MMO Weekly 04/08/09

Hello there, my fellow avatar jockeys, and welcome to this week's futuristic edition of MMO Weekly.  In this week's epic installment, we'll take a hard look at some of the more intriguing sci-fi MMOs of the past few years.  We'll also examine why they failed, and why sci-fi MMOs generally fare quite poorly.  

"Fare quite poorly" doesn't accurately describe the state of things though, does it?  Perhaps a bit more accurate would be the phrase "die a horrid death."  If you're a lover of sci-fi, and you find yourself endlessly hoping for a juicy sci-fi MMO to sink your teeth into, you know exactly what I mean.  Sci-fi MMOs just don't do very well - and usually go under- especially compared to traditional fantasy MMOs.

A couple of quick caviats.  First, I'm intentionally leaving EVE Online out of this discussion.  While it is certainly a successful sci-fi MMO, it is so unorthodox, so unconventional that its unique success deserves a column (or several) of its own.  In fact, I'd argue that EVE Online succeeds despite itself....but that is a tale for another day.  No, what I'm referring to is the traditional MMO, one in which a player assumes the role of a character that plods the soil, finds instances in need of delving, princesses in need of rescuing, and monsters in need of slaying.  My second caviat is that this isn't supposed to be a thorough treatise on the subject, but more my own impressions from having played my fair share of sci-fi MMOs over the years.  Take it for the subjective opinion piece that it is.

The question, of course, is "Why does sci-fi fumble as an MMO?"  Sci-fi and high fantasy have traditionally gone hand-in-hand.  Among fans, there is a huge crossover.  Having just come back from Comic-Con, the smell of this cross pollination is still fresh in my nostrils.  Sci-fi, fantasy, comic books, film, anime; they all blend together, as do even the most obscure sub-genres (retro-futuristic steampunk, anyone?).  Broadly speaking, the same geeks that love Trek, Star Wars, and Ray Bradbury also love Lord of the Rings, and vice versa.  The gamers among them should love sci-fi MMOs as much as they love fantasy ones.  

So then, why do classic fantasy-based MMOs succeed, while sci-fi MMOs generally fail?  Some have postulated that the genre simply doesn't lend itself to MMOs.  These same folks often point to television: many sci-fi series have succeeded there, but successful high fantasy series are very few, and very far between.  In a similar way, they argue, the MMO just doesn't fit with sci-fi, and it never will.  It's a square peg - round hole thing; sci-fi MMOs are doomed from the start.    

I don't agree with this line of reasoning.  I think that a conventional sci-fi MMO can succeed.  I remember watching a panel discuss this very topic at the GDC in 2008; each of the panelists treated sci-fi MMOs negatively, and some openly claimed they simply couldn't be successful.  Rob Pardo - one of the fathers of WoW - was openly dismissive of their comments.  He maintained that sci-fi MMOs could certainly be very successful.  According to Rob, we simply haven't seen one do so quite yet.  

So what are sci-fi MMOs doing wrong?  Why aren't people signing up?  Or, more accurately, why are they signing up and then unsubscribing?  Why do a lot of sci-fi MMOs shrink to a small, dedicated band of players, while others go under completely?  I have a few observations, and most of them have to do with the foundational concepts of character building and role playing, essential ingredients to a successful MMO.


Problem One:  Sci-Fi MMOs Make Players Play Generic, Sucky Archetypes

First up - the "classes" (and boy, do I use that term loosely) are generally very generic and very similar to one another.  In a fantasy RPG, you know that a wizard and a warrior are very different.  They have far different skills, far different abilities, and very distinct attributes.  They even dress differently: the wizard, as everyone knows, wears only cloth armor.  The warrior?  The heaviest armor in the game.  Run the list of standard fantasy RPG characters in your head - cleric, necromancer, rogue, monk, bard - and I'll bet a distinct archetype immediately pops into your mind.  

Now do the same for a sci-fi RPG.  "Um, there's the soldier, and then the medic, and, um, there's the....uh....there's another guy, and...give me a minute....isn't there usually some sort of hacker or something?"   

See the problem?  I remember distinctly a moment in Anarchy Online when this problem struck me very clearly.  I was playing in a nice mixed group of characters, each of us a different class.  I looked at my character, then at every other character in the group.  We had just pulled a mob.  And then we all stood around our opponent, in a big circle, firing guns at him until he was dead. We all wore very similar, highly futuristic armor/clothing, and we shot our rapid-fire pistols, rapid-fire rifles, and rapid-fire submachine guns at the mob, until it fell over.  Then we did the exact same thing again, and again, and again.  

The bottom line was that the doctor and the soldier, although distinct classes in the game, suddenly seemed similar and non-distinct, right down to their equipment and clothing.  This is true for most of the classes.  From the player's point of view, he doesn't feel unique and heroic; he gets the impression that he's just like everyone else in the game.  This problem is very different from that of most successful fantasy MMOs, in which the distinctions between classes is pronounced.