BioWare Founders Consider Mass Effect MMO
- Thread starter Mike Kayatta
- Start date
NOOOOOOOOO
Mass effect has always been an awsome epic single player game
MMO? Id rather see them make a multiplayer FPS (inb4 somone points to ME3)
just..no...I love single player games, dont turn somthing I love into the very thing I hate
EDIT: and ohh christ..if they ever pull a "revan" with shepard...somone is taking a trip to canada armed with some napalm and an angrey letter
EDIT 2: uhhh...not entitled at all..right?
EDIT EFFECT 3: ohh god..Ive become the very thing i hate
NNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Mass effect has always been an awsome epic single player game
MMO? Id rather see them make a multiplayer FPS (inb4 somone points to ME3)
just..no...I love single player games, dont turn somthing I love into the very thing I hate
EDIT: and ohh christ..if they ever pull a "revan" with shepard...somone is taking a trip to canada armed with some napalm and an angrey letter
EDIT 2: uhhh...not entitled at all..right?
EDIT EFFECT 3: ohh god..Ive become the very thing i hate
NNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
No, please don't, BioWare.
I luv all of your works, and I honestly can't think of a title that was beyond mediocre, but this is probably the best way to start screwing over the productivity and quality of your products.
Besides, as much as I don't care for it, I don't want to see TOR die, so at least see that through to its end.
I luv all of your works, and I honestly can't think of a title that was beyond mediocre, but this is probably the best way to start screwing over the productivity and quality of your products.
Besides, as much as I don't care for it, I don't want to see TOR die, so at least see that through to its end.
For god sake, let the series end on a high. Don't milk this one... Let mass effect keep it's reputation as a beacon of shining quality. Not a milked malnourished cow of squeezing every penny out of the fan base.
Honestly I think they should've skipped over the SWTOR and just went Mass Effect.. but thats just me..
I shall now prove to everyone thinking I agree with Bioware and EA on everything not entirely right!
As much as I like the idea of a MMORPG for Mass Effect, I'm still very wishy washy on the idea. On the one hand, I love the Mass Effect universe. On the other hand, there are a few problems:
1) The amount of money they would need to accrue.
2) The amount of money it would take off of their own flagship MMO (TOR).
3) It needs to be different - going from squad based shooter RPG to WoW style... just no.
Personally, if they did want to make this, I think a more streamlined, instanced approach would work better to not conflict with SW:TOR - think Guild Wars 1 but with shooter and RPG mechanics. That would actually sound enticing - flying to the planets you want, going "pew pew!" at as many things as you want. Best of all, there's little room to shoe horn the tired "faction v faction" style that WoW and TOR demonstrated.
Could even be set during the First Contact wars... THAT my friend, would be cool.
As much as I like the idea of a MMORPG for Mass Effect, I'm still very wishy washy on the idea. On the one hand, I love the Mass Effect universe. On the other hand, there are a few problems:
1) The amount of money they would need to accrue.
2) The amount of money it would take off of their own flagship MMO (TOR).
3) It needs to be different - going from squad based shooter RPG to WoW style... just no.
Personally, if they did want to make this, I think a more streamlined, instanced approach would work better to not conflict with SW:TOR - think Guild Wars 1 but with shooter and RPG mechanics. That would actually sound enticing - flying to the planets you want, going "pew pew!" at as many things as you want. Best of all, there's little room to shoe horn the tired "faction v faction" style that WoW and TOR demonstrated.
This idea, however, does sound interesting and very plausable. Given that EA shoved another studio under the Bioware banner to make C&C Generals 2 (yep, they weren't actually employed under Bioware's management, this was another of EA's "brilliant" ideas *eye roll*), if C&C Generals 2 actually does well, the two teams could actually work towards a game like this. Maybe somehow stick a bit of their signature RPG magic in there somehow.TsunamiWombat said:
Could even be set during the First Contact wars... THAT my friend, would be cool.
