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

[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.