City of Heroes 2!
Microsoft: “Hey guys, can you port CoH to the Marvel license for PC and 360? That’d be one sweet money-maker.”
Cryptic: “Sure! Let us just unload CoH onto NCSoft to clear our plate.”
MS: “Thanks for doing that, guys. By the way, we’re getting out of MMOs.”
C: “If we use really narrow letters, we can just fit ‘Champions’ wherever ‘Marvel’ used to be!”
Snark aside, CoH was a great foundation for a fun MMO. I hoped the Marvel license would give them the backing to really follow through, and build a great superhero MMO that didn’t have to be done on the cheap. I hope that’s still a possibility.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:13 am
I’m totally excited about it. Though I’m thinking the process was more like this:
Marvel: “Players can infringe on our IP with your character creator. Stop them or we’ll sue your ass off.”
Cryptic: “That’s pretty much impossible for us to prevent.”
Marvel: “Hm… good point. Okay, how about you make an MMO for us? We could make a lot of money.”
Microsoft: “Did someone say money?”
Marvel: “We said money if you said risk dispersion.”
Microsoft: “Okay, fine.”
Cryptic: “Uh… okay, cool.”
(Time passes)
Marvel: “No, we don’t like how that design decision utilizes our IP. Change it.”
Cryptic: “Ugh… okay…”
(Repeat 7500 times)
Microsoft: “Okay, screw this. We aren’t going to beat WoW with this, so we’re not interested.”
Marvel: “Fine. We’ve hated this whole idea from the beginning.”
Cryptic: “OH CRAP. That’s where the studio’s money was coming from.”
NCSoft: “Hello there. You may remember us, your actual publisher for your actual game that you actually shipped.”
Cryptic: “Oh, hi.”
NCSoft: “You know, you’re going to have to lay all but a few people off without MUO. Though if you gave us some devs and your half of the IP rights to CO*, we could give you enough cash to take that new half-developed MMO and rebrand it.”
Cryptic: “You know, we were thinking the exact same thing.”
NCSoft: “Great.”
(Crime drama-style exchange of suitcase of money for hostages, except they weren’t hostages, but bear with me, it’s about the visual, damn it)
Cryptic: “Well, it can’t be freakin’ City of Heroes 2 now… hey, what was the name of that p&p superhero RPG we used to love…?”
March 3rd, 2008 at 11:09 pm
I’ll no doubt buy it and try it out, but… well, I could run off the list of stuff that discouraged me in CoH. Suffice to say, I will probably create a bunch of low level characters just to get some amusing concepts out of my head and into their fantastic character creator, and then abandon ship.
As to something Matt said last weekend, I’ll have to agree and add it here - a MMO does not need to beat WoW to be successful. I would think that if a MMO manages to stabalize around 100k subscribers, they could put out several content patches and some features and ride that train for some time. I’m also beginning to wonder if there is a WoW-beater out there, or if in the end it will disperse into many MMOs. With no clue as to the actual numbers, that seemed to me what happened in the interim of EQ -> WoW - it wasn’t WoW being out that killed EQ, but a lot of people slowly trickled off and did other things.
March 4th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Geoff said: “With no clue as to the actual numbers, that seemed to me what happened in the interim of EQ -> WoW - it wasn’t WoW being out that killed EQ, but a lot of people slowly trickled off and did other things.”
I know a lot of people that were MMO-hoppers — they went EQ -> DAOC -> AO -> COH -> WOW. But then they stayed with WOW.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Interesting point– most MMOs used to be on pretty similar levels, so the hopping was probably fairly equitable. Now everyone dead-ends at WoW.
I wonder what the total current audience size is for “core” MMOs right now, minus WoW. Has it actually decreased since EQ’s heyday? My guess is that it’s still increased, but MMOGChart does show 2007 being a rough year for most competitors.
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
If you count non-sub MMO business models, though, the market has drastically expanded audience-wise, even subtracting WoW. See Maple Story, Guild Wars, etc.. (Interestingly, the rest of the PC market may be moving that way; i.e. free Battlefield coming from EA.)
None of this is relevant to CoH2, AFAICT, which I think will be going with the standard sub model.
March 5th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Wow, who the hell are all these people playing Final Fantasy XI?!?
March 5th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
I know! By modern MMO (WoW) standards, FFXI is really pretty bad. I wonder what percentage of those players are on the console. If it’s even 30 or 40 percent, it makes me wonder why no one else will make an MMO on the console.
March 6th, 2008 at 12:44 am
I was under the impression (again, probably completely unreliable) that many FFXI players were from Japan, and that WoW never caught on there. I mostly figured that from all the intriguing posts I saw of what the auto-translator did to deteriorate US-Japanese relations.
(Still can that beat getting hate mails in Chinese in WoW; or being asked “is you china?” while in a pug?)