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MMORPGs And Franchises
MMORPG.com has an interesting piece on major franchises and their relation to massive games. They take a look at the question of whether or not virtual worlds are appropriate venues for IPs. From the article: "It's precisely because of that 'famous world' that we run into trouble. The more famous it is, the higher the expectations that players put on it. This leads to the developers having less and less flexibility in the way that their world is built, the rules that they choose to use, and the content that makes the game interesting."
... you might not know me but I buy your product and pay a monthly fee for accounts.
... but, well, with the latest patch my no longer does damage per tick.
I like your game a lot, I feel the virtual reality that you provide to be satisfying. In fact, I left reality on June 8th, 2003 when you launched your first server. Since then, I have preferred destroying for endless hours day after day and on multiple occasions have, as a result, been accused of being a scripted bot by a game master.
I appreciate you trying to make changes to the game
Having spent a small fortune on this recently leaves me in despair.
Unfortunately for you, I've acquired your home address and am on my way over to your house to commit hari kari in your front lawn.
Goodbye."
Yeah, it's farfetched. But I believe that was indicative of the outburst when Star Wars Galaxies was changed for the betterment of the game in the eyes of Sony Entertainment Online and Lucasfilm.
Anyone care to speculate what would happen if the very basics and foundations of World of Warcraft were to be altered in a patch?
My work here is dung.
OK, this is a tricky one. On the one hand, new MMORPGs are only generally going to succeed if they can draw in an audience from outside of the existing MMORPG player pace. With the amount of investment needed to get anywhere in a MMORPG, most players tend to stay loyal to a single game for a long time and getting them to switch is hard. Franchises are a great way of doing this.
On the other hand, a rigid franchise doesn't always sit well in an open ended context. Galaxies, in particular, suffered from being squashed into a particular spot in a particular, well developed time-line. Basic changes that were needed to make the gameplay work clashed with the requirements of the franchise.
Personally, I think the best balance occurs when you get a reasonably open-ended franchise, which sets the scene and brings a fan-base with it, but has no particular plot committments. Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft are probably the best examples and are, of course, among the most successful MMORPGs around.
Okay, I read the article, expecting them to mention World of Warcraft at some point. It's based on some very popular IP, being the whole Warcraft universe (the subject of 3 RTS games already, and a number of novels). But they didn't. That's just a huge oversight.
Yeah, the Warcraft universe isn't comparable to Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, since they came from different media, but you can't argue that the Warcraft IP didn't exist or that it wasn't very popular. Yet Blizzard found a way to keep the lore intact AND build a hugely successful MMORPG at that.
-- jchenx
I still don't understand how Star Wars got the first choice as an MMORPG. While the books create an expansive universe, only the hardcore fans are familiar with it. This guy has the right idea:
Amen. All the way back in 1996 I was contemplating the idea of Star Trek combat. Nearly all the Star Trek action games to date had failed miserably, but always because they tried to simplify the controls down to a flight simulator. What you need are actual officers sitting in each position, giving the commands, firing from tactical, flying from the conn, etc. i.e. You'd need a staff of about 4 people on each ship, linked up via the Internet, and able to hear each other speak. The idea seemed sound enough.
Then I considered the matter of away team missions. Why not add in an FPS mode where you could explore a planet, fight with a Gorn, or wage all-out-war with the Dominion. At the time this seemed like an unrealistic idea. But as the idea of MMORPGs started to take off, the idea seemed more and more appealing. I think the technology would now be able to make it happen. You'd need some sort of command structure, but such a game could recreate the experience of being in the Star Trek Universe. It seems so obvious, that I'm surprised that no one has picked up on it until now.
Another game that needs a chance was the failed Wing Commander: Privateer MMORPG that was being worked on. If there was ever a more perfect Universe for a SciFi MMORPG, I haven't seen it. It's got dog-fights, trading, sub-plots, factions, everything! In fact, if you add multiplayer to the original game, you've pretty much got an awesome MMORPG! Unfortunately, EA pulled the plug on it after they screwed up the Wing Commander series with their lackluster Prophecy. With the renewed interest in the Privateer Remake, you would think that EA would be chomping at the bit to get back into the market. Go figure.
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Making a game in order to attract the fans of a particular offering, such as Jordan's _Wheel_of_Time_, say, has to follow the conventions as laid out in the source material or else the risk of alienating those same potential users becomes almost 100%. On the other hand, if you're looking to attract the fanbase of, say, _Star_Trek_, you have a lot more freedom. You either need a large enough space to work in, or a large enough timeline.
