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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."
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.
Thank's to Sony's creative "Station Pass" subscription system, they can fudge the statistics on all their MMORPGs and other games. With a station pass, you have access to SWG and EQ and EQ2, so depending upon the whims of their public relations department, they can attribute EQ2 customers as SWG subscribers. IOW, SWG subscriptions are growing in leaps-and-bounds*.
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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That's not true. Bounty hunters, smugglers, pilots, imperial and rebel soldiers... there are a ton of professions referenced in the Star Wars universe that aren't Jedi Mastaz but would still make for exciting gameplay. Hell, the most dedicated players in the game were artisans and spent time stocking and decorating their stores.
Had they just ruled out Jedi from the start or made them as rare as they claimed they were going to be, and then spent time fixing bugs and tweaking the other professions instead of futzing around with Force Sensitive systems, they would have had a killer game.
Instead they had weak PvE, weak PvP, entire professions that were essentially useless, skill branches in almost every profession that were essentially useless, and horrible servers and bugs. It took them, what, over a year to fix not warping when you're in a sitting animation?
The fact that people played the game as long as they did is a testament to the fact that a Star Wars game could definitely be a hit, if done correctly. Even if most people didn't know about the EU, it would be easy to make a game set after the movies with the weakened Imperials and the Rebels on even footing. There would be plenty of recognizable characters, uniforms, blasters, everything. Even a justification for having Jedi. As it is, they didn't even use the characters from the time period they chose. Vader, Han, Jabba... they were all just cardboard cutouts sitting in a shack in a random corner of some planet giving out missions to talk to someone and retrieve a battery. I think exploring Jabba's Palace as a hostile dungeon filled with those spider-brain monks would've been more exciting than having Jabba reduced to quest_npc_X.
No, no, it's entirely the fault of the devs. This whining about working with existing franchises is a bunch of bullshit.
It's because they implemented the license poorly and had no idea how to fix it. They needed to make the game more "Star Warzy" because they picked a time period where they could literally do nothing substantial with the major characters. Jabba and Han sat around chained to their theme parks all day handing out quests to retrieve power packs.
One of their iconic classes, Bounty Hunter, had its iconic skill borked with no real PC bounties to hunt for god knows how long. Another, Smuggler, had (has) nothing to smuggle. Creature Handlers went from overpowered to useless and then to being omitted entirely. Jedi wavered between non-existent to flooding everything, trivial to kill, and then nearly impossible, and now back to trivial. I'm not even sure how the changes make things more "Star Warzy," it just prunes impotent classes and makes balancing trivial.
Most damning of all, the "authentic" armor took a backseat to one and only one type of armor, composite, which I don't even recall seeing in the movies. Pistols and carbines took a backseat to rifles, martial arts, and mad scientists carrying bottles of disease.
People who play a Star Wars game would want to see locations from the movies and some from the EU. Check. Exciting battles of Imperials vs. Rebels that have consequences. Failed. Exciting blaster fights, as opposed to armies of ninjas in composite chucking poison at each other. Failed. Smugglers smuggling, bounty hunters bounty hunting, creature handlers handling creatures. Failed. Exciting space battles. So-so... and implemented far too late into the development cycle.
And this is not even discussing the incredible gameplay glitches, imbalances, and complete lack of content. None of this has to do with the Star Wars license, except the devs' poor decision about timeframe.