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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.
this might live as long as nethack.
Oh, wait...
snarkth
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.
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.
"...because there's a wealth of options for character classes."
And in true Fox tradition, you start at level 20. When you make 25, you drop back to do levels 5 though 10, then 32 to 37, then back to 11 to pick up your first skill bonus. After playing levels 42-47, 13-18, and 26-31 you finish up with levels 48-59. When you qualify for 60, your character gets dropped back into the tutorial and you choose which class you want to be.
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.
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.
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
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