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Otherland MMO Announced
Eurogamer breaks news that German games publisher DTP Entertainment will be making an MMORPG based on Tad Williams' Otherland series of books. As anyone who has read the books will know, this could be an interesting new spin on virtual worlds. Quoting:
"For want of a better soundbite, let's call it the first cyberpunk MMO: a virtual world about virtual worlds, in which your avatar is an avatar, the NPCs play NPCs, and you explore a multiverse in which you might be in realistic historical surroundings one minute, and cartoon fantasy ones the next. Everything changes, even your own appearance, and nothing is even pretending to be real. ... You start the game as one of those consciousnesses in a place called the Land of the Lost, a nightmare scenario which you're trying to escape. You'll run, be killed, and reborn in a 'baby' state as a simple, low-rent sim (though we suspect the game won't be using that term, for obvious reasons) - a blank, featureless avatar that can be male, female or even neither."
The onion did a piece on "World of World of Warcraft", where players play a character sitting in a lonely basement playing warcraft. The "your avatar is an avatar" part reminds me of that, though technically they imply different things... and actually that statement doesn't imply much...
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/warcraft_sequel_lets_gamers_play
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Those were some good books, but the "it's all a dream" aspect of the setting can lead authors into self-indulgences. Essentially, there are no rules for the world. That was the major problem with it. Also, since "it's all a dream", a lot of the drama seemed false. The real characters were interesting but most of the time spent with the dream characters is just that many more pages of inconsequential stuff.
The "no rules for the world" quality would destroy an MMO. You can't just change the rules all the time or all the players will just hang out in the part with the most advantageous rules.
I will be replying the daylights out of this thread since I really liked the series.
It is a tetrology of 4 books, all gorgeously detailed! I really liked that a crucial feature is two AFRICAN characters as lead heroes! One from a modern province, and one a classically trained Bushman.
Tad W. does a brilliant job of showing how the Old Bush Ways could provide crucial insight into our modern era.
I hate MMO's, but I'll probably have to get my own little corner of this one solely because of the books.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I mean the whole point of Otherland was that people got trapped there ... does that just mean they wont cancel your credit monthly if you quit?
I take it you've never read Otherland.
I think we need to have something cleared up. I keep seeing people refer to the "lore" of Otherland, but that kind of misses the point. Otherland doesn't really have "lore" in the same way that things like WoW, LoTR, Warhammer, or even StarTrek do. The basic premise of the book was that the internet has evolved to the point where everyone interfaces via a direct neural interface and it's experienced as a immersive 3d world with avatars etc., but that something weird is happening and some people are getting "stuck" in the virtual worlds. This is similar to the premise of .Hack, but very different in other ways. Anyway, there's really only 2 bits of "lore" I can think of from the books that could conceivably be brought across. The first would be the major antagonists from the book, which is a fat man and a skinny man that hunt the characters across the various virtual worlds (always wearing an avatar that matches them in some way, for instance the fat man as a toad and the skinny man as a praying mantis). The second item would be the use of certain gestures to perform various actions, such as moving fingers in a very specific pattern to open a portal to another world. It's important to note however that in the books when the characters get sucked into the virtual worlds and lose their ability to log out, the worlds also stop responding to the standard gestures.
Anyway, the important thing is, that for the purposes of something like this MMO, Otherland isn't really a single world with lore, rather it's more of a meta-world in which the players randomly get dropped into one of many worlds each with their own lore.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
There is, but all that occurs outside of the virtual world this is going to be based on. The storyline is also not applicable, as in the books the main characters are investigating why people are getting trapped in the virtual world and once they themselves become trapped attempting to work their way out of it. As several others have already commented, the virtual world parts of the book are really very shallow because it's mostly about them attempting not to get killed long enough to make it to the next world. I would say it's comparable to trying to convert something like Portal into an MMO. There's a story there, and I don't think anyone would argue it's a pretty good story, but it's sort of a one shot thing. Sure the gameplay mechanic could be carried over, but the story itself is no good for an MMO setting. Likewise the over-arching story from the books, what made them good, is no good for an MMO setting.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.