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An Early Look at the NASA MMO
Big Download is running an article with details and screenshots from the MMO under development by NASA. The game makes use of Unreal Engine 3, and it's titled Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond. A demo is planned for later this year, and in 2010 they expect "the first episodic installment of the game" to come out. Jerry Heneghan, founder and CEO of Virtual Heroes, described it thus: "This game is going to be a fresh look at the future circa about 2035. ... The core of the gameplay is going to be people building up their characters and as you move forward, you will have more options unlock with new places to go, new equipment to use and new things to do. We are not so much focused on interstellar flight and all that entails... the gameplay is actually about being in a habitat on a planetary surface and doing things like mining Helium-3 for fuel, operating a hydroponics facility to grow plants and create oxygen and operating robots and vehicles."
What's up with everybody using my money to make games these days. It's the latest fad in government agencies or what?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Will it have realistic physics? And by realistic I don't mean video game realistic, but actual rocket science physics like Orbiter has.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
I think of zero-g frolics, optionally involving aliens. If they make their MMO right, we can look forward to some interesting add-in modules...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If it's set circa 2035, why is there a space shuttle docked to the ISS in the screenshots? Shouldn't it be an Orion capsule?
"Houston - we have a problem." "Aight, I put on my robe and wizard hat."
What evidence do you have that this is your money?
The article gives a hint with the words "subscription based", three clicks and I managed to find the RFP, a quick skim gives the following quote: "Funding to design, develop, and deploy the MMO should be included in the proposer's business plan."
Apologies for interupting everyone's political flame fest, please continue...
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The first portion of the game will have you fighting Level 1 Obsolete Satellites, and it'll take about 70 of them to level the first few levels. You'll have missions to destroy tiny asteroids, maybe fix some GPS Satellites, or possibly collect a dozen 'Unique Space Debris' and bring them back to the Hubble Telescope.
But by the end of the game, there will be large 40-man Raids scouring the Martian valleys, fighting Dust Golems and Communist Colonists, the final boss of which will be the long-missing rogue Mutated Mars Rover.
How else are we supposed to keep the moon clear of moondust farmers?
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
It won't take long for the Chinese Helium-3 farmers to ruin the economy.
Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond will be a 'first-person-exploration' game that will also include traditional role-playing game (RPG) elements for both single-player and team-based space exploration, but with a realistic twist.
By "traditional RPG elements" they must mean goblins and wizards and the most absurd J-Pop characters creatively possible...how they plan this with a realistic twist is beyond me.
Sounds to me like Final Fantasy in Space. Can't wait. Elder Scrolls Moon Landing perhaps?
Way to see our government dollars and manpower hard at work!!
No. Traditional RPG elements are inventories, permanent avatars, the ability to develop skills and fulfilling quests/objectives : applied to this game, I can think of building/buying new spaceships, satellites ; trying to get new fundings, taking photographs to make maps, exploring, etc...
Goblins, wizards, magic swords, hats and robes are classical heroic fantasy or D&D elements, not typically RPG.
AltSlashdot. Because f'k the beta
Does someone need to look up the term 'circa' ?
And 2035... Unless we get a SERIOUS move on, 2035 will be very, very little different than today: No manned spacecraft to the Moon or Mars at all.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Could be an interesting social experiment. With all the "human factors" involved in both success and failure of a long term Mars mission,this could be an excellent playground to find the situations that provoke irrational behaviour and which are particularly hard to simulate.
Didn't you read the article? This is "The Sims: Space Edition"
Theres no place for PVP
The core of the gameplay is going to be people building up their characters...the gameplay is actually about being in a habitat on a planetary surface and doing things like mining...
Don't worry-- the NASA MMO deal is that the developer has to spend their own money. All NASA provides is basically licensing rights to use NASA images, the name, etc (in return for some oversight on the project). In fact, that was the big controversy last year during the NASA MMO pitches, that NASA wasn't pitching in money but expected the developers to fund it under NASA term's but with the developer's dime. That's why they ended up getting far fewer pitches then originally attended their big meeting.
So for good or bad, it's the developer's dime and the developer's dough. The developer, by playing by NASA's rules, gets access to neat NASA images and docs, but that's the only cost to you, the taxpayer. If it works, the developer gets lots of revenue and NASA gets good PR. If it fails, the taxpayer doesn't lose anything. I hope the game works out!
A.
Well, maybe, but exactly what idea or notion are they trying to get the people interested in? They can basically,
1. Actually show what life in such a colony would be like. Which is probably going to be as boring as paint dry.
It won't even be some kind of a wild-west lone-frontierman scenario. It won't even be a WoW-crafting-only scenario. Most likely you'll just be an employee doing a job there. Maybe an employee of NASA or maybe an employee of whichever corporation thinks they can make a fortune mining that Helium 3, but an employee nevertheless.
You're not going to make a living swinging a pickaxe by yourself, and/or filtering nuggets in a sieve like the wild-west gold-rushers. That wouldn't even pay for the cost of the rocket trip there. It'll going to be some large scale mining operation to make any economic sense. Someone will have to pay for all the machinery and surveying there, and that will be something worth millions or even billions of dollars. It'll be either some major corporation or NASA itself, and if you want to take any part in it, you'll be their employee. You'll work 8 hours a day operating some machinery, then go to your dorm and watch TV and hope you get paid at the month's end.
And I just don't think a work simulator will get many people interested in the MMO or the idea it sells. I know normal MMOs were called "work simulators" before, but this is the real thing, and orders of magnitude less interesting.
2. Let's say they give it some gameplay twists, like, say, make it a sorta WoW crafting and social scenario, but without the rest of WoW. So you go there on your trusty mount (maybe a rover?) look on the minimap for He3 ore veins, then go hit them with a pickaxe and rush to the auction house with the results. You know, more immediate gratification.
The first problem is that it's already deviating from the truth. It's selling an idealized frontierman colonist idea that just won't happen that way. As selling itself goes, selling based on false and deliberately misleading falsehoods and mis-representations has a name: fraud. Oh, they'll probably avoid liability in the court someway or another, but at the heart of it it remains fraud.
The second problem is that one-trick MMOs tend to still be really unpopular. Even ones which let you completely avoid most of the game (e.g., mining in safe locations in EQ2 and then spending the rest of the day in the crafting "instance") essentially just let people shoot themselves in the foot and get bored faster. You get to do the same thing over and over again, it gets boring, you leave.
The runaway success of WoW is at least partially due to there always being more than one thing to do.
Plus the rest of the game gives a meaning and purpose to that crafting exercise. You bother with it because you can make something better for yourself, or for someone else who'll then go and beat up some NPCs with it. Or if you just mine/skin and sell, you do it because someone else wants to do that. It's an activity which isn't there for itself, but because it fits the bigger picture. Cutting one activity out of context is like taking just the fingers out of the Sistine Chapel and thinking it still should make a good painting.
Basically the verdict is: it'll probably be as popular as The Sims Online, which unfortunately flopped. It won't get that many more people sold on the idea of colonization than version #1.
3. Go the full monte and make it a full MMO with lots of combat (space _and_ ground combat), hunting alien spiders for epic world drops, PvP (maybe one faction gets to play the aliens), and tiered endgame grind.
Well, I for one would welcome _that_ overlord, because there's a severe lack of good traditional (character-based as opposed to ship-based) SF-themed MMOs.
But at that point you just give up any pretense of getting people interested in what NASA actually does and in what moon colonization will be like, and sell them just a game. And any interest "buying" NASA's space-programmes based f
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.