out their mission to colonize planets. Needless to say the crew will have an insane amount of xenomorphs to deal with when they get to their distination and possibly rival factions too. I can imagine this mmo to be a combination of games like Star Trek Online, the classic X-COM, and Colonial Marines but with 3rd person view.

weird video editing there :D

Yes an Avatar MMO! I totally want to play a water bend... oh wait that Avatar? No thanks, I'll pass.

Bioware would be making some massive assumptions in talking about a Mass Effect MMO. One, that players will put up with this themepark EQ/WoW gameplay rehash for another 5+ years. Two, that they even have enough gameplay to make a Mass Effect MMO.

Mass Effect's gameplay outside of the great ground combat and role playing was little more than faffing about. Planetary exploration wasn't very intriguing in ME1 because the planets began to smear together after a while, and that whole mining thing they replaced it with in ME2 made me want to strangle myself due to tedious nature of it.

MMOs need to figure out what they need to do to grow and improve before anyone plunks down another 100 million+ on any project.

Avatar

I'm in agreement about the opinions expressed mainly because movies and games are two different beasts. Movies rely on making a few characters central in the lime light and that's where all the enjoyment comes from.

A MMO movie game would have to find some way to make everyone feel like like that special hero, which in some instances is difficult because when everyone is a special snowflake, then no one is. This is why I'm very interested to see if SW:TOR can pull it off and prove me wrong.

Blizzard

Blizzard has sucked all the enthusiasm from me for their products. After seeing the fact that Diablo 3 would have an RMT auction house. This problem of gold farmers/item sellers won't get fixed if Blizzard's grand idea is to now to be the middleman for very same behavior they used ban accounts for.

However, I am off topic. Titan had better be a jaw-dropping-genre-pushing masterpiece when they finally unveil it. Because while I like the polish on Blizzard games, they don't exactly come up with the most original concepts.

Even though that is true. WoW is definitely here to stay. Like or hate it, the game was made decently, and did play well even though I didn't care too much for some the game's incessantly long raids.

Firefall

Hard to get excited about this one. On one hand the gameplay looks pretty structured and extremely well done. However, until I see that cash shop, my enthusiasm will be kept in check.


Ultima Online

It's good that's it still around, but it's not the game that made me excited about the MMO genre. Especially since its taken some of more deplorable aspects of the games it helped influence, such as selling Pay-to-Win items in its store (no baby, I'm not leaving this pay-to-win thing alone).

F2P is going shank a couple of these development teams straight in the eye. If they keep up with selling power/advancement through cash. The speed that developers latched onto this F2P trend is troubling. Many developers have taken longer to implement patches than they've taken to go whole hog into this F2P conversion.

MMOs and Storytelling

MMOs should present their story through the gameplay instead of jamming on the breaks to tell the player what their motivation is through cutscenes. That's probably one of the main things I'm worrried about with Star Wars:The Old Republic. It may be TOO story driven and actually hurt itself. e

I remember long cutscenes being a detractor in many games, especially games where I'm playing with a friend. I don't mind a good cutscene being lengthy, however my group mate may not share my fondness and it may lead to boring them earlier.

Social Gaming

Will anymore $100 MIL+ MMOs be made? I sure hope not. Not until we get a new direction to go with. Enough is enough, the baby steps that are being taken with each new MMO coming out are maddening. I'm hoping that Guild Wars 2, Archeage, The Secret World, World of Darkness, or some MMO that is currently under radar kicks the MMO genre straight in the rear.

That said. Social gaming has achieved something that the majority of MMOs have yet to do. Getting a highly varied audience of young and old playing at the same time. MMOs are getting there, but its seems to be slow going.