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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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The problem with the genre is that often times the Sci-Fi set is too smart for its own good. Take for example the original Star Wars: Galaxies. It had some brilliant character creation and development systems. The concept that you could mix and match from 24 professions to create your character made it very appealing. What happens to it? It didn't have the content it needed to guide a users experience hence it was too hard for people to understand. Then SOE starts a series of neuters that reduce it to a shadow of its former self and any of the redeeming features are removed.
Now this "too hard to play" syndrome is present in the Fantasy genre. UO/DAoC were too hard core for a lot of players who gravitated to Everquest then WoW.
With the exception of EVE I cant think of another Sci-Fi MMO that still has a presence in the MMO space.
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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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Yeah, that's almost exactly EVE. Try it.
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This isn't just about MMORPGs; written literature has a similar issue.
As some have pointed out above, it's far easier to invent a story-framework when you don't have to deal with plausibility.
In our technologically sophisticated world, and especially among gamers, we have a territorial claim on technology and scientific plausibility. We're much more critical of sci-fi, because we feel comfortable judging sci-fi settings. In contrast, fantasy is allowed and expected to exhibit arbitrary rules like magic, and to develop romantic stories involving heroes.
If, in a fantasy setting, I'm jumped by rabid fairies from the Underworld, I can buy it. If they cast eternal drowsiness on me and limit my mobility for 10 seconds... OK that's fine. If, in retaliation, I cast a spell to call down meteoric fire from the sky, that's totally believable (not to mention awesome). Fantasy doesn't invite us to call bullshit.
But if, in a sci-fi setting, I'm attacked by robots, well OK that's plausible. Maybe they're programmed to attack outsiders, I can buy that. They hit me with their laser guns... OK, I can buy that that's possible in the future with advances in battery technology. And I guess I didn't get cut in half because I was wearing special nano-armor that, ummm, absorbs laser light. But in retaliation I cast my hacker-spell and... wait... I smell bullshit.
It's easier as an author to just cut yourself loose from present-day reality. It's far more challenging to write in a future-of-now setting, and deal with the annoyances of the real world's rules and history.
It does work in SciFi settings as well, as long as there is more than one "uber" class.
In a fantasy setting, you have many kinds of heroes. You have the knight in shiny armor, you have the powerful wizard with his spells, you even have the sneaky bastard that backstabs the evil guards. They all make formidable heros.
Star Wars the MMO was kinda doomed to fail, for the reason you said: Everyone wanted to be the one single super class, the Jedi. It's like making a superhero game and asking people to play either a hero or some peasant. Now, what would everyone pick?
It can work in a SciFi setting, though, if you avoid too much focus on one single hero type. Maybe we have more fantasy than scifi stories so we have more hero archetypes to draw from in that setting, but why shouldn't it work in SciFi as well? You just have to make sure that all heros have their shortcomings, and that all heros need others to aid them in their quest and you have, essentially, the story written for a SciFi MMO.
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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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