Champions Online: The No-NDA Merged Edition

[naum]

I thought 1up was already dead… …probably confusing it with some other $game_company…

[Venkman]

If Marvel did want it that way, I think it could have been workable. It just would have been a LOT of work, and probably far less profitable than CoX. Not being the main characters is something this genre has been dealing with forever. And not having those main characters as static world NPCs isn't necessary a fail. Considering that these were the weakest points of games that weren't that successful anyway, there's not a lot of player expectations to go by here.

Limited-canned-dialog non-interactve NPCs in a static space is not a win.

[UnSub]

When Jack Emmert sat on a panel at Comicon (I think), he indicated that the plan was to let players play as the recognisable Marvel characters sometimes, such as in historic events in the Marvel universe (bad luck to the sap who gets to play Captain America during the Civil War missions). For the rest of the time, you'd be playing as your own character.

But this was a verbal discussion on a MMO with no set release date, so it would be very open to change. I have to think that Marvel would want a lot of control over their IP to the point that it could potentially be a sticking point.

[BigBlack]

Not to nitpick, because I agree with your general point, but by "games that weren't that successful", you mean "games that produced significant revenue for their owners, but were not WoW"?  Really, by what reasonable business-person's standard is LoTRO not a success?

My personal, basic thought about how you could make CoX into Marvel Universe Online:

A million and one random encounters around town.  Practically every other corner you turn down, you see a Marvel Super Hero doing something interesting.  Fighting someone, in an argument with another hero, or just zipping along - you look up and see Silver Surfer or the Human Torch zipping by in the sky.  Spend tons of time and energy literally coding thousands of these (as opposed to the maybe dozens that were in all CoH zones combined), such that running around the 'shared spaces', you get the sense of a living, breathing Marvel universe that you're a part of.

Make them each have multiple outcomes, so all but the most jaded don't experience a whole lot of "hmm, seen that one before".  Make them mutually exclusive, so you don't see two Wolverines fighting two different bad guys a few feet from each other.

Very basic example:  Jubilee is tangoing with some Sentinels.  She's a bit out-matched.

If the player comes:  Helps fight them off along with Jubilee.  Get some XP if successful.  If you don't overkill the Sentinel robot (i.e. get it down to less than 5% health without killing it entirely?), and you've got someone with tech knowledge with you, you can salvage the CPU core and perhaps get directions to a Secret Sentinel Base instance.

If the player doesn't come to the rescue:  Eventually Wolverine comes dashing in to save the day.  Someone who comes running by well after the battle's started would witness this happening.

If the player doesn't come and Wolverine is busy:  Jean Grey pops in, holds them off for Jubilee to escape, and continues fighting them.

Several thousand flow-charted minor encounters like this.  All going on with relative frequency, all going on whether the player is around or not.  And the odds of any given one happening is rare enough that even if there's a specific one the player's heard about that he wants to experience (say, he wants to check out the Secret Sentinel Base above), it makes zero sense for him to try and search it out, he just has to wait until he happens to be in the right place at the right time.

With more elaborate, in-depth scripts for Marvel heroes to participate alongside the players in CoH-style instanced missions.


With enough polish - the make or break on this design, to be sure, would be a metric fuckton of polish - you'd have a pretty impressive virtual world to offer.

The art and scripting assets involved would be immense, though.  You wouldn't just be re-skinning CoH, with Spidey as Statesman handing out quests - you'd be modeling, animating, and scripting virtually every character even remotely known in the Marvel Universe.

Then, just have the admins force anyone who comes along as XxWolverine2xX to change their name and costume a bit.

[Aez]

Stuff...

Are you on crack?

[Venkman]

Really, by what reasonable business-person's standard is LoTRO not a success?

Same way SWG wasn't deemed one

The core games and even their deliveries were fine. As generic games they would be deemed successes no problem. But an MMO with the SW license not hitting the all-time record and keeping it? An MMO with the one license anyone who's ever even passed by a fan of fantasy not overtaking all of the predecessors that knocked it off?

These are the sort of promises made to first secure an IP and then to secure the funding. Neither game lived up to its promise. That, in business, is construed often as a failure.

Otherwise, I agree with your thinking on MUOizing CoX. It's a lot of work, but I don't think they need to go as deep as you've described at first. Just having Marvel characters you can help at whim within a CoX-setting (which anyone who's played CoX can see is eminently possible) would be enough of a different to be interesting.

Quality, fun factor and all that stuff TBD ;)

[stray]

Eh, I'm not particularly interested to defend SWG or LotRO, but you make too much out of what they're "potential" was supposed to be. This is also the biggest reason why I'm glad that damn SWG thread is dead. It's all anyone kept saying, explicitly and otherwise. WAH! Star Wars. Woulda, coulda, shoulda..

Neither of those licenses guarantee stellar popularity. Whatever "promise" you're talking about barely exists. And whatever good Star Wars or LotR games that exist mostly stand on them being good "games" first, not necessarily good SW or LotR games. What's truly popular in the gaming world comes down to that. Take a look at the most popular games ever made, and the majority of them were brands/IP that popped out of nowhere.. The Sims, Halo, Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, Mario, C&C, Warcraft, quite a lot of Capcom shit, etc..

