Exploring the Marvel Universe Online

In the wake of yesterday's formal announcement of the Marvel Online title, Gamespot has an interview with 'Cryptic Studios' creative director, Jack Emmert, and Marvel Entertainment's vice president of Interactive, Ames Kirshen — as well as Microsoft Game Studios' senior director of business development, Frank Pape. They discuss the details of a game on Windows and the 360 (both will play in the same world), how the game will reflect the comics, and why Cryptic is involved. From the article: "Cryptic with their great pedigree, their great track record on the City of Heroes franchise — it was the perfect partner. We have access to all the characters in the history and lore of the Marvel universe to put into this game. So we're super excited. I mean this is, for an MMO player and for folks on the console that want to play an MMO and bringing in a new audience, it's as compelling a statement as we can make." And here I thought they were going to talk about that little multi-year lawsuit between Cryptic and Marvel.

Comments

Competing Against yourself?

[ironwill96]

1. Make a comic-themed MMO. 2. Get sued by Marvel, make comic-themed MMO for them that competes against two of your own products. 3. Profit?!?

Jack "Statesman" Emmert claims that the new MMO will be more "story" based and tied into new comic book storylines etc and that they will continue to support the COX (City of Villains and City of Heroes) games. However, it seems to me that they must be competing with themselves on some level, even if with two separate development teams at Cryptic handling the different games. Can anyone here imagine them *not* using the same style of character creator that they have in the COX games? It is brilliantly executed and almost necessary for this type of game so I'm pretty sure we will see it in some form in the Marvel MMO. The Marvel MMO will probably have 40-50% nicer looking graphics which is going to woo a lot of people as well as full permission to use all Marvel charactes in the story which is also going to draw a lot of fans. I think the COX games have reached their peak in subscribers and once the Marvel MMO comes out, they will in all likelihood lose customers. However, Cryptic is probably making a % of all profits from the Marvel MMO so this works out well for them but not so great for long-term support for the COX games.

Re:Competing Against yourself?

[Jarnis]

CoH/CoV are dead. They will continue to run the life support and token 'additions' as long as it's financially sound, but it's obivious that Cryptic's main devs will concentrate on the new stuff.

Just look at DAOC after Warhammer Online was announced. I rest my case.

Re:Competing Against yourself?

[vonPoonBurGer]

According to the president of NCSoft North America, Robert Garriott (brother to Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, who now works as a game designer at NCSoft Austin), they're not competing against themselves. They're making churn their friend. From their insight into the MMOG space, they see customer paying and playing for around 10 months, then they move on to some other game. By having lots of MMOG games in their stable, they increase the chances that that, the next time you're looking for an MMOG, you land on another NCSoft product. In this particular case, I don't think they care that they already have a superhero-themed MMOG. Maybe people get sick of CoH/CoV, and they want a different superhero MMOG; in that case, NCSoft's got another option to sell you. Or maybe you go on to Guild Wars, or one of their other products. They don't really care which. At the same time, it allows them to get the Marvel lawsuit off their backs; even if the game barely breaks even, they'll come out way ahead. You can read more of their thoughts on these topics in this Escapist Magazine article: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/63/28

Re:Competing Against yourself?

[Keith Russell]

Just look at DAOC after Warhammer Online was announced.

Well, this isn't quite the same thing. With DAOC and Warhammer, that was pretty much the same team moving on to the next big thing on their own.

One thing Positron said in his letter to The Cities community was that the Cities and Marvel Universe will have totally separate dev teams. And with the kinds of cash Marvel and Microsoft can throw at Marvel Universe, Cryptic wouldn't have to siphon any money from the Cities' team. In fact, I doubt Jack Emmert would agree to this deal if he didn't think the Cities would be self-sustaining throughout the process.