Now some will argue that WoW was far from "done" when they released it, but that would be an asinine statement. All MMORPG's go through an initial struggle at launch because that is the first time real players, not the beta testers, get involved, and with millions more people checking it out, the glitches are bound to show up.
But, I played WoW in beta, and am still playing it today, and while I do not agree with every change, or even necessarily their pace for patches and updates, I am quite satisfied with the game and happy to pay for it.
So this is the excuse that's being spread around the industry relating to the failure of SWG? That it was such a well-known franchise that customers had unrealistically high expectations and this led to its failure?
Oh yea, very high expectations of a MMORPG that wasn't fundamentally changed and nerfed every few months. It's undoubtedly because of Star Wars' fame that players such as myself had such high expectations from the game: that it WORK; that it make sense to play it.
Puleaze.
It's all about the gameplay. The big companies still haven't figured out yet that most players really don't give a shit about derivative work. Granted, if you stick "The Matrix" on some title, there is a set amount of dingleberry-brained consumers who will buy it, but a MMORPG doesn't live by those rules in the long run.
From TFA, I think that Dana Massey has it spot on and Jon Wood is completely missing the point. The changes that have happened in Star Wars Galaxies have "supposedly" happened to make the game more "Star Warzy" (their term, not mine). The result has been to force players into a very narrow range of professions apparently based on movie characters (such as my personal favorite, the medical droid who took care of Luke at the end of EpV).
People used to be able to live out virtual lives in SWG, including taking up professions that had nothing to do directly with any combat. There were big ideas and themes that helped to make ties to the Star Wars universe palpable, and with the expansions this was strengthened. But what the developers and, more likely, the higher-ups directly which way the game would go failed to see was that it was primarily the players who created the content of the game. SOE could provide props to use, but an MMORPG like this is an act of collaborative fiction -- forcing us into replaying the actions of the movies is just plain stupid.
SWG was an awesome game at first. They killed it by changing the rules too many times. Shouldn't it be common sense that if you have something popular that a lot of people are enjoying, you can add to it, but don't drastically change it. SWG managed to survive one drastic change. The fanbase was up in arms, but gave them the benefit of the doubt. But then what do they do? Less than a year later they do another change that's twice as drastic. From a gameply perspective, the game isn't even hardly recognizeable. Removed all of the classes and skills and replaced them with something different, made huge changes to the combat system, then sat around wondering why everyone left. And people left. They left in droves, and it's now just a shell. The poster child of how not to run a mmorpg.
If WoW did something similar, it would be a disaster. Thankfully, they're probably not that stupid.
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One big problem I see with MMORPGs created from existing franchises, such as Star Wars, is that everyone wants to be Luke Skywalker, as it were. Nobody wants to be the Ugnaught who sifts thru garbage all day by a furnace in Bespin. Everyone wants to be the hero. Unfortunately, a good story only has room for a handful of them.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
They have EQ1 and EQ2 for adult players, MXO for the Matrix fan, and SW:G for the people who loved community and crafting.
What did they have for the kids? Nothing! So SW:G and its 'sandbox' became SWG:G-NGE, perfect for porting to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 and Nintendo Revolution, and the kids could be Luke or Leia or Obiwan or whatever.
The article points out that, in licensed properties, the player can at best only be a bit player in the story of the world, since whenever they and a licensed character are in the same spot, it's not hard to win at "pick the spear carrier". So why not make a game where you play Luke, Vader or whatever, just with a different name, and let the kids act out their fantasies.
Since I am blissfully unaware of anything SOE plans, I fully expect a console-based version of SW:G when PS3 launches.
