We Fly Spitfires – MMORPG Blog

I had a blast writing about my idea for a Zombie MMORPG the other day and the response from readers was fantastic (thanks to everyone for their comments). A few of the replies even urged me to start an indie studio and make it! That would certainly be a dream no doubt, but maybe not one that’s going to happen any time soon There was also a couple of concerns about whether the audience of the game would be too limited to make such a concept “successful”. This got me wondering: is the MMO genre limited by the scale of the games?

Much like the movie business and those big summer blockbusters, video games are becoming ever larger in scale and requiring more and more time and money to develop. There is no better example of this than MMORPGs and how now players have vast expectations for new releases, thus requiring years of development and millions of dollars in funding. Yet, if we look back at the history of video games as a whole, some of the most successful and popular were made by small studies. Doom, by id Software, springs to mind here.

Are MMOs just too big to survive? We’ve now got companies like Mythic who declare their games unsuccessful if they don’t hit 500k subscribers. Is there no way for small studios to produce polished games and can compete in the market?

Although studios can buy the Unreal Engine and certainly use it as a base to produce their MMORPGs (Vanguard used it), there’s still a vast amount of work that needs to be done to modify it to create the MMO element of the game. This made me wonder something. What would the impact be on the MMORPG industry if, say, Blizzard released their World of Warcraft engine as a purchasable product for a reasonable fee?

I think the impact of smaller studios using something like the WoW engine to create their MMOs would be an amazing leap for the industry as a whole. No longer would we be limited to one or two AAA MMORPG releases a year. No longer would MMOs required hundred of thousands of subscribers over several years to be considered a success. No longer would developers err on the side of caution and stick with ’safe’ design concepts.

If MMOs could be produced in a more efficient (time and cost) manner and yet still keep their tremendously appealing scale, we’d then truly see the industry evolve. Evolution requires innovation and risk and right now the MMO genre is lacking in those simply because the requirements to produce these games is too high. However, if we could reduce the requirements and allow MMOs to be produced by smaller studies, then we might see some great things happen. Maybe then one day we’d see my survival Zombie MMORPG come to fruition.

What do you think? Are MMOs, by definition of their requirements and scale, always going to be limited? Would making a cost-effective, re-useable MMO games engine available change the industry for the better?

Y’know what I’d love to see? A zombie MMORPG. Maybe MMORPG is the wrong acronym for it though, maybe it’s more of a virtual world and not a game. You see, in this MMO the object wouldn’t be raiding or roleplaying (well that might fit in at a player’s discretion), the object of the game would be survival. And there would be permadeath.

Imagine a large virtual world, perhaps only a single server ala EVE Online, that’s set in a fictional United States of America, modern time. It’s completely overrun with zombies (dozens of different types of them) and in a severe state of dilapidation and the players are the only inhabitants left on the planet, forming together into small groups or large gangs in order to stake claim to territories and eek out a semblance of normal life.

There would be no levels in this zombie MMO, instead players would earn experience simply by surviving. You’d be able to tell how much of a veteran someone is by how many days they’d survived. There would also be no classes, instead everything is skilled based and learnt from studying books, videos etc found in the world or passed on by another player. Players could learn medical skills to help heal others, mechanical skills to repair cars and electrical generators or combat skills like to marksmanship to make them better at killing those pesky zombies.

A zombie MMO would require a lot of freedom of action. Every vehicle should be driveable (so long as it’s in a state of good repair, has fuel and you have the appropriate skills), every house enterable, every animal, person or thing killable. There would be no auction house or global chat, instead players would need to rely on bartering or in-game phones or walkie-talkies. Oh yes, plus there would be permadeath.

There would need to be some way of letting you transfer some of your skills onto your “family members” (new characters) but ultimately everyone only has one life. There would be no resurrection spells or spawn points, instead if you die, you die. I think this is absolutely necessary in order to create a real feel of survival and fear. Being killed by a zombie has real impact. Being killed by another person maliciously, even more so.

The most interesting thing about this game would be seeing how events unfold. Would players unite together towards the common threat of zombies or would they bicker and fight between themselves in gangs over territory? Would they create states of laws and order or would they succumb to the anarchy? I’d love to known.

So what do you think? Could a game like this work? Would you play it ?

I’m certainly having an exciting holiday in Tokyo this year. Sunday saw me experience my first ever earthquake. It happened about 8pm when we were eating dinner in a restaurant in Roppongi Hills. It occurred off the eastern coast of Japan and was magnitude 6.9. Japan has it’s own scale for measuring earthquakes and in Tokyo we felt what was known as level 4, described as the following:

Many people are frightened. Some people try to escape from danger. Most sleeping people awake.
Hanging objects swing considerably and dishes in a cupboard rattle. Unstable ornaments fall occasionally.
Electric wires swing considerably. People walking on a street and some people driving automobiles notice the tremor.

So reasonably hardcore. I wasn’t scared though. No sir, not me. Weaker men might have crumbled but not I. My nickname in the office is Mr Norris after all. I’m THAT tough.

Earthquake Levels - 19:56 9th August 2009 - DannyChoo.com

When the quake started, I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was some heavy machinery being used or something but then it kept going and going and climbing in magnitude until eventually the whole building was shaking. I was totally dumbfounded until my wife told me it was an earthquake (she barely blinked). When it ended, an automated message came over a speaker system informing everyone that there had just been an earthquake. Fun stuff.

I thought that quake would’ve been the end of my holiday adventures but then at 5am on Tuesday morning we were awoken by another one. Again, it was of similar magnitude as the one on Sunday but I think because it occurred in the middle of the night it was especially freaky. It didn’t help being on the 35th floor of a skyscraper and hearing all of the earthquake proof mechanics squeaking behind the walls either I remember lying in bed wondering how long it was going to last as the whole building kept shaking. Eventually it passed and all was well. Then came the typhoon.

If you’ve been following the news you’ll have seen the passing of Typhoon Morakot over Taiwan and China and Typhoon Etau over Japan. Fortunately the latter one was relatively minor (comparatively in the grand scheme of things) and by the time it hit Tokyo it had been downgraded to a tropical storm. We weren’t sure how severe it was going to be for us but it turned out to barely have any effect on Tokyo life. I feel kinda bad saying that because several people were killed when it struck the western coast of Japan so my thoughts and sympathies go out to all of the families effected by it.

One thing that was very interesting me to me was how the different news networks covered the events of the typhoon. The American news (CNN) seemed to go ape-shit about how dangerous Etau was and reported the events in a fast paced, adrenaline filled manner that would’ve freaked any viewer out completely. Comparatively the Japanese news was reported in a very calm, precise and informative manner. They told us exactly when the typhoon would be passing (and I mean the exact times of each stage) and how it would effect people. I can’t stress enough how calm it was dealt with compared to CNN who seemed to be hyping the entire thing up into the mega-storm of the century. Goes to show the power of the media and the effect it can have on the public.

So that was my fun with natural disasters in Tokyo. Don’t let it put you off having a holiday here. At least we didn’t experience one of the dreaded and highly infamous “Godzilla Attacks”. I hear one of those can cause serious delays on the subway.

A couple of weeks ago Steph from IRGRL.com (yes, she’s really a girl!) asked if she could interview me for her blog. I was utterly flattered of course and couldn’t wait to impress her with my dry wit and British humour.

IRGRL is doing a series of articles about getting to know her Twitter followers and if want to check out my response to her interview questions then exercise your mouse fingers and click here.

IRGL.com is an excellent blog about gaming and geeky stuff and wins the We Fly Spitfires awesomeness award for managing to have a name based on both I AM Weasel/I R Baboon and Internet slang. Intentional or not, anything that pays homage to Micheal Dorn thrills me.

If you feel so inclined, you can follow @IRGRL on Twitter. Maybe she’ll interview you too.

Something I love about the Japanese is there undying love for awesome stuff. I mean, they do cool things just for the sake of doing cool things. Take this for example – a giant replica 1:1 scale RX78 Gundam robot that they built on the man-made island of Odaiba, Tokyo. 59 feet tall and utterly awesome, it’s a site to behold.

Gundam Odaiba

Looking sexy in front of the Gundam

If you want some hi-res photos or photos of it at night check out these posts over at Danny Choo and Shibuya 246.

The following is a guest post by Guaka. If you’d like to write a guest post for We Fly Spitfires, please feel free to contact me about it.

Warcraft makes a lot of money. Like, a LOT. So it occurred to several game developing studios that they might like a piece of that action. This has led to a whole host of MMOs currently in development. I thought I’d have a little look at just some of the games that are lost, cancelled or have had their chance and were killed off.

I’ll start with MMOs that are, or were, (1950’s sci-fi movie voice) LOST IN THE MISTS OF DEVELOPMENT PURGATORY!!!!

MYTHOS:

Originally developed by Flagship Studios Seattle now at HanbitSoft.

Mythos as it looked in March 2008

Mythos was developed by a group of ex-Blizzard employees and it was intended for the game to feel like a massively multi-player Diablo, with randomized dungeons and aimed squarely at the casual market.

The game was supposed to be free to download and free to play and would be a kind of a bigger equivalent of Hellgate: London.

Well… Hellgate came out but Mythos didn’t. What happened? It seems as though Flagship Seattle weren’t doing too well financially (Hellgate had been called ‘”a major failure” by Flagship CEO Bill Roper) and had to lay off most of its staff. So, even though Mythos was actually in closed beta, the developers went out of business and Mythos was put on indefinite hiatus.

The story doesn’t end there though, HanbitSoft (a South Korean publisher), acquired the game and intellectual property rights. HanbitSoft have gone on record saying that Mythos is being “reconstructed” and they are aiming to release it in Korea and North America.

STARGATE: WORLDS

Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment and Metro Goldwyn Mayer

Concept art from Stargate: Worlds

The Stargate franchise started with the 1994 film and is still going strong today (Stargate: Universe looks pretty damn good). The MMO was announced back in February of 2006 and there were lots of updates and concept art keeping gamers informed and all seemed well.

The game would see you taking on one of at least seven ‘archetypes’ and explore the expanded universe established by Stargate: SG1 and Stargate: Atlantis. The archetypes included Asgard (a kind of caster/pet-user hybrid), Commando (a stealth based rogue type) and Soldier works as a Jack(O’Neill) of all trades.

Then the world economy hit some trouble and one of the casualties was Stargate: Worlds. There were fewer updates and, as time went on, it was assumed that the game had died poor and alone.

Things are looking up for Stargate: Worlds as it now has its own YouTube channel and series creator Brad Wright quoted as saying the game is “just around the corner”… in May 2008. The new screens on the website look great and I have high hopes for a good sci-fi action based MMO.

ELITE IV

Frontier Developments

Sorry, no screens just the logo!

Elite 4 is the third sequel to the space trading game that a lot of us grew up with. David Braben the designer of the original Elite has gone on record (see Gamespot for these interviews) with some new information about a game that was considered myth by some and legend by others…

Apparently, development started on Elite 4 in 2000 as an MMORPG and stopped very soon after. The reason given was “at the time [Internet] connectivity was rubbish”. Braben didn’t want to make a game beyond the capabilities of the Internet of the time.

The indications are that when Frontier’s work on their current project ‘The Outsider’ is finished work will begin on two versions of Elite; one a single player game and the other a MMORPG.

The Outsider is due out this Christmas so we should see an Elite MMO by… 2012? EVE Online may soon have some competition.

UNTITLED BLIZZARD PROJECT

ummm, Blizzard

I dunno

Nope, I have no new information for this one. There was a post on the World of Warcraft forums from Zarhym that said “it’ll be a brand new franchise” and “it’s a shell of a game thus far”.

It could really be anything, but I’m hoping for something sci-fi. Actually, I’m hoping for World of Starcraft but it doesn’t look like I’ll get it.

Yikes, I’ll take a break here and come back with a selection of cancelled MMOs. See you then!

Guaka

Coincidence or shrewd planning, I don’t know, but I received two emails yesterday offering me discounted lifetime subscriptions to MMORPGs. The first was from Codemasters (the European distributor for Turbine), offering me a limited offer 50% discount on Lord of the Rings Online (apparently I had been “randomly selected” but I’d bet they sent the email to everyone) and the second was from Cryptic Studios offering me either a discounted lifetime subscription or a discounted six month subscription for their forthcoming MMO, Champions Online.

The LotRO lifestime subscription is being offered to me for only £75 ($127) and I’m pretty tempted to take it. I own both the original game and the Mines of Moria expansion but have barely played them although I keep considering it. I’ve heard it’s a great game and has all of the depth and group orientated play that I enjoy but I’ve only dabbled with it in the past and never fully gotten into it. It’s certainly on my list though which makes the lifetime subscription very appealing because it means I can play it any time for as long as I want without worrying about ongoing costs. £75/$127 is also a very reasonable price but I need to make my mind up fast as the offer expires on the 10th August.

Cryptic Studios don’t say what percentage their discount is but their offering me a lifetime subscription to Champions Online for £119.99/$199.99 and a six month subscription for £35.99/$59.99. They’re also offering adding incentives with each deal, including vanity pets, extra character slots and costume sets (depending on which deal you pick) plus guaranteed access to the Star Trek: Online closed beta regardless. Pretty sweet. It’s also very interesting how they are leveraging the Star Trek: Online beta as an incentive for Champions Online.

I’ve pretty much disregarded the lifetime subscription for Champions Online. It’s a lot of money to pay for a game I’ve never even played and don’t know a great deal about. However, I’m seriously considering the six month subscription as it’s actually a very reasonable price plus getting into the Star Trek beta would be quite cool.

So what do you guys think? Should I go for the discounted LotRO lifetime and Champions Online six month subscriptions? Do you think they are good deals? It adds up to a fair amount of cash but maybe it’s worth it in the long run.