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Firefly MMORPG Announced
bishiraver writes "Multiverse has announced that they have gained rights to a Firefly Massively Multiplayer Online Game. Multiverse is a company started by several former Netscape employees, and they have developed an engine/network that works for all of their games. They intend to break into the MMO industry by being an MMO publisher of sorts. By standardizing, they can provide a less expensive alternative to the tens of millions of dollars and several years it takes to currently develop an MMO. They have said they will hire out a studio to build the game for them. Corey Bridgets, Massive's Executive Producer, says: 'If you're doing science fiction, you have to really think it out and create an incredibly rich environment that is compelling in its own right, and worth exploring and going back to week after week. That's what Joss Whedon did with Firefly.'"
It has an almost cult following these days, and those will be the ones playing it. Depending on the marketing for this (and I doubt there will be much), it may survive for a year or so before being scrapped.
Earth & Beyond was a great MMO, unfortunately, little to no marketing, and just a sort of "Die Hard" fan-base to live on. It just wasn't enough. I suspect this will play out similarly. Historically though, Sci-Fi ish MMOs don't tend to do very well.
Well, not compared to their Medieval-esque counterparts anyway.
I've been lusting after new Firefly content for a long time, but I have to admit that a MMORPG is not exactly the culmination of my homes and dreams. There are so many dangling threads in the Firefly universe (Book, Blue Sun, etc.) that I'd give extremities to see explored/resolved. I just don't think that this kind of gaming experience is going to be able to give that kind of satisfaction. Not that the Firefly universe isn't interesting to explore on its own, but what made Firefly special was its extremely strong characters, and I don't see an MMORPG being able to advance the characters.
Before anyone freaks out (in a good way), Multiverse has yet to ship a product. MMOGs take a lot of time, and a lot of money to produce. While I'm cautiously optimistic about this announcement, it's going to be a while before Serenity flies again.
I loved Firefly. I liked Serenity. But I have serious doubts I'm going to be able to be interested in an MMORPG like this. I don't hate MMORPGs, in fact I love them (although I do define them as an online, multiplayer game where there is an evolving storyline). I originally played Armageddon and loved it. I have since tried the Matrix Online which supposedly had an evolving story and it was completely boring. Absolutely no enjoyment factor whatsoever (thankfully I tried it with a free account).
But that doesn't mean graphical MMORPGs must suck. One that is great will be Myst Online: Uru Live. I say that with such certainty because we already got a taste of the evolving storyline with the original beta in 2002 - 2004, a detailed account of which can be found here in an in-character manner. You can also find a film documentary in several parts here.
The big difference between Uru Live and the Matrix Online was that Uru realized you don't need to go around killing people. They also realised that when you first enter an area it can be very confusing and daunting, and so Cyan Worlds limits it by limiting what you can access at first both because areas aren't open to players, but also because areas need a puzzle to be solved before you can go to the next area. This was a problem I had with the Matrix Online as I was allowed to roam free as I liked in a very large area. Although the maps did help alleviate this, I found they actually did too much and took away the challenge in finding out what to do next and so the only challenge was killing people or stopping someone from getting killed. It became very repetitive, which is something Uru Live realises and avoids. Instead each puzzle is unique and there is no leveling so there is no repetitive gameplay (although there are things you can do more then once such as Ahyoheek).
However the big differences between Uru Live and Matrix Online was that the Matrix Online felt like it was completely empty of other players. I logged on and I saw no other players around. Perhaps I was simply in the wrong area. However Uru Live does away with that problem by having an introduction that explains where you can go if you want to play alone or where you can go if you want to find other players. It also has only a couple of places you can go to at the start one of which has players. The Uru Live beta has nowhere near the amount of players that Matrix Online does (it is after all a beta that has limitations on who can play) and yet it felt like it was the more heavily populated. I remember when I first logged onto Uru in 2003 I very quickly not only found another person, but I found a character being played by someone.
Unfortunately this MMORPG Firefly sounds more like Matrix Online then Myst Online: Uru Live.
It seems to me that TV executives just don't "get" science fiction. Star Trek was killed after three years. Farscape's "to be continued" almost never was. Firefly gets canned just as people are getting into it. And to top it off, they fill the SF airwaves with wrestling (wrestling? wrestling? Sheesh, reruns of Mork and Mindy, or Space 1999, or even The Starlost would have been better).
Hey TV Execs, we SF fans will watch re-runs just as faithfully as mundanes watch new shows. Remember that "Star Trek" show that you wanted to cancel? Ten feature length films, five spin-off series, shelvesful of books, $$$ that almost slipped through your fingers. So, go ahead, run the old Doctor Who episodes in prime time and just watch the numbers. How about feeding NASA-TV footage, or the Jetsons, or Thunderbirds, or the Prisoner, or Planet of the Apes, or...