If MMORPGS were all about the gameplay then a rather small one known as Shadowbane wouldn't have died off so quietly (or at all). Let me explain In Shadowbane, UbiSoft paid a guy who goes by Meridian to write lore for them. They wanted an MMO because they felt that it would make a ton of money. So he did, and they came out with the classic swords, magics, barbarians and priests etc. that a lot of games do. But he also came out with a story mostly his own, and several different religions. So this sounds like the kind of world where developers get to do whatever they want, and that's the point of this article -- this should happen more. right? Well these guys took it a step further, and didn't fill in the lore. They gave outlines like what we know of medieval Europe - sure there were some battles that we know about, and we know the major ideas, but when it comes down to it, the details are created by the people at Renaissance Fairs. Similarly, Shadowbane was a server with a blank landscape. You go out with a guild or by yourself, and you level up etc. and you build a city. You wage wars. You and your guild control territory. The only NPCs are the ones in towns that are equipment-bots and trainers for people who're starting. So there you go - fully functional fantasy warfare (INCLUDING siege) and the players are the ones who move the story along. On a personal comment, i'd say its as successful for the single person to small, say 3 person group as for the 50 man guild. http://chronicle.ubi.com/, http://www.shadowbane.com/us/WhatIsShadowbane.php ... The gameplay was (is?? there's a 10 day trial) really buggy, but perhaps it's better. but there you go - gameplay =/= name recognition
The mmorpg genre has great potential for creativity in story and exciting gameplay, and any restrictions are obviously a bad thing. Money, Time & Technology are already restrictions on the development of these games, franchises just add another level of creative restriction that shouldn't be needed. Marketing is an obvious boon from franchises, and the established base is enticing, but all that gives you is initial sales and doesn't indicate in the slightest if the game will prosper long term. Warcraft is a slightly different style of franchise, as Blizzard is not producing someone else's IP, and instead have had and will always have complete control over it. If they wish to change things, rewrite history, then they can and have done in the past. It is a little (only a little though) more flexible than franchises based on movies and books. In my opinion, increasing game tech should allow companies to increasingly cast the player as PART of a virtual world, not just a player of it. When we have a world that reacts more dynamically to player choices and actions, then i think we will see less of a need to be CAST as a hero and instead be allowed to forge our own hero story amongst those we care most about anyway, other players. Story is another element that suffers under franchises, as generally it has already been told before we even load into the game. It is much more exciting to see a story unfold around you, and hopefully be effected by you, then to have characters thrown in for novelty. [insert character from franchise] "See Kids, it really is [franchise] cause [character] is in it. See!" So Lame, So Very Lame.
The "it belongs to a third party and Lucas made us do this and that" aspect has been mentioned, but I still can't shake the feeling that Lucas made better films than Sony made a game based on it. Yes, episodes 1 to 3 included.
For all his ever-changing visions, and all his later getting on a stupid quest to undo the very good-vs-evil foundation of his universe (the jedi weren't apparently all that good and noble, and the sith were just the other sect according to episodes 1-3), Lucas started from scratch and made SW the biggest movie franchise. Better yet, he made SF mainstream. It says something. The very fact that people still debate whether Han should shoot first, or whether Jar Jar is a worse comic relief than C3PO is a testament to how much Lucas's films touched a lot of us. You don't see that kind of passion in people arguing Godfather 1 vs Godfather 3.
By comparison, what did Sony do with it? They created a DIKU MUD with graphics, and a ho-hum "me too" one at that. It's always been massively buggy, balance was always non-existent, and Sony did their best to piss off the customers, like Sony always does. Even as a MUD it was of the "me too" quality seen when a third-grader downloads DIKU and throws together his own smurf areas. It featured such half-baked stuff ranging from whole areas and town that existed just to fill the map (but didn't actually have any NPCs, quests or anything), classes added without any thought to balance just because someone thought the class name was all that was needed (don't tell me Raph Koster gave even a second's thought to the balance of, say, entertainers vs animal tamers, and how fast one levels up in respect to the other, or how fast they make money), and pretty much the bog-standard DIKU combat and mechanics. And as is the case when someone just isn't competent enough to do the maths and balance a game, the balance swung wildly in patches, not getting any more balanced, but just for the sake of pissing off existing players.
Briefly, they made a crap "me too" game that survives _only_ because of the franchise. Far from being hurt by Lucas's franchise, it's their transfusion line that keeps their fetid corpse of a game alive. If SWG had started from scratch without a franchise, like AO or DAOC did, I believe it would have been a flop that went straight to the garbage bin of MMO gaming.
So basically all this "oh, we're just hurt by the Lucas's franchise" is just a crap excuse from the makers of a crap game. That's all. What did you expect? Them to come forward and admit "guys, we fucked up. We have no clue how to make a good game even when someone hands us the franchise, the fans, and the story on a silver platter"? It's not gonna happen.
Blizzard can design a good game, the SWG team just can't. That's all.
Heck, forget Blizzard. Even the SW franchise has been previously used well, say, in KOTOR. Note how both side-stepped constraints by stepping outside the time frame of the proper franchise. WoW happens some time after Warcraft 3, KOTOR happens some millenia before SW, buying them a lot of freedom to create their own story and characters in that universe. It's a neat trick, but it takes a real designer and some balls to come up with it, as opposed to mindlessly taking what's been handed to them and transcribing it into a MUD.
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Is that a case of living up to the original or the "It just wasn't the same" concept that seems to be hitting SWG?
Apparently being completely freaking offtopic is "informative" as well. The topic is "FFXI isn't in a preexisting universe" not "I think this crapass game is popular".
then why dont you stay on topic yourself instead of posting a troll asshole.