I thought this, but Star Wars is the smarter solution as it has a larger fanbase and lightsabers!Timberwolf0924 said:
Having said that, I would have preferred Mass Effect...
I don't think that it *could* be all that bad, but there are a few things that they'd simply NEED to do.
1. Don't make it a point and click cliched MMORPG. Seriously, we've got enough fucking MMO's which has the same goddamn gameplay. Running from stationary quest to stationary quest, Stacking abilities and watching them play out, Where everything is determined by fucking maths and digital dice rolls, Fetch X of this, Kill Y of that...ENOUGH ALREADY. This kind of gameplay is the "Modern day military FPS" of the MMO world; we've had plenty, thank you.
Lets see something like planetside, or the Star trek MMO (if they'd actually done it right), Something new or at least not done to death.
2. Lets not make the character you play "THE ONE", where "YOU" and "ONLY YOU" can save the galaxy from blah blah blah blah. Again, taking ques from Planetside, I think that Mass Effect's touting of "Consequence for your actions" would be most apparent through the collective actions of the larger population as a whole. Your personal actions may effect very little, but you can be a cog in the machine which could affect the whole galaxy.
3. There probably shouldn't be a "plot", per say, more a context. Let the player-base create stories and "plots" of their own, like found in EVE online.
4. It has to be on consoles, They won't find a big enough audience otherwise. Preferably (though completely unlikely) it should be cross-platform. Honestly I think this could be achieved through a hybrid cloud-gaming system so that everyone can play in the same space without the developers needing to worry about compatibility.
5. It has to be far removed from Mass effect 1-3, and the best way to do this, IMO, would be setting it a few hundred to a thousand years after the event of the game...It needs to be close enough that the universe is recognizable, but far enough that Shepard's choices will not get in the way of the context.
Hm, all I can think of right now.
1. Don't make it a point and click cliched MMORPG. Seriously, we've got enough fucking MMO's which has the same goddamn gameplay. Running from stationary quest to stationary quest, Stacking abilities and watching them play out, Where everything is determined by fucking maths and digital dice rolls, Fetch X of this, Kill Y of that...ENOUGH ALREADY. This kind of gameplay is the "Modern day military FPS" of the MMO world; we've had plenty, thank you.
Lets see something like planetside, or the Star trek MMO (if they'd actually done it right), Something new or at least not done to death.
2. Lets not make the character you play "THE ONE", where "YOU" and "ONLY YOU" can save the galaxy from blah blah blah blah. Again, taking ques from Planetside, I think that Mass Effect's touting of "Consequence for your actions" would be most apparent through the collective actions of the larger population as a whole. Your personal actions may effect very little, but you can be a cog in the machine which could affect the whole galaxy.
3. There probably shouldn't be a "plot", per say, more a context. Let the player-base create stories and "plots" of their own, like found in EVE online.
4. It has to be on consoles, They won't find a big enough audience otherwise. Preferably (though completely unlikely) it should be cross-platform. Honestly I think this could be achieved through a hybrid cloud-gaming system so that everyone can play in the same space without the developers needing to worry about compatibility.
5. It has to be far removed from Mass effect 1-3, and the best way to do this, IMO, would be setting it a few hundred to a thousand years after the event of the game...It needs to be close enough that the universe is recognizable, but far enough that Shepard's choices will not get in the way of the context.
Hm, all I can think of right now.
How would classes work?
Solider(Tank and DPS?)[Shotguns and Assult Rifles]
Human
Turian
Krogan
Infilitrator(DPS)[Sniper Rifles and Pistols]
Human
Quarian
Salarian
Drell
Vanguard(DPS and Healing?)[Pistols and Shotguns]
Human
Drell
Asari
Adept(Healing and DPS)[Pistols and SMGs]
Human
Drell
Asari
Engineer(DPS and Crowd Control)[Shotguns and Pistols]
Human
Quarian
Salarian
Turian
Sentinel(Tanks and Crowd Control)[Shotguns, SMG, Pistols]
Human
Krogan
Turian
I know that this is more of a WoW layout which I don't think will work. With a FPS infact I'm positive it won't
But if you're going to group up, then you're going to need someone to heal, someone to take the brunt of the attacks and someone to blast away at the enemy as the tank does what he does.