[Venkman]

You're talking as a gamer. Nothing wrong with that of course I lived both of these games right alongside everyone else, so know what they ended up like (trainwreck and meh, respectively). Oh, and I'm a big fan of both IPs as well, so I was their customer.

My point above has little to do with gamers and all to do with the business folks that concoct these strategies before there's even a design (same thing happened with STO). People justify an extension of an IP through precedence, project the success based on <precedence>+<megaomg_IP> and when the result is only the precedence (or worse), that can be considered a failure. Otherwise, what was the point of securing the IP, bringing in another fee to eat away the monthly take, and increase both the size of the team reviewing everything that happens, but also the schedule it takes to pull it off?

[stray]

These people who concoct things before design probably resemble those corporate dudes in "Big". Which, really, hasn't done much good for gaming OR their pocketbooks. I'm sure it's a fine strategy for toys however.

Anyways, the games I listed are both popular to gamers, but they all make mad amounts of cash as well. If you just want to talk about bottom line, those are still it. No game based off of Star Wars comes close to any of them, even the good ones.

...

I'm sure I'm missing the point here though and not fully understanding you, but I might as well say what I did anyhow.

[UnSub]

A piece of non-news: the Cryptic forums have been silent of redname posts of substance for about two weeks (at least), or since around the time 1up posted the story. Sure, some of the people have moved to NCsoft NorCal, but the ones who shouldn't have - Sporkfire aka Victor Watcher being the most notable - haven't said a thing in a few weeks after usually being pretty chatty.

 

[geldonyetich2]

I don't think I'd be too talkative, either, if I had a green light to make a marvel MMOG and lost it.

[UnSub]

A piece of non-news: the Cryptic forums have been silent of redname posts of substance for about two weeks (at least), or since around the time 1up posted the story. Sure, some of the people have moved to NCsoft NorCal, but the ones who shouldn't have - Sporkfire aka Victor Watcher being the most notable - haven't said a thing in a few weeks after usually being pretty chatty.

 

... and as of yesterday, Cryptic is advertising for Online Community Relations Representatives. Despite their current ones being very silent.

Again, tinfoil hat time, but it's odd the Cryptic CMs can't even pop up to say "we're not dead".

[Trippy]

Did Cryptic have an CMs? All the CoH/CoV ones were/are NCsoft people (even pre-acquisition).

[geldonyetich2]

It's my fault, really, yesterday's meltdown scared off their previous CMs which were a poor replacement for CuppaJo when she went AWOL over to Tabula Rasa.

[UnSub]

Did Cryptic have an CMs? All the CoH/CoV ones were/are NCsoft people (even pre-acquisition).

They had Sporkfire (Victor Watcher), Kestrel (Christine Thompson) and Diamonds (their web tech guy) who have all been silent for more than two weeks after several months of active chatter. They were specifically hired by Cryptic for Cryptic, with Sporkfire being the MUO CM (at least as I understand it).

[Montague]

As work on Cryptic Studios' upcoming projects progresses, we have reached a point where we must focus all of our energies toward ensuring that our presentations of those projects are the absolute best work we can do.

So effective today, we are closing the Cryptic Studios forums and blog.

We're excited about what Cryptic Studios has planned for next year and beyond, but we need to give those plans our undivided attention. There are some great things coming, and we can't wait to tell you about them!

We realize that our presence has been missed on the blog and forums, and we apologize. We have been paying attention though, and your feedback and suggestions have been noted!

Everyone at Cryptic Studios would like to thank you for your support and participation. We will be releasing more information about our projects in the coming months, so please keep checking CrypticStudios.com for information.

Thank you again, and we'll see you in 2008!

[Draegan]

True.  If you're not constantly communicating with your "fan base" you're not doing anything.

<Insert pie reference>

[stark]

Confirmed dead 

http://kotaku.com/354886/why-microsoft-murdered-the-marvel-mmo

[Nevermore]

So Cryptic has gone from having two superhero IPs to none?  What does that leave them, just the super sekrit MMO they were supposedly working on along with the now-dead MUO?

[IainC]

So Cryptic has gone from having two superhero IPs to none?  What does that leave them, just the super sekrit MMO they were supposedly working on along with the now-dead MUO?

Aren't they widely rumoured to be the recipients of the poison chalice ST:O franchise?

[Nevermore]

I thought they were picking up some of the ex-ST:O devs but whether it was for ST:O 0.20 or something else, who knows?

[Montague]

"I don’t think it’s necessarily a case of what went wrong,” Kim told me. “I don’t know that that’s the right way to put it. For us we look at our priorities and all of the things we have to do. It’s a tough space. It’s a very competitive space. And it’s a space that’s changing quite a bit. …When we first entered into the development and agreement of the development of ‘Marvel Universe Online,’ we thought we would create another subscription-based MMO. And if you really look at the data there’s basically one that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success. And then you have to look [and say]: ‘Can we change the business model for that? Is that really viable given how far we are in development? And so forth. Does Marvel want to do that?’ There’s a whole bunch of factors.”

