by Jeff Woleslagle on Apr 16, 2009
Welcome to the 1,059th Edition of Loading...
Loading... is the premier daily MMORPG news and commentary newsletter, only from Ten Ton Hammer.
In this issue of Loading... we'll build on today's featured opinion piece as we look for the pot of MMO gold at the end of popular works of fiction. Everyone has their own ideas on what book would make a good MMO, so I'll share mine and invite you to do the same. That, a quick preview of tonight's DDO Module 9 dev chat and this afternoon's premium newsletter and new guides for World of Warcraft and EVE Online top off today's Loading... Reading Rainbow.
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The Pulse
You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the result is the Ten Ton Pulse (What is Pulse?).
Here's today's top 5 Pulse results for today:
World of Warcraft EVE Online EverQuest 2 Age of Conan Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (UP 2)Biggest Movers in the Top 20 today :
Warhammer 40k Online (UP 92!! to #16) DC Universe Online (UP 25 to #13) The Chronicles of Spellborn (down 8 to #18)Loading... Daily
***Catch our DDO Module 9 Vooncast tonight at 7pm EDT in Voon room Ten Ton Events, everyone is welcome. Today is the inaugural day for our weekly premium members newsletter too, full of premium-only articles and freebie opportunities and much more. If you're a premium member, it should hit your inbox this afternoon.***
Ten Ton Hammer's Dalmarus has posted the first installment of his look at which book series (series is the plural of series, yea, it looks weird) would make great MMORPGs, naming Dragonlance, Ravenloft, Narnia, and Harry Potter as his top picks. All of which have the tremendous storyline advantages of dealing with a deeply intricate, if flawed and fragmented, world that boasts more than its share of open questions. The thing about a good book or series of books is that your brain can't stop chewing on it even after the heartbreak of the last page. The longer and more engaging the series, the more momentum the world builds in your imagination.
And we all have our favorite series that we'd like to see made into a game. Recently I shared a cab with a fairly well-known and well-respected developer, and though I can't be specific at his request, it wasn't anyone that we feature regularly. (In fact, I don't believe we've ever published an interview with him, to still your questioning hearts.) He was obviously excited about his current gig in the "I'm bursting to tell you but we haven't told anyone anywhere and they'd kill me" sort of way, and his only clue was, "What's the most under-represented genre in MMOs today?" I assumed my usual giddy grin I wear when this topic comes up and exclaimed, "Westerns!"
I'd been reading Stephen King's The Dark Tower series which, though fairly genre-ambivalent. draws heavily from the spirit of the spaghetti-western Clint Eastwood man-with-no-name. That in itself draws from Carolingan tales of knights errant in the same way George Lucas drew from Kurosawa classics to create the Star Wars universe, which in turn drew from other tales told in times past. Stories like these aren't just good entertainment, they're part of the grain of our humanity passed down from generations past in one form or another.
You don't have to be a Louie Lamour fan to know that cheap and abundant content isn't a problem for the western MMO. The wild west represents a number of organic MMO characteristics, progression in difficulty from east to west, abundant questing, crafting and mercantile, natural excuses for player vs. player combat, indiginous factions to make friends with or battle against, mounts, possibilities to settle and be a farmer or craftsman and maybe even go generational (raising a family of alts in sort of a Sims meets the 1830s style with your guild a.k.a. town), or venture out and adopt weapons and tactics of every sort. There are even all kinds of expansion opportunities between land rushes, gold rushes, wars, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and much more. Fallout 3's VATS system offers a promising way to do a fairly realistic gun-based MMO when coupled with the TBS pacing of Atlantica Online.
There's no reason to doubt that the western MMO would have to go through the same process that fantasy MMOs went through - first as pencil-and-paper games, then as a number of single player RPGs that function as a proof of concept. Only when these efforts are successful will someone invest in the concept heavily enough to make an MMO. Alas, no game (let alone MMO) has ever really captured the spirit of a western, with the possible exceptions of the old NES title Gunsmoke and maybe Gun and Call of Juarez, though the latter two were unforgivably brief and linear in scope. I'm not holding my breath, but I do hold out hope.
Back to the cab ride, I gushed on and on in this fashion until I realized that my co-occupant's now forced smile was drooping. "Westerns!" obviously wasn't the correct answer, and after my admittedly rare show of enthusiasm he was abashed to clue me in further. Fortunately the cab ride was over soon enough to make the polite silence seem almost correct.
What do you think, could a Little House on the Prairie meets Deadwood style MMO work? What work of fiction would you like to see made into an MMO? Share your thoughts in the Loading... forum, or send me an email!
Shayalyn's Epic Thread of the Day4 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 78 in April! 465 in 2009!
New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today [Thanks Phil Comeau for links and Real World News]
World of Warcraft: PvP Basics for the DruidReal World News
Woman killed by laptopThanks for visiting the Ten Ton Hammer network!
-Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer team