Is sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa stumbling towards extinction? Eurogamer certainly seem to think so:
Today’s piece, sadly, feels more like an autopsy. Tabula Rasa isn’t cold on the slab, but it’s certainly heading that way.
And so yet another sci-fi MMO heads off into troubled waters. What’s going on here? Can Eve’s esotericism really be the only way to create a reasonably successful sci-fi game? Do people simply not want to play in a character-based science fiction world? Are we addicted to spaceships?
Okay, readers. What would you have done if you were Lord British? How would you fix the science fiction MMO and make something to challenge World Of Warcraft? Is it as simply as World Of Starcraft? Or do we need a licence, like Warhammer 40k? Or do you, like me, think that the lessons are there to be learned from City Of Heroes, Planetside, Guild Wars, and Eve Online? Are the MMO developers simply guilty of not learning from the mistakes of past games? What is the answer for the science fiction MMO?
Related Stories:
Maybe it’s my asian bias, but I would sure as hell play a Macross (Robotech?) MMORPG. Customizable Robots! Massive Fleet Battles! Space, Land, Air Combat! Extensive Lore!
Ixis: interesting thoughts, but I think you’ve mixed up what’s essential to a successful game with what the current conventions are.
The current formula for a successful MMORPG is:
A. Minimal barriers to entry
B. A focus on socializing.
C. Intermittent positive reinforcement
Basically, you make something that everyone can play, no matter how smart or twitchy they are, you put them in contact with a lot of other people, and then you provide direct reinforcement (”good job!”) as well as things that others in the game will imbue with social value (”oooh… Nice medallion! So you too beat the Witch-Spider of Ibn-Rushd! You really must join our guild.”)
If I were to make a You Have to Burn the Rope into a MMORPG, I would have players login to a lobby. There would be a chat window. Players would join a mission by walking off to the right, in a departure zone that would take up to eight players at a time. they would all begin the standard YHTBTR-mission together. Every 2-6 times (random) the player competed the mission, he would go up a level, and the player’s level would be indicated by a star and a number next to the name in chat (Dinger*06: Hey Ladies!).
Put up a forum, and you’re done.
You’d have guys in there at level 70 in no time.
The problem with the model is that it’s basically a model based on addiction reinforced by an enabling culture.
Science fiction games don’t work as well because they complicate things.
I never played SWG but I can see the major problem with that license. Jedi are cool and powerful, but in the fluff they are RARE. A large majority of the people playing the game will want to be a Jedi. If you play a single player game in the Star Wars universe this is not a problem, as most of the people you meet will not be Jedi and so your uniqueness and ‘coolness’ is not compromised.
If every other person you meet is also a Jedi the whole point of the class and part of what makes it special is taken away. If Jedi are outnumbering stormtroopers (or whatever) then something is very wrong.
A 40K MMO would have a similar problem, although possibly not to the same degree. A lot of people will want to be a Space Marine. Space Marines are meant to be double hard bastards. How do you balance them and make them playable without ultimately undermining their narrative driven superiority? A regular ‘human’ trooper would lose 9 out of 10 one on one confrontations. You’d have to do something pretty damn cool with the other classes if you don’t want 60% of your server to be marines running around. Grey Knight Terminators outnumbering regular infantry would be a big immersion breaker.
I think Planetside was a partially a victim of being too ahead of it’s time. To enjoy it when it was released you needed a very solid (for the time) specc’d machine and you needed a Broadband Internet connection. At the time it came out most people were still on dial up and Broadband was very much the exception rather than the norm it is now. I never played the core combat addon but the original had lots of good ideas which i’d like to see integrated into a better game. A Sci Fi MMO which takes this and some of the better WoW ideas and successfully combines them would be a must play in my opinion.
When I first played WoW three or so years ago I was blown away. It was a good RPG game first and the whole experience was just so well polished. It wasn’t necessarily revolutionary but it took so much of the good things in many many other games and just refined them into an excellent game. The thing now is, it’s 3 years old. I just want someone (or realistically some company) to do the same thing again. Get inspired, get a good idea, get a talented and well managed team together and come up with the spiritual successor to WoW. it’s got to be due by now!
(When I say spiritual successor it can be any genre, Sci Fi, Fantasy, contemporary I really don’t mind.)
Forgive me if this has been suggested but isn’t the Mechwarrior Universe crying out for an MMOG?
It’s almost an analogue to Eve but on the planet side of things. You could have the Mechcommander aspects for strategy and the actual mechs for stompy/shootiness.
