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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?"
Maybe people don't want to play in sci-fi games because they're tired of all the technology in their real life? Computer problems, phones, pagers, emails, IMs, ads on TV and radio... it all adds up without realizing it. People play games to take a break from real life. Do you think they'll play in a game with even more technology, or a game with stuff they'll never have, such as magic, monsters, etc?
I don't know offhand what IS, but I don't think it's the "impersonal" factor of guns being able to shoot across a room - witness the Counterstrike and Quake and countless other multiplayer FPS games that have been massively successful. I'd say there is some other factor at work here.
I'm thinking offhand, but most of the time your classic fantasy stories have been about parties of heroes (witness Tolkien) whereas classic scifi has tended to be much more individualist (even with the Matrix, the main character so strongly overshadowed the others that it didn't really feel very much like a group effort). (Maybe Star Wars is an exception to this, and the Star Wars games have tended to be fairly successful, although some people call it space-based fantasy instead of science fiction anyway.)
I can't really think of any compelling party-leaning science fiction stories at the moment. And this translates out to the scifi games I've tried, from single player stuff to MUDs. They've all felt very "lonely." In fantasy, you have clearly defined classes with separate roles and you tend to need a group of them to get anywhere, which is begging for a multiplayer setting.
Keep in mind that I'm only on my first cup of coffee, though.
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The problem is not Guns in Multiplayer - as you say, look at all those FPS games. The problem, as I see it, is that Gunfights don't map as well to a series of prebuilt animations in turn-based combat.
Everyone wants their MMO to basically be Everquest with a different tileset, and the camera doesn't suit the kind of long-range fighting that gun battles suggest. If I point at an enemy and click to shoot at it, I want to shoot at it, not have a bunch of stat monkeys decide whether my character is good enough to do so.
So the setup practically demands an FPS control instead of an RPG one, and then your nearest city descends into Lag Hell. Oops.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
You can't do "anything" in a good fantasy game. Good fantasy still has to have internally consistent rules. And I doubt sci-fi fans are more discerning than fantasy fans. There is just as much crappy sci-fi published as crappy fantasy. More actually, because fantasy editors are picker now as there is far more fantasy available. There is a dearth of Science Fiction for publication, so they are taking lesser quality work in the science fiction markets.
Look at books: In recent years, the Narnia, Harry Potter LOTR, Robert Jordan, D&D adaptation novels (Dragonlance, etc) have ripped up and down the bestseller lists. I'm having trouble even thinking of recent science-fiction bestsellers. Look at movies: A lot of those names repeat, don't they? Add in the fantasy-heavy pirate blockbuster movies. I'm having trouble thinking of outright huge science fiction movies. Yes, we can count the last "Star Wars" movies. There are other genres where fantasy is trumping science-fiction.
Where were you when the voynix came?
All the sci-fi based MMOs have been utter shit so far. Star Wars Galaxies? Utter shit. Anarchy Online? Utter shit. The Matrix Online? Utter shit. Everquest was the first real big MMO out there, and World Of Warcraft cashes in on a decade of building up a rabid fanbase. Those two just happen to be fantasy games. If Blizzard had decided to make an MMO out of Starcraft instead, it would have done just as well.
Fantasy's a more romantic setting. It's a simpler, nicer looking world, no electricity, no power stations, no concrete jungles, no stock markets, no traffic.
We're surrounded by so much technology nowadays that immersing yourself for eight hours in even more technology in a sci-fi Mmorp seems completely overbearing, whereas a technology-free world is like an escape.
Perhaps they should have hired a japanese writer then, when an anime is SciFi you can be damn sure that the majority of the combat is either with swords or devices that rely on the power of their owner, guns are rarely used and never "the great equalizer" people call them in real life. Come on, in a scifi environment you could replace people's arms with plasma cannons and there you have your fireballs. Or you could have them genetically modified to be able to shoot poison from their mouth. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", remember?
We don't even expect much different gameplay, all we want is a game that doesn't put us into a quasi-medieval scenario. Star Wars is fantasy but it's a refreshing change from the usual swords, magic, dragons and orcs you get in 97% of all fantasy settings. Same with WW2 shooters vs. Prey, it's not about gameplay as much as it is about us being sick and tired of shooting Nazis in different implementations of the same few battles.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Please someone make a Shadowrun MMO. I loved that universe in the pen and paper days. It was the best of both worlds, wizards with railguns!
