MMO Firefly? Mixed feelings.
Relevant material: Firefly Reborn as Online Universe
Firefly is one of my favorite shows, and the source of a deep grudge between me and Fox Broadcasting. I don’t know what they were thinking for canceling such a great show. Granted, we got an excellent movie and a comic series. Now, Wired is reporting that a company called Multiverse is working on a massively multiplayer game based in the ‘Verse.
My instant reaction to squeal with delight. I want to be a Browncoat, assemble a crew, and stick it to those Alliance pigs. However, it is in my nature to remain cautiously skeptical. There are so many ways this could be fantastic, but just as many that this could be an abomination.
Optimally, I imagine something along the lines of Freelancer with more features. The ability to land and actually explore planets would be a necessity. You could play an Alliance soldier, a Bounty Hunter, a smuggler, or any range of tradesmen. Imagine questing on a home planet of your choosing until you get up the money to buy a ship, gather a crew, and start your own “legitimate business”. Or, maybe you’d rather hone your technical skills and get hired on as an engineer. There would be plenty of room for tradesmen to stay on their home world, perfecting the arts of weapon and armor crafting, ship repair, or parts makers. Of course, too much detail could slow gameplay, turning it into tedious drudgery as you struggle to find another player in a specialized class just so you can make that deal on Whitefall.
Players should probably be kept in the “normal human” range. Too many psychic River-clones running around would dull the feel of the game world, turning it into a race to amass the most psychic abilities. And what about Reavers? While I’m sure plenty of people would love the opportunity to play a Reaver, I imagine they’d be the perfect griefer class.
Overexposure of established characters would hamper the believability of the world. Part of what made Firefly so great is the believable feeling the ‘Verse had. There’s a sense that things hadn’t changed much; we just had better technology. Not every player could run a job with Mal and his crew, or even have the opportunity to meet them. Not every deal could come from Badger, or Fanty and Mingo, and not everyone is friends with Mr. Universe.
Translating an established property into a new medium is never easy. I just hope any further additions to the franchise are done with sort of care that was taken when the movie was made, and the comics were inked. Having Joss as a consultant on the project wouldn’t be a bad idea, at all. If they can pull it off, Multiverse has my fifteen bucks a month; goodbye World of Warcraft.
And hey, since Fox is involved (licensing and whatnot), maybe it could prompt them to give Firefly another chance after they botched it so badly the first time. Maybe they could even do it right.
3 Responses to “MMO Firefly? Mixed feelings.”
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December 24th, 2006 at 11:27 am
after playing WoW, I have to say that an MMO based on an established franchise popular mostly for its story elements might not be a great idea. At least for you. Say hello to having your favorite series and movie raped for ideas. Say hello to the creator having little or no control over development. Say hello to an entire, rich backstory reduced to a handful of character classes and a bunch of “go get this, go kill this many monsters, go defeat this evil warlord, go pull this lever” kind of quests. Every once in a while, if you’re lucky, they’ll throw story elements at you that further the plot of the game a bit, but they’ll either not be canon (in which case what’s the f-ing point of playing?) or they will be (and you’ll see convoluted, MMO-oriented quests and plot twists worming their way into a story that, for all I’ve heard about it, is very much based more on the character development and interaction than on the gadgets and doodads). I don’t know which would be worse, in the end.
In my opinion, the MMO genre has its good points and bad points, but continuing an established story-line with any semblance of consistency or even believability isn’t one of them.
Look at WoW. Azeroth started off as a large, unexplored world. There were areas with ancient evils that had not been awakened in eons, factions that had never met, wars that never seemed to end, powerful magic, and all of these things made the mortal races of Azeroth look petty in their struggles. Now we’ve got a game where for every normal person (for instance an NPC villager), there are 10,000 superheroes running around and killing supermonsters and what not. Walk into one of the six (!) major cities in the entire world, and you can see overpowered heroes dancing naked, casting next-to-impossible magic spells, or trying to pawn off some supposedly magical priceless artifact for a mere pittance. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the MMO nature of WoW… for all intents and purposes, Blizzard got it better than anyone else did… I’m just saying that if you had any care whatsoever for the story of Azeroth and Outworld, for the development of the relationship between Orcs and Humans, Night Elves and Blood Elves, etc, you’ve got to be sitting in the middle of Stormwind gouging your eyes out with a fork. Because the rich story of Warcraft? Yeah, that went out the window the moment the game launched. There’s no more influential politics. There’s no more armies marching on cities. There’s no more superpowered individuals turning the tides of battle in favor of one side or another. There’s no more legions of scary, unbeatable demons threatening to break into the known world and destroy it while the citizens of the world watch helplessly. Any plot element that emerges from here on out is merely a challenge for a player to level up to, and if a fully leveled player can’t take out that challenge, then she and fifty of her friends will make short work of it. And this happens several times a day, every day of the week. That dragon threatening to destroy half of Darnassus? Yeah, no matter whether you kill him or not, he’ll be back at noon, and then again at sundown. And somebody will beat him, no problem. There are no more insurmountable odds, and I guarantee you there will be no triumph of one side over the other. Whatever happens from here on out in the Warcraft universe, at least as long as WoW continues, will be specifically designed to add a new encounter for players to participate in, and to not have any significant permanent outcome or consequences based on victory or failure.
The history of Warcraft that develops from here on out will be of the kind: “A great monster emerged, threatening to destroy the world. A band of super-powered adventurers rose to the challenge, and defeated the monster. All was well, and the battle between the Horde and the Alliance raged on, unchanged.” Oh, and every once in a while you’ll get one of these: “Two new races emerged from the aether, with rich back stories that had heretofore been untold. One race joined the Alliance, the other joined the Horde. Their home cities were opened to their respective factions, and the battle between the Horde and the Alliance raged on, unchanged.” If you want to see that sort of empty plot continuation happen to your precious Firefly universe, then you’re probably not a true Browncoat.
A Firefly MMO might be fun to play for me, a guy who’s never seen the shows, has watched the movie and thought it was nice, and knows there’s some sort of huge cult following and wants to be a part of it… I’ll get a little summary of the back story somewhere in the manual, I’ll get to explore the different factions in the game, the different worlds, etc. I’ll think it’s fun, and when the next big MMO comes around, I’ll move on and never look back. For you though, you’ll anticipate eagerly, then when it comes out you’ll buy it on release day, create your character to look just like one of the secondary characters (how many variations on the name Mal do you think you’ll see running around the game on that first day? Probably about as many as the Drizzts that run around Darnassus right now), and then immediately try to shield yourself from the disappointment when you find that Mr. Universe is handing out quests to all the new PCs like they were candy and it was Halloween. Oh, and they misspelled his name and forgot about the bit on episode 1×06 where he clearly demonstrated that he was left handed. It might be fun to play around in that universe for a while, but eventually the killing of the plot will get to you.
No, I wouldn’t wish MMO status on any of my favorite story universes. I’d rather see a great single-player game, with perhaps some minor (read: optional) multi-player aspects thrown in for good measure. I’d rather immerse myself in the rich storyline, explore the giant world(s) developed in breathtaking detail, and not have to deal with the griefer spamming his purple shards in general chat, and the PKer taking out unsuspecting noobs in the starting areas. But that’s just me.
Sorry
/buzzkill
December 24th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
Congratulations on wrangling the essence, the veritable apotheosis, of my doubts and fears and summoning them into human-readable pain. Seriously, that’s pretty much all of the nonsense that keeps me from squealing like an excitable little monkey over the endeavor.
And even if they did manage to get it right, they’d have to hope the entire Browncoat population would rally behind it, or else they’d have to start changing and “upgrading” to conform to the standards of the hyperactive WoW turd just to maintain a profitable subscriber count.
For now, all they’ve really done is announced that they’ll have something to announce somewhere down the line. Granted, I’ll still take a chance to check it out. I’m not the obsessive follicle-counting type, so even if it’s a little off the mark, I might be able to stomach it. We shall see.
December 24th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
yeah, there’s always that hope that they won’t screw it up like they always do. Star Wars Galaxies looked cool, but from what I hear Sony absolutely fugging killed it when they took over.
Anyway, D&D?