by Chris Ware on Oct 08, 2009
When
someone mentions the term MMOG, most gamers get a
mental image of swords and sorcery, barbarians with large weapons and
armor
clad female elfs with other large assets. While many subsets of the
genre have
popped up since Meridian
59, launched
well over a decade ago, the fantasy segment has dominated in both
number of
available titles and number of players. The three largest MMOGs in
history have
all been fantasy so it would stand to reason that the players must
enjoy this
style the most, right? Not quite, although its popularity is evident by
the
sheer number of players, many have been clamoring for something new for
years.
To
date most non-fantasy MMOGs usually get relegated to a
niche market at best, or see the plug pulled fairly early. It
isn’t that every
fantasy game that is made is a sure fire hit, far from it,
it’s just that nothing
other than a fantasy world has hit that proverbial home run in either
box sales
or concurrent subscriptions. Early entries from SOE
style="">Planetside and
Star Wars
Galaxies had arguably the best
runs of it to date, but that was in the
pre-WoW environment that judged success a little differently than the
current
market does, and in the case of SWG, a rabid fan base that stuck with a
game
that would have died off quickly if judged strictly by its own merits.
style=""> As
Ten Ton Hammer’s own Benjamin J. de la
Durantaye wrote in his recent
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=46821">Loading…
article,
the cost of making a top tier MMOG is nothing to sneeze at:
style="">
style="font-size: 10pt;">We're talking about anywhere
between 10 and 100
million dollars, not too far off from a budget for a feature
w:st="on">Hollywood
film. Add to that technical and service and support costs to keep the
game
running, and the bill gets pretty big. As we've seen many times in the
past
too, some of these games don't even launch in a complete state, often
due to
lack of resources (meaning they went through their multi-million dollar
budget
and STILL didn't have enough to finish the game). That's a lot of moolah.
With
this in mind, it is hard to fault developers from
straying too far
from the beaten path and taking a chance on something that has
historically failed, but several games on the horizon are looking to do
just
that. BioWare, a newcomer to the MMOG party, has the most hotly
anticipated
game since WoW in the works with Star
Wars: The Old Republic and the
buzz surrounding it grows exponententially
with each day. Also looming large is the new
style="">Star Trek Online game
from Cryptic Studios that is looking to make
big waves as well. Couple these two newcomers with
style="">EVE Online,
which has slowly but steadily grown into a quiet
powerhouse in the “niche” realm (calling EVE a
niche game is not completely
accurate, considering it boasts 300,000 subscribers), and the space
race
appears to be in full swing.
Will
this abundance of interstellar action be just what the
fan base has wanted, or will it fall by the wayside and end up in a
deep space
dustbin? Given the hype and the track records of the developers it is
unlikely
that both of these titles will flop, although of the two, STO has the
higher
probability of being only a minor success. Many players hope this trend
continues and becomes the norm, as evidenced by both forum post here on
Ten Ton
Hammer and other boards, as well as speaking with many of the gamers
that I
have been playing MMOGs with for years. Immersion is wearing thin in
fantasy
land, and players are hungry for change.
Let’s
focus on SWTOR and gaze into the crystal ball for a
bit and imagine how the gaming landscape may look in two or three years
after
it is released. It is now 2013 and BioWare are the new kings of all
media,
riding high on the unmitigated success of their initial MMOG release,
with
subscriptions nearing 10 million players. Blizzard, having lost their
domination
of the market, has unleashed a media blitzkrieg about their soon to be
released
original IP game – a space based sci-fi MMOG. SOE has
released a new browser
based MMOG based on the Star Wars IP and are shattering their own
records set
by Free Realms
in that segment. CCP
has added an avatar based component to
style="">EVE
Online making it both more
accessible and somewhat easier to learn. Cryptic
is in the hunt with STO, and a host of Asian free-to-play space based
games
have sprung up seemingly overnight. Meanwhile, the once fertile lands
of
knights and dragons, orcs and humans and the lot of the fantasy world
have gone
fallow with populations that have seen server merge after server merge
in
efforts to squeeze every last revenue stream out of them.
If it
indeed plays out like this, or in a relatively similar
fashion, it is conceivable that the second decade of the MMOG craze may
be
completely dominated by space based “star games.”
Could the gamer of the future
end up drifting in deep space, bored of interstellar conquest and being
longing
for “the good old(e) days”? As with movies, books
and music, popular culture
always follows the trends, and games have certainly been no exception.
With the
sort of monkey see monkey do attitude that abounds it stands to reason
that
this could be a very real possibility if the gaming paradigm shifts to
sci-fi
and space based games.
Hopefully,
for the sake of all games and gamers, the new
breed of MMOG is met with tempered success that allows all forms of
game worlds
to thrive and keeps the developers always thinking ahead to the next
emerging
trend, keeping games fresh and exciting for years to come.