For the mostpart the "other races" are still humanoid though, but fantasy has plenty of things beyond that such as dragons, beholders, and various other tentacle monsters. There are plenty of identifiable aliens as well, those from the Alien movie (bipedal/quadripedal), predators, klingons, kilrathi (sp?), Kzinti, Posleen, etc etc
Yeah, somebody might not immediately identify with a Posleen (basically centaur-structured lizards), but the badasses from the Alien series are pretty identifiable (ever played AvP), and the Kzinti/Kilrathi are pretty much fuzzy people.
Thinking about it, one of the previous comments definately hits near the mark. People will identify with being an orc, hill-giant, or hobbit because they're common fantasy characaters. People could also identify with being a Klingon, Geiger-Alien, Predator, Kzinti, etc.... but that's not going to happen because when you include them all you're probably going to have your ass sued into the next starsystem by the copyright owners of Star Trek, Aliens, Predator, and the Larry Niven books. I suppose you could make similar characters and/or use parody (a-la SpaceQuest), but look at what happen with City of Heroes and the lawsuits wherein players could make characters similar to movie entities.
Anothe reason why current Intellectual Property laws suck ass, while using a Klingon named "Worf" in your game might be dubious, you shouldn't be attacked for having something klingon-like, hell it's a compliment to the creators.
I think that whole statement is bunk.
The main reason you see sci-fi mmo games not doing well is because they pretty much all suck, not as many have been made, they have not
gone through as many iterations as fantasy mmos. look how long it took to finally make a decent fantasy mmo game. (by decent i mean on a large scale to a very large audience).
Looking at the various fantasy-related MMORPG breaks down party roles into clearly defined responsibilities: tank, healer, DPS. Some variation between different games is inevitable (pets, hybrids), but they appear to rarely break away from these primary roles because they're well established. Does easy = mass market? When you get some SciFi MMORPGs, they tend to have more open-ended class roles resulting in alot of hybrid classes or their roles are defined but not as clear as a D&D meme that's been around for 30 years. Here's a pop quiz: Guess the best tank in Guild Wars--warrior, necromancer, monk, or mesmer? Which one is the best healer? Guess the best tank in City of Heroes--Blaster, Brute, Defender, or Tanker? Which one is the best healer? Guess the best tank in Anarchy Online--enforcer, soldier, doctor, or agent? Which one is the best healer? Guess the best tank in Matrix Online--soldier, patcher, code shaper, or programmer? Which one is the best healer? Now, folks will say "well this is a complicated answer" and "you can add modules slots to make any Eve ship a better healer". But a game's complexity is usually something to be overcome for mass market acceptance unless there's a built in audience that can understand the concepts (e.g. Star Wars or Tolkein fans).
"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. I find this article to be rather amusing, in that they chose this moron to discuss MMORGS. The short of it for the slashdot audience is that this guy is is a tool. Not once has anyone in this thread mentioned the Mythic Entertainment flagship product. For those who are interested it "WAS" Dark Ages of Camelot. And if you've read this far along, please take a trip down memory lane, via the VNboards. I can't paraphrase what the thousands have done before me with any degree of justice, but here goes a try. 1. DAOC, the game 2. Lust for money via 2nd accounts 3. profit 4. Timesinks 5. Mackey (on the devteam@mythic) 6. Class imbalance 7. Trials of Atlantis fiasco 8. Cowardice, the lack of customer forum for feedback 9. Spazdic changes to the game, and promises un-kept 10. custering, and downtime 11. Denial and lies 12. Never in the office, on the road pimping vaporware 13. Stupid expansions that destabilize the game 14. Pumping up the gotta-have-items arms race 15. Ignoring game mechanics. "Warlocks, Banshees, Turrets, Casting thru walls" hours of fun with 15, enjoy. 16. Arrogance above all. Taking this guy's opinion at face value would be a mistake. (just so everyone knows, he bought the DAOC game from another company before it went live. Jacobs is a complete tool who just happened to pick up a product that was ready to go live.) Enjoy the link.. http://vnboards.ign.com/daoc_general_board/b5176/p 1
Actually, a medieval Japan or China based MMORPG would be a nice change of pace if we have to keep MMOs in the past. Far eastern mythology is at least as interesting as European mythology.
This poo is cold.
It's understandable that you gave up on EVE. Unlike most massives the content is heavily loaded towards the more advanced characters. I've never played WoW but I've heard from many people how it's lots of fun until they hit 50 and then it sucks. EVE is exactly the opposite in that the more time you have in the more options and opportunities open up before you. I've been playing EVE for 3 years now and I still haven't tapped out all the content because every 8 months or so they add a new level of complexity to the game (for free of course). When Kali launches there will be a whole new range of PvP interactions and PvE complexity. That being said for the new player with no friends in-game it can be quite daunting and there are no manuals to tell you how flipping awesome it gets once you've put in some time. If you want to know more PM me, I try not to boost EVE too much on /. because the more people who play the more the economy risks getting foobed by RL money makers.
-Pinkoir
"fantasy is very well defined in our minds"
Isn't this phrase a bit contradictory? Shouldn't this be setting of warning alarms in what is supposed to be a creative industry? Maybe the problem isn't sci-fi vs fantasy, maybe it's stuck-in-a-safe-rut vs being-creative-and-coming-up-with-new-ideas?
Maybe we need a new name for what are now popular yet highly generic fictional "fantasy" worlds, such as "Olde Tyme Wizard's Worlde" so that "fantasy" can go on being imaginative. The whole fantasy genre as it stands is terribly predictable, after all. Sci-fi isn't doing much better.
"The creative imagination; unrestrained fancy."
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Star Wars is not science fiction it's fantasy. Just because you use swords does not make you fantasy and just because you have a gun does not make you science fiction; personally I'm partial to Phillip K. Dick's definition which I am only able to paraphrase at the moment so I doubt I'll be nearly as succient nor as accurate.
...disagree all you want but I think I'll stick with PKD on this one.
'The Shifting Reality of Phillip K. Dick' contain many different short stories and pieces of speeches he gave throughout his life; in one of those speeches Dick espouses his definition of science fiction which goes something like this: A science fiction story takes place in a world that is not our world, but could be. In other words, the story is grounded in some sort of reality that we know. Star Wars has no such grounding, unless someone knows where I can find me some Ewoks to enslave.
I have only played SWG, and the star wars franchise is the only one mentioned that I have knowledge of so I'll limit my critique to that but clearly it's just shitty fantasy. Star Wars has been shitty fantasy for a long time and has never been science fiction. It's childish and nonsensical...
PS: If you think I've just commited an act that merits hari kari, stand up from your desk walk outside and breath some fresh air...
While I am not a fan of Fantasy MMOs, it is mainly because of the monthly dues. Plus my personality really isn't into Fantasy, its with Sci-Fi space sims.
Lately I have been playing Darkstar One, which to me is a re-incarnation of WC: Privateer, but with a better looking ship, and weapons. I have been into this game the moment I found the demo, and have been playing non-stop even though at this point all I am doing in the game is playing the randomly generated 'quickie cash' missions. (I'm improving my Saitek X45 flyin g skills)
I've gotten into EVE, and I really love the vast universe it brings to me. I could get lost into such a vast sci-fi mmo, but one things holds me back from getting into the 'monthly pay for' phase of game play. Its the interaction with my piloting of my space(craft)ship.
Sci-Fi MMOs have to abide by higher gameplay standards than that of Fantasy MMOs. Fantasy has to create scenic worlds, on a planet. While Sci-Fi, needs to create planets, within galaxies, to which even our own knowledge of the universe is incomplete so everything must be created theroy. While I will settle for EVE mixed with Freelance, and Privateer qualities, physics and game play are very hard to incorporate into a MMO. How about the alien races. I'm pretty sure, that a Sci-Fi MMO could just involve humans the way EVE has done. The storyline is impresive, create 6 human races with entirely different cultures. Attempt to create a universe with peace. Give the player a ship, and tell him to survive in space. DONE.
Just make the space physics, economy, social interaction (go ahead and create space stations with NPCs, hell make planets with NPCs too... Go as far as allowing people to goto 10 or more places on one planet) But as long as I can combat like a pilot against uneven odds of space pirates/bounty hunters/alien races, then fly home on the last leg of my spaceship to the nearest solar system to fix my ship, and fix my next job, then... and ONLY THEN will I be happy.
Here is what I would want in a Sci-Fi MMO;
1. Vast Universe... (EVE's universe is huge... I know it would take me years to goto each solar system, only to go back to one, and its been changed entirely. Thats how reality works too)
2. Human/Alien Races... (I have no problem dealing with some foreign alien, Rule #1 if it shoots at me, I shoot back. nuff said)
3. Economy... (EVE, excells, heck I could possibly find enough friends to help me manage a vast company in EVE, but hell, I need better friends to help me manage my OWN finances. Make the economy complex, but also allow for some form of automation, that will pay the ingame bills, every time you goto a planet/space station)
4. Gameplay Interaction... (This one is what EVE lacks. Put in some flight controls, and first person POV so I can duke it out with space pirates. If my ship exploids then... shits, I'm a bad pilot. Restart at the nearist planet/spacestation, and lose the mission.)
