So, how would you set up a Marvel MMO?

[dvandom]

The more I find out about DC Universe Online, the more I think they're Doing It Wrong. But the original premise that lets them have thousands of new heroes running around, that works fine. When setting an MMO in an existing property, you need a reason why there's all these non-canon characters, after all, and "Lex Luthor came back from a horrible future with a bunch of stolen powers he's giving out in an attempt to avert that future" works fine.

How would you set up the MMO premise for Marvel?

Make this an alternate Earth where Scarlet Witch never turned into Crossover Queen. The world still has thousands of mutants, and governments around the world are desperate to find ways to cope with this explosion of powered entities.

New players can create a mutant, or a tech/training character from one of the many programs set up to deal with mutants. Other origins (magic, cosmic rays, etc) would be unlockable or added in expansions. Mutants would start off with one power and learn new ways to use it as they gain experience. At some point, they'd unlock a Secondary Mutation. Tech characters would have access to various relatively mundane gear (think SHIELD agent grunts, so maybe jetpacks as the high end), and instead of a Secondary Mutation they'd get to pick up a more advanced tech path (powered armor being an obvious possibility). Both archetypes would have access to training abilities (martial arts, mental resistance techniques, etc), although the tech characters might get better versions.

Comments

[zqadams.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who was in both the PC and PS3 betas, "Doing It Wrong" is an understatement. I like the idea of segregating "powers" and "combat" so that you can have a character whose power "theme" doesn't prevent them from being able to throw a decent punch or carry a staff. But the laughably small number of power types, the limited amount of content and the heavy emphasis on sucking up to the Power Trio of each side just kill any immersion for me, especially when potential global threats like Grodd are level five bosses.

As for your Marvel idea, that works well--one thing that'd be more important to me in a Marvel game than a DC, Champions or original-like-CoH universe is cosmic stuff, but I guess that could wait for an expansion...

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure a cosmic focus really works in the MMO context, though. It's more of a single-player or limited multiplayer sort of thing. They could later, a la CIty of Villains, launch an alien-focused game where beginning players are Kree or Shi'ar or whatnot and then let characters zone between them in limited circumstances (X-Men going to the Shi'ar galaxy, Kree coming to hang out on Earth, etc). But true "Marvel Cosmic" is about single characters with world-shattering power levels...or at least partnered with that sort. Not everyone can be a Guardian of the Galaxy or Nova Corps member.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Setting a game in any established genre universe is going to lead to the same basic problem: simply by being established, the universe already has hordes of hugely powerful NPCs who have done, or are destined to do, everything that is actually of any real interest in the universe. LucasArts discovered this first-hand with the full-speed run into the closed patio door of the marketplace that was Star Wars Galaxies, Cryptic learned it (or rather evidently didn't learn it) with Champions Online - and actually anticipated it by creating the City of Heroes universe from the ground up with the all-powerful NPCs that player characters can never, ever be as awesome as right from eight o'clock Day 1, which was an interesting but I might say a bit misguided approach to the problem. DC's going to run into the same thing with DCUO and any Marvel MMO will have exactly the same problem too. There's just too much history in any pre-established fictional universe for the flavor to be preserved without the Signature Characters who, by their very existence, make the player characters' journeys pretty much meaningless in the grander scheme of things. Whatever you do, however powerful you are, you're going to wake up tomorrow morning and there are still going to be Skulls blowing up people's cars in Kings' Row.

As a premise pitfall, I think that's more or less insurmountable. You can wave your hands all you want - and your suggestion for Marvel's not a bad handwave as they go - but at the end of the day you're still going to be in the same corner, because it's dictated not by any kind of dramatic requirement, but rather the cold numbers of how an MMO works. Actually, I think that's my whole beef with shared-world games in general. You can never actually be in any way significant to the universe, because that would change all the other players' gaming experiences, and that's neither practical nor good business. It's why I eventually got so tired of City of Heroes I haven't even bought the expansion that would finally allow me to do with my first City of Villains character what she was designed to do in the first place (that is, bag the villain game and become a hero).

