Honorverse the online game (kind of)

[Baldrake]

So as I finished up my copy of At all Costs, the latest in the Honor Harrington series, I was surprised to find an ad at the end for Honorverse: the online game.

Now before we get going, we can all agree that this game is almost certain to disappoint:

• The web site has nothing on it.
• It's a developer we've never heard of.
• They claim they'll release Fall 2008.
• They're going to support 50,000 concurrent players.

Let's not even have that discussion.

What's interesting is that the game has put me on a nostalgia trip. It seems to have a lot in common with the very first multiplayer persistent world game. I of course don't mean UO or M59, but Empire, which beat those others by a good couple of decades.

The idea in Empire was that at the beginning of the game, everyone has a little colony. You move out, expand the empire, cultivate crops, establish industry, and (if you want), go to war with your neighbours. It's the game that Sid Meier copied, except he left out the multiplayer.

Empire runs very slowly, in real time. You play it by checking in once a day or so, seeing how your production has made out, and seeing if anyone has attacked you. Combat takes a long time to resolve, so there's no pressure (or point) in checking in obsessively. The game has excellent facilities for automating production and unit movement, so you can set up a strategy and largely let things run themselves for extended periods.

I've often thought that if I were to make a foray into MMO gaming, it would be to make an Empire-like game. I'm really surprised, given how fun Empire was, that nobody has taken this approach. The only game I've seen that has any similarity was Legacy Online, which was a browser-based trading game that unfortunately just wasn't that much fun.

If I had any confidence at all that this Honorverse game was being run by professionals, I'd be looking forward to it. It seems to have the same Civ-style approach of building your colony and fighting your neighbours. But like Empire, everything runs at a slow pace, requiring you to log in occasionally, or react to messages coming by email or SMS.

Anyway, like I said, reading about it was a nice nostalgia trip for the mid eighties when I played Empire on a Vax 11 under Unix.

[geldonyetich2]

"Artificial Software representatives denied allegations today that they produce vaporware."

[Stormwaltz]

Play the Honorverse in analog:

http://www.genreconnections.com/shop/home.php?cat=249

[Chenghiz]

I can only imagine an Honor Harrington MMO being even slower than EVE.

[edit] Wait, each player runs an empire? Good lord the world must be huge. 

[schild]

Good lord the world must be huge.

Chances are the world is never going to exist. Also, instancing. World could be tiny.

But they aren't making a game, so it doesn't matter.

[Chenghiz]

Well... conceptually.

[Kitsune]

I'm of two minds about ol' Honor.  On one hand, I enjoy the hell out of David Weber's writing and have read all of 'em.  On the other, Honor's reputation in the books of being a strategic genius seems a bit insane.  I mean, well, I suppose I should /spoiler this for anyone who'd be dismayed to find out that she doesn't die in the first book of a nine-book series...



[SPOILERS]





Anyhow, her 'fly straight at the enemy ship and let it pound the crap out of my ship' tactic in the first book wasn't any master stroke, it was the only option open to her.  And in later books, she had a hefty technological edge over her opponents, who on top of crap technology also had stupid, poorly-trained crew.  In the last books, her opponents cleaned up their acts, got a decent military in shape, developed some decent technology, only for her to show up with super super duper technology and blow them all up.  Circumstances often seemed to make things fall neatly into her lap.  Which, despite my enjoyment of the books, really irks my more nitpicky side.

[Baldrake]

My nitpick is that like most mega series, the writing has gone way downhill. I don't know why SF and fantasy authors seem to feel we want to buy books by the pound. Instead of 1,000 pages of rambling schlock, I'd rather a 250 page book that had been, you know, edited. I was about to throw the last book in the fireplace if I had to read one more stilted conversation where someone's eyes "twinkled".

Anyway, back to Empire -- in Empire the world is large, and you interact pretty much exclusively with your immediate neighbours. (Until you conquer them, and then you interact with their neighbours.) To me, the big challenge in putting this into MMO form is that the games have a beginning and an end. It sucks if you get knocked out three days into a two month game. It's got to suck a lot a more if you're paying a monthly fee while waiting weeks for the next round to start. Once again, I have little confidence that the nooblers creating Honorverse have worked all of these issues out, but maybe they'll surprise me.

[Venkman]

Only an issue if you follow the format of narrative. Instead, go the LoTRO route: copy the genre your backstory helped create and then never bother advancing the storyline people showed up to play

Or, do so slowly enough nobody knows its advancing, which really isn't all that unlike the books actually...

[Hoax]

Just to clarify, what is different between Empire and say Ultracorps or any other turn based browser empire game?