5. Gameplay cont... (As with Dying, respawning is not a bad idea for Sci-Fi.. heck we don't explain WHY when I die in Guild Wars, I end up alive at the nearest gateway, why not in a sci-fi sim as well) With Darkstar One, when I die at the lasers of a pirate, I just reload my most recently autosaved game, and retry.
6. graphics... (Things can't get worse from todays standards of MMO graphics, so at this point it can only get more detailed, or stay the same. EVE has done well with the online MMO for Sci-fi graphics)
7. Customizability of... (Characters, Ok, so Fantasy allows you to customize how your character looks, Sci-Fi can do the same thing with characters. You start off as a person/alien anyways, so let us customize five or more races of human or alien.)
8. Customizability of... (Spaceships, well for sci-fi why not customize your spaceship. Give users 10 or more types of spaceships they can start from, and then allow us to customize the wings, engines, shields, paint jobs, computers, etc. I know we'll upgrad
"Don't Forget to Salt the Fries"
Why must a MMORPG be a single avatar per player? A player could control several characters, or a team, or a military, or a civiliation, or research lab, or a starship, or whatever. The players could be super-titanium robots, which would get rid of the gun problem. Or other alien races that developed different types of weapons. Or perhaps some real time strategy aspects could be pulled in, but on a larger scale. You'd then have a mechanism for balancing out extremely power technologies. I suppose you lose a bit of the immersion when you don't play at the single character level, but I could see a market for a more complex gaming mechanism that would suit a sci-fi universe.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
But by necessity, at some point, they'll have to make a concession. After all, in faster-than-light travel were perfectly explainable, and we had the schematics for all the necessary machinery and could present it in such a way as to be understood by the average intellectual, my guess is we'd be well on our way to Alpha Centauri by now. We can try to make sci-fi realistic, but eventually we just have to take it on faith that "yes, this works, we figured it out, and no I can't really explain it in great detail." At some level the distinction blurs between sci-fi and fantasy--because if everything in sci-fi were possible and explicable, then it wouldn't really be sci-fi, it would just be fiction.
But is the dearth of sci-fi games a function of the genre, or just an unfortunate circumstance of the MMO market? I would argue that it's not because fantasy games are harder, it's because MMO makers are retarded. Most fantasy MMOs suck too. It's just that a few companies have managed to make good games, which happened to be in a fantasy setting. Sooner or later someone will make a good game that happens to be in a sci-fi setting. It's not a question of difficulty per genre, but one of simple economics. WoW has now provided an excellent formula for a fantasy MMO. No one has done so for a sci-fi MMO. Which genre has the better risk/return ratio?
MMORPG games that are Sci-Fi based have worked out many times in the past! Examples to back that up are
e =bellato
Earth and Beyond (shut down when EA aquired the company leading that): Had an advanced crafting system that was ahead of it's time and was a primarily based space fighter! http://enb.rpgplanet.gamespy.com/ (Most of EnB sites are now down.)
Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided: Had several ranged profession (carbineer, pistoleer, rifleman, bounty hunter, smuggler) as well as melee professions, with a space based expansion that came later on and an interesting take on crafting classes. The game is now in ruins though, the development team that was put in place to develop the product was new to the MMORPG world and throughout the games life it has seemed to be in 'beta' because of that. www.starwarsgalaxies.com
PlanetSide: A complete FPS battlefield using ranged weapons for a majority of the combat (aka you can use a knife) www.planetside.com
Eve Online: I'll let the site speak for itself http://www.eve-online.com/
RF Online: http://www.codemasters.com/rfonline/news.php?them
So, can you really say fantasy > Sci-Fi?
It seems to me that it is the MMO part that is hard to accomplish well. There are good Sci-Fi RPGs out there and some of them are really good. I know I really liked Fallout but that game doesn't lend it self very well to an MMO. The whole problem is they need to incorporate team elements into it successfully. Planetside put in the team elements but it was a FPS which may or may not appeal to RPG fans. You need someting in between the two.
What I wonder is why haven't we seen the equivalint of a Fantasy FPS?
The gunfight is far faster, spot, shoot, kill.
While in real life a hit with a broadsword is probably as much an instant kill as a bullet in the head, movies have made us believe that sword fights last minutes while gunfights are over in a matter of seconds.
Now take a look at the various MMORPG's games. Because of the general lack of AI or anything approaching tactics let alone strategy most fights are about wearing down the enemies hitpoints slowly in a prolonged duel. No instant kills allowed. It just doesn't fit in the gameplay.