Maybe I need to think outside the computer and think with console in mind. Give me abit more and I'll see what I can do.
Solider(Tank and DPS?)[Shotguns and Assult Rifles]
Human
Turian
Krogan
Infilitrator(DPS)[Sniper Rifles and Pistols]
Human
Quarian
Salarian
Drell
Vanguard(DPS and Healing?)[Pistols and Shotguns]
Human
Drell
Asari
Adept(Healing and DPS)[Pistols and SMGs]
Human
Drell
Asari
Engineer(DPS and Crowd Control)[Shotguns and Pistols]
Human
Quarian
Salarian
Turian
Sentinel(Tanks and Crowd Control)[Shotguns, SMG, Pistols]
Human
Krogan
Turian
I know that this is more of a WoW layout which I don't think will work. With a FPS infact I'm positive it won't
But if you're going to group up, then you're going to need someone to heal, someone to take the brunt of the attacks and someone to blast away at the enemy as the tank does what he does.
Maybe I need to think outside the computer and think with console in mind. Give me abit more and I'll see what I can do.
Actually, just had a thought - this might actually work in EA/Bioware's favour if they time this with making SW:TOR free to play (if they ever had to resort to that).
Not saying this is a wise choice, but business wise, it'd make sense if they have the dosh.
Not saying this is a wise choice, but business wise, it'd make sense if they have the dosh.
Bioware? It's a bad idea. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of a Mass Effect MMO, but seriously, it's a bad idea.
It should all be oriented around controlled socialization. It shouldn't be WoW in space. It shouldn't orient (chiefly) around combat, and in-game currency shouldn't be some bullshit resource like other MMO's -- tusks, or ore, or whatever.
It should be favors. Jobs. Work. Players should be in various positions of control and leadership, with no hard level structure. Everybody has their own things they need to get done, to advance as a character, which requires them to seek out the help of other players.
Say you're a Quarian. Your job -- and how you progress as a character -- is the upkeep and improvement of the Migrant Fleet. What can you add to it? How can you protect it? Everybody votes -- what system should we move the fleet to this week?
Say you're a Krogan. You don't give a shit about the big picture -- it's about you and the 15-30 other bros in your clan. Who are we fighting? How do we expand our borders? Maybe we don't like the direction our Battlemaster is taking us -- can we ban together, kill him, steal his money, and hop a spaceship out? Maybe we'll start a mercenary band.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Combat and death should not be everyday events. They should only occur under specific circumstances.
Say you're a little (no levels, but the equivalent of) a level 1 Krogan, with your clan in Tuchanka. You can't just draw your gun on anybody you want and engage in combat; that would be anarchy. You can only kill people your battlemaster has marked as targets.
But attempting to do so opens you to the risk of death: with your own willing consent.
Now say your clan battlemaster is putting together quests for the clan. He wants to send five of you to take this (instanced) hospital from another clan, to expand your territory. He gets a little notification -- "Warning: Putting krogans in your clan on this mission will expose them to risk of death." And he has to think about that. And YOU have to think about it, when you accept the mission.
When you die, you're dead. But because there's no hard level system, and because combat and death is ALWAYS a carefully-calculated scenario where all parties involved know what they're getting into, any time you die, it's the result of a series of choices you made.
Battlemaster sent you into a mission way above your ability to handle? Should have grown a quad and told him so, or brought some more friends along. Quarian killed you in a bar? Well maybe you shouldn't have murdered his wife on that space station a year ago.
And again, it comes back to social links and role-playing.
Kill somebody, and anybody registered as a "friend" to them gets a notification, can declare you an enemy, and now has the ability to go weapons-free on you if they ever spot you in public.
Do you really want to kill this Quarian engineer, who claims she has friends in the Admiralty? Maybe she's bluffing. But then again, maybe somebody could shoot you in the back a year from now. And at any rate, if you don't kill her, you're going to have to deal with the fallout among your clan.