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

The big reason Civil War didn't rankle me more than it did was due to my thinking they were establishing the registration act as a premise for their then-in-the-works MMO. Even though it bucked the in-verse ontology that such things are evil (e.g., Mutant Registration Act), it stuck me is a brilliant way to tie the comics into the game, and vice versa.

[wtimmins.livejournal.com]

Starting out, they don't have any 'big tough strong guy' powerset.

They aren't even in the same constellation of 'doing it right.'

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Starting out, you have to unlock super-strength just like any other iconic power.


This is because you are a normal person infected with exobytes containing the power signatures AND fighting techniques of other heroes.
Those power signatures at onset consist of "fire" "ice" "magic" "mental" "nature" and "gadgets". Yes, being able to summon specific weaponry is a power framework.

I wasn't impressed at all by these. Each had a very limited tree of SFX wrapped around a very similar set of combat effects, and a wrist-destroying set of activation procedures involving multiple click patterns and mouse-movement that was poorly adapted from the controller-biased movement they wanted.

AND they made it hard to actually TYPE while doing much of anything at all, so you were encouraged to use their voice chat. No, thanks. I don't give my voice away to strangers that I haven't even gamed with a little.

Meanwhile everything was built to encourage you to do PVP and almost balanced to make PVP workable, but I didn't have any feel for it whatsoever.

The exobytes concept makes everyone in the world a single-origin character.
This concept is in the end both limiting and painful.

I was impressed by some really novel costume tricks (but a dismally small number of costume sets and only three body frameworks, small, medium, and x-large, with SIGNATURE supercharacters between medium and x-large, and some at xx-large. Further, the females have no breast slider but come upsized for Fanboys, including the "small" model which is supposedly good for "kid sidekicks"... those kid sidekicks have breasts bigger than their faces. It's kind of disgusting and horrifying.

I pre-ordered, and thus, will be playing the first month.
I do not intend at the current time to extend my order past the first month; they have a LOT of fixing to do for it to be anywhere near as compelling as City of Heroes or Champs Online, both of which, despite their flaws, are not so brain-hurting and not so wrist-hurting.

[zqadams.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but Super Strength isn't even SS in the sense of CoH, let alone CO; all it is is a melee damage boost, right? (I never got past level 10 in beta, because I went back to COH) Thus, it's entirely a gameplay effect and has nothing character-defining about it, which in a supers game is a Bad Thing.

I think I decided firmly I wasn't preordering it (which didn't stop me from putting it in my Amazon basket twice and deleting it before checkout, because there is Something Wrong With Me) when I spent an extended amount of time looking at powers, combat styles etc. and realized that I couldn't come up with a character that was more than a costume theme and power selections. I had my first CoH character by the time the bus got me home from Gamestop--powers (kin/elec defender) and backstory (ex-prizefighter exposed to mutagens when a tanker truck jackknifed in front of him on a deserted highway, giving him energy-draining and -channeling powers at the expense of brittle bones), with costume coming within a half hour of finishing installation. My Champions main didn't take significantly more work than that. But six powersets and a single origin for every player character is such an obscenely limiting status quo that I retreated to goofy names and matched costume sets with nothing behind them for the first time. How can they make a game with no generic "energy manipulation/blast" powerset to cover everything from Starfire to Captain Atom?

This is way too long for a comment already, so I'll just say this. I firmly believe the insistence on making it a PS3/PC combo release has led them to favor what they think console gamers want, at the expense of creating an experience that's going to hold people for years the way a good MMO can. They could still prove me wrong--I never expected Champions or Star Trek to last a year, let alone make as much progress in that time as both games have. But I think that SOE's and DC/Jim Lee's mindset on DCO is so narrow that "fixing" the game is impossible.