Bioshock MMO
Posted by Stropp on March 29, 2008I caught the news on Ten Ton Hammer that EA is actively considering creating a Bioshock MMO.
Sigh.
While I enjoyed the game, where others thought it a little shallow, I don’t really see it as a MMO property. What Bioshock has going for it was that it is a well paced, fairly linear FPS that told a decent story. That story presented a particular take on a certain philosophy, showing us the results of blindly following it.
Games like Bioshock, and especially games like Deus Ex and System Shock, let the player interact with and to some extent change the world. Deus Ex allowed the player to follow the story through to the conclusion and select from three possible endings. Each ending would have had completely different ramifications for a future world. Bioshock has two possible endings, depending on how the player dealt with the Little Sisters through the game.
I’m not entirely sure that this can be done in a MMO.
For one thing, the current crop of MMOs are fairly static worlds. Quests are the same each time they’re done, no species become extinct after having been hunted so vigorously, and mining nodes respawn time after time. Nothing the players do has an effect on the world.
Take the dynamic world out of Bioshock, or any of these games for that matter, and you end up with a reasonably generic first person shooter.
How do you turn a game that carefully measures each action of the player on the game world, which is part of the fun of the game, and turn it into a MMO where each player has little or no effect on the game world?
Not every single player game can or should be made into a Massively Multiplayer Online game. There is still a place in the gaming world for good single player PC games, despite what some of the industry bigwigs are saying.
MMOs take so much time to play, World of Warcraft is around 4 or 5 days to 70 now, despite the recent reductions in leveling time. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to play a game that can be finished in ten to twenty hours.
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Hmm not sure either Stropp…could you see a GTA MMO? It would be total mayhem but it would also have the best ever cityscapes in a MMO!
I’m not sure about GTA either.
One thing I didn’t mention in the post that has just come to mind is that single player games are really good at positioning the player as ‘The Hero’ or ‘The Anti-Hero’ as with GTA. It’s a whole part of the hero affecting the game world in a big way. MMOs don’t position players as the single individual responsible for saving the world. They can’t do that for everyone.
That could be why we tire of an MMO eventually as nothing we do as a player really makes any difference to the world are character lives in.
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