Mechwarrior Online was definitely in development for a while, but got scrapped. A robo-MMO seems like a no-brainer to me. There’s Exteel, but it’s a but rubbish. http://www.exteel.com/us/
Coming back to the license thing, i agree that the licenses were no guarantee of success, i just thought it interesting that omst of the ocmments seemed to think that was what was needed for sci-fi to take off. There seemed to be a certain concensus that a better extablished world in place. Let’s face it, warcraft is a license, is it not?
It’s a videogame license. I think that’s an entirely different animal.
Anarchy Online did pretty well and had some great ideas (it was a shame they all but scrapped the warring factions thing with a stupid cease fire).
I expected much much more from Garriott.
In the past he and his band were always on the bleeding edge of innovation. I feel like maybe he has just given up. (and I wouldn’t blame him really)
Economics of these games are always (to me) a disappointment. It is as if no one has dared to step up to the plate to try and craft a more realistic dynamic economic system where players, and some crafty tweaks by devs, would produce a real living world.
From there we have realistic crafting. It seems that so much silliness is thrown at us in the name of ‘balance’ and I am disappointed.
First person shooter… wasn’t expecting that. Its fun for a while but I need more depth. Crafting and a living world would help though.
Silly lack of limits to equipment. Where is the backpack I can store in? Why are weapons so large but I can have so many of them? What, do we have a magical logos portal into a psuedo dimension to store this stuff? Sort of a technomagical alternative to a bag of holding? What great tactics and teamwork are laid to rest because of this ‘freedom’ Now everyone is a walking arsenol.
Why the level treadmill? What about skill based? Why the level and class based limits to equipment?
Just silly. I expect more from todays games. I have been gaming for over 30 years and now see a trend towards dumbed down games. For awhile it looked like games were getting better, but now it is all about the chrome I guess.
I haven’t played and I don’t intend to play this game but… You complain both about the lack of limits to equipment and the actual limits to the equipment…
While I have an active subscription to this game, out of nothing more than my forgetfulness to cancel it. In my opinion I would not be surprised to see this game get the closing notice in the near future.
Active forums on this game seem to only be filled with the Fanatical Fanboy attitude. To them TR is their god, their air, their everything and will defend it with their very life.
Many promises are being made by the development team and a recent so called War College event was held in which 8 players were invited to meet the development team for a day, which in my opinion was a joke as the “chosen ones” are the biggest fanboys of them all. While the dev team listened to the griefs/complaints of these chosen 8, a much cheaper online webcast with the entire player base would have been a much more productive way to spend the money wasted on getting these 8 to the dev team. (Personally I honestly feel the entire thing was somehow more about meeting some personal friends in RL and having TR foot the bill – haha!)
A recent update applied to the servers lowered the population indicator threshold, before all servers showed low population, a patch applied and 30 minutes later all server showed medium to high population for the first time since launch? I don’t think 1 measly patch could increase the subscription base that much… For the most part the game maps make you feel like you have the entire world to yourself or like you are paying 15 a month for a single player game with the exception of the starting map (wilderness) which is full of trial account users which are nothing more than goldsellers trying to make real money from a huge money exploit that hit a live patch a few months back.
I would tell anyone asking, stay away from this one…
I’m one of those suckers who still likes PlanetSide, even with all it’s problems. Granted, I started playing a few years back and I only play about one month each summer (i.e. one month a year). But every time my subscription expires I know I will miss it because it has some of the best PvP and MMO can offer.
I also played Star Wars: Galaxies for some time, but we all know the story with that… if you don’t it wouldn’t be hard to find out.
In my opinion, Tabula Rasa completely failed on offering players options other than PvE grinding. Where is the PvP? Where is the crafting? Where are the social hubs (like Coronet in SWG, Orgrimmar in WoW?). They just aren’t there. I also agree with a previous poster who said that the base captures just didn’t matter to anyone. The “war” had no real purposes for a player other than providing stuff to shoot at.
Not only that but many skills trees were broken/buggy at the start, and I’m not sure how TR is now because – while I loved some of the art and the story – the game itself just wasn’t fun enough for me after a point.
To make a good Sci-Fi MMO, you have to give the player options. EVE has options. I don’t like EVE, but it’s popular because of the many options it has (I don’t like it mostly because of how combat and missions were implemented). I mean, there isn’t just shooting some PvE once in a while. People get bored of that and do mining, trading, crafting… you name it.
We just need a fun game with all the expected bells and whistles. Well.. bells and whistles that work. If they are broken, they don’t count. XD
More and more global importers, trading companies, worldwide wholesalers buy China wholesale products from Yiwu – the world’s largest wholesale market of small commodities at cheapest wholesale prices.