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?

Comments

But they are the shape of things to come.

[will_die]

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.

Re:But they are the shape of things to come.

[Dragoon412]

The problem with the idea of just selling boxes for an MMOG is the cost inherent in developing the game.

I don't have any hard numbers to support it, but it seems to be that with development times on MMOGs taking so much longer than other games, selling them at the same price point, which is the current practice* as other games would mean less profit, or possibly even taking a loss per unit sold.

And I know, more box sales will ultimately lead to more subscriptions, but at this point, the MMOG market is largely cannibalizing itself. The market for MMOG games with non-skill based combat systems that require hundreds upon hundreds of hours of tedious monster-slaying, with game engines that handle like a 14th-hand rip off of Chainmail is completely saturated. To that end, I think the idea of pulling off what SWG did is only going to work for huge titles. Middle Earth Online may be able to do it too, but aside from WoW, I really can't think of another title that's even been announced that'll have enough clout to pull that off.

The future of MMOG design is going to change drastically. There's an absolutely massive untapped audience of more casual gamers that want more action-based games and don't have thousands of hours to invest in a game, and don't want to be alienated from their friends because they went to bed early one night, missed an awesome experience grind group, and now they can't group anymore because there's a 3-level difference.

Planetside, conceptually, was a great stab at that market. Unfortunately, the fuckups at SoE mismanaged it into the ground. They ruin everything they touch...

Anyways, without getting into a rant about what's wrong with MMOGs, just watch: the first person to make a more skill-based MMOG (be it FPS-style, or more sim-ish) that appeals to casual gamers (i.e. no systems like "levels" that only fragment the player base, or absurd time requirements to advance) will be a very, very wealthy individual.

While I was unemployed, I actually wrote up some design documents for such a game... got a 'real' job before I had the chance to pitch it, though, and I haven't had time to work on it since.

*At least until they realize they're about to tank and start offering free downloads of the client online.

Re:But they are the shape of things to come.

[Mprx]

Such a game already exists. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is completely skill based, with no real levels (levels exist but have extremely minor gameplay effect), and does not require any great time commitment. This is an ideal game for casual players, and still has enough in-depth content (eg. player run economy) for the hardcore players. It's also written in Java so it's crossplatform, and it doesn't require great hardware or internet connection. You can try it for free and subscription isn't too expensive.

intellectual property owners have the last say.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to add that very often developers don't have a choice with what they can do with a licence.

As an example, look at the licenced properties in racecar games. Until recently, licenced car brands weren't even allowed to *take damage* in a race. The car companies thought it was bad that the representations of their products might get broken when the player ran into a wall at 150mph. The car companies have now started to lighten up as they get used to working with developers - but it's a similar thing with MMORPGs - or any other game that uses licenced intellectual property.

The owner of that property doesn't want it acting in any way that would be contradictory to their valuable image. This inherently hurts any game that you try to build using the licence. You can't do anything unpredictable, and certainly can't kill off a well-known non-player character for the sake of furthering an original plot. For example, say you were adapting the Lord Of The Rings to a videogame. Here's my take on it:

Act 1, Level 1, prelude cutscene: Sam dies and nobody cares.

I think it would make a much better *game* to eliminate the whiny characters to build dramatic tension (or comedic relief), but the licencing rules would probably say that Sam must make it through to the end of the game because the story has to follow that of the book and movies. And in a MMO game, it gets worse. Because:

(1) There was only one Han Solo - duplicate characters are kind of stupid. If there were thirty people walking around all claiming to be Darth Vader it would just be silly.

(2) Even if I could play Han Solo, I'd want to hunt Ewoks - but this goes totally against character. As such, George Lucas would not want to allow me the choice of doing this because it will tarnish Han Solo and just look wrong to the eyes of the other players.

So if you cut out the major characters, this leaves you with playing the background characters that nobody really cared about in the movie. You've got the world - environments, cultures and the physics of how that world works - but that's pretty much it.

Re:intellectual property owners have the last say.

[notamac]

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.

Not just with licenses

[MMaestro]

do licenses bring excessive expectations to a persistent world where everyone wants to be the hero?

Yes and beyond that. Technology today is allowing people to do things in games better than we could've imagined. Nowadays simple press releases have to be carefully worded since the simple mention of an "online world" could mean MMO, or "mature theme" could mean a survival horror type game. Its not just video game licenses that can be tagged with huge unattainable expectations, a company could also generate the same (or more in some cases) amount of hype which ultimately leads to a bad game or bad reviews.

Re:Not just with licenses

[Ayaress]

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.

World Design

[xanderwilson]

There's an great old AD&D book, called "World Building" or something like that, and it helped me immensely as I was doing stuff like this for fiction. It talked, I believe, about the difference between top-down world creation vs. "create as you go" creation. It's easier to create exciting and new landscapes and situations when you use the latter, but you might run into problems. You eliminate those problems by creating, say, the ecosystems and weather and geography first, and then the politics and histories, etc. But that might lead to less exciting stuff at first and it might be a lot of work in vain if you never get a chance to use more than a small patch of grass before you realize nobody's interested.

Alex.

Villainy

[1WingedAngel]

"[D]o licenses bring excessive expectations to a persistent world where everyone wants to be the hero?"

