Marvel MMO: Death Knell

[Cthulhudrew]

Well, it's been rumored for several months now, but it has finally been officially confirmed. There will be no Marvel Superheroes MMO from Cryptic/Microsoft Games.

From the article, it was apparently decided that "there’s basically one that’s successful [Me- WoW?] and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success."

More like someone realized that the single draw of a Marvel MMO was the cast of Marvel characters, and that you could either play as Marvel characters- having thousands of Spider-Man, Sp!d&r_M@n, $pydrmn, etc. clones- or else create all original characters and have them pal around with the Marvel cast as sidekicks, teammates. Neither of which truly is all that exciting, IMO.

 

[Relique du Madde]

I think they looked at City of Heroes and sealized that CoH isn't doing as well as WoW... and that they could not come up with any ideas which are different from CoH besides from using Trademarked characters.

 

[trancejeremy]

MMORPGs are almost like pen & paper RPGs, almost completely dominated by one, except D&D is no where near as dominating as WoW. Still a majority marketshare, but leaving something for other companies to eek something out. Whereas WoW is probably 20x as bigg as its nearest competitor (like what, 10 million to half a million)

I think a Marvel MMORPG could work though. Have it work like Sword of the New World/Granado Espada - let players have a whole stable of characters and play 3-4 at a time, with the various famous heroes being unlockable via quests. And then they could have different costumes for the heroes and accessories. So things wouldn't be too bad, in terms of repetition.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

I think a Marvel MMORPG could work though. Have it work like Sword of the New World/Granado Espada - let players have a whole stable of characters and play 3-4 at a time, with the various famous heroes being unlockable via quests. And then they could have different costumes for the heroes and accessories. So things wouldn't be too bad, in terms of repetition.

How would that work as an MMO, though? If you've got thousands of people playing basically the same characters, don't you lose something in the immersion factor that people play MMOs for?

Or are you talking more along the lines of something "instanced", where you (and the people you team up with) select a particular mission, and choose characters for that mission, and then enter into it that way, without interacting with all the other people out there (like Guild Wars missions)?

 

[trancejeremy]

How would that work as an MMO, though? If you've got thousands of people playing basically the same characters, don't you lose something in the immersion factor that people play MMOs for?

Well, you might have that many people playing them, but considering you rarely have more than a few hundred at any given location at once, it would likely only be 20-30 people with the same character in the same area at most. Since not everyone would want to play Spiderman all the time (Wolverine, maybe, but not Spiderman).

And there would be some customization. Most superheroes have several uniforms, so they wouldn't necessarily look alike. Add in accessories, and you could easily be a unique version of the hero in an area.

I also don't know if immersion is really why people play MMOs, at least MMORPGs, becaue I don't think I've ever played one where people actually acted in character. Usually its more like a schoolyard than anything else. But comics are known for having many alternate universes, so it wouldn't be that out of place.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

From the article, it was apparently decided that "there’s basically one that’s successful [Me- WoW?] and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success."

More like someone realized that the single draw of a Marvel MMO was the cast of Marvel characters, and that you could either play as Marvel characters- having thousands of Spider-Man, Sp!d&r_M@n, $pydrmn, etc. clones- or else create all original characters and have them pal around with the Marvel cast as sidekicks, teammates. Neither of which truly is all that exciting, IMO.

No, they're telling the truth -- they either wanted to go big or not go at all. They dropped Vanguard off on Sony for the same reason. (And a good call that was.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think they looked at City of Heroes and sealized that CoH isn't doing as well as WoW... and that they could not come up with any ideas which are different from CoH besides from using Trademarked characters.

Good lord, I can come up with 20 ways to improve upon CoX without even trying hard. CoX is a freaking mess, especially for a purported superhero game.

CoX is the biggest superhero MMO only by virtue of being the ONLY superhero MMO.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

Good lord, I can come up with 20 ways to improve upon CoX without even trying hard. CoX is a freaking mess, especially for a purported superhero game.

It's definitely in need of something at the moment. I love the game, but I haven't even been active in quite some time, because it's just too much of the same thing all the time. Get a mish, go beat up villains/heroes, finish, repeat. There are some really great elements, but, yeah. The last really cool thing was the Rikti Invasion, with the revamped Rikti War Zone and the random raids, which were all fun. RWZ is a virtual graveyard these days, and forget about trying to get a ship raid together.

I'm hoping that now that NCSoft has it all to their lonesomes, there will be some great things coming down the line; I know that Cryptic kept them from doing at least a few things they wanted.

 

[Vigilance]

So things wouldn't be too bad, in terms of repetition.

Except that didn't really work well for Star Wars Galaxies, where they made the initial wave grind to become Jedi, heard a lot of complaints that they just wanted to play Jedi, then changed course, ALLOWING everyone to be a Jedi right from the start, thus making those early adopters who had done the grinding even more mad.

I think it would have been a better tack to treat a lot of the established franchises like guilds, so you go train at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, they send you on quests, which helps a mutant level up his powers, and eventually you're a full-fledged member of the X-men.

Non-mutants could go for Avengers, or SHIELD, and such.

And in a post-Civil War Marvel, there's plenty of room for PvP.

Still, I don't think any ideas we come up with would solve the fatal flaw of a Marvel MMO, which is that you can't actually play as the main characters of the setting. You could never be Iron man, or Spider Man, or Wolverine, or Captain America, so you were always going to be somewhat second string.

It's like that fantasy game world where the NPCs are way cooler than the PCs could ever be.

I think licensed MMOs have always failed for that reason. Maybe the rumored KOTOR MMO will solve that, though there they don't have to deal with the "glory NPC" problem, since there's no Luke, Han or Vader.

 

[trancejeremy]

Except that didn't really work well for Star Wars Galaxies, where they made the initial wave grind to become Jedi, heard a lot of complaints that they just wanted to play Jedi, then changed course, ALLOWING everyone to be a Jedi right from the start, thus making those early adopters who had done the grinding even more mad.

Well, my idea really isn't like that. If anything, it's closer to pokemon. Many of the marvel characters would be very easy to get. Just do a simple quest for them. The better characters would have more involved quests. Only a few would have a lot of time consuming grinding. And then every month (or few months or ep), they could add another couple of dozen heroes.

And then once you had a hero in your stable, you could do special storyline quests based around him. (Which might unlock more heroes).