Sci-Fi MMOs Way To Go Says Mythic Designer

Despite the strong showing of MMOs like Age Of Conan, there’s no doubt that World of Warcraft remains the king of MMOs. Mythic GM and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning lead designer Mark Jacobs has put forward some helpful hints on how other developers can get a handhold on the MMO market. His path to success leads down an avenue most developers have ignored: the Science Fiction MMO.  A few games have tried to make this work: EVE Online, Tabula Rasa, Star Wars Galaxies and a handful of much less successful titles whose failure is evident by their names being unknown. His reasoning of course being simply this: anyone attempting a fantasy MMO is competing against Blizzard and their online juggernaut.

Unfortunately a sci-fi MMO is quite an ambitious project. While the world of fantasy can get away with a lot because of the general potential of ‘magic’ for solving any problem and making anything possible, science fiction has many layers to it that players will often desire to involve themselves in. Force your players to travel from system to system like airline passengers by purchasing tickets on a chartered spaceship and they’ll ask how long before they can get a ship of their own, kit it out with weapons and smuggling spaces and do their best Han Solo impression. That of course leads to space pirates and zero-G dogfights in addition to standard MMO combat. To truly create an effective sci-fi MMO experience requires a lot of different programming and balancing of different gameplay types. It’s likely this overall complication will be the primary reason that sci-fi MMOs are much more difficult to pull off.