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Topic: Star Control MMO: Good idea or bad? (Read 12802 times)
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Alvarin
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Nah, probes have a story behind them and...
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Are you saying I will be able to make them stop behaving like that and, better yet, force them to self destruct?
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Draxas
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Just take a look at what Lukipela's game SC:BEL tells us about the star control universe. The story is told by the world around you and the people(npc's) in it. That's better than some alien with a squeeky voice blurting out walls of text about how the event happened  .
These are two different beasts. BEL is the way it is because it's a very dynamic game, which is because it's being run by a human being, not a computer. The game master is able to observe player responses to various scenarios and adapt to unexpected situations on the fly in order to help the game feel more alive; suffice to say, this is not something a computer would be capable of. It also bears mentioning that BEL is far from an MMO; if it were an MMO, there would be 50 other players running around the Ilwrath temple, all the good loot would be gone (and the less useful stuff scattered across the floor randomly), all the mobs would be clustered up and aggro since someone ran through the level and killed the High Priest to try and get the high level drops, and our infiltrators would be under attack by a group of max level Shofixtis, because only noobs play any of the other races and griefing is fun. It's very difficult (if not impossible) to tell a coherent story in an environment like that.
Nah, probes have a story behind them and...
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Are you saying I will be able to make them stop behaving like that and, better yet, force them to self destruct?
Ofcourse!
You lie. Both blatantly and poorly.
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Angelfish
Enlightened
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Posts: 568
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Just take a look at what Lukipela's game SC:BEL tells us about the star control universe. The story is told by the world around you and the people(npc's) in it. That's better than some alien with a squeeky voice blurting out walls of text about how the event happened . These are two different beasts. BEL is the way it is because it's a very dynamic game, which is because it's being run by a human being, not a computer. The game master is able to observe player responses to various scenarios and adapt to unexpected situations on the fly in order to help the game feel more alive; suffice to say, this is not something a computer would be capable of. It also bears mentioning that BEL is far from an MMO; if it were an MMO, there would be 50 other players running around the Ilwrath temple, all the good loot would be gone (and the less useful stuff scattered across the floor randomly), all the mobs would be clustered up and aggro since someone ran through the level and killed the High Priest to try and get the high level drops, and our infiltrators would be under attack by a group of max level Shofixtis, because only noobs play any of the other races and griefing is fun. It's very difficult (if not impossible) to tell a coherent story in an environment like that.
1) I was talking about the way that a world can tell a story, not about the fact that in this case there's a game-master present and in the other case it's pre-programmed in a very well done way. WoW is incredibly well designed in that aspect, but I guess since you have never played it you can't be a judge on that  .
2) About 50 players running around at once: I guess you have never heard about instances . I could explain this to you but I guess you're more interested in making your own point than learning about other games .
Nah, probes have a story behind them and...
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Are you saying I will be able to make them stop behaving like that and, better yet, force them to self destruct?
Ofcourse!
You lie. Both blatantly and poorly.
[/quote][/quote]
Oh dear, but atleast I'm not pretending to know anything about a game that I don't like and haven't played before .
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Draxas
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Actually star control 2 protects its homeworlds in the very same way . Unlimited ships around a homeworld? Unlimited guards around Thrall  .
While this works in SC2, it doesn't in WoW, since he still can be killed anyway. Besides, you've glommed onto a fairly irrelevant point here anyway, since the idea is that it destroys the effect of the world building.
Tangentially, if WoW is so great at world building, how do you reconcile that with the mess its made of its own canon?
Which server and race/class did you play? I played an UD warlock on Kor'gall EU.
I've already mentioned I've never played WoW, and never will. This doesn't mean I haven't tried other MMOs before, nor does it mean I haven't done a fair bit of research on the game and its characters. But I couldn't care less about character builds or server names, as those things are entirely irrelevant to me, and this discussion.
It proves that it's still possible to have fun despite people who act like assholes .
Maybe for you. I have a very low tolerance level for that flavor of BS. Most people I know feel the same way.
you are missing the point here .
How so? It is, as you say, a "fact of life" that these sort of people are attracted to MMOs, seemingly for the sole purpose that their brand of "fun" involves making as many others miserable as possible. Why would we want to attract this demographic to any game at all?
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Angelfish
Enlightened
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Actually star control 2 protects its homeworlds in the very same way . Unlimited ships around a homeworld? Unlimited guards around Thrall . While this works in SC2, it doesn't in WoW, since he still can be killed anyway. Besides, you've glommed onto a fairly irrelevant point here anyway, since the idea is that it destroys the effect of the world building.
And that idea is wrong, since it also rarely happens at all.
Tangentially, if WoW is so great at world building, how do you reconcile that with the mess its made of its own canon?
That's not true. WoW is wonderfully faithful to its own canon. Almost all of the regions and characters that were n the Warcraft RTS games are also visitable in WoW (if they hadn't been killed or somehow disappeared). Surely there were some shortcuts, but any game or series has to make those to serve gameplay/storytelling needs.