IMHO, keeping the teams separate is almost a necessity. Neither team will want new features to be dependent on the other. Certainly, there will be a new client engine, since the Cities are OpenGL. Marvel Universe will run on both Windows and XBox 360, so Direct3D would be an engineering no-brainer even if Microsoft wasn't publishing the title. And, if nothing else, the inevitable rivalry between the Cities and Marvel Universe will push both teams to prove their own worth. Marvel Universe doesn't want to be seen as a mere "re-skin" of City of Heroes, with Jean Gray and Xavier's School standing where Ms. Liberty and City Hall used to be, and the Cities don't want to be reduced to one large beta test for Marvel.

Re:Competing Against yourself?

[Jarnis]

It's exactly the same thing as DAOC.

DAOC claimed that 'no this won't affect DAOC, Warhammer Online has whole different dev team on another floor of the same building'.

While this may be mostly true, any real dev investment to DAOC went downhill fast after that. Yes, they still have people fixing exploits and they are releasing a small expansion later this year, but there has been no real development after Catacombs was launched to the core game systems. DAOC has been broken as far as gameplay is concerned since bit after TOA launch, and Catacombs just broke it a bit more. No real effort has gone towards fixing it. Many of the original dev team have moved on to other companies.

See Cryptic Studios - many gone from there too. Part may be NCsoft-mandated downsizing (they took a huge blow when Auto Assault was a massive flop) of the CoV/CoH devteam, but either way the end result is the same.

CoH/CoV had a nice combat system. However, the character development curve was badly designed - you get fewer and fewer new abilities as you go up in levels, while levelling gets slower and slower - most players gave up well before maximum level, as there was nothing new to gain, and while rolling alts was fun for a while, they shot their own foot in the most spectacular way by introducing 'storyline' in CoV newbie zones - essentially forcing EVERY SINGLE ALT of yours to level thru EXACT SAME BORING MISSIONS during the first 20 levels or so.

CoH at least had several starting zones and several starting mission lines. No such luck with the Villains side - so nobody could be bothered with more than one or two Villains alts before the initial grind thru the on-rails noob zones caused the players to basically slit their wrists and hit /cancel.

Plus neither game had no endgame what so ever. Kinda critical flaw in a MMO.

WoW would've flopped like a dead duck had they left out every 10+ man instance in the game. CoH/CoV is a bit like that.

RPG or Twitch?

[the computer guy nex]

The only way I see a MMO doing well on a console would be twitch-style gameplay. Anything with hardcore RPG elements is better done with a keyboard.

The only twitch-based MMO I can think of is Sony's Planetscape (I believe). I hope they go this route, it would be fun on a console.

Won't fly

[Jarnis]

Cryptic never had enough devs to actually develop City of Heroes forward from it's intial smack-endless-piles-of-baddies-with-mad-AE-attacks gameplay. The game has zero content.

Yes, they relesed an expansion, that copypasted half the powers from Heroes side, and dropped another pile of nearly contect-free stuff and told people to go level again from zero.

Also, a superhero game with a license is the silliest idea ever. Either you have 200 spidermans zipping around (beyond silly), or you can't allow players to play 'name' characters, at which point the whole point of a license goes out of the window. People play license games to 'be the hero' so to speak, and that doesn't work in a MMO. The concept is just broken out of the gate.

Expect a weak ripoff of City of Heroes with marvel (tm)(R)'s added all around, with some weak license-tieins like 'name' heroes giving missions to the player characters, and maybe villains as bosses to whack. With zero endgame gameplay at launch and nearly zero post-launch content.

MMOs live and die on the _gameplay_, not any license or logo, and while Cryptic did prove with CoH/CoV that they can make a workable superhero combat system that's cool for roughly two weeks, they also proved they couldn't design their way out of a paper bag beyond the combat system. All the bolted-on stuff has been broken - PvP was riddled by extra rules and special pvp nerfs to powers, base system was so badly designed it was unusable to most of the playerbase and the 'crafting' introduced in CoV was so bad it makes EQ2's crafting system look great in comparison.

