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MMORPGs Matrix and Star Wars

Jedi2099 writes "Warner Bros., Monolith Productions and EON Entertainment are combining forces to create a new massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) based on The Matrix using Monolith's new LithTech Discovery System. " Personally I'm much more interested in the fact that the Star Wars Galaxy Beta that has started taking beta apps.

29 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Can there be a market for all these MMOGs? by Fenresulven · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Somehow I have a feeling that a lot of them will crash and burn due to an insufficent market.

    1. Re:Can there be a market for all these MMOGs? by levik · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I'm sure that's what'll happen, but the appeal is just too great... Think about it, instead of getting your game on the shelves for a couple of months, you ensure a cash stream for a couple of years at least. That's every single subscriber you've got not only shelling out $40 - $60 for the game in the store (of which you only get a percentage), but also paying $10 - $15 to you *directly* every month.

      That's like getting somebody to buy a new game from you every four months, but with only a fraction of the money spent on development, distribution and marketing of what you would with a traditional game model.

      I'm sure that all these companies are fully prepared for the risk of a failure due to market saturation, but if you weigh the benefits against the dangers, I think you end up coming out with a pretty profitable proposition, as long as your product is decent.

      Besides, if all these games in the market drive up the overall quality of the genre, everybody wins. With so many companies fighting over the players, I'm hoping to see the end of the "we can always fix in in a patch" mentality that dominated the early days of MMORPGs.

      --
      Ñ'
  2. ARG! Don't /. the SW:G beta!! by StupidKatz · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... damn. Too late. :( Guess I'll have to wait until December to play now. You people are EVIL! :)

  3. I have an idea for a mmorpg by JeanBaptiste · · Score: 4, Funny

    howbout RealLife? You go outside and interact with other people. Great graphics, although it is rather difficult to advance in levels. Oh, and no starting over.

    1. Re:I have an idea for a mmorpg by Soko · · Score: 5, Funny

      howbout RealLife?

      Guess you took the Blue Pill.

      Soko

      --
      "Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
    2. Re:I have an idea for a mmorpg by big_cat79 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh, and no starting over.

      You can if you are Hindu.

      --

      BigCat79

      "The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
  4. Aren't we already playing? by VertigoAce · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wasn't the matrix a MMORPG in the movie? The AI developed a system in which the humans would lead ordinary lives simulated inside a computer. So couldn't one skip the $50 and just go lead a normal life and get the same effect?

  5. Also, of note... by nherc · · Score: 4, Informative

    Besides the next generation of the current crop of MMORPG's like Asheron's Call 2 and EverQuest 2, Cyan has finally announced their intentions of doing a MMORPG with the MYST universe.

    --
    'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
  6. And, when server loads get too great.. by kafka93 · · Score: 5, Funny

    .. new sign-ups get to play as "batteries"..

  7. Addiction... by rgraham · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Great, another game to get hung up on. Time has an article on the addiction angle of all these MMORPGs.

  8. Nah, its already there, we call it lag. by Shivetya · · Score: 3, Funny

    ..... it does a great job of imitating the move from the game

    --
    * Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
  9. Ironic? by Copperhead · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Does anyone else find this a bit ironic? Isn't the movie about a small group of people trying to unplug humanity from a virtual world? So, now Warner Bros. is creating a virtual world for fans of the movie to plug themselves into.

    Weird.

    --
    Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
  10. I can see it now... by TheNecromancer · · Score: 4, Funny

    Call me fickle, but this MMORPG is just tooo similar to the first Matrix in the movie.

    Next, you'll be telling me that Skynet has automated all our stealth bombers, and they have had perfect flight records...

    --
    Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
  11. Oh the possibilities... by Deosyne · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now I can finally follow Trinity around staring at her ass without getting the crap kicked out of me by her bodyguards every couple of days. Or play an agent and tap the hell out of the woman in red, since, you know, it wouldn't be weird having sex with a program or anything, since I'd be playing as a computer program myself. Of course I'd be a human playing a program having sex with a progr... god, I need to get laid.

    1. Re:Oh the possibilities... by Conspiracy_Of_Doves · · Score: 3, Funny

      god, I need to get laid.

      Now, THERE's a line we never thought we'd hear from a slashdotter.

  12. Try explaining it to your friends by mblase · · Score: 5, Funny

    "What are you playing there?"

    A virtual computer-generated world with thousands of other people. All your enemies are programs created by the simulation.

    "What's the game about?"

    A virtual computer-generated world with thousands of other people. All your enemies are programs created by the simulation.

    "..."

  13. Re:Nah, its already there, we call it lag. by bafu · · Score: 3, Funny

    I can just picture the chat now...

    N3oRul3z: Server sux, dude. Really bullet-timey.
    (*+==Tac-Tiks==+*): No shite..was bullit-timin all ocver the place like abiotch!!!
  14. What th--? by daeley · · Score: 5, Funny

    from the can-i-play-as-trinity? dept.

    I think the better question would be: Can I play *with* Trinity? ;)

    --
    I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
  15. Just talk to Bungie by mblase · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Oni's gameplay was remarkably similar to "The Matrix", although its visuals obviously were not. They could save themselves a lot of time by just licensing the game engine, keep the buildings, changing all the characters, and making it massively multiplayer.