Decisions, decisions!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No global /tell features or anything like that. Travel and communication are tightly designed features within the context of the game.
Everything should be done by players, for players, through players. It's all about using social links to create emergent narratives.
Say you're a drell, and some Krogan (another player) kills your wife (also another player). How do you deal with that? Well, he's in a completely different star system, so you shoot him an email on the extranet, demanding an explanation. He doesn't respond.
So you email a friend on a nearby planet -- "can you go check this out for me?" He says sure thing, because you helped him rescue his friend from that slaver crew that one time. He finds out the krogan who killed your wife is living on Omega, and so he pays a local mercenary leader to keep an eye on him -- who pays some underlings to do it.
And all the way down at the end of the line, it boils down to an "observe and report" quest.
So now your goal is to get to Omega and kill this guy. Only word gets down the grapevine that he's a battlemaster and has ten krogans underneath him. So now you're trying to call in favors, build a team from your friend, raise the money to charter a spaceflight, and get to Omega to mete out some revenge.
And because this is all just players, maybe that changes once you get there. Maybe you walk into the bar where this guy is and there's a huge fight about to go down, and he asks for forgiveness, and offers to pay you. Or maybe you two become friends, and start working together.
And however it gets resolved, you've just spent the last month in a very interesting personal story, rather than dicking around farming crystals or mining ore or whatever.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Down the line, once players are migrating away from their native social systems (high-level krogans leaving their clans, Quarians saying "eh, screw this" to the Migrant Fleet) you introduce a colonization system. Players get together, find an empty, habitable planet, take some resources there, buy some construction mechs, and start a colony. They put someone in charge. They vote on the basic direction they want to go, and then they start building.
In order to expand, they need to clear zones of the planet. Clear a zone, and you can attach a new building there. Which is just an instanced environment. You can accomplish a lot, design-wise, with carefully-controlled instanced environments.
Except clearing the planet necessitates clearing out thresher maws and other nasties. Which requires the hiring of mercenaries, who can do it as a "kill five thresher maws" quest. Which requires money. Which requires buying/selling/sharing resources with other colonies nearby.
Now, obviously it shouldn't be anything like an EVE-level of craziness, but the idea is that, since the game is oriented around social systems with favors and work at the core, an infinite number of planets to be colonized are, essentially, engines which produce an infinite amount of work TO BE DONE.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There probably shouldn't be a space-game -- at least not in the sense of people whipping ships around like fighter pilots, flinging lasers and missiles at eachother. Number one, because it's resource-intensive, and number two, becuase it's not what the ME universe is about.
Travel takes place in real-time, similar to the airships in FFXI. Book a flight to another planet, and you need to be on that ship before it leaves. And then it's a two-day journey from your planet to the nearest Mass Relay -- during which time you're inside an instanced space-ship, with all the other passengers.
Maybe down the line you get your own ship (NPC crew handles the minutae). Now you're free to live on your ship in space, if you so choose -- but you have to pay attention to fuel, food, etc. Travel still takes time, but now you're free to chart your own course at any point you choose.
So say you buy a ship, and you want to go exploring empty planets. You invite some friends aboard, and your little ship of fools sails off into the stars.
You log in to Mass Effect Universe mid-transit -- so your character wakes up, aboard the ship. You talk to your friend, who owns the thing. He tells you you've got about a day and a half until you reach the Charon Relay. So you grab some food from the mess, and go sit by the big space window, and the two of you just sit there and talk for half an hour. Maybe you discuss philosophy. Maybe you trade social links; "You know a good engineer? I need to get the ship maintained soon." "Sure thing. But hey, do you know anybody with mercenary connections? I've got this thing I need to take care of."
Then you go back to bed, and log out.
---------------------------
tl;dr
The whole point is: don't make it WoW in space, with "collect five rachni hearts" as the standard unit of gameplay. Don't make every character the hero destined to save the galaxy.