[Baldrake]

Sweet! I'd never heard of Ultracorps. It looks very similar. The technical difference is that Empire is real time, while Ultracorps is turn-based. So in Empire if I move my unit, it moves right now. In Ultracorps, my move is a command that is executed whenever the next "tick" occurs. Given that Empire-time moves very slowly, I suspect there is no practical difference.

The other difference of course is that Empire was in production 30 years ago, whereas Ultracorps is still in alpha.

[Hoax]

Is it?   

Ultracorps was a very successful, very good f2p game on the M$ Zone.  You could gain some small advantages if you were a paying user like access to more games at once and some other stupid shit.  This was hella years ago.

It was an amazingly fun time, basically super streamlined version of browser based empire games (there used to be a ton of them) with fun flavor and a good community.

Then one day, Microsoft decided to make it p2p, not many did because MMO's weren't even well accepted at the time.  So instead of keeping it f2p they canceled it being the evil fucks that they were.

So I have no idea how it can be back in Alpha.  But I'm sure you can find some f2p browser based empire games akin to Ultracorps.  I've played a few since that time but none were nearly as good.  I remember we had a thread about this a million years ago but I'm not even sure what you should search for to find it.

[Baldrake]

Oh, ok -- this page explains -- they were dropped by MS Zone because they weren't making money. It is now being revamped as an indie for general release, and is in "open alpha". I'm inclined to check it out once work slows down a little.

[Teleku]

Anyway, back to Empire -- in Empire the world is large, and you interact pretty much exclusively with your immediate neighbours. (Until you conquer them, and then you interact with their neighbours.) To me, the big challenge in putting this into MMO form is that the games have a beginning and an end. It sucks if you get knocked out three days into a two month game. It's got to suck a lot a more if you're paying a monthly fee while waiting weeks for the next round to start. Once again, I have little confidence that the nooblers creating Honorverse have worked all of these issues out, but maybe they'll surprise me.

Uh, why not just let players start as many games as they want?  If the pace is as slow as you say, and the games last 2 months, just let the player play as many games at the same time as he wants.  Shouldn't be hard to log in and manage 10 different games simultaneously.

[Rendakor]

Anyway, back to Empire -- in Empire the world is large, and you interact pretty much exclusively with your immediate neighbours. (Until you conquer them, and then you interact with their neighbours.) To me, the big challenge in putting this into MMO form is that the games have a beginning and an end. It sucks if you get knocked out three days into a two month game. It's got to suck a lot a more if you're paying a monthly fee while waiting weeks for the next round to start. Once again, I have little confidence that the nooblers creating Honorverse have worked all of these issues out, but maybe they'll surprise me.

Uh, why not just let players start as many games as they want?  If the pace is as slow as you say, and the games last 2 months, just let the player play as many games at the same time as he wants.  Shouldn't be hard to log in and manage 10 different games simultaneously.

I believe the idea was that there's a single persistent world everyone plays in.

[Teleku]

Hmm, then I'm having a conceptual disconnection with what is being advocated.  If you have 1 world, with thousands of players playing at the same time....how do new ones even start?  I could see a game like that going on almost endlessly.  I was imagining more along the line of a ton of instanced game worlds (just called games/matchs) with a good number of people in each (10-50-100, what ever is doable, or set by the game creator).  Those could still easily take months.  Putting 50,000 people in a room and then waiting for 1 guy to finally win seems a bit..........not fun.  Or even doable.

Then again, my idea seems to be similar to Soverign, which got canned, so who knows how doable that is in itself (though I was looking forward to that game :( )

[Rendakor]

You might be right, I've never played it. That's just the idea I was getting.

[Khaldun]

Man, I dislike that series. It isn't just an homage to Napoleonic stories/Horatio Hornblower, it's a nearly robotic reprise of them. Right down to having the ship mechanics reproduce nearly exactly Napoleonic naval conflict. Sorry, I'd like at least a little science fiction in my science fiction, thanks.

As far as an MMO goes, it has the same basic issues that Star Trek does as source material. Namely, to do it right, it really needs to focus on ship-to-ship combat and management leavened with some experiences on planets. SWG finally tried to tackle those two very different settings, but at least it was  dealing with ships that were one-person fighters. In this case (or ST) you've really really got to have groups of players cooperating on the management of a single ship in combat. I agree that *someone* needs to try to figure out how to do a proper space opera MMO in structural terms. If they did it around this property, I'd overlook the derivative setting.

Not likely though, as everyone's pointing out.

As far as an Empire-style MMO, maybe Spore will turn out to be a bit like this--everyone develops their species, then species get put togther in some kind of loose multiplayer space. In this case, everyone would develop their own planet, then interrelate them through some kind of specially designed MMO architecture? Kind of an interesting idea.

[Sutro]

MMO RTS?

10six!