WoW upped the bar on the amount of content and gameplay required to keep people hooked on a MMO. And even WoW faces constant whines how there's not enough to do. I can't blame people for trying, but I sincerely doubt Marvel Online will be a success - if it even gets out of the gate (Microsoft has a tendency to kill off/sell off MMO projects when their beancounters get the willies during development)

omg multiplatform!!@#$%^

[Rob T Firefly]

FP: [...]It will be on Xbox 360 and on Windows, and will feature cross-platform seamless simultaneous play, which we believe is unprecedented.

GS: So it'll be the same people on the PC as on the 360?

FP: Absolutely, playing at the same time, which we think is tremendous--a unique and compelling feature for folks to play the game.

So it's the same tremendous, unprecedented, unique, compelling feature that Square/Enix and Final Fantasy XI have had for a number of years?

Re:I never got the "men in tights" thing...

[Chris Burke]

I'd couldn't prove it, but my thought is that the skin tight suits is a result of the historical necessity to keep art costs down in comics.

Drawing clothes is extra work. First you draw the body, then you have to draw the clothes over that body such that they appear to hang naturally.

Or you could just draw the body, and then color it to look like the hero is wearing clothes, maybe add a couple pieces of flair. It's faster, ergo cheaper. Add fifty years and maybe it isn't financially necessary for publishers like Marvel but it has basically become a tradition.

I understand there's a similar explanation for why characters in Japanese comics have crazy-colored hair. Everyone in Japan has black hair, so in B&W comics it made sense to just leave the hair blank to save money and prevent printing problems and their readers just naturally filled it in with the expected color. When they started using color printing, the artists thought why fill in that blank space with black when you could use pink or blue? This, too, then becomes a tradition.

It could work

[Chris Burke]

Also, a superhero game with a license is the silliest idea ever. Either you have 200 spidermans zipping around (beyond silly), or you can't allow players to play 'name' characters, at which point the whole point of a license goes out of the window. People play license games to 'be the hero' so to speak, and that doesn't work in a MMO. The concept is just broken out of the gate.

Expect a weak ripoff of City of Heroes with marvel (tm)(R)'s added all around, with some weak license-tieins like 'name' heroes giving missions to the player characters, and maybe villains as bosses to whack. With zero endgame gameplay at launch and nearly zero post-launch content.

If Spidey and Wolverine are just hanging around handing out quests and tossing out catch phrases, it will be stupid.

However if they involve these characters in the actual gameplay, it could be pretty fun.

Imagine taking your original hero character, working your way through the ranks, proving your mettle, such that you become a full-fledged X-Man and get to go on missions with Wolverine. Would that satisfy the desire to "be the hero"? It sounds like it to me. Best of both worlds: My own creation, my personal avatar, I am a bad-ass super-hero, and look there's my favorite Marvel characters kicking ass beside me!

Of course practically speaking I'm not expecting anything that involved. It will probably be as you describe, and be crappy. Yet it is possible, if Marvel decides to give Cryptic a serious up-front cash injection so they have enough developers to handle it. Hopefully Cryptic made money of Co(H|V) themselves and can afford more developers. If they take it seriously, spend the money, and do it right, a Marvel MMO could be great.

I'll start holding my breath right... now.

Re:I never got the "men in tights" thing...

[kfg]

I'd couldn't prove it, but my thought is that the skin tight suits is a result of the historical necessity to keep art costs down in comics.

I couldn't prove it, but my thought is that skin tight suits is a result of wanting to sell nudes to teenagers without getting arrested.

Draw tits. Ink them yellow. Done.

KFG

Re:I never got the "men in tights" thing...

[justaj]

I remember Stan Lee saying the reason he went for the spandex look was because a) superheroes had to be able to move around comfortably and without constriction and they couldnt do it in normal clothes and b) he wanted to show off the muscles in the guys and the curves in the girls.

Which makes more sense to me. Superman wouldnt be quite as cool if he was lifting a truck in a suit and tie.