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Fantasy Trumps Sci-Fi For MMOs
simoniker writes "Mythic's Mark Jacobs, whose MMO company is being acquired by EA, has commented in detail on why fantasy MMOs sell better as part of an extended interview. He suggests of MMOs: 'Fantasy is easier than sci-fi. Want to know why? It's simple. A gun. What's a gun? A gun is impersonal. A gun can shoot somebody from across the room... Part of the challenge we found with Imperator is how do you make a combat system based on lasers and energy weapons, compelling to an RPG audience. The other challenge with a sci-fi game is that fantasy is very well defined in our minds ... I also think there's something I can't explain, which is that people are more willing to play a fantasy game that's not as good online, than they are willing to play a sci-fi game that's not as good online. And I'm not sure why that is.' Suggestions?"
I don't buy this argument. In fact, I think that copyright restrictions and forced creative direction are what destroys an MMO. Look at Star Wars Galaxies, too many copyright restrictions and attempts at intervention from LucasArts as to how the game experience should feel. Look at Middle Earth Online. Actually, it doesn't exist and is some pretty famous vapor ware.
Now look at games that are completely original to the developing companies like World of Warcraft, lineage I & II, Runescape (fantasy games), Eve Online (a sci-fi game). You might point out that there are more successful fantasy games but I think it's just the fact that sci-fi is often spurred from novels or movies. Rarely do you hear of an original sci-fi game. Therefore, your players have this pre-conceived notion of what the game should be like and if it misses the mark, they are disappointed. I'd like to think the correlation of success comes with creative and artistic control as well as originality. I don't really buy the argument that projectile weapons make a game difficult to design.
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I think it's largely an issue of art style. Sci-Fi MMOs are either immaculte buiness sims (like EVE) or ugly dystopian battlegrounds (like Auto Assault) while fantasy MMOs are lush forests and towns nestled in mountains and meadows. My guess is that people would rather frolic "outside" than in claustrophobic corridors which they see enough at work.
Another issue is the familiarity with the weapons, as mention in TFA. A 3-foot sword has a 3-foot range, but a 2-foot gun has an arbitrary range that takes practise and familiarity to recognize by sight. It's quicker and easier to cut a guy with a kitchen utensil then to hone a masterwork of alien engineering.
That's exactly why sci-fi isn't doing very well as an RPG. Most efforts to make sci-fi based on hand-to-hand combat come across as very contrived. It works sometimes for movies and books (see Dune for a classic) but in takes a great deal of originality to explain how people can travel from star-to-star but still have to wack eachother with sticks in combat.
And in any case, by the time you've reduced it to hand-to-hand combat you practically have fantasy anyway.
I think one reason that fantasy does better is that it's easier. The constraints on believability are much, much more lax for fantasy. Magic isn't supposed to really make sense. You don't really tend to say "fireball? in this humidity? yeah right!" On the other hand with sci-fi you allways have crowds of people asking "how does artifiial gravity really work?" and "You're saying I have a fighter ship than can travel hundreds or thousands of miles an hour, spin on a time, and I'm not reduced to mush inside the cockpit, how?"
Sci-fi involves some level of scientific rigor. If you don't have to explain anything (or if you don't bother to even try) than sci-fi itself becomes fantasy (that's why Star Wars is considered fantasy by most people that care about fantasy). Sci-fi demands some exercise in explanation. Fantasy does not. This means fantasy is easier.
-stormin
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These are two different mindsets, and they really do make all the difference for a role-playing game. The sci in scifi, the idea that it's Scienc and technology and such, is really different from the more spiritually-mystically-oriented realms of fantasy.
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As someone who runs pen-and-paper RPGs in fantasy and scifi environments, I've learned that for Scifi to work on the same playability and fun levels as a fantasy RPG, many tweaks need to be made.
There is the gun issue from TFA, but if done right it's not anywhere near as big an issue. For something immersive like an RPG, the game must be crafted with things like this in mind. In the "Dr Who," "Star Trek," "Star Wars," and general scifi RPGs I've done, the story has to be crafted in such a way as to make things interesting for the players without just being a shoot-em-up. There are scifi concepts galore, but they have to do far more than just "shoot bad guy X to get item Y." In these particular Universes, the "tank" type of character tends to be the absolute least interesting to play. Storyline, brain-requiring quests, and interesting puzzles make all the difference in something immersive.
In any case, I really think the best stories can't be cold computer-generated grind quests, they need to be crafted around the players talents and shortcomings.
To be fair, my love of truly immersive interactive RPGs is part of why the whole MMO deal never did it for me. A game world full of people going "lol" and "a/s/l" and "omg nd heal pls" really kicks the crap out of suspension of disbelief.
I digress, but I do believe that immersion and feeling like part of an imaginary world is doubly important to scifi fans in such an environment. Hardcore scifi nuts, the types who read Gibson or Heinlein or Asimov or Douglas Adams or whoever else, tend to want to use a brain more than they want to just shoot everyone. It just takes a lot more effort on the part of the game creators to get it right. Think of the best scifi games you ever played. What was interesting about them which you don't see in modern MMOs?
Take the Hitchhiker's game from Infocom, for instance.. I've played very few games that I've ever felt more immersed in. I was totally Arthur Dent for most of my time in front of that monochrome screen. (Except for the parts where I wasn't..) And how many times in that game does the player shoot or kill anyone?
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or if you don't bother to even try) than sci-fi itself becomes fantasy (that's why Star Wars is considered fantasy by most people that care about fantasy
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or if you don't bother to even try) than sci-fi itself becomes fantasy (that's why Star Wars is considered fantasy by most people that care about sci-fi
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World. Of. Starcraft.
May just be wishful thinking on my part, but if Blizzard ever decides to do it, it would probably invalidate this article. I'm not a WoW fan at all, and ever since I quit RO I've placed a moratorium on MMOs for myself. But I don't think I could resist something like this, assuming it's done well.
Not that other sci-fi themed MMOs can't be great. I'm just going off of Blizzard's track record here...
There is one more great big difference between the two type of stories. Fantasy plots generally are limited in their geography. Even if you did know about the far away land, getting there is prohibitive, and the stars are simply unthinkable. Sci-Fi plots almost universally have expanded to multiple planet scenarios up to the point of having so much to explore that no one could possibly hope to even see it all on film, much less in person. If I were a game developer, I'd feel much more comfortable producing, and even coding a world that has reasonable and well defined borders and limits.
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His answer to, "Why is fantasy so hot?" is basically, "Because with fantasy, we don't have to be original." Listen, this is about a much larger "problem" that's been slowly cropping up recently within in geek fiction: readers (and gamers) believe they're willing to try something new, but they really aren't. So, when you pick up a hundred fantasy novels off the shelf in your local bookstore*, you'll find that most of them have similar themes ("We have to save the world!"), have the exact same types of settings (similar to medieval Europe), have the exact same types of action (swordfights with wizards) and have the exact same type of fantasy beasts (dragons, zombies, dragonzombies, zombodragonoids). Likewise for fantasy games. Why is fantasy so limited? It should really only be limited by the author's/ designer's imagination. But too often, designers and authors (rightfully) believe that their audiences just want more of the same. That they don't want a completely new type of world, a completely different definition of "magic," a completely different set of creatures unique to the world. We end up with more of the same becuase that's what sells. And since it sells, producers/ publishers are unwilling to take risks. The sad truth is, the self-important fantasy crowd lives in an adolescent power-fantasy. They know how they like their superheroes, and they know how they like their fantasy. Sci-fi is too challenging to them becuase from one universe to the next, the rules are completely different. (This could be the case for fantasy too, but too often we're just force-fed more of the same). What Mr. Jacobs' answer should have been was, "Because it's easier to force-feed our users more of the same." *(a pre-Amazon phenomenon)
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Perhaps, but I would say advanced particle physics and quantum mechanics are difficult enough sciences that most people will accept any explanation given at face value, which essentially makes the distinction somewhat meaningless.
I would say the real reason why sci-fi is more difficult to pull off than fantasy is because science fiction removes the human element altogether. The driving force behind any MMO is to make your avatar more powerful. But in a true sci-fi world, individual people become powerful through the tools they use and the things they own, and not through personal growth. A laser shot from a ship piloted by a level 1 captain shouldn't do any more damage than one shot from the same ship piloted by a level 20 captain--so clearly the traditional method of "leveling" would need significant tweaking. This is akin to the same "explanation" you quoted earlier, but I'd rather label it as "internal consistency." A sci-fi world could not be internally consistent while operating under the same basic system as, say, WoW. This doesn't make it more difficult than a fantasy MMO, it just requires a different take on it--and we all know how successful video game companies are at breaking free of traditional formulae.
Fantasy has several established archetypes so there's enough variety in character choice. Warrior, Rogue, Ranger, Mage, Healer, and some variation in between. Sci-fi's got guns. That's it. If you're Star Wars you've got guns and lightsabers, but Jedi are supposed to be rare.
Balancing melee weapons with guns (a la SWG) is pretty much impossible because it breaks the laws of physics and along with the basics of latency, ruins the fun for either the melee classes because they can't get close enough (realistic) or the ranged classes are so gimped that the melee can trash them against all logic and reason.
Trying to create enough classes with guns just needlessly restricts the player. Why shouldn't a guy that's an expert with a rifle be able to shoot a carbine? That makes no sense.
At least that's the answer I can take from SWG. Star Wars really isn't a good universe for an MMORPG. An MMOFPS, though, now that would be a different story. Anarchy Online, I think, just wasn't all that attractive of a universe. Very odd. And had a very rough start. If there was a Sci Fi game with the polish and pazazz of WoW, I'm sure it'd do just fine, if they could solve the class problem.
That's just retarded. It's also called science fiction. If we're going to judge it stricly based on the name of the genre, the ONLY identifying characteristic of the genre would be science.
The battle over defining sci-fi is long running and never ending, but the consensus is growing that the type of fiction you like (science fiction minus the science) is better termed as "speculative fiction". If the story you are telling can be told without any of the sci-fi trappings (e.g. if you're writing a mystery story with lasers) then it's arguably not really sci-fi.
-stormin
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What about those of us who don't want to engage in player-vs-player and team-vs-team? Those of us who would like to mine asteroids, esplore star systems and do transportation, while honing our piloting skills, without being killed every five minutes or bullied to join a faction?
Those of us who would see a challenge in things like plotting the most efficient course from A to B, without running out of fuel or taking excessive time, or do difficult docking and low-g landing maneuvers? To enjoy the loneliness of space when you want to?
Who would like to become a good pilot with a good vessel before launching into areas where there's risk of people shooting at you.
Why does killing and us vs. them have to be mandatory? I'm not against it being available, but why mandatory? And why isn't it permanent? IMHO, that's the biggest hinder to credibility -- you resurrect with minor if any penalties, instead of avoiding death like, erm, death, because you'll lose everything.
The same holds true for fantasy games too, and lately, the trend has been to force people into groups with the sole purpose of killing other groups, after which you pop back to life again. Why? Because that's what the 15 year olds want, and it's them who constitute the majority of the players, despite the M18+ age limits on the boxes?
Sorry, I just have questions, it seems, and no answers.
Regards,
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*Art