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It is a bit of an odd dance though it is possible to work out how the mods think. In your case your post may resurface at a good point rating later in the day; A good analogy is the first post is a very pretty woman walking down a very dangerous and dark alley late at night. You really have no idea what is going to happen even if it is a good post. Though unfortunately if your post does get saved the post you just made, and this one, will be driven into the ground as off topic (I have the karma to burn). I tend to consider the people that put the effort in to fix inconstancies like the ones you mentioned to be the best people here on /. as they give people the information they want though they don't always have the mod points when it's needed so don't rely on them.
There are a number of other oddities like for example you post a very informative post but in the proccess you call the person you are responding to a moron you will start to get informative points but then be killed off as a troll. If you want to stop this you simply post a strong reinforcement of your original post and its content and suddenly your original post and the one you just made will go up points wise as people who aren't looking for trolls but informative posts will mark it up. No one ever marks a >+4 post as troll. So there are ways that you can deal with mods who are unfair without resorting to abuse, spamming up threads, or tracking them down; Just watch how everything works and in general be a good poster.
I would like to use this post to also call to the attention of every one the seeming increase in people marking a post troll in political or religious debates and then going to ones history and using the rest of their points to mark down ones other posts.
I ate your fish.
Multiverse seems to be like all the other freeware engines out there, homemade. And this isn't even a real game announcement, just a sort of open invitation for someone to come along and develop a MMORPG for them.
Until they actually announce a studio willing to develop it and sign the final licensing contracts this is not news. A vague wish to hire someone else to develop a firefly game (which they don't even own the concept of), for their homebrew freeware engine is not a frontpage slashdot story (unless the crappy homebrew engine happens to run on linux).
----- 70% of all statistics are completely made up.
I actually found the music in firefly to be anything but corny. There are so many elements of so many different musics, and combined in a very creative and original way.
The music really helps to intensify the culture infusion forced on this society. It also blends the old west sound, asian sound, and typical "western music" sound extremely well. There's also a lot of emotion expressed in the music. The Ballad Of Jayne and the show's theme are both, in my opinion prime examples of this.
The instrument combinations are extremely unique, which helps to represent that people were just kind of thrown out into the rim and whatever instruments were around was what they used - atypical sounding or not.
In the several times i've watched the seasons of the show, I've always taken particular note of the music adding greatly to the weight of a scene. So, I respect your right to criticize it, but as an avid musician and music consumer, I have to respectfully disagree with your statement.
they are standardizing the tools for building MMOs. they actually aren't deving the MMO themselves. the part that bothers me is that the multiverse MMO tools and engine are years from being production worthy so the firefly MMO is probably 5-7 years away. the other thing that bothers me is that according to this thread in the multiverse forums. http://update.multiverse.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t =34&highlight=quad&theme=multiverse
it is not a very good engine for a space based MMO so it is probably going to another SWG with all planetside gameplay. bleh
If that is the case then the MMORPG should be a good game. Because all though it was a 'failed' Show and a 'failed' Movie it was also a good show and a good movie.
Who cares what the mods think? Just keep posting what YOU think. There's nothing less interesting than navigating into a discussion and reading two hundred attempts at reflecting the un-official group consesus of Slashdot. It's interesting to hear intelligent individuals put forth their ideas and test them against counter-argument. Slashdot is supposedly a website that "smart people" read. There's nothing smart about being a sheep or a dictaphone. I quote Captain Picard: "If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for who we really are."
Since Firefly depicted the vacuum of space as proper silence, the lack of a music soundtrack would have people wondering if the sound cut off on their TV sets. Some music was needed to seamlessly cut from environments with air to those without it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Let me say that whoever thinks that the network engine is the most expensive part of a MMO is either a snake oil vendor, or genuinely deluded. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it's trivial, but it pales in comparison with other money sinks and bug oportunities. E.g.,
- The sheer quantity of content there. Compare the surface of WoW, including instances, to, say, NWN2. And NWN2 was a long one. A SP game is meant to be played for 10 hours, maybe even 50 hours in some cases (e.g., NWN2), while a MMO is meant to be played for 6 months on the average. (That's about how long it takes for an average player to get bored anyway and quit. Mind you, like with all averages, some quit after a week, some stay for 6 years.) So you actually have to have content for all that time. Even if it gets more time sinks at the end, you have to, you know, still keep people there and excited by the time they get to the endgame grind, or they won't be goaded into it.
And while sheer terrain surface can be algorithmically generated, the next parts can't:
- Quests and scripting. A world which is just populated with hordes of respawning monsters to kill repeatedly, just doesn't cut it any more. You may find your 10,000 player niche that way, but you'll never be the next WoW. The aspect that the world is essentially a static one is a turn-off. It takes much work and scripting to get the player to suspend disbelief and believe "yay, I saved the elven girl" just as he watches the next group member standing in line to deliver the same cure again.
Ok, so it's not that bad, but you want the quests to be _interesting_, and _believable_, and make the players feel like they've discovered a bit of the story or background or whatever. Copy and paste, mass-produced quests... well, ask Sony how well that worked for EQ2.
- Balance. It's not just for Blizzard any more, folks. In a SP game it's less problem if everyone plays the Godmode class, though even there it _will_ piss off everyone who picked the Pussy class and can't even get to an enemy before being nuked. But in MP a game where everyone plays the same class is boring. Doubly so if it has PvP.