SWG offcourse had guns and believe me that after years of movies and books and other star wars games it came as something of a shock to find that stormtroopers do not die instantly if you hit them with a blaster shot. Neither two, nor three, nor five. In fact during a period before the dreaded CU/NGE debacle you had roving bands of stormies that had some very big brothers that could whoop your ass. But apperently not spot you sniping their platoon down one by one. Well when I say sniping I mean firing away at their heads with concealed shot for about five to ten minutes a piece.
Not that the melee combat was any better but at least that seems acceptable. You can parry my sword blows but how exactly do you stop an energy bolt straight between the eyes? It gets Jagged Alliance kind of silly where you shoot somebody with a machine gun at point blank range, only somehow manage to hit them once, in the head and they still fight with 94% of their health gone in the next round. WTF? Any notion of suspense of disbelief is gone. You are in a spreadsheet with pretty picture mate. Not fighting the evil empire. Or rebel scum.
The same problems occurs ofcourse in KOTOR with the damn lightsabers. You get this cool weapon that can slice through anything except it seems clothes, swords and any piece of armour. That wasn't the deal!
Guns don't work in current MMORPG gameplay. For instant kills to work you need more enemies, they need to be more intelligent (how many MMORPG's are there were the enemy is even capable of seeking cover?) and you need far better code for instance collesion detection to avoid people targetting and shooting through walls. Already a pain with swordfights it could make gunfights with instant kill even more frustating.
Oh and if you add instant kill on the enemies, do you add it on the player? A modern war based MMORPG would suck for the point guy. Spend an hour getting ready to get to the quest area only to be ambushed and get a bullet in face and be forced to respawn.
Your argument of aloneness doesn't ring true to me. Star Trek is very much a group off people, especially the original series, while say the entire TES series of games (Oblivion) is very very lonely.
People accept a resistance to fire. They do not accept a resistance to hot lead. MMORPG structure at the moment just can't do gunfights. Hell, single games can barely do it. FEAR and that old Lucasarts cowboy game are about the only games I remember where there was movie style gunfights going on.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Not if that level 20 captain knows just where to point that laser to deal the most damage because of his advanced knowledge of ship hulls and weaknesses, or the way his technology operates. On top of which, there is the human (player, not character) skill fudge factor that must be in any game, or it becomes boring very fast.
EON operates on a two tiered model, ships for options, but characters (pods) for skill advancement. A character with very crummy skills and a good ship will no doubt lose to a character with a less than average ship and very good skills in combat.
The ships require some sort of grind (or getting lucky pirating) to acquire, but skills are relatively free to learn. (Barring a few notable exceptions.) Not only which, skills are based on character longevity so it gives longtime players an advantage over short-timers (griefers, and noobs.) Blah, more rants. Eve did it pretty well, so did vendetta, both I play in linux. (Eve with cedega, vendetta has a native client.)
There are good Sci-fi MMO's they only cater to those who want them tho, and it seems there isn't as big a draw as to Fantasy MMO's (can you say girrrlz?) Blame it on the lack of targetted engineering education to women, but if you can only hope to target half the population (mainly men, 4-8% women) with your ads, how can you expect to expand much?
Yeah argue all you want, these games are sausage fests way more than even WoW, and that's saying something.
The player character for the Zerg could be a fragment of the Zerg Overmind. By itself, disembodied and ephemeral. In fact it would be invisible to your typical non-psi human. What the Zerg PC can do however is create and command Zerg. For example, a first level character would command one or two zerglings, and if they were killed could summon more to replace them. Perhaps by mutating local organic material. Different classes of PC Zerg would be differentiated by the mutations they can apply to their Zerglings. 'Fighters' would make them beefier, 'Healer/Mages' would focus on psi talents and 'Rogues' would focus on stealth and speed.
I think that some of the reasons that sci-fi mmo's/rpg's are harder is the leveling.
In fantasy based ones you can start the character with a quarterstaff or a short sword etc, and has they get better they can progress to decent stuff (larger, two-handed etc)
With sci-fi, you've start with some kinda of gun weapon, but realistically there is no reason why your weedy level 1 character can't fire the super weapons straight off...its not like pulling the trigger is harder to do. So to get the progression the devs have to unrealistically hamper the character.
Also in a similar vein, who cares if your stronger in a scifi enviro, the guns aren't going to do more damage are they?
and without this levelling, there is no real progression apart from the story...so you need a utterly excellent (planescape torment level excellent) story arcs.
just my pov...
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person