- MMO: Massively Multiplayer Online…
- MMOG: Massively Multiplayer Online
Game
- MMOPW: Massively Multiplayer Online
Persistent World
- MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer
Role-playing Game
A darkened theater, a flickering movie screen. You, with a bucket of
popcorn (and maybe a hot date) in hand. Action fills the screen. And in
the back of your head, a little voice: "I want to do that.
I want to live that. I want to be that." A smuggler firing a blaster
at a rush of stormtroopers, a hero in armor making a last stand on a rampart
overwhelmed with orcs...
We live in an age where comics books are made into movies, movies are made
into console games, and console games are made into TV shows and collectable
card games. Popular licenses are bursting out of their media. So it's no
surprise that this feeding frenzy is attaching itself to the massively multiplayer
gaming movement. A massively multiplayer environment allows gamers to explore
a world more completely and interact with a license more intimately than
any other kind of media. Plus, MMOGs are just 'stickier:' they keep people
involved for months on end, keeping a license fresh for years. It's good
entertainment, and financially attractive to people with hot properties.
The fields, forests, towns, and caverns of
Middle-Earth are coming to a PC near you.
The rush is on. Star Wars Galaxies, released this past
Summer, was only the beginning. Middle Earth Online
Middle Earth Online |
is gearing up to bring The Lord of the Rings to life in
ways that the movies couldn't dream of. The Matrix Online
still secretive, is a real noodle bender: A virtual reality based on living
life inside a virtual reality? Games that have been popular elsewhere are
also making the leap to persistent worlds, classics like Warhammer,
WarCraft, or Dungeons & Dragons.
Will this new breed of licensed games crack the market wide open? What properties
lend themselves to epic social games such as these? Is the transition always
smooth? We rounded up the usual, and not-so-usual suspects to find out.
Why Build an MMOG from a Licensed Property?
"A big name draws attention, it's really that simple," argues
Sony Online Entertainment's Chief Creative Officer, Raph Koster. Koster's
work as Creative Director for Star Wars Galaxies brought
one of the most conspicuous of movie licenses to life. "Particularly
with some of the licenses that are getting worked on today (Star Wars, Tolkien,
D&D), you have worlds that people have loved and wished they could live
in for decades now. They're worlds that we all grew up on, that we want
to walk around in."
Christopher Taylor, the Vivendi Producer for Middle Earth
Online, also lists audience appeal as a big factor when considering
the business of marketing an MMOG. "The advantages of licensed properties
... are a lot like the advantages of licenses in traditional games,"
he says. "You get to play in well-known worlds... and you can get a
lot more people to look at your game... Having a well-known name on your
box means it's easier to sell it to the retailers and more likely you will
have a casual shopper pick up the box."
So licensed games are easier to market. But are they any easier to develop?
A big advantage is that the groundwork for the game is already set down.
Nobody knows this more than Jeff Anderson, the President and CEO of Turbine
Entertainment software. Fresh from releasing the graphically advanced Asheron's
Call 2, his company is working on two huge licenses: Middle-Earth
Online, based on Tolkien's Lord of the Rings world, and Dungeons
& Dragons Online, based on the classic pen-and-paper RPG. "One
of the biggest advantages that a licensed property provides is letting the
developers focus on making a good game without getting lost in the minutia,"
Anderson explains. "In many cases, the settings have been established,
the monsters have been thought up, and so on. This allows us to roll up
our sleeves and get to work on the stories, art, and adventures -- and making
the game fun. Creatively, the team loves it."
Was
Star Wars the perfect fit for an online game?
But is it too restrictive for the creative types? "It cuts both ways,"
Koster tells us. "You get a huge leg up on c
Star Wars Galaxies |
ontent, on backstory, on all that sort of thing. The license itself often
conjures up images of the gameplay, so some game design work gets done for
you. But at the same time, sometimes the 'obvious gameplay' that a license
suggests may not actually translate into something fun or balanceable."
But such limitations can be overcome. "I liken it to a canvas that
a painter works on," Koster continues. "If you're an artist, and
all you have is black and white and a 3 inch square canvas, you can still
make something great ... constraints can be good things, and licenses offer
really interesting constraints, which can make for really
interesting games." (He hastens to add: "It can make for sucky
ones, too, but I don't think that is necessarily because of the license.")