He could have just said "We pussied out" and he would have saved the reporter a lot of typing.

[eldaec]

You have to wonder just how many still born MMOGs MS plan to litter the landscape with before they actually release one.

[Ingmar]

So Cryptic has gone from having two superhero IPs to none?  What does that leave them, just the super sekrit MMO they were supposedly working on along with the now-dead MUO?

Aren't they widely rumoured to be the recipients of the poison chalice ST:O franchise?

Take this with a grain of salt, but I frequent the same local game stores in the San Jose area as a certain former Red Name on the CoX forums, and the way that he could "neither confirm nor deny" them having that license was awfully smug and cheerful.

[WindupAtheist]

"And if you really look at the data there’s basically one that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success."

Quick, someone give this guy the speech about how all those post-WoW games with 100k subs or whatever aren't really failures!

[Lantyssa]

"And if you really look at the data there’s basically one that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success."

Quick, someone give this guy the speech about how all those post-WoW games with 100k subs or whatever aren't really failures!

It's Microsoft.  Less than 100% of the market is too little.

[Nevermore]

So Cryptic has gone from having two superhero IPs to none?  What does that leave them, just the super sekrit MMO they were supposedly working on along with the now-dead MUO?

Aren't they widely rumoured to be the recipients of the poison chalice ST:O franchise?

Take this with a grain of salt, but I frequent the same local game stores in the San Jose area as a certain former Red Name on the CoX forums, and the way that he could "neither confirm nor deny" them having that license was awfully smug and cheerful.

Speaking of CoX, resub dammit! 

[Ingmar]

So Cryptic has gone from having two superhero IPs to none?  What does that leave them, just the super sekrit MMO they were supposedly working on along with the now-dead MUO?

Aren't they widely rumoured to be the recipients of the poison chalice ST:O franchise?

Take this with a grain of salt, but I frequent the same local game stores in the San Jose area as a certain former Red Name on the CoX forums, and the way that he could "neither confirm nor deny" them having that license was awfully smug and cheerful.

Speaking of CoX, resub dammit! 

I've been spotted!

[eldaec]

"And if you really look at the data there’s basically one that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success."

Quick, someone give this guy the speech about how all those post-WoW games with 100k subs or whatever aren't really failures!

If his definition of success is an income of no less than $100M per month than he's right. Beats me why anyone would build that business plan up front though.

Blizzard didn't, for instance.

This is rather like declaring you are abandoning your plan to make movies because someone already made Titanic.

[UnSub]

There probably were a lot of factors involved in the decision to cancel. If MS / Marvel thinks that WoW is the only game in the market worth paying attention to, then they aren't ever going to release one. At the same time, if they looked at the Guild Wars model or any other Asian RMT-orientated MMO, then they are probably going to be disappointed there too.

However, what hasn't really been said yet (that I've seen) is that MUO was meant to give the Xbox 360 a MMO. I know that AoC has been announced as an Xbox 360 title, but according to the Technology FAQ on the AoC site, AoC isn't yet coming out on any consoles. Given that Xbox Live is one of the 360's crown jewels, a MMO seems like a natural fit. But even MS doesn't have confidence in console MMOs, apparently. Which leaves Sony in the driver's seat for console MMO development, with at least The Agency coming out on both PS3 and PC.

Alternatively, I've heard a lot of circumstancial evidence that the Xbox Live architecture doesn't scale well to MMO levels. If that's the case, the first Xbox MMO will probably be closer to Diablo or Hellgate London in terms of lots of instances for small teams. A 'traditional' world-format MMO wouldn't work.

[UnSub]

On a separate note:

 - the announcement (not of the cancellation, but the fact it went public) probably surprised Cryptic, given that they haven't yet taken down the MUO trailer from their site

 - a rumour on the CoH/V forums is that Cryptic will be announcing a deal with the Champions license on Feb 18th; it's just a rumour

 - some people are grasping at straws and saying how it appears that Marvel and Microsoft appear to be walking away, which doesn't necessarily mean that Marvel and Cryptic have parted ways (but MS has the license rights, so that's not correct)

[Venkman]

Don't forget that this isn't folks talking about the merits of launching a generic MMO. This is all about whether they think their IP with it's XX% awareness and YY% penetration would do any less than WoW, from someone not willing to invest the $100mil in development and probably that also in marketing to pull it off.

[Ratman_tf]

"And if you really look at the data there’s basically one that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success."

Quick, someone give this guy the speech about how all those post-WoW games with 100k subs or whatever aren't really failures!

If his definition of success is an income of no less than $100M per month than he's right. Beats me why anyone would build that business plan up front though.

Blizzard didn't, for instance.

This is rather like declaring you are abandoning your plan to make movies because someone already made Titanic.

We going back to Titanic again?

My heart will go on...

If anything games have taught us, it's that IP's don't mean crap.

[Margalis]

Sounds like MS is getting out of the MMORPG business entirely -- not that they were ever really in it in the first place.

You have to laugh at the time and effort they put into various MMOs with nothing to show for it.

[Ratman_tf]

Halo MMOG. Planetside blazed them a trail there.