Worse yet, in SP you can give the player a known mix of party NPCs, so you can know what abilities combine with what other NPCs ability. In MP you can have (and _should_ have, because otherwise again it's uninteresting) all sorts of possibilities to combine the abilities of any two classes. Is there some uber combination you've never foreseen?
Are there some items which are horribly unbalanced? E.g., if, say, you give players an ice sword which applies a slow effect, what happens when 5 players with ice swords hack at the same NPC? Does it stack, effectively being able to freeze someone solid for as long as you wish? Does it stack with other slowing abilities, like a mage's Slow spell? If not, do your items make a class completely obsolete as the same spells and effects are available from items? Does it stack with, say, applying an ice oil to that sword? What is the trade-off if I use that sword, compared to another?
Basically, balance is more work than most companies realize or are willing to put in their game. But it makes a hell of a lot of difference.
- Support. If your whole game's premise and repeated business incentive is that it's a persistent world, and people should get attached to their possessions and character, then you'll have to deal with whatever unfair stuff happens to their character or their equipment. Don't underestimate the costs of that, because few things piss a player off at your game than falling in some hole and the understaffed support not answering for a week. And it's not only because of getting attached to that, but while in SP you'd just curse and reload a previous save, in a MMO you don't even have reload.
- General code quality. E.g., did you make sure that the game glitches don't double your support requests? E.g., if in a SP game it's possible to duplicatee items or money, well, (A) it doesn't affect anyone e
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What's worse than that the client is written in c#. All the gargage collection goodness of Java with none of the portability ;)
That post actually helped me understand why I got modded down recently for a first post that kinda made fun of Apple and was modded down as a troll (although after looking back on my wording, I wasn't careful and was pretty un-flattering) even though all of the replies to my post agreed with what I said and reiterrated my point while getting modded up. It seems to me that if you are going to be the first post, you had better say something neutral or else someone will come after you.
Then again, picking on apple is probably going to bring some hard core apple devotees down on you.
Could have been worse, it could be the theme to Enterprise!
First God made idiots. That was for practice. Then He made Jack Thompson.
I'd have to disagree here - I'm sure there are more people like me out there, who like the idea of a Sci-Fi online game, but don't like the fact that you can't step outside of your ship... I see on your post that they are putting in an FPS section, but I can't help but think that it will feel like an afterthought (mostly because it is...) and it won't really feel like it's one whole game, but two separate games. However, to be fair, it will be no small feat to make the Firefly game coalesce into something truly engaging the way WoW is and the way SWG isn't... I don't think EVE online is the same sort of game. I see EVE online as more of a TradeWars for the internet generation... I don't think a Firefly game has to be intensely space-combat based the way EVE is - the show barely had any real space combat. If they're successful, it will be just as much fun avoiding space combat as it will to engage in it. So basically I guess what I'm saying is that there's enough people playing WoW, SWG, and EVE online that like what they're playing, but will find a successful implementation of this Firefly game more compelling... At least that's how I feel.
This seems to be a running theme for TV shows and movies. The Studio execs don't want to spend the money or think that video games just can't handle a good story so they make a MMO without a solid storyline. Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Matrix, Firefly, the list goes on. The reason these series and movies did well, for the most part, was compeling stories. I know for some they just get sucked into the lore and they'll be happy with a bland repetitive facade of a game that esentially is the same as the others with tiny variation and a different theme. But some of us want stories. I send out a plea to Studio Executives. Please support in depth games with compeling stories! Let your writers work on the video game story lines. There is still a massive audience that like to play games with stories.
I don't care, I'm still free, you can't take the sky from me.
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
heh yeh, but being modded down for challenging the group-think gets frustrating after a while. one of the things that gets ignored frequently is that everyone is entitled to an opinion, however much you disagree with it.
back to the actual topic: if they do this game right, i think it will kick ass. i loved firefly, and its a great setting for a sci-fi MMO. however, firefly has some rabid fans, and if this games sucks, they will _crucify_ this company for f'ing up firefly..
sometimes, i wonder if i'm the only conservative on teh intarweb. ah well, back to mah hogs and warmongerin'....
because you would be the worst kind of person on the team. People who are fanantic about something can't look at the big picture, or imagine why a customer would want to do something outside you perception of the series.
Writers who are browncoats would be good, artists who are browncoats wuld be good, not developers.
So What I am saying is:
I am a developer, I enhjoy the world, but am not a browncoat*. Can I have a job?
*I perfer to wear Hawaiian shirts to firfly events.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Have you seen Dr Who? I'm talking the earlier seasons, not the latest two. Costumes were cheap and set design was largely dumpster diving and spraypaint. And despite the obvious low quality special effects, and cheesy appearance, it is the longest running SF series ever. Why? Because SF fans will put up with lousy eye candy as long as they get a good story.
So, if the Execs would invest the $$$ in writing instead of gloss, they would see a much larger return on their investment.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!