When everyone is special, no one is.
Mass Effect is about role-playing, social links, and interactive character conflicts, with multiple sides to every story.
The game should be built in a way that facilitates players to live through these kind of stories in an organic way. To make a choice, and have it pay off -- or bite them in the ass -- a month, or six months, or a year down the line. Players should be encouraged to play multiple characters, in multiple races. Players should look back on their roster of dead characters and say, "That guy had a story from beginning to end. He did this, he did that, and then he died. That was a good story. I look back fondly, on having experienced all that. This is what I learned. This is what I'll do differently with the rest of my characters. I wonder what stories I'll live through next."
It should be favors. Jobs. Work. Players should be in various positions of control and leadership, with no hard level structure. Everybody has their own things they need to get done, to advance as a character, which requires them to seek out the help of other players.
Say you're a Quarian. Your job -- and how you progress as a character -- is the upkeep and improvement of the Migrant Fleet. What can you add to it? How can you protect it? Everybody votes -- what system should we move the fleet to this week?
Say you're a Krogan. You don't give a shit about the big picture -- it's about you and the 15-30 other bros in your clan. Who are we fighting? How do we expand our borders? Maybe we don't like the direction our Battlemaster is taking us -- can we ban together, kill him, steal his money, and hop a spaceship out? Maybe we'll start a mercenary band.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Combat and death should not be everyday events. They should only occur under specific circumstances.
Say you're a little (no levels, but the equivalent of) a level 1 Krogan, with your clan in Tuchanka. You can't just draw your gun on anybody you want and engage in combat; that would be anarchy. You can only kill people your battlemaster has marked as targets.
But attempting to do so opens you to the risk of death: with your own willing consent.
Now say your clan battlemaster is putting together quests for the clan. He wants to send five of you to take this (instanced) hospital from another clan, to expand your territory. He gets a little notification -- "Warning: Putting krogans in your clan on this mission will expose them to risk of death." And he has to think about that. And YOU have to think about it, when you accept the mission.
When you die, you're dead. But because there's no hard level system, and because combat and death is ALWAYS a carefully-calculated scenario where all parties involved know what they're getting into, any time you die, it's the result of a series of choices you made.
Battlemaster sent you into a mission way above your ability to handle? Should have grown a quad and told him so, or brought some more friends along. Quarian killed you in a bar? Well maybe you shouldn't have murdered his wife on that space station a year ago.
And again, it comes back to social links and role-playing.
Kill somebody, and anybody registered as a "friend" to them gets a notification, can declare you an enemy, and now has the ability to go weapons-free on you if they ever spot you in public.
Do you really want to kill this Quarian engineer, who claims she has friends in the Admiralty? Maybe she's bluffing. But then again, maybe somebody could shoot you in the back a year from now. And at any rate, if you don't kill her, you're going to have to deal with the fallout among your clan.
Decisions, decisions!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No global /tell features or anything like that. Travel and communication are tightly designed features within the context of the game.
Everything should be done by players, for players, through players. It's all about using social links to create emergent narratives.
Say you're a drell, and some Krogan (another player) kills your wife (also another player). How do you deal with that? Well, he's in a completely different star system, so you shoot him an email on the extranet, demanding an explanation. He doesn't respond.
So you email a friend on a nearby planet -- "can you go check this out for me?" He says sure thing, because you helped him rescue his friend from that slaver crew that one time. He finds out the krogan who killed your wife is living on Omega, and so he pays a local mercenary leader to keep an eye on him -- who pays some underlings to do it.
And all the way down at the end of the line, it boils down to an "observe and report" quest.
So now your goal is to get to Omega and kill this guy. Only word gets down the grapevine that he's a battlemaster and has ten krogans underneath him. So now you're trying to call in favors, build a team from your friend, raise the money to charter a spaceflight, and get to Omega to mete out some revenge.
And because this is all just players, maybe that changes once you get there. Maybe you walk into the bar where this guy is and there's a huge fight about to go down, and he asks for forgiveness, and offers to pay you. Or maybe you two become friends, and start working together.
