Loading... Benighting Twilight

Welcome to the 1,133rd Edition of Loading...

Loading... is the premier daily MMORPG news and commentary newsletter, only from Ten Ton Hammer.

MMOs and movies make strange bedfellows even with the most versatile IPs, and the latest rumors swirling around a possible Twilight MMORPG have gotten our community talking. Does the idea have legs? Ethec puts aside his initial disgust with the book to discuss why most trendy book / movie IPs don't make good jumping off points for MMOs in today's Loading... Benighting Twilight.

Coyote is back from Comic-Con, and his daily column explores all things geek with Coyote's trademark wit in It's All Geek to Me. Read it daily at Ten Ton Hammer! Today's topic: 25 Things I Learned at Comic Con ("learn" can mean "regret")

The Pulse

You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the result is the Ten Ton Pulse (What is The Pulse?).

Here's today's top 5 Pulse results:

World of Warcraft Aion Champions Online (UP 1) EverQuest 2 (down 1) EVE Online

Biggest Movers this month :

Lineage 2 (UP 15 to #16) Torchlight (UP 15 to #13) Atlantica Online (UP 14 to #12) Recent MMO Releases 6/30 - City of Heroes Issue 15: Anniversary 6/30 - Lord of the Rings Online Book 8 7/7 - Darkfall Player Housing Expansion 7/13 - Darkfall NA launch 7/21- FFXI "Moogle Kupo d'Etat" Addon (release date)

Important Dates

7/31 - 8/3 - Aion Beta Weekend 8/21 - 8/22 - BlizzCon '09 9/4 - 9/6 - Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) Upcoming Releases 8/25 - CrimeCraft (release date) 9/1 - Champions Online (release date) 9/9 - Fallen Earth (release date) 9/22 - Aion (release date) Early 2010 - APB

Loading... Daily

The Twilight video game talked about and mocked about in today's epic thread is yet another bad novelty game idea. As a concept for an MMO, it's a worse idea. I'm not just an idle observer on this one. A little while ago I picked up Twilight at the library on the recommendation of a few friends whose tweenage kids got them hooked. These same friends got me onto the Harry Potter books, so I thought they knew their stuff. But I knew I was in trouble in the first few pages; relaying a tale of isolated adolescence oscillating between broken homes with a vampirical twist, complete with pseudo-Dickensonian verbosity and wrapped in afterschool special melodrama.

Now, I've found that sometimes a book that doesn't read well can make for a decent audiobook. Case in point, I'd listened to many of the Drizzt books, but couldn't figure out why my more bookish friends thought my latest literary addiction was laughable. Then I tried to read one of the books and understood. That's not taking anything away from R.A. - sometimes stories are better in the moment-by-moment telling (as in audiobooks and movies) than in book form. So, I traded in my book for an audiobook and tried again. This time I got as far as the vampire baseball part, then that little part of your intellect - the part that tries to shake you loose when your standards of quality and consistency with fact or accepted fantasy are under assault - could no longer be ignored.

My problems with Twilight aren't just that it's literary junk-food of the high trans fat variety, it's that there's no game design room beyond the average movie port, following characters and changing voices to loosely wrap around a branchless plotline. Trendy teeny-bopper stuff does not an MMO make, nor does 99% of the movies that come out of Hollywood. An MMO has to be epic in scale, an entire world that you want to be a part of, but enough like a sometime hobby or maybe an Enya CD, something that you might put down but keep coming back to. Maybe there are plenty of fans that want to live on Twilight's version of the Washington state coastline, today, but what will hold them there beyond the current wave of youthful hysteria and multi-million dollar marketing?

We've been over why MMOs and movies make strange bedfellows a few times before. Last time, many of you disagreed with me, thinking that a WoW movie isn't just another attempt to cash in on an MMO that has maybe become more like your story than Blizzard's.

On the other hand, we all have books that we'd love to see made into MMOs. Here's my question: can a book or movie concept ever rise to MMO realization without an Twilight-ian initial wave of popularity? MMOs like Otherland will be instructive, but what do you think? Share it in the Loading... forum, or send it my way via email?

Shayalyn's Epic Thread of the Day

From our Articles, News & Events Discussion

Twilight Video Game in Production

Make mine werewolf, please.

The only good thing I can think of about Savanja's news that there's a Twilight video game in production (rumored to be a MMOG) is the possibility that I could log in on Team Werewolf and kick some pasty, sparkly, scrawny vampire ass.

If you have something good to say about the potential for a Twilight MMOG, say it here. Or if you'd just like to ridicule the idea like the rest of us, there's still plenty of room for that.

==============================
Awesome Quotes from the Epic Thread

"Hold!
I just realized: why is Hollywood 90210 with vampires getting an MMO
when us Harry Potter fans have to make do with dressing up in our
Gryffindor scarves while playing Harry Potter Wii?

... not that I do that, of course."

- Mikes
==============================

Have you spotted an Epic Thread on our forums? Tell us!

3 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 87 in July! 852 in 2009!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today

The Game Behind The Game: A Global Agenda Infrastructure Q&A with Stew Chisam
Stew Chisam, VP of Game Operations for Hi-Rez, graciously took some time to answer our questions about Global Agenda's web presence, the role of the support staff, what Hi-Rez is already doing to improve performance and gameplay early in closed beta, and much more in this Ten Ton Hammer exclusive interview. Exclusive Mini Fighter Screenshots Looking for something different in an MMO? The folks at MarvleQuest are working hard to provide just that. Mini Fighter is a frenetic, side-scrolling fighting game that features massively multiplayer online battles with over 200 combatants. Players can level-up their fighters and compete in a wide variety of modes, from Survival and Tag Team matches to Boss fights and daily Siege Warfare. Take a break from the fisticuffs to compete in a variety of minigames, including the brain-busting Quiz Village. Mini Fighter is currently in closed beta, but enjoy these exclusive screenshots while you wait for your chance to play! World of Warcraft: Ulduar Boss Strategies - Freya
In the World of Warcraft, Ulduar is the current end game raiding
instance, and one of the bosses that must be defeated to progress is
Freya, a giant female titan found in the Conservatory of Life. This guide provides all the basic strategies you
need to be aware of to defeat this boss in Ulduar.

Hottest Content:

City of Heroes: Power Spectrum and Going Rogue Interview from Comic-Con '09 Champions Online: Nemesis and Omega Interview with Bill Roper DC Universe Online Hands-On PvP Preview from Comic-Con '09 Bait and Switch? Ethics & Values in MMO Marketing Star Wars: The Old Republic Comic-Con Interview - Exploring the Expanded Universe Picking Up Cool Perks in Champions Online World of Warcraft: The Ultimate Guide to Ulduar's Bosses: Razorscale Aion Class Interview - The Sorceror Aion: PvP Q&A with Brian Knox World of Warcraft - Current State of End Game Raiding

Thanks for visiting the Ten Ton Hammer network!

-Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer team