Dust514: Eve Online....with guns?
It's an MMOFPS. Will it be successful? Sadly, there isn't a good track record for games of this genre. But CCP may be able to pull one off...after all, they did make a space fighter game when fighting in space was no longer in vogue.
Other MMOFPSI used to play Planetside pretty religiously in high school. If it wasn't the first of it's genre, it's definitely the genre's best example. It promised epic battles and it delivered. Thousands of players around a single hotly contested base. Tanks, artillery, soldiers, snipers, heavy armor...personnel carriers, dropships, fighters...all working together to create a truly novel game. In CS, Halo, and Battlefield - probably the best known FPS, organized assault is the exception. You'll only end up participating if you delve in really deep into the game. There's an incredibly high barrier to entrance, and even when you're in, it's a pain in the ass because victories and losses have so much riding on the - emotions, pride. Things that end up determining whether the match was fun or was dismal. But Planetside democratized the field. Made it so anyone could participate in large battlefield maneuvers. In essence, everyone was in a clan, and anyone could do anything. Those who played long enough got to direct the armies and coordinate the battle. Those too green still got the feeling of accomplishment when a base was captured. Large battles were the norm. Large outfits coordinate the assaults. Every night there was some operation to take over the world, and maybe we'd get 40% of the way there before we encountered the enemy in full force. Like I said, they delivered. EVE and CPP
Okay, 2009. Eve online declares a MMOFPS. Whoop de doo. I'm sure some of you remember Huxley and how it was supposed to be released some 3 years ago. Huxley, the new Planetside. All shiny, new, and improved. The fact that it's been in closed beta for 3 years now is a testament to the difficulty in creating a game in this genre. That Planetside ended up spiraling to its demise within a few shorts years speaks wonders for how fragile such a game can be, even if it is successful. CCP's community of gamers is still drawfed by that of WoW. But they've managed to corner the SciFi genre quite well. EVE succeeds because there is nothing like it. Other scifi MMOs simply fail. The community touts itself as being mature and worldly - not a friendly place for the high school kid, and people are drawn to that idea. With good execution, EVE's success is natural. Even if Blizzard were to come out with a Starcraft MMO, it would have a hard time taking the market from CCP. The best they could do is possibly make a WoW clone, but then they'd just be getting more of the same users they already have in the end. And a single MMO is bad enough, but two? Man, that's a lot of time in front of a computer.
I am, however, pretty sure that at the very least it'll be just as beautiful as the current EVE game.
Issues?So an MMOFPS? I'm curious to see how CCP will avoid the same problems that EVE has. If we shed all the arguments about balancing (which mean nothing, the game is already fairly balances as it is), what's left are some real issues about gameplay and the community. If, as Hilmar says, the new MMOFPS will be linked to EVE, then at the very least the community issues will carry over. There's definitely the clannishness you find in Halo, or CS - that is that corporations are an exclusive group, not an inclusive one as they were in Planetside. The best corporations are those that end up excluding people, not inviting everyone. Not especially friendly for the newbie - to whom a sense of community is incredibly important. But it's an unfortunate outcome of gameplay and politics. There's also the issue of scale. There are thousands upon thousands of planets. The EVE universe is massive. Most systems are completely empty. In an MMORPG this is acceptable, but in a MMOFPS it's not. How will they alleviate this issue, and will it be done well? And what about the EVE online connection? As a subscriber to EVE online, I'll want to somehow relate my FPS character with my EVE character. I mean, they're both essentially me. And whether or not it makes sense from a story perspective is irrelevant. Why would I pay two subscriptions on two different systems, for two different games? If I pay for EVE, I want to play the FPS, and I want to have my two characters interact. I made a lot of progress in EVE, why would I throw it all away for an FPS?
I mean, that's just a few of my thoughts scribbled away in a few minutes. I don't forsee this game making new inroads into FPS mechanics themselves. It'll still play like Halo or Battlefield mostly. Maybe Quake3 a little. Who knows. What this new game will add is an extension of the current universe and the current game.
I only hope that CCP isn't overreaching on this one. It's a big gamble, and could mark the beginning of the end for CCP, or it could breathe new life into the genre.
/ramble off, moar studying now.
The natural decline of some of our mental abilities as we age starts much earlier than some of us might expect
