MMO Weekly: Blizzard To Borrow From Hellgate London?

19 Jan 2010 at 00:00:00 by Jeff Hollis

Ahoy there, my fellow avatar jockeys,  and welcome to this week's edition of MMO Weekly.  In this week's article, we'll explore my favorite rumor of the past few weeks.  Of course, I'm referring to the utterly unconfirmable rumor that we covered recently involving Blizzard's new, still in the works, not yet announced MMO. 

The rumor goes like this:  French gaming site NoFrag says that they’ve got an inside source, and that Blizzard is working on a very different kind of MMO.  It’s an MMOFPS, set in a very sci-fi future, where everyone has two lives. The first life is quite like the Sims, and takes place in some sort of hub-like city environment where trade and social interaction takes place.  From this hub, players can connect to their second life, and it’s in this life that all the futuristic sci-fi fighting action takes place.

Is there any possibility that this rumor is true?  Sure there is, and Blizzard does have a strong corporate presence in France, so a rumor leaking out to a French website is possible.  It it likely that this rumor is true?  Pfffft...who the heck knows?  You'd have just as much luck trying to determine Blizz's next MMO by using Tarot cards as by listening to internet rumors. 

Despite the fact that this is just a rumor, it really got me thinking.  The biggest problem with MMOFPS games is the interface.  Traditional MMOs have a well-established interface, and this interface allows players to interact with NPCs one minute, then cast fireballs at monsters the next.  This system has been refined for many years in MMOs themselves, and in single player RPGs for several generations prior to that.  It's a pretty smooth, well understood system at this point in the genre's development.

Single player FPS games have an entirely different development history.  Interact with NPCs?  Seriously?  No, there's very little of that.  FPS games generally show you an intro video, and then you're in the game, lining your sights up onto some baddies.  There is no role-playing, and no interaction with the townsfolk.  Basically, you're given a mission, and you're placed into combat. 

In multiplayer FPS games, which are all the rage right now, the pattern is the same.  You log in, you're shown the map, and you've got a given amount of time to amount more kills than the other team.  There is no interacting with anyone, unless you consider putting several 7.62mm rounds into someone's skull “interacting” with them.

So the problem is that FPS games, overall, haven't really worked out all the bugs involved with the whole 1) talking to NPCs, 2) getting quests from them, 3) following them, rescuing them, or obtaining necessary items from then, and 4) shooting enemies and monsters the very next minute.  What's more, the recent interface systems that developers have implemented in their attempts to design MMOFPS games have been kludgy and awkward to say the least.

In discussing this latest Blizzard rumor with an MMO-playing friend of mine, she made the following comment:  “So, Blizzard is copying Hellgate: London”?  And quite suddenly, I realized she was absolutely right.

Hellgate London wasn't a bad game; in fact, it got some decent review scores.  What killed the game in the US and EU was Flagship's bizarre business model.  In fact, the game is still alive in Korea and Japan, and an expansion is in the works (and according to recent reports, is due for a rerelease by HanbitSoft). 

One of the central innovations of HGL was, in fact, its interface.  On the surface, the interface was the standard FPS interface, in which your gunsight was controlled by your mouse, and you walked in different directions by using the WASD keys.  There was no “tab targetting” like in standard MMOs; you put your sight on a target, and you squeezed off rounds.  The game addressed the disparity between ranged and melee weapons quite well, by simply giving melee characters a fairly long reach, and a nice wide swath whenever they swung their swords or maces.  Basically, a melee weapon acted as a small, short range, AOE attack.  The whole combat system worked quite well.

When players were in the civilized hubs (which, in HGL, were subway rail stations), combat was completely disabled.  The controls still worked exactly the same, however.  If a player clicked his gunsight on an  NPC, they didn't shoot or attack; they talked or traded with them instead. 

The whole gameplay experience was simplified and streamlined by this system.  In combat zones, the interface was combat enabled.  In the civilized hubs, it was interaction enabled.  Simple.  Understandable.  Easy. 

And this, for me, is what gave the whole French rumor some legs and some viability.  HGL, for all its faults, had an innovative, easy to use system for 1) combat, and 2) interacting with NPCs, and it worked quite well.  It resolved, quite effectively, the interface dilemma that plagues most other MMOFPS games.  While Blizzard does occasional innovate, they are generally quite happy to emulate instead; it would not surprise me one bit if they had, in fact, adopted the system that HGL had used.  The fact that the French rumor described, essentially, an HGL-like system for interacting and fighting only made it that much more credible.   

And that, fellow gamers, is all the rumor-mongering we have for this week.  If you enjoyed this bit of speculative nonsense, and want to keep up with the very latest and greatest happenings in virtual space, come visit us over at WanderingGoblin.com, where we cover this kind of tomfoolery each and every day.  For now, ciao!

Comment