Actually, from what I've seen, the difficulty would lie in the number of people who want to be the villain. It is a very popular role, but, unfortunately, one that the game developers never really flesh out. Villains, by nature, do dastardly, nasty, things that game developers (and the companies holding the license) don't want to give the characters freedom to do.

Just don't be the hero.

[LNO]

It sounds so simple, doesn't it?

I currently play SW:G with two good friends. We group together occasionally, and they're steadily grinding through professions to unlock their force-sensitive slot (that is, to have the ability to make a Jedi character). Being a Jedi holds absolutely no interest for me.

I can't be Han Solo, and I knew that going in. Instead, I'm Jawbone Mandible, owner and proprietor of McJawbone's Golden Mandibles, fast food to the galaxy. I can't even kill a crippled Ewok, but I can whip up some bio-engineered food that's in high demand. Want to take absolutely no damage from the next five attacks? Drink some Flameout; I'll sell you a glass of 6 drinks for only a couple hundred credits.

There are many players who desperately want to become the hero, have their lightsaber, pretend to be Darth Maul that they spend hours grinding boring professions to do it. There are those who want millions of credits so they can buy their way through some professions, and so they try to sell food at inflated prices.

I'm able to undersell them (fun for me!) and get a pile of money (more fun still!), and since I have absolutely nothing to do with it .. I've hit a wall.

If I wanted to be a Jedi, I'd burn through those tens of millions in a heartbeat. Since my friends want to be a Jedi, and they gave me some seed money to start when I created Jawbone, I give them a couple million credits apiece each week as 'investment dividends'. With the rest of it ...

Well, want 100,000cr to jump into the Sarlacc pit and take a screenshot? Here ya go.

1,000cr for each second you can spend alive within melee range of a Krayt dragon?

500,000cr to the first player to race from Mos Espa on Tatooine to Jaxian Bay on Naboo, get an item from my friend acting as the relay point, and get back to me?

The list goes on. Basically, if you want to rewrite the saga, it ain't gonna happen. Everyone's gonna want to rewrite the saga. Barring a player lottery in which one lucky person gets to be Main Character Foo, you're relegated to a background character. Make the most of it, or play a different game.

Re:Just don't be the hero.

[b0r0din]

Being a Jedi holds absolutely no interest for me.

I'm glad you feel that way, but unfortunately you're in the minority.

If you ask me, there are two inherent problems with any MMORPG: the heroism dilemna and the villain dilemna.

How do you create a game in which each individual desires to be a hero? And how do you create a game in which villains are more rare?

Now as far as the heroism dilemna goes, it's very simple. You've got thousands of people on one server, the competition to be #1 or even legendary is very fierce. In a FPS, there's maybe 4-8 people in competition with each other, and it's more even a battle. In an MMORPG, you've got maybe 50-100 people all vying for top dog, all wanting to be the hero of legend, in some cases taking names like SirLanceslot or something similar. People want to be noticed, to be famous.

Well it's just not possible. Most (and not all, as in your example) don't want to be a simple security guard. They have those jobs out of game, it's called working in a cubicle farm or Walmart. They want to wield the sword of destiny or be part of a moving plotline.

Personally, I don't think MMORPGs will ever solve this dilemna. They can't devote enough time to be personal to each individual player and remain profitable. Possibly in the future, someone will come up with a ruleset that solves this problem, or maybe AI will become so good as to solve it. But I'm fairly doubtful. Smaller non-masive MORPGS would be ok, but we've yet to see a really good implementation. (I don't really consider NWN that although it's close, the graphics and worlds need to be better and less Lineage-like.)

The other dilemna is the villain dilemna. This one isn't so much a problem, it can be reasonably handled. But it applies to griefers. How do you prevent people from being complete jerks, stealing kills, killing other players in a PK environment, etc?

The answer is pretty simple: a self-policing society. But how do you self-police a society when everyone wants to be a hero and not a security guard? Maybe a few people would want to be the griefer-slayer, but not many.

Now, you could do a couple of things for both of these.

The problem with most people is wanting to be the hero without doing anything heroic. There's nothing heroic about slaying foo 20hrs/day like every other MMORPG that rewards the person who spends more time on the game. What is heroism, anyway? In the chivalrous sense, it's putting your life in danger for another. You have to risk something to be a hero. In a lot of examples, you have to die or be horribly maimed. Well, how to apply that to an MMORPG? Realism wouldn't hurt - or would it? Maybe people lose limbs, are horribly disfigured, or die regularly. Permadeath. Maybe that's what the society needs. That's skill-based, it forces players to be strategic and careful in combat. But it's not popular.

Now, let's use this in a society, let's just say medieval-fantasy since that is overdone right now. You are a local blacksmith. You don't fight, you just make really nice swords. You are rewarded for your swordmaking with lots of money from players who rely on your ability. You don't die so your skill level increases. Every once in a while, you make a masterpiece. Maybe only once or twice in the game, sort of by accident. This sword is so special that you can only give it to the right person. Maybe you're fitting into a bigger game plot that you aren't aware of. You're a part of that world's history at that point. You fit a niche. And you aren't dying.

Now, the other people who want to be heroes can go ahead and fight for fame and so on. But they die and permadeath takes hold and they don't retain their hero status. The real heroes would be revealed in this sort of society because of their skill. Maybe instead of level, there are certain incarnations of heroes. You may die a lot, but if you are smart and become a hero through certain deeds and then die, you retain some of what you had even though you are dea