How secure is our MMO adventure?

I was writing about how franchises can boost their user-base by jumping on the MMO bandwagon earlier this week and how that’s sometimes successful and, more usually, not successful. It got me to thinking about how games can have millions of dollars of marketing, hype throughout the internet and hundreds of thousands of players and ultimately they can still shut down. I’m not getting soppy here, bad games end when nobody decides to play them, but there are hundreds of online games that you may have sunk hundreds of hours and lots of money into that you can no longer access. There are storylines and character arc s that I couldn’t experience even if I wanted to.

You're late and you've missed a lot!

It’s a shame, especially for somebody who came to the genre quite late. I look at early reviews of something like the Matrix Online and it sounds like there were some great points that not only have faded away with the disappearance of that game, but were unique at the time and extinct now. Take the excerpt on the Interlock battle system below from Eurogamer’s review of the game and tell me that doesn’t sound pretty damn awesome.

“In each round you and your opponent decide which attack you're using for that period, after which the statistics of each are compared, a random element added and somebody wins, damaging the loser. Formalising it in this way means that these attacks can be played out in beautifully animated fashion, with blows blocked, opponents thrown around, and so on. It mostly looks great, and captures the film's action well.”

It sounds like a kind of gymnastic version of Top Trumps, and reading a passage likes that makes me feel pretty damn annoyed that I’ll never get to take part in an Interlock battle. The system is gone, the game is gone and, besides checking a few Youtube videos and looking over whatever fan sites there still are, there’s no way for me to get a feel for how this, or any part of the game, worked. More annoying is the fact that it is a continuation of the movies, developed alongside the Wachowski brothers in an attempt to have their universe live on. There are plot points in the game that may have been important to the films but with the closure of the Matrix Online, the best I can do is read what happened.

It's not about having no games to play

Now don’t get me wrong, I have enough to play. I’ve just bought a Vita and a 3DS, I’ve got nearly a year’s worth of games to get through on both 360 and PS3 and I haven’t played anything more than a little Wii Sports Resort on my Wii. If I had the willpower, I could probably get through to the end of this year without having to buy a single title. Some titles become out-dated and, eventually, the option to allow people to carry on playing isn’t viable. I don’t need seven year old games added onto my to-play list (there are a couple already there), but I can’t help but think about the effort that the developers must have put in and the countless hours some people must have played.

When Star Wars: Galaxies was shut down when the Old Republic launched, some were rightfully disappointed. It had been an MMO staple, a major title in general and a member of the interactive Star Wars family, no small reason to get excited. It had been around for eight and a half years by the time it was shut down and it’s not impossible to think that some people played it constantly for that eight and a half years. This wasn’t just turning off the server to an multiplayer game, this was shutting down the entire game and the people who spent hundreds on expansions and subscription fees over the years now have very little to show for their support.

Decade of memories...

This is something that I’ve been thinking about since the announcement that Sony Online Entertainment is closing a set of MMOs, including Everquest Online Adventures for the PS2. I can’t pretend to believe that there will have been thousands of people still playing any PS2 game, let alone an MMO that probably now doesn’t offer much more than the average free-to-play game, with quite obviously dated graphics to boot, but for those people that are still playing, will a refund of any unused and 3 months’ worth of Everquest I & II time really be enough to make up for the sudden halt in play that will come for somebody that has supported this title for the last decade of their life?

Perhaps I’m looking at in the wrong way, perhaps it’s because I was, until very recently, a console gamer and this is something that we’ve not had to deal with until quite recently. People now complain that the multiplayer parts of games are being shut off, EA seem to announce server closures every couple of months and the last big victim of “no longer financially viable” was Metal Gear Online. MMO players have had to put up with this sort of thing for years, and sometimes with less time played than available to console gamers. How could we continue this article, this look at the downside of online gaming, without mentioning, in brief, All Points Bulletin?

How long will APB last?

APB was going to be everything that would get a console gamer playing a PC MMO; it had been originally planned for the 360 and the premise was basically Grand Theft Auto Online. Sure, it lacked the attitude and general feel that that series is known for, but it was still a big game of cops and robbers, loaded with action, beautiful cars and big weapons. After 5 years of pre-production, development and marketing, hundreds of previews and news pieces dedicated to the game, ABP closed after just six weeks. Thankfully it relaunched in a better form and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere for the time being, but just how long can it last?

I think this is a problem that is impossible to overcome without introducing single player components to massively multiplayer online games. If you’ve bought something, even if it’s something you bought ten or more years ago, it’s always nice to dig it out of the attic or out of some overly-packed cupboard and try and play again. Chances are, if you try that with an MMO, you’ll get an error message and not much else. With some of the bigger MMOs, people are creating emulators and offering new servers for old games, and that’s something that will carry on and is very exciting. For smaller, less polished games, they’re now lost to time in a way that a single player game never can be.

© 2012 DevilsMMO.com
M. Growcott