The Firefly MMOG: Here’s Hoping They Get It Right
Wired News is reporting on an upcoming Firefly MMOG, from Multiverse. While I’m pretty much convinced this can only end up in the vast heap of MMOG failures, there’s a remote chance it could be really really good.
I still hold Elite Plus and TradeWars 2002 as the gold standard of space sims. After playing Everquest for the first time, my immediate thought was how awesome a MMO space sim would be. When EVE Online came out, I figured somebody had finally done it. They came extremely close, but the game just wasn’t that good.
The main thing Elite and TW2002 had that EVE didn’t was the ability to feel important. This is a problem with most MMOs, but World of Warcraft and City of Heroes both handled it extremely well. They basically take the attitude that you can either play in a player-vs-player environment, a cooperative instance, or a parallel single player reality.
Previous games, like Everquest, involved mostly sitting around, waiting for a monster to appear from thin air, then trying to beat the other dozen guys to it. This led to a game that was mostly a boring grind, trying to do your time in the dungeons until you can get up to the higher levels where the game actually becomes fun, mostly because there’s less competition and you have more chance to play.
Instances were a big help to this sort of grind. This means you can enter an area alone or with a group, and you’re the only ones there, as far as you can tell. There are of course others there, but they’re all in their own instances. This gives the experience of a single-player or small cooperative game, but with the added benefit of a massive social environment surrounding it. The PvP content in WoW (granted, it was mostly stolen from Dark Ages of Camelot) added another dimension to this by allowing massive battlefields with gameplay much like a First Person Shooter. All this, while retaining the exploration and loot accumulation of the original MMORPG formula made for a really fun game.
EVE Online doesn’t have this. It has a lot of flying around and mining asteroids. The real fun of the game itself is mostly in the political corporate intrigue and the ships. Unfortunately, these things are actually really awesome and done very well. The problem is that the game itself sucks.
A Firefly MMOG could fix this. Take Firefly’s aesthetics. Dirty rust-buckets, old beat up space stations. Take the focus off how boring space is by giving the player something else to look at. The only way to do this is by moving much of the action inside the ship. Take the tribes approach, and let multiple players cooperate in the same ship: a pilot, a gunner, a mechanic, etc. Firefly was about the crew, not the ship, or even the captain.
Once you have dedicated gunners and pilots, you have the ability to make it a more skill-based game. This would have the added benefit of taking away some of the advantage gained by simply having played longer and built up skills. You could still allow some of this, by letting players build up skills and money to buy their own ship and captain it, but a player with a good twitch could jump right in and become the best gunner or pilot in the game, on somebody else’s ship.
With a decent ranking system like in most online games these days, a casual gunner could jump in and post himself up for hire. A captain looking to go on a mission could then browse a board showing his ranking and price, and hire him for an hour or two.
I can’t think of any other game style that would lend itself to such universal appeal, allowing casual action games and hard-core MMOG grinders entirely separate roles to play together. Of course, this won’t actually happen. We’re talking about a video game based on a TV show with a rabid fan base. They’ll probably just take an Everquest clone, set all the textures to black, and swap out the orcs with reavers.
