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Do Licensed MMOs Inherit A Disadvantage?
Thanks to Stratics for its editorial discussing the problems faced by the licensed massively multiplayer game. The author points out: "Star Wars, The Matrix, Middle Earth - these are just some of the pre-existing worlds that are making the MMOG leap", and goes on to lament: "One of the problems is that you have to create an entire believable, explorable world. This is hard enough as it is, but then you have to cater to pre-existing notions of that world. Fans are your main target group here, and they have that world all locked up tight in their heads. Prepare for Foaming-at-the-Forum disease, my illustrious developers, prepare well." We've previously covered other aspects of this dilemma, but do licenses bring excessive expectations to a persistent world where everyone wants to be the hero?
The big licened MMORPG are the things to come after SWG. Here you can release an extremly poor MMORPG with extermly stupid design(thanks raph) yet sell 300,000 because of the name attached. Then you can expect to keep less then 1/3 but while you are being paid to develop the game after which you try to get people to sign up.
As for how to do it, you have to set up a world that feels like the movies or books and allows them to interact with areas mentioned in the book.
Middle Earth looks like it is taking a good view of it, they have said that the areas from the movies will be in the game but after the ring bearer or whoever the important person/event passed through/happened so that you cannot modify the even of the story, and no climbing over the characters.
It's a different kind of problem, though. This isn't just about expectations in gameplay and quality that hype builds up - this is expectations in the game design and content that years of reading books, watching movies or TV shows, and following an immense existing body of "knowledge" on how Middle Earth or the Star Wars universe or the Matrix works.
When we first heard about, say, the Elderscrolls games, or everquest, we had no preconcieved notions of how the world behind the games functions, because it's new to us.
With non-MMO games based on licenses, there's a step up. Fans of the previous works already have some knowledge of the game world, but a single player game is easily constrained in ways to make it work.
Now, the step up to a licensed MMO game. First, you can't constrain them, since the game world has to be functional. Second, you have to have a LOT more content in the game, and it still has to fit the existing concept of what the world is like. Star Wars is probably the worst of them, since the book series has set forth a storyline from before Episode I until several decades after Episode VI.
Plus, in these game worlds, the fans have always known them through the eyes of the Great Hero. That works good in a single player game, because it's ok if you have 50,000 players out there all playing as Legolas or Luke Skywalker in that case.
But an MMO game takes place through the eyes of a slightly above-average person for the most part. Who the fuck is this Wookie named Sheyan, and why is he dancing? Everybody wants to be the hero, they all want to be Jedi, but that's not the way MMORPGs work.
I think the best example of getting around this kind of stuff is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Whilst not an MMO at all, it was still a decent RPG in its own right, and it was interesting because it placed you as a major character in the Star Wars universe... just not at the same time as the trilogy (and its lacklustre prequil trilogy) occured: instead it placed you 4000 years before hand.
In doing so, it gave the game designers great freedom in how the developed characters, whilst still holding true to everything that is Star Wars (the force, light side, dark side, sand people, jawa, etc...)
Methinks this is the way that future MMO's should go in adapting licenses to games.