MMO Adaptation Will Ruin What You Love About Your Favorite Franchise

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

The only way a Game of Thrones MMO wouldn't fail (initially) would be if it had boobs and proper sex scenes included. Without them, it would just be a fantasy themed MMO, and it's not like we don't have any of those.

 

[Jandau]

The problem with many MMOs is that devs take a single player game and ruin it by making it an MMO. They fail to realize that the underlying paradigm is different and that existing design formulas just don't work in an MMO environment, so we get bad MMOs.

MMOs that are built from the ground up as MMOs are a great thing, but so many would be better off (and probably make more money) as normal games. For example, I'm currently playing Secret World. This game would have been the next Vampire: Bloodlines if it was just done as a normal game. As it stands, it's an excellent concept and a great setting dragged down with MMO fuckery. I still have fun with it, but it would have been a classic as a normal RPG, but is instead relegated to be a niche MMO...

 

[Jumwa]

I think Guild Wars has been doing interesting things. Every so often they move the world forward as major events take place. I am an on-again/off-again player and it seems like every time I hit an on-again phase I have to start by learning what happened. Last phase I logged out while in Lion's Arch, a bustling central hub where all races came together as one unified force(my impression) and recently I logged back in to find that Lion's Arch had been pretty much destroyed in a recent conflict.

Guild Wars also serves to illustrate how many things that other MMOs do wrong can be fixed. You can hop in and out of fights and events without stealing credit from others allowing a loner like me to have fun and adventure without being screwed by spawn farmers who run around wiping out mooks which are still a challenge for my character and when you harvest a gather point or treasure chest it is not removed from the world for everyone else until it respawns. Add to this that they built their own world instead of trying to force some other property to function in a system it wasn't intended for and you get a fun game that is not such a static theme park.

Unfortunately I can't speak on the subject of PvP since I have no interest in having my rear handed to me constantly by the people who devote their lives to these games.

All well said, and on the point of PvP I couldn't agree more to boot!

But contrary to what Yahtzee said about the static nature of MMOs being a downside (which I agree with, for the record) its actually something the bulk of MMO players seem to prefer. The one issue I've heard complained about the most in GW2 is that the content updates are all changing. New events occur, big invasions and battles, but they only last for a time, after which the world is changed and shown to be impermanent.

Yet people complain that the content isn't just tacked onto the game as a permanent new addition. That destroying Lion's Arch (or one of the other numerous places that were laid to waste or changed throughout GW2's Living Story) instead of just adding in a new area to mess up was a "waste".

What's one gamers delight is despised by another. There's no one answer.

Though I'm loving the way GW2 does things, and how much the world and characters within have changed since launch.

 

[ExileNZ]

In all fairness to promising-IP MMOs, they're really just the latest face of a well-established trend: the shitty game port.

Any even remotely promising IP gets a game port at some stage, usually right after (or in some cases even before) the release. Most of these are shit - MMO or not. Before MMOs it was third-person action games (Two Towers, anyone?), before that it was the obligatory RTS conversion (even Aliens and Halo got one of these).

And pre-2000? Even. Worse.
(http://www.i-mockery.com/minimocks/moviegames/ - no I can't be arsed linking it properly)

Even if they are doomed to fail most of the time, at least this latest spate of MMOs shows some effort on the developers' part.

 

[Thyunda]

I said The Elder Scrolls Online 'could be interesting' because the singleplayer games are based around mostly-static characters giving quests out in regions denoted by biomes. If the single player games can get by on little depth and simplistic dungeon-diving and artefact-finding, there's no reason why you couldn't found an MMO on the same premises. There's my justification for using the phrase. And I didn't even change the subject.

 

[Thanatos2k]

Everquest Next is about the only MMO I have any hope for, and that only because it looks like they're trying to move away from the whole static theme-park approach. I have some friends who keep trying to convince me to get on ESO because "It's not like any other MMO," but everything I've seen on it points to it just being another same-old grind with slightly different combat and art design.

See, the only way you could make a good Game of Thrones MMO would be for all characters to have PERMADEATH. Good luck trying to get that past the suits.

While I agree with you to a degree, this would be hard to implement, since one of the primary reasons people get offed in GoT is to keep them from spilling your secrets and plots.

So let's say you're some high lord in King's Landing, and you're planning to assassinate some prick you don't like. But then this other guy finds out about your plan and threatens to squeal, so now you have to kill him. Once that character is dead, you can scheme in peace... for five minutes as the player rolls a new character and PM's the guy you were gonna assassinate.

See, exchange of information is key for player-driven games. In Westeros, information can only ever travel as fast as a raven can fly or a messenger can ride. But in an mmo, information moves at the speed of instant messages and Skype calls. What people know or don't know about the actions of other characters is integral to the intrigue of GoT, so having players who are able to communicate instantly from across the map, or retain knowledge from previous characters, would make it nearly impossible to simulate.

There would be no "PMs." You would only be able to speak to people in sight. But maybe someone is hiding in a hallway nearby, listening....

Of course, this doesn't prevent out of band communication, but that only ramps up the paranoia even more. Are they talking behind our backs? That IS just a bot in our vent channel, right?

And who are you going to trust with your contact information.....?

One MMO actually managed to accomplish this feet of only nearby or LOS communications. Albeit unintentionally. Asherons Call 2, shortly after its release when its crapy experimental Microsoft Chat Server system imploded and remained broken for months. You could only chat with people in your immediate area. It killed the game. It never recovered.

Well yeah, the game was built assuming the functionality would be there, and then it wasn't. It's kind of key for an MMO with grouping functionality.

A Game of Thrones MMO would be sandbox - there would be no groups, and no need for such things.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Need more highly customizable MMOs and less generic overly scrutinized watered down bore fests. Hell I've spent more money on Champions online simply because you can customize so much. Make a creation kit for TESO and keep PVP out of it and I will buy in.

 

[laggyteabag]

MMO adaptions are generally terrible. Unless a game franchise is created specifically to be an MMO (ie Guild Wars), or the game does something quite revolutionary (World of Warcraft, at the time), I find most MMO adaptions to just be terrible and shallow. From what I played of the beta, The Elder Scrolls Online is a prime example of this, even though the Elder Scrolls as it is, is generally not an overly rich experience, they somehow managed to dilute everything further to create a game that was just thoroughly tedious and not enjoyable in the slightest.

 

[Mumorpuger]

It seems to me that if you wanted to adapt GoT to be an MMO, it would be better handled by the guys who make EVE Online... GoT is about politics, not combat.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Secondly, all MMOs take place in a frozen moment of time, where the status quo can never change, for the sake of all the other human players who are going to want to come along and do the same quests as you.

This here sums up my biggest problem with MMOs. I never feel like I'm making much of an impact on anything.

 

[Nurb]

The devs: "Adapting MMO mechanics to each individual franchise to get the most out of the game is hard and time consuming, let's just pound it into the standard MMO mold with the same classes, quests, and grind despite it not making sense for the source material and kick it out the door."

And so Elder Scrolls Online was born!

 

[Do4600]

I honestly think the reason nearly all MMOs invariably slowly collapse is because the genre could be called "World of Warcraft + X" A long time ago when WoW was just starting to make huge amounts of money, five or six developers stepped in and more or less just copied WoW except they added one additional element each. For some reason it stuck even though they always fail, MMOs are still mostly "World of Warcraft + X and the people who go into the MMO market expect "World of Warcraft + X" This keeps away people from the market who would enjoy an MMO with actual different elements and the people who want World of Warcraft + X to see something fresh within the WoW format won't respond well to major changes in the formula.

 

[Gerishnakov]

I'll be interested to hear Yahtzee's thoughts on the multiplayer component of Watch Dogs when he does the Zero Punc for that. More specifically, it sounds to me like Yahtzee might appreciate the PvP element that's been showcased for Watch Dogs.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

I'm not sure Yahtzee quite hit this one on the head. MMOs definitely kinda suck for all the reasons he listed, but the overriding issue is the sheer number of players combined with the need for persistence. This is very different from discounting multiplayer RPGs outright. After all, people play DnD every day, right? As long as you have half a dozen folks on the same page, I think you can make a multiplayer online roleplaying video game work. It just won't hold together when you need to account for thousands of people doing thousands of things - and a fair number of those people attempting to actively sabotage everything for everyone else - in a shared-world that must be online almost 24/7.

As an example: if they were to develop a game like ESO from the ground up as a non-persistent experience catering to a party of three or four players working in concert to further the story and develop the game world... well that might just be an amazing experience for all involved. In fact, that's exactly what I (and I suspect many other MMO players) truly want: an RPG set in an expansive game world that we can explore with our friends. The persistent nature of actual MMOs and the preponderance of strange players? Yeah, these things actually suck. They're the trade-offs we think we have to make in order to get bits and pieces of the game we really want to play.