Gaming Signal: Can A SF MMO Be Successful?

Can A SF MMO Be Successful?

Over at pOtshOt, they've written an article discussing the differences between fantasy and SF based MMO's. He goes into quite a bit of detail and offers his thought's as to why SF-based MMOs haven't been successful: basically he posits that SF MMO's haven't been sufficiently story-driven to appeal to the mass market.

I have to disagree. First, look at Eve Online. Certainly it's not mass market, but it has been successful and it has no storylines whatsoever, everything is player created as far as stories go. Earth & Beyond had a potentially interesting story, it just unfolded too slow to them any good (plus the fact that you were almost always in your ship). Heck, Star Wars Galaxies had the ultimate, from a fan perspective, story to work from and Sony still managed to auger that one in.

I guess it could be a lack of decent storytelling, but I think iits more to do with science fiction in general and how people perceive it more than anything else. SF is always seen as the domain of the geeky and nerdy. Never mind the fact you can find excellent stories, as good or better than elsewhere, in SF, the perception is that it is camp and goofy, filled with BEM, laser pistols and scantily clad women (sadly for Tim, Grace Park isn't in the general public's imagination).

This perception also seems to be held by the people who pay the money to create an MMO. They know SF based MMOs don't do well and are very reluctant to fund one. Maybe Tabula Rasa will break the mold, but I'm not too sure about that.

In short, unless science fiction as a genre begins to appeal to a wider audience, I think SF MMOs have a tough road to follow. Even with the success of shows like Heroes and LOST I don't see general public opinion changing anytime soon.

What is successful?
Successful in that your game made a lot of money for a bunch of suits?
-OR-
Successful that you made a really fun game?

If we are talking about success for the suits, then yeah there has not been a successful game yet. But if you just mean success for the sake of the game then I submit that Anarchy Online was a very successful MMO. I would even submit that AO made the suits happy as well with the much more recent "Advertising supported" free version of AO.

AO's instance zones is in my opinion the best implementation of instanced zones yet. They are easy to use, don't require making your whole team transport to the zone, they auto scale the encounter difficulty to the strength of the team entering the zone.

I don't think WoW, or EQ2 instance zones scale like that.

Posted by tditto on Monday August 06, 2007 at 10:49 AM