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The State of Sci-Fi MMOs
Massively is running a story that looks into the status of the sci-fi MMO genre, and why such games have had a tendency to struggle over the years. Quoting:
"Fantasy alone carries with it assumptions based in our own history, a romanticized version of the middle ages where knights were good guys and smart people with beards could cast spells. Preconceived notions in sci-fi are far less cast in our collective memory. While stories that predict the future are surely as ancient as the myths describing the past, sci-fi itself didn't really ingrain itself into our culture until the 1800s, with H.G. Wells' stories and other writers at the cusp of the Industrial Revolution. ... Compounding the lack of specificity in setting is the tendency of sci-fi games to overwhelm players with skills and rule sets they initially don't understand and eventually don't need."
Enough said.
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It's not just MMOs where sci fi has been somewhat less popular than other genres. It's also true for traditional roll playing games.
I think it's possible that what's going on here is that when people want to play games, they'd rather have it be about something totally out of the realm of possibility, rather than a possible future scenario, which is frequently the goal of sci fi.
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The whole concept of Fantasy is to give power to the weak and nerdy and put them in a milieu that encourages and promotes the behaviors that they so desperately want to express in the real world. But the real world is a harsh critic, and those behaviors (being smart, mostly) are universally reviled.
So the lucky ones discover the Fantasy genre and are rewarded for their behavior with scantily-clad women and a sense of satisfaction from acting chivalrous. It's a self-feeding world. The only necessary thing is a bunch of disaffected nerds.
The problem with sci-fi (or SyFy, if you prefer the modern nomenclature) is that it is designed to tackle difficult moral issues. Unlike Fantasy which is designed to feed the spiritual needs of nerds, SyFy is designed to force them to think. In a sense, fantasy provides an outlet for basal needs, but SyFy provides an outlet for higher-order needs.
Also, since SyFy is based on reality and the possibilities of reality, it is seldom that women are included in the plot solely for the sake of being women. Unlike the damsel in distress role in Fantasy, women in SyFy are neutered and masculinized to appeal to a sense of liberal sexual freedom. Fantasy does not have this limitation and therefore provides ample space for sexual expression for the nerds who take part in it.
It's no wonder that Fantasy MOO games do so much better than SyFy games.
In a game like WoW, you're basically walking or riding a horse around. That limits the distances you have to travel. Even the cities are excusably small when you rationalize for the smaller fantasy "village." With Sci-Fi, the ranges that the map worlds have to cover will become huge to be believable. That's a lot of space to design and populate.
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It's simple -- everyone wants to be Cpt. Kirk, and nobody wants to be Ensign Ricky. How many starship captains can one MMO really have?
Alternately, everyone wants to be a Jedi and nobody wants to be a blaster-wielding doofus.
The success of MMOs is about enabling the player to wield ridiculous amounts of power and have obsessive-compulsive levels of control over their character. I do not believe this is an impossible task for a Sci-Fi MMO to achieve, it just hasn't been done really well yet. The Fantasy genre lends itself much more naturally to this type of thing.
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Well, first, fantasy MMOs are the "oldest" of the pack. Take a look at the history of MMO games and you'll see a lot of fantasy, but really few SciFi classics. This leads to a certain standard setting: People know what to expect. When you look up and down the fantasy MMO genre, you'll see basically the same games. You get your heavily armored tank, you get your stealthy damage dealer, you get your healer, you get your damage caster... and wherever you look, this distribution holds true.
Look at the SciFi genre and you won't get necessarily the same. You can be as close to the "fantasy trinity" of tank-dd-healer as AO, or as far away from it as EvE. You could stumble into something as alien to the whole MMO concept as Tabula Rasa. Or even a multiplayer FPS game gone MMO like Neocron.
And, as TFA points out, people don't really want to jump into uncharted waters with a game they want to stick with for years.
So my guess why fantasy succeeds where SciFi fails would be that people know what to expect from fantasy MMOs. And, sadly, the majority seems to want to play what they know already. Not good news for those of us that want something new, finally, but I guess that's how it is.
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What this guy seems to want is things to be simple. In an MMORPG. That is possible, just play any asian MMO.
Not all MMO's, typically the western ones, follow that design. Typically, western MMO's have fewer levels, but more happening in a level (skills) and are on the whole slower to play. One free MMO has me AoE a dozen of enemies and killing them with a single skill dropping piles of loot. Of course to pick it all up, you had to buy a piggy with real money or spend ages clicking loot after each 1 key press killing spree.
In for instance Lotro, such enemies are hard to find. For the new rune-keeper and warden classes, such enemies would be nightmare. They are classes that build up their attacks. One shot kills are boring.
The lore-master class has a lot of skills, but many depend on the situation. What enemy, how many, dictates how you play. Not nearly deep enough as far as I am concerned but I am sure way to complex for some.
SWG and the likes didn't fail because they were complex. WoW is complex. They failed because they were so bug ridden only the most devoted fan could tolerate it and then the developers screwed their fans. Funcom and SOE are companies that basically just don't get customer relations. They don't understand that a game is NOT their product. It belongs to the people who bought it and you can't just mess with it. Change it after the sale to attract more customers does NOT work. You upset the people who bought it for what it is and any new customers are going to be scared off even if they are now intrested by the way you treated your existing customers. After all, if they screwed their old customers, why wouldn't they screw their new ones just as hard?
SWG and Age of Conan have showed that you CANNOT just change the game and expect success. SWG has been talked about enough and AoC tried to lower its age rating by getting rid of nudity. Both failed. AoC and SWG are just waiting to die, if in fact AoC hasn't already.
The simple thing an MMO designer must do is this. Ask "WHAT IS MY MARKET".
Is it a simple, "chat with your mates in an internet cafe while clicking away barely paying attention to the action" korean MMO? Is it, "Anybody can play this for half an hour a day, but paying a full monthly fee"? "Hardcore raiders only, anything takes at least a weekend to accomplish an end-content requires a cathater?" "Real life is to earn the monthly fee, this isn't second life, this is your life" style world-sim?
Mix and matching don't work so far. If you satisfy one customer you are sure to upset an other. SWG pleased some, then they changed it. AO was to messy and Eve is doing fine because the developers picked their audience and don't upset them.
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Well, part of the problem there is the definition of Fantasy. The giant of American Fantasy is named Howard Philips Lovecraft, not only because of his own stories but because he was so influential on other important American Fantasy authors like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith.
It's not like people don't reckognize the man's influence, the problem is that they just don't reckognize him as "Fantasy" partly because a large numbers of his fantasy stories are set in what were for him modern times, and partly because he was comfortable dabbling in science fiction and mixing up science fiction and fantasy. Oh, and also because nowadays people think that Fantasy has to have knights and elves in it.
Putting it all down to Tolkien is not saying he invented Fantasy, just that in the U.S. when the term Fantasy is used as a defining term people are often referring to Elves and Hobbits (or Halflings, Kithkin, what have you).
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