    (Yeah, I know Oni's fighting engine was rather simplified compared to, say, Street Fighter II, but when you're trying to go for widespread appeal, that's actually a Good Thing. Plus, Oni allowed you to pick up new moves as you advanced in levels, a feature which lends itself nicely to an MMORPG.)

  16. Why I quit MMORPGs by IIRCAFAIKIANAL · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Three reasons:
    • You can't win. There are no real goals.
    • You can't pause. My GF hated when I used to play DAoC and she'd come into the den to say hi and I would tell her to wait until I could log out.
    • They require an obscene amount of time investment.
    Yup, that's why I keep my addiction to games I can win in a month or so and pause.

    Small scale multiplayer RPGs are fun, but MMORPGS just seem to eat time. Even when I played a lot of Quake 2, I could drop out any time and not feel guilty about letting my character lvl fall behind my friends' levels.
    --
    Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
  17. Time for Activision to wake up! by Joe+U · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And use Zork as a template for an online game.

  18. Doesn't sound like much fun to me.... by dbretton · · Score: 5, Funny

    What's so fun about online matrices?

    ubergeek1: "Ooh boy, I wanna be 1,3!!"
    uberggek2: "Oh yeah, well I'm 5,5"

    >
    >miscellaneous fighting noises...
    >

    ubergeek1: "Ha! I got normalized on yo' ass! Whatchya gonna do now, that I thrashed your second row??"

    ubergeek2: "Little did you know that I have the cloak of Cholesky! Prepare to die!"

  19. Distributed MMORPG by kaladorn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The poster was being funny, but the idea is interesting. Distribute some of your processing load to unused cycles on user's systems. Not all MMORPGs require all the horsepower a system can provide. It might be a neat feat and it would mean that in some cases, adding users might be a significantly lower drain. This might help with a few of the problems of scalability for MMORPGs. Imagine that you could also earn account hours or credits in game for leaving your PC hooked up when you aren't there if you have a good BW connection so the server can offload some processing onto your machine. Probably a lot of issues involved, but it might offer some interesting lines of investigation.

    --
    -- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
    1. Re:Distributed MMORPG by Kingfox · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Seriously, the other less-polite reply to your comment is right. It's one thing to just go around canning suspicious users on web games or M*s... it's quite a different story when the enduser is a paying customer.

  20. Re:Why the Matrix? by Rary · · Score: 3, Funny

    The "Matrix Universe" is the real universe. So I'm guessing they'll render the entire world in a 3D model. And maybe at the start of the game, it'll ask you were you live in real life, and then it'll place your character in whatever your hometown is, standing right in front of the virtual version of your house. Then you'll wander inside and head towards the room where your computer is, and there you'll see yourself sitting on front of a computer, and if you get real close to it, you'll see that on the computer monitor is a 3D model of the room you're in, with you looking over your own shoulder at a monitor, on which there's a 3D model of the room you're in, with you looking over.....

    --

    "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein

  21. What? Matrix Math no fun? by kaladorn · · Score: 3, Funny

    You must have been in my Engineering Algebra course... ;)

    We all know the correct response to the cloak of Cholesky is the sword of Eigen following by the spell of n-spacial translation.
    In n-space, no one can hear you fail the course...

    --
    -- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
  22. Yeah, VERY dissapointing. by Augusto · · Score: 3

    > TPM was widely disappointing while the matrix was that year's big surprise...

    I wonder if that's why it made SO MUCH money than the Matrix, specially after so many bad reviews and "bad word of mouth".

    And oh yeah, it had much better special effects, imagine, a virtual world that looks ... just like ours. Talk about photorealism !!!

    --

    - sigs are for wimps.
  23. Looking forward to crushing agents.. by bsdparasite · · Score: 3, Funny

    I would much rather play Morpheus than Neo. It would be quite something to unplug people and tell them this is not a joke and watch them throw up!

  24. Same flaw SWG has..... by TheLostOne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well.. personally I have played my share of EQ in my day. In case you haven't it's pretty clearly a ripoff of D&D straight across (which is all Tolken anyway.. but eh.. ). So maybe all the races have been seen before, maybe no new concepts. But it IS a new world.. it is their world (you're in our world now is their slogan).. this allows them to write history, future, plot lines..

    It allows you to be the main character in your own little world.. silly perhaps.. but

    If you put it all in a preexisting storyline, with a preexisting world with already established heros, already planned and acted major events...well what the hell is the point anymore?

    Why bother with a Matrix mmorpg? Afterall you aren't the one... the one will fix everything... you are just a spudly.. you don't matter. No matter what you do, live or die, quest or destory evil bad guys... you have no effect.

    At least with EQ (which is quite a ripoff at times) they could make their own races... if they ripped off a race they could give it a new history.. they could make their own evil badguys.. name their own dragons.

    Can they REALLY do that in SWG and Matrix? The world is already defined.. races and classes already exist, already have a history.

    In other words.. EQ while being a ripoff allowed room for creativity, for discovery. SWG and Matrix are just yet another marketing device.. 'ooh ooh lets make a cool racing game.. then put it on Tatooine and call it SW Epi1 Pod Racer!!'

    It is one thing being yet another adventurer in a world with no pre defined heros or plotlines... but why pay the money just to play a cameo in a movie?

    --


    '..that kernel panicked like a nun in a crack house!'