blog
Aritcle
digg
1
I’ve seen a few articles lately discussing the good and bad things about “cloned” MMO’s. The closed beta release of Wind Slayer has reignited debate on whether blatantly cloning an MMO is good for the gamers, the game itself and the industry as a whole.
For those who haven’t seen it, Wind Slayer is almost a carbon copy of another MMO; Maple Story. It does have a few differences in some areas (such as PvP) but the similarities are too many to ignore. Wind Slayer just doesn’t seem to have any original ideas of its own and even resorts to flat-out plagiarism at times; one of the NPC quest givers is named “Gangdalf”, naturally he’s a kindly old wizard (who would have guessed?) and in one of the quest texts his name is misspelled as “Gandalf”.
But Wind Slayer is not the game that shamelessly plucks its essence from other sources:
Wind Slayer vs. Maple Story
Lineage 2 vs. Shaiya
Lord of the Rings Online vs. …well, a little bit of everything.
While the focus is currently on whether or not cloned games are any good, I’ve become a bit more worried about the genre overall.
Cloning games, while not always a good thing, is still accepted in the MMO community. The humble MMO seems to be now stuck in a rut. Game after game gets released and everyone, to some extent, knows exactly what to expect.
With the exception of Aeronauts, every new MMO I’ve tried in the last year has been comfortingly familiar. It’s that cosy feeling you get when you know exactly what you’re doing even if it’s your first time on a “new” game, like snuggling up to that favourite blanket you’ve had since you were 4 years old after your Mum had to wash it.
Same comfortable blanket, doesn’t smell like it did yesterday.
New ideas in the genre seem to be few and far between and the games that do try it usually fail due to poor implementation or not having enough funding. Because an MMO’s success fully depends on its players, cloning games seems like a safe bet for developers and gamers simply because people want that comfort.
Whether you’re for cloning or against it, nobody wants to be a noob again… ever.
It’s why people still play Counter-Strike 1.5 in net cafés across the globe. It’s why people have elevated Starcraft to levels seen in elite sporting competitions.
Hell, it’s why people still freaking play Runescape.
People pay for what they want and the majority of gamers don’t want to be confused by new game mechanics, new styles and new ideas. People play MMO’s for any number of reasons but nobody plays to feel like a noob all over again.
But therein lies the problem. If developers are afraid to take chances then the genre will end up stagnating to the point where all that gets released is clones of other successful games. We’d end up missing out on so much if developers are too afraid to try new things.
Even though survival-horror MMO’s have been tried, they generally had too little funding to accomplish anything worthwhile and these sorts of results can stop big name developers from making a game like Dead Rising Online.Like that idea? You may never see it if MMO’s get stuck the way they are.
How about Alien vs. Predator Online?
Or maybe Firefly Online?
Those concepts have people excited all over the world, but if the MMO developers end up too afraid to make anything but a clone then they’ll never see the light of day.
Here’s hoping that some developers out there take the plunge into some great new ideas…
-Tob
Ariticle url: http://my.mmosite.com/blog/14afdf2a843afb80f21f93cba3dbf0df/blog/item/19bd98550c14f68b8403722471985f74.html