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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.'"
Will the music be unrelentingly corny?
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
Finally, a MMORPG that I might be interested in playing. Quick! Burn my credit cards before I become addicted!
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.
The show never really clicked with me (I think it was because it took the idea of a "space Western" a little too far) but the universe is perfect for an MMORPG, because there's a wealth of options for character classes.
this might live as long as nethack.
Oh, wait...
snarkth
I'll happily give you guys money just to float in an empty space that will soon be filled with Joss Whedon goodness. Here's a crazy idea, how about getting him to write the story arc?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Shiny!
This may be the first online life-sucking game I subscribe to.
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.
A game that specifically supports the Chinese gold farmers native language!
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.
Never underestimate the stamina, wherewithal, and sheer terrifying focus of horny nerds.
I've had plenty of success writing Java servers. With proper threading they can scale rather well. That said, it'll take some doing to scale up to WoW numbers. But I'll bet a server written in Java running on a unix platform is going to be a hell of a lot better than C-based code running on Windows servers. I was horrified to realize SWG servers ran on Windows, but I'm sure lots of these games do.
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.
it'll suck. just like firefly did.
/.ers in the room stand up, thier chairs falling over behind them.
And suddenly, all the
The bartender ducks behind the bar, and the theme to 'The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly' can be heard in the background.
Them's fightin' words, mister.
Technoli
I think I just had a nerdgasm.
Mom says there are bad people out there, and they can hurt me. But my friend Bill says that there are real girls at the mall that I can talk to.
I am going to try it. Call 911 if I don't come back.
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.
Yay! So instead of each MMO being a drastically different experience we can expect all the MMOs from this company to be horrible rehashes of their prior product with some new graphics. As if the MMO market wasn't becoming flooded with crappy games already, now we can expect this company to churn out horrible MMO's at a rate of 1 or 2 a year!
I am going to start playing as a level 1 Kaylee...
I wouldnt mind playing with a Kaylee either...but i think i'd like one at least around 18 or 19.
I wouldnt mind playing with an Inara, or a River either.
I'm up for a few rounds with a Saffron too.
That show had more than its share of beautiful women playing fun characters.
(before anyone complains that i left out Zoe, i have a firm belief that it is best to leave Morpheus' wife alone.)
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
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."
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.
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.
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'....
of course it is possible.
This is the EXACT same issue the TV shows must dael with, and that has been done successfully.
I can think of several ways to do this, so I am sure there are game makers that could figure it out as well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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!