Which server and race/class did you play? I played an UD warlock on Kor'gall EU. I've already mentioned I've never played WoW, and never will. This doesn't mean I haven't tried other MMOs before, nor does it mean I haven't done a fair bit of research on the game and its characters. But I couldn't care less about character builds or server names, as those things are entirely irrelevant to me, and this discussion.
That's what I've guessed, and I'm also guessing that your research is flawed since I have actually played the game and see little truth in what you're saying .
It proves that it's still possible to have fun despite people who act like assholes . Maybe for you. I have a very low tolerance level for that flavor of BS. Most people I know feel the same way.
Then I guess my tolerance is a bit higher. It's the same as playing in a football team. Surely there are some people you don't like or behave like assholes, but that's not a reason to quit the team altogether .
you are missing the point here .
How so? It is, as you say, a "fact of life" that these sort of people are attracted to MMOs, seemingly for the sole purpose that their brand of "fun" involves making as many others miserable as possible. Why would we want to attract this demographic to any game at all?
[/quote][/quote]
Because it is and always will be a minorty. 95% of the people who play MMO's are actually fun to hang around with .
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Mad Cat
Zebranky food
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I've been thinking for the last little while that a Star Control MMO would be an awesome idea, provided it was done right. And by "done right" I mean that it would not be the usual re-skin of WoW that so many MMOs are nowadays. It would have to have many innovate features in it that currently do not exist in any game I've played so far. Such as?
Such as having both ship combat and ground combat with an "away team" if you will. I know Star Trek Online has this, but it doesn't seem very well implemented. They seem to have taken a Mass Effect style approach to the combat. But what if you had a more RTS style combat system with your away team?
Either way, with an away team, allied AI would have to be considerably better than what exists today.
The reason most MMOs are just like WoW is because WoW is phenomenally successful, and the "follow the leader" mentality is a time-honored tradition in every type of media humanity has ever produced. Your desired features would have to be pretty amazing to justify breaking the quick-buck mold that many companies fit their MMO games into.
I think the fact that pretty much every WoW-clone has failed in some sense would be a wake up call to the industry that you CANNOT compete with WoW, and therefore, should not. If an MMO feels like WoW with a different skin, players will not play that game for one of two reasons:
a) they hate WoW and therefore hate the MMO copying it
b) they like WoW and see no reason to play another WoW-clone when they could just go play WoW, especially when the number of players is greater and the game polish is better in WoW.
But I'm curious as to why people think a Star Control MMO would be a bad idea. More often than not the complaint I see against an MMO idea is that people are allergic to paying $15 a month to play a game (though few are allergic to paying $15 to watch a dumb two-hour 3D movie), or that they automatically assume that the worst parts of the MMO genre will be the main features of the game (ok, this is slightly understandable given history,but still...). That latter point is a major sore spot for me. As I've mentioned, I don't have scores of friends who are into online gaming (in fact, I don't have any friends who are into online gaming, really), so I would be going it alone both with and against the teeming hordes from the Intarwebz. I play games to relax and entertain myself, not deal with GIFs, and I don't want to be forced to do so.
I only have a couple friends who play games (and then, mostly very casually) as well, and like you, I play games to relax and have fun. I don't see why not having friends who play games you play should be an obstacle. At the very least, if you like playing games with other (like-minded) people, then you will have the opportunity to meet said people in MMOs.
That monthly payment is also a major sticking point for me as well. I buy games to own them, not rent them by the month.
I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding here about how MMOs and other game genres work. MMOs are not like other games that you buy and throw away when you are done with them. They are more like a service you pay for. The good ones like WoW, at least, are constantly being updated with fixes and content patches. There is also stuff like server maintenance, technical support, customer support, et al in addition to all the content patches, game changes, and bug fixes. The money to pay for all that has to come from somewhere.
I also tend to pick up most titles after they've been greatly reduced in price (my typical price point for most games is $20 or less).
That's fine. I paid $20 for my copy of WoW.
Paying $15 a month for the priveledge of playing an MMO is like rebuying the game every month, as far as I'm concerned. Not to mention the fact that if I'm continuously spending money in order to play a game, I feel like that money is wasted whenever I decide not to play. Guilt-based gaming is not something that appeals to me either.
Well, it depends on how much time you spend on a game. Over a three year period I have roughly paid for 30 months of game time at $15 per month. Plus the initial $20 I paid for WoW, and the roughly $130 for the two expansion packs (I bought one of the collector's editions), this comes out to roughly $600 over three years.
This seems like an excessive amount of money. However, I have about 100 days played on all my characters in WoW (NOTE: I have only ONE max-level character, on whom I spent 95+ days; the other 5 days were spent on very low level characters I experimented with for a little while, so it's not like I have an army of high-level alts - far from it, actually). The gametime played per character is tracked in game, so the 100 days (and that's whole, 24-hour days) is NOT an estimate. Over 32 months (the extra two months are for the first free month, two 10-day trials and some bonus days for downtime), that comes out to roughly 2.5 hours of gameplay per day. Not exactly a hardcore number of hours, is it?
Now let's put them together: $600 total paid / 2400 hours of gameplay = $0.25 / hour of game play. And please remember this is NOT an estimate - all the money and gametime you spent in game is tracked and available for you to see in your account management page. You can use this to calculate your own numbers if you wish. So, if, say, you only play half as often as me (so about 1.25 hours per day, or 9 hours per week), you'd pay twice as much, which is still only 50 cents / hour.
With that being said, find me a game or other form of entertainment that comes out to be as cheap. I doubt you will find many. (And I say "many" only because I paid $10 for Star Control 2 and got many hours of fun out of it
Incidentally, I don't got to the movies very often since I feel like the ticket prices are exorbitant. However, paying $15 for a movie ticket vs. $15 a month for an MMO subscription is hardly a valid comparison. You pay once to see a film, and that's it, film's over. There's nothing forcing you to continue paying, for example, an additional $5 every half hour in order to keep watching or the screen shuts down... Not to mention that you can make a one-time purchase of the DVD and then watch the movie as many times as you like with no additional fees.
$15 ticket / 2 hour movie = $7.5 / hour. $7.5 / $0.25 = 30. Thus, a movie costs roughly 30 times more than playing an MMO (15 times more if you play half as often as I do).
It's not surprising you don't want to pay to go to the movies, but I don't see your argument that movie prices are somehow better.
There is also another concern: I don't think an MMO would be able to tell the kind of story we have come to expect from Star Control.
That's one of the challenges / innovations I mentioned earlier. At some point, someone will have to do something different.
One of the most well-loved aspects of SC2 is the story, and that is also one of the things that the average MMO either glosses over or doesn't even bother with at all, because it's very difficult to tell a cohesive story in an environment where thousands of players exist simultaneously, and all are at different points in that story. It's also tends not to be a worthwhile effort, since about half or more of them couldn't care less about the story, and are just there to grind levels/run raids/gank noobs.
Well, that is true to some extent. I do think devs care about the story in an MMO, though. If the story sucked, few people would not like it, as it is the story and setting that ultimately give the MMO it's flavour and atmosphere.
However, you are correct that the type of story and it's delivery is different in an MMO than in a single-player game. But then, I'd say that's one of the strengths of the MMO genre.
Instead of being limited to one storyline throughout the game, you can take part in multiple ongoing storylines throughout the galaxy.
Instead of being the godlike figure who gets everything done, you are part of a team or larger organization of people who help make things better (or worse) in the galaxy.
It's a different kind of story and a different kind of storytelling, but I don't see how this is a bad thing. And given the disappointing mediocrity of Star Control 3, I don't think there are many out there who wouldn't want to give something new a try.
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« Last Edit: September 18, 2010, 03:09:11 am by Mad Cat »
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Admiral Zeratul
*Many bubbles*
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I enjoy overthinking things.
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95% of the people who play MMO's are actually fun to hang around with .
You made this statistic up. Not every game is the same, MMO or otherwise. Different games attract different audiences. I have played MMO's before. Some of them, for whatever reason, have greater proportions of troublesome players than others. The difference is often quite extreme. In one game I may rarely, if ever, encounter such unwanted pests, while in another I might never get through a single gaming session without having to deal with them. At the time I still played MMO's, my gaming sessions were very extensive, which means this finding cannot just be a coincidence.
You do not know what kinds of people this idea of yours would entice. Sure, we could get lucky for a while and have no trolls, punks, or whomever to spoil our fun. It will most likely start out with only a very small and manageable community, but keep in mind that griefers and the like can be all the more disruptive among small groups.
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Priority override. New behavior dictated. Must break post into component ideas.
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Mad Cat
Zebranky food
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What indeed is the point of the MMO storytelling method if new players know nothing about Star Control (and most of them won't) ?
To explore the Star Control universe? Why do you assume previous knowledge of the franchise is required to play an MMO? Do you think all 12 million WoW players played Warcraft 3?
When you're trying to figure out the story of Thrall, while 40 other people are trying to kill him, it tends to lessen the effect and cheapen the world as a whole. And he's one that actually takes a lot of people to kill off, never mind the less protected NPCs.
What do you mean by "trying to figure out the story of Thrall"? And how does a PvP raid on Thrall (which is actually very rare) affect this?
Tangentially, if WoW is so great at world building, how do you reconcile that with the mess its made of its own canon?
This is mostly the fault of the writers and to some extent the gameplay designers. No one at Blizzard predicted, or could have predicted, that WoW would become so popular and that certain parts of the lore might have to be fudged to get a better player experience.
However, this is a pretty minor issue, to be honest, and has little relevance to MMOs as a genre.
You made this statistic up. Not every game is the same, MMO or otherwise.
Then why assume that a Star Control MMO will be full of assholes and retards?
I have played MMO's before.
Which ones? Because, as you said, different games attract different types of players, so you're experience with those MMOs may be atypical.
At the time I still played MMO's, my gaming sessions were very extensive, which means this finding cannot just be a coincidence.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. But still, I wouldn't mind if you could elaborate, given I've apparently had vastly different experiences from yours.
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