Robin Dews, the General Manager of Warhammer Online Ltd., is hard at work
bringing the Warhammer world to a massively multiplayer environment. Like
the others, his company is dealing with creative assets that have been around
for years, and admits it can be trying. "The team doesn't have the
freedom to simply resolve gameplay or design issues by coming up with an
invented solution," he explains. "It always has to be referenced
back to the IP [Intellectual Property] to ensure that it remains
coherent."
Developing from an existing
property, like Warhammer, gives developers a leg up.
Will Wright, creator of The Sims Online is pragmatic about
licensing content. "There's definitely a content advantage," he
admits. "We had developed a lot of content and graphics that we were
able to reuse [between The Sims and Sims
Online]. But there's also a 'property expectation' disadvantage.
I think a lot of people came in [to Sims Online]
expecting a lot more freeform gameplay or a lot more control. I think it's
a similar problem with Galaxies, they came in with a set
of expectations
Warhammer |
related to the Star Wars experience. But not everyone
can be Luke Skywalker!"
Across the board, however, the advantages of licensing an existing game
world outweighed any problems the developers are encountering. Dews is ecstatic.
"We've often joked internally that Warhammer Online
has been twenty years in the making, and that's because it sits astride
a game world that has been in continuous development since the early 80s
and that has spawned not only a tabletop battles game, but an impressive
role-playing system, book, artwork, comics, fiction, miniatures, and of
course computer games ... the dev team don't have to spend their time 'inventing'
new material and generating yet another cod fantasy property." He continues:
"The computer game market is simply saturated with indistinguishable
fantasy and sci-fi clones and so having a world that genuinely has been
developed over time and through a range of media does, I believe, give you
a good head start."
Anderson, waist-deep in Middle-Earth Online development,
put it even stronger: "If you think about it, it's like having J.R.R.
Tolkien on your design staff."
What Games Lend Themselves to Massively Multiplayer Incarnations?
Just because a license is popular doesn't mean it lends itself to an online
game world. Some of the most recognizable franchises around just aren't
cut from the right mold. "Character pieces are tough," admits
Galaxies' Koster. He cites an example from another Lucas
property: "Much as I love the Indiana Jones movies,
there's no sense there of it being an experiment in worldbuilding. I can
see an MMO set in that time period with similar characteristics, but it
wouldn't necessarily be an Indy game."
What types of licenses do work? "Rich, robust worlds
are the best choice for these kinds of products," says Turbine's Anderson.
"The world needs to be well-developed with a detailed back-story, memorable
places, unique races/classes and strong characters."
"It's like having J.R.R. Tolkien on your design staff."
Middle Earth Online |
Will Wright likes to clarify the differences between games and other types
of media. "Books and movies are by definition very linear properties,
as seen from a single protagonist's point of view. That's very
hard to put into an online world," he asserts. "What works is
an environment, a place, something like a Disneyland, with no strictly narrative
base. You want an environment laden with narrative opportunities. Something
like Star Trek: When you think of Star Trek,
you don't think of one particular plotline or even one particular group
of characters."
Most agree that great licensed games have to be based on a sense of place,
as opposed to character. Although Dews is working on Warhammer
Online, he was quick to point out the advantages of the Star
Wars universe: "[You need] worlds that have depth, breadth,
detail, atmosphere, populated by cool characters but paradoxically also
worlds that are not too tightly defined. Star Wars is
a great license because although it has a narrative based upon the characters
in the films, it also has a bigger back-story -- the conflict between the
empire and the rebels -- that can sustain the involvement of a lot of players.
That's why it has been able to support a whole range of games from X-wing
onwards."
It's a difficult call to make. Among the biggest complaints for Star
Wars Galaxies is that players never get to feel like the epic hero,
the light-saber-swinging Jedi portrayed in the movies or single-player computer
games. Middle-Earth Online might suffer from the same
problems, as Dews describes: "at its core, it is the story of the key
characters and their journey to Mount Doom. It is highly narrative and highly
character-driven. This makes it much more difficult to offer up to thousands
of players in an MMOG environment -- do they all have to get to Mordor?"
Anderson has some thoughts on the matter, which brings us to:
Books to Massively Multiplayer. Case Study: Middle-Earth
Online
When filmmaker Peter Jackson set out to create epic movies based on the
Lord of the Rings novels, he was forced to make some tough
decisions: what scenes he could include, what he needed to accomplish visually,
what had to be cut to keep the movies viewable in a single sitting -- tough
stuff. The Middle-Earth Online team is facing similar
challenges bringing the novels to life in a completely different medium.
Fortunately, they've got a rich fiction to work from. Not only can they
tackle places that the movies didn't (such as the horrific Barrow Downs
from the first book), they can also flesh out places that the fiction only
mentioned in passing. "Middle-Earth Online gives
us an opportunity to develop critical details only hinted at in the books,
like where the Nazgul came from," says Turbine CEO Jeff Anderson.
"Middle-Earth Online can explore places even
the books didn't visit in detail."
Middle Earth Online |
Tolkien's prose, rich and descriptive, left generations of readers with
very clear images in their heads of what to expect. Anderson isn't intimidated
trying to bring this into the game world: "Ultimately, no matter what
game you're making, you're always converting things from a printed page
into something real. Usually the stuff on the page is written by a design
team. In our case, The Lord of the Rings is written by one of the best authors
of the 20th century."
Some design decisions just have no ideal solution. "A perfect example
of this predicament is the size of the world. Some fans think that it should
be 1:1 scale, taking months to cross in real-time. Others think it should
be traversable in 10 minutes," Anderson tells us. "Clearly, someone
is going to be disappointed!"
But then we come around to the sticky point mentioned earlier. Is the Lord
of the Rings world driven by a small group of heroic characters? How
exactly can that translate to an online community with hundreds of thousands
of players trying to be the hero?
It was definitely a design concern from day one. "The solution is to
embrace the full scope of the license," Anderson explains. "MEO
might be a story about a small group of people but it touches the lives
of an entire world. The Fellowship doesn't just drift through Middle-Earth,
it brings chaos and turmoil wherever it goes. In our game, the Nazgul ride
again, the Barrow Wights hunt for new sacrifices, Old Man Willow plots his
revenge and the depths of Moria echo with screams of rage. With the Balrog
fallen, there is a vacuum of power and ancient demos rise from the darkness
to fill it. The players must choose -- do they wish to battle the Shadow
as it closes behind the Fellowship or do they want to join it and vie for
the honor of sitting by its right hand?"
A similar issue has been faced down by the most anticipated MMOG in recent
years, Star Wars Galaxies.
Movies
to Massively Multiplayer. Case Study: Star Wars Galaxies
Unlike books, movies come with built-in imagery. Generations of gamers have
scenes of Star Wars burned into their heads: The rush
of white-clad stormtroopers, the lines of the Millennium Falcon, the glitter
of alien eyes surveying a smoke-filled cantina, the glowing blade of a light
saber.
Dealing with such a powerful license in a format as intimate as an MMOG
was tough. Raph Koster makes no bones about it: "Oh God yes. Fortunately,
LucasArts was very involved and supplied all the help we could need. But
even so -- making a virtual world of Star Wars is probably
something that you can't ever get 'quite right' -- there's so many people
out there with their visions of what it should be."
"No Jedi here? Dealing with a strong license can be a
blessing and a curse."
Star Wars Galaxies |
But the passion that people bring to a licensed game can help make it stronger.
"It's a liability because you cannot mimic their dreams," explains
Koster, referring to the Star Wars fan base. "But
it's an advantage because their dreams are what bring them to the game,
and then they bring their dreams to the game and it makes the game better."
Star Wars fiction presents a problem, however, in that
-- even more so than Lord of the Rings -- it was a mythical
story about certain unique characters. The dreams of the players were in
many cases dreams of being Jedi, wielding powers that by definition had
to be rare. "[That's] the toughest design problem in the game,"
Koster admits. "Jedi should be superpowerful. Jedi should be rare.
Everyone wants to be a Jedi and 'we'll complain on forums and in reviews
if you don't let us be one.' So we need a world full of superpowerful, rare
Jedi. Riiiiiight..." Their solution: "Our choice was to make them
rare, and live with the lumps. It felt like what was honest to the fiction."
Honesty to the fiction is a theme MMOG developers dealing with licensed
products come back to again and again, no matter how difficult the decisions
have to be. Matrix Online, another movie-to-MMOG conversion
is facing down the same problem: not everybody can be "the one."
Otherwise, he wouldn't be The One, now would he? The Matrix
Online team has an attack plan, but isn't ready to go public with details
just yet.
On the surface, converting existing games to massively multiplayer game
worlds would appear easier, but that's not always the case...
Games to Massively Multiplayer. Case Studies: Warhammer
Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and Uru:
Ages Beyond Myst
Is it easier to convert a tabletop or single-player PC game into a massively
multiplayer world? At the outset, one would think it would be simpler. Players
are already familiar with the game world and dealing with it interactively.
Then again, just ask The Sims Online team. This enormous
effort was supposed to crack the mainstream market wide open by taking the
best-selling PC game of all time and bringing it online. And while the online
subscription numbers are nothing to sneeze at, they don't come anywhere
near the figures for the original game.
Clearly it's not that easy.
"Sims Online
may look similar, but the game experience was very different than its offline
counterpart."
The Sims Online |
Will Wright spearheaded the creation of Sims Online,
and he points out how different the two games had to be. "If you
looked over someone's shoulder, they looked very similar. But they were
radically different games," Wright tells us. "An online game
forces you to make certain design choices that you can't get around. I
always thought of this as experimental: 'How do we take this and do the
changes required for multiplayer?'" He points out that an even bigger
problem revolved around a new payment model given his mainstream target
audience. "Getting people to subscribe to a game, particularly casual
players, is a real challenge."
Rand Miller, co-founder of Cyan Worlds, is no stranger to successful mainstream
games. He and his brother created Myst, the CD-Rom phenomenon
that to date has sold over 12 million units worldwide. And, like The
Sims, his company is trying to channel that success into an online
world. Uru: Ages Beyond Myst has just gone gold and
will be released next month, offering an ongoing multiplayer component
to the normally solitary Myst adventures. But what did
Miller think of Sims Online?
"Sims Online was a different game from The
Sims, but the play simply migrated toward the existing crop of online
games," Miller concludes. "Instead of taking advantage of the
unique entertainment The Sims had to offer, the online
version became much more like a leveling game. In that process it lost
some of what appealed to the mass market."
In contrast, Miller hopes that Uru will capture the
spirit of the Myst franchise. "We're simply trying
to expand the experience that people enjoyed so much in Myst with what
'online' has to offer. First, the ability to have worlds that never end
-- using the online connection to provide ongoing content. And second,
the potential to explore the worlds with others."
"In Uru, players can explore ever-changing content
... together."
Uru, Ages Beyond Myst |
If loyalty to the fiction was tantamount in bringing movies to an MMOG environment,
a loyalty to the original game experience is key when creating worlds based
on existing games. That's certainly the case with Dungeons
& Dragons Online, the MMOG version of the granddaddy of all roleplaying
games. Jeff Anderson and his team at Turbine are working on this potential
blockbuster, as well. "The best part about D&D has always been
the social aspect -- hanging out with friends and going on adventures 'together,'"
Anderson explains. "That is the essence of D&D, and it also is
the essence of massively multiplayer role-playing games. So, in many ways
the D&D rule set lends itself perfectly to online play."
But do the rules ever get in the way? Can a tabletop game intended for small
groups ever apply to an enormous online world with hundreds of thousands
of players? Anderson's team is trying to keep the D&D 'feel' by establishing
private dungeons, much like they're doing in Ultima
X: Odyssey. "Occasionally, the official D&D rules come into
conflict with some of the more traditional MMP expectations. In those cases
we usually come down on D&D's side," Anderson admits. "We
decided that it was better to push on the notions of what makes an MMP rather
than change the best role-playing game of all time."
Another way the designers intend to keep a D&D 'feel' is through what
Anderson calls the "small world" philosophy. "We want players
to experience a strong sense of community in D&D Online,
where they felt like their actions and relationships were significant,"
he says. "By having smaller in-game populations, worlds with dense
adventuring and social spaces, players won't get lost in anonymous hordes
of strangers. The small-worlds approach helps us be true to both D&D
and good online game play."
"D&D Online aims to capture the essence of table-top play."
D&D Online |
In contrast, the Warhammer license is all about scale.
We return to Robin Dews, general manager for Warhammer Online Ltd. He, too,
is taking a well-established game franchise and bringing it online. According
to Dews, "Warhammer is interesting, because it was designed from the
outset as a game world that could sustain the ambitions of thousands of
players who would be engaged in tabletop battles and role-playing sessions.
It has breadth, depth and characters..."
Dews doesn't see the leap online as a big one for this particular property.
The table-top miniatures game is a phenomenon among players who can afford
it, but Dews is quick to point out that "it is simply one realization"
of the game world. "We see the Warhammer world as exactly that ...
a real world that we can explore and discover in as many ways as possible:
Tabletop battles, role-play games, miniatures, artwork, novels, and so on.
Massively multiplayer games are simply one of those opportunities,"
Dews tells us. "...In addition, we also have the legacy of some very
innovative and well-developed core mechanics from the Warhammer fantasy
role-play system that are particularly suited to character development within
an MMORPG..."
From fantasy dungeons to Middle Earth to galaxies far away, every licensed
game tackles a world. But they don't do it alone.
"That Wouldn't Happen in MY World!": Managing
a License Typically a game is created through the efforts of a developer
who has a vision and a publisher who wants to enable it to happen. Licensed
games add a third player to the mix: The owner of the original property.
Is it difficult to work under those additional constraints when developing
an MMOG? Embroiled in current projects, naturally none of the developers
we talked to admitted to any difficulty managing the relationships between
the license holder and the game design team. But everyone made it clear
that it was a lot of work to make sure everyone communicated smoothly.
Christopher Taylor, Vivendi's Middle-Earth Online producer,
talked about the steps Vivendi has taken: "We hired several consultants
to go over all the lore, artwork, and audio before we present it to the
license holder. That way we get pre-approvals before formal submissions.
It shows how much we take the license seriously and saves them time,"
He continues: "It also involves education about out development process,
what makes a good game great, and our choices of implementing the licensed
material."
"How tall should my Wookie be? The license holder gets
the final say in all content."
Star Wars Galaxies |
The Star Wars license, next to Star Trek,
is one of the most fiercely monitored properties in fiction. But Raph Koster
was pleased at how smoothly the relationship between Lucas and the design
team panned out during Galaxy's development. "It
hasn't been that hard to manage in SWG's case, though
it takes constant work," he told us. "You just need to keep those
phone and email lines open, send off everything you're thinking about, get
the answers back. It does slow things down a little bit, but it's worth
it for the extra care you take." "I have heard horror stories
about it with other licensed titles in the industry," Koster continues.
"I think the place where you run into trouble is with licensors who
don't understand games, and game developers who don't understand the license.
Putting yet another kart game or yet another shooter on top of any old
license isn't necessarily the right thing to do for the license, and having
non-game designers design the game isn't really that smart either. But
when you work in an atmosphere of mutual respect, then it can really be
a fairly pain-free experience."
Turbine's Jeff Anderson, who's juggling two enormous licenses right now,
knows the work involved and also the pitfalls. "On the harder side
is potentially falling into an ego-trap. When you're creating a big-name
game the designers can feel like they have to come up with an uber-design,
putting their own unique stamp on the project so that their work doesn't
get swallowed by the IP. But the best thing we can do to make Middle-Earth
Online and D&D Online successes is to respect
the franchises and get out of the way," Anderson says. "The
design teams are really strong and talented, but we believe that the surest
path to success is to trust the franchise."
The Promise of a Licensed Game, Fulfilled!
And so we return to the darkened movie theatre. Popcorn, and perhaps the
same hot date, in hand. Action fills the screen, but this time, the voice
in the back of your head says with pride: "Been there, done that. Lived
that." That's the promise of licensed worlds.
"The worlds
of D&D and Middle-Earth are first
and foremost exciting places to be alive. While the franchise might have
tales about a particular band of heroes, there are always new stories to
be written and new tales to be wrought," beams Turbine's Jeff Anderson.
"New concept art for D&D Online."
D&D Online |
Warhammer's Robin Dews is equally excited. "We have the advantage of
being able to reveal [the Warhammer] world to the players in ways
they've simply never experienced it before. Orcs that grunt and move and
fight, Skaven that scuttle through dark and dank sewers and so on..."
Rand Miller is chomping at the bit, eager to see how going online can propel
the Myst license forward. "Exploring is enhanced
enormously by the fact that the content isn't locked down on CD or DVD.
It's completely dynamic --- growing and changing all the time. Explorers
won't just wonder what's around the next corner, they'll wonder what's around
the next corner today."
Dews agrees: "The beauty of an MMORPG is that the launch of the game
is merely the start of the journey. Only when your world starts to be populated
by players does it really come alive and that's a moment in the life of
Warhammer Online I'm greatly looking forward to..."
The same could be said for millions of players, eager to jump into their
favorite worlds in a new medium... |
