Planting A SEED

This week’s common content has a special place in my heart as it relates to
an MMO I covered during our travels to E3 this year. The widely unknown MMO of
SEED has filed for bankruptcy and thus ends another MMO publisher attempting to
break into an already saturated market. A game based entirely around social
interaction and development based on player actions, SEED had both an
interesting concept and the graphics to boot. Sadly it seems there is no room in
the modern market for a game like SEED to survive against the behemoths of WoW
and others.

I’ve often been heard talking about the PvP elements that seem to dominate
WAR and why Player VS. Player will be such a huge component to the game, and now
seems a good time to discuss why it will be a successfully ideal to base a game
around. My view of SEED’s problem was that it was reliant on player goals and
player interaction, while player conflict has always been a staple for any
successful MMO on the market. The only way I can describe the success of player
conflict is that people like being jerks. Messiah still regrets that I chose to
start us on a PvP server in WoW, I love it!

MMO’s are in essence based around player interaction, and since it require
multiple players acting together or in opposition there is a sense of
competition amongst everyone. As SEED was dependant on players working together
for a common goal there was no "team competition" that comes out of standard
MMO’s (‘hey look I have the Phatest l00t!) and WAR will
take this to a new level with six different races to have competition
between.

So far there is very little we have seen about the economy in Warhammer
Online so it is hard to gauge how it will compare to the completely player
driven world of SEED. Interestingly enough the concept of WAR’s controllable
locations and the ability to annex enemy capitals is almost similar to the SEED
concept of letting the players control the fate of the world that they are
living in. With WAR there is a sense of working together to achieve the goal of
completely messing up your opposing faction (by ransacking their capital) or by
generally beating them in individual player VS. player matches. The same is also
true with WoW, where there is an overall sense of victory in high scale PvP
events and then individual honor achieved by each player of a faction. So while
SEED offered the chance to succeed on a personal level and a team level, it did
not excel at letting you shove your nose in other people’s faces and mock them
for their failings. Clearly every MMO needs something to let other players know
who’s boss!

It is a shame to see a game such as SEED fail, having met the developers at
E3 I was very interested to see how the game would develop and I really enjoyed
their enthusiasm about the game that they were developing. The fall of SEED is
an example however that enthusiasm alone will not keep an MMO floating in the
current gaming environment. As a game that had difficulties with control and
even basics that were difficult to grasp for new players, SEED was a perfect
example of a game that tried to do too many things too fast. It seems that WAR
has not made this mistake from what I have experienced thus far. Using
principals that can be found in several MMO’s on the market (cough WOW cough),
Warhammer Online uses a basic UI system similar to most other games. With new
concepts but nothing that drastically changes the style of the game, WAR seems
to be on a straight path for gaming victory in the next few years… I hope.

Unlike SEED, the makers of Warhammer Online seem to have a pre-existing
audience that is looking for a good game to play. This means that unlike SEED or
other new games, there is very little press that Mythic needs to release about
their game in order to keep the fanbase continually interested and anticipating
it. The only problem with an existing fanbase is the need to appease them, and
since Warhammer fans are a pretty dedicated bunch, it will be very interesting
to see how they react to the game as they will decide in the long term if it
succeeds or fails. However based on concept and existing support it is looking
unlikely that Warhammer Online will be another SEED, and we can all keep our
fingers crossed for that!

Warhammer Online is a game that seems to have a good direction and a strong
development corps with a good amount of common sense and enthusiasm for the
game. In an industry where bad first showings can cut the legs from under you,
WAR will be something to keep an eye on for the next while. If they go too far
in one direction WAR may be the next SEED of our time, but more likely (and I
hope) we can expect to see WAR gearing up to take on World of Warcraft in the
next big MMO clash of the titans. Only time can tell what will
happen…