And however it gets resolved, you've just spent the last month in a very interesting personal story, rather than dicking around farming crystals or mining ore or whatever.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Down the line, once players are migrating away from their native social systems (high-level krogans leaving their clans, Quarians saying "eh, screw this" to the Migrant Fleet) you introduce a colonization system. Players get together, find an empty, habitable planet, take some resources there, buy some construction mechs, and start a colony. They put someone in charge. They vote on the basic direction they want to go, and then they start building.
In order to expand, they need to clear zones of the planet. Clear a zone, and you can attach a new building there. Which is just an instanced environment. You can accomplish a lot, design-wise, with carefully-controlled instanced environments.
Except clearing the planet necessitates clearing out thresher maws and other nasties. Which requires the hiring of mercenaries, who can do it as a "kill five thresher maws" quest. Which requires money. Which requires buying/selling/sharing resources with other colonies nearby.
Now, obviously it shouldn't be anything like an EVE-level of craziness, but the idea is that, since the game is oriented around social systems with favors and work at the core, an infinite number of planets to be colonized are, essentially, engines which produce an infinite amount of work TO BE DONE.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There probably shouldn't be a space-game -- at least not in the sense of people whipping ships around like fighter pilots, flinging lasers and missiles at eachother. Number one, because it's resource-intensive, and number two, becuase it's not what the ME universe is about.
Travel takes place in real-time, similar to the airships in FFXI. Book a flight to another planet, and you need to be on that ship before it leaves. And then it's a two-day journey from your planet to the nearest Mass Relay -- during which time you're inside an instanced space-ship, with all the other passengers.
Maybe down the line you get your own ship (NPC crew handles the minutae). Now you're free to live on your ship in space, if you so choose -- but you have to pay attention to fuel, food, etc. Travel still takes time, but now you're free to chart your own course at any point you choose.
So say you buy a ship, and you want to go exploring empty planets. You invite some friends aboard, and your little ship of fools sails off into the stars.
You log in to Mass Effect Universe mid-transit -- so your character wakes up, aboard the ship. You talk to your friend, who owns the thing. He tells you you've got about a day and a half until you reach the Charon Relay. So you grab some food from the mess, and go sit by the big space window, and the two of you just sit there and talk for half an hour. Maybe you discuss philosophy. Maybe you trade social links; "You know a good engineer? I need to get the ship maintained soon." "Sure thing. But hey, do you know anybody with mercenary connections? I've got this thing I need to take care of."
Then you go back to bed, and log out.
---------------------------
tl;dr
The whole point is: don't make it WoW in space, with "collect five rachni hearts" as the standard unit of gameplay. Don't make every character the hero destined to save the galaxy.
When everyone is special, no one is.
Mass Effect is about role-playing, social links, and interactive character conflicts, with multiple sides to every story.
The game should be built in a way that facilitates players to live through these kind of stories in an organic way. To make a choice, and have it pay off -- or bite them in the ass -- a month, or six months, or a year down the line. Players should be encouraged to play multiple characters, in multiple races. Players should look back on their roster of dead characters and say, "That guy had a story from beginning to end. He did this, he did that, and then he died. That was a good story. I look back fondly, on having experienced all that. This is what I learned. This is what I'll do differently with the rest of my characters. I wonder what stories I'll live through next."
I like Mass Effect, eagerly waiting on my Collectors edition march 9th... but i wouldn't buy an MMO of it im afraid. I like my stories to have endings, and Mass Effect has been just oh so good up to this point that having it go on forever would just lessen the impact the entire series has had on me.
Thank you Bioware, but no. No MMO's for this Mass Effect fan im afraid.
Thank you Bioware, but no. No MMO's for this Mass Effect fan im afraid.
You think you have it bad? I have to wait for the bloody 9th of March.The.Bard said:
A Mass Effect MMO would be interesting. Being able to play as different races would be cool. I doubt this will happen for many years though since they just released the Star Wars MMO.