Lens on An MMO Opportunity Squandered

Today I'll be talking about a lost opportunity...a "what could have been" for a game dead almost three years now.

The last couple of nights on AMC they've been showing the "Reloaded" and "Revolutions" movies from the Matrix series.  Certainly the first in the series, "The Matrix" was an entertaining action movie cloaked as a science-fiction movie.  (Why "cloaked"?  Well if "machines use humans as energy source" is your fundamental conceit, you've stepped way beyond science into fantasy.)  The sequels were not as well received because the story grew increasingly dependant on a sort of deterministic mysticism that was somewhere between opaque and indecipherable.

But goodness there is some lovely action and "shit blowing-up" moments!

And, although today's MMO kiddies may not remember, there was also a game..."The Matrix Online" (aka MXO).

I played some beta in MXO and for a month or two after release.  There were certainly things to like about the game, but for me it failed in a number of fundamental ways.  I'll talk a bit about the strengths it brought to the table and why, for me (and I'd imagine a great many others) it wasn't enough.

Keep in mind, it's been years since I played the game, and I wasn't around for whatever incremental improvements were implemented in the 4 years it ran, so by the time SOE put it to bed the Matrix may have been a very different place.

THE WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

MXO had a shot.  It was the right idea at the right time.  Even though the second and third movies didn't live up to the hype, the IP had a huge recognition factor and plucked just the right strings of the ol' geek guitar.

When it was announced, my response was "If you're going to play in WoW's sandbox, you'd better be niche or have a Big Name IP, and they've got a Big Name IP."  I didn't think they had a prayer of knocking off WoW, but I thought that if they executed, they could build a solid base and grow.

And they had some great ideas at launch.

The three-faction system was a natural fit.  You could play Zion (free the human now!), Machine (change the system over time!), or the neutralist Merovingian faction (where's mine?).  To date, three-faction systems seem to work best for a game with any sort of PvP activity due to the inherent self-balancing mechanisms.

The world of the Matrix we saw in the movies was filled with combat and intrigue for those who were in on the "it's all a simulation" secret.  Combat, missions, factions...fertile ground indeed for building an MMO.

Your character (if memory serves) could "jack in" with any number of different load-outs and could act as any of the many character variations.  These were broken out into 3 major varieties (not the so-called "Holy Trinity" of tank/healer/DPS for a change), Coder, Hacker, Operative.

Operatives used weapons of all sorts in combat.  Hackers could "hack" the code of the Matrix to provide for mage/cleric type functions (damage or healing "programs" instead of spells).  This seemed much more elegant way of handling it than, say, Anarchy Online's nanos, which always seemed like a kludgey way of saying "magic spells that aren't, y'know, magic".  And Coders were crafters of goods for use within The Matrix and also could "summon" creations similar to pet classes in other MMOs.

The fact that the entirety of the world was a computer simulation meant that things changing abruptly in-world, whether the setting or the physics or the local "wildlife" was not out of bounds.  Just as "earlier versions" of The Matrix had things like vampires and werewolves, there was no reason pockets of things like that (mini-fantasy/sci-fi "worlds") couldn't exist alongside the default, turn-of-the-millenium setting of the movies and game proper.

Over time the game also developed a fanatical group of core players who did enormous amounts of work to create in-game events and the like.  This is similar to what happened in another SOE game, Star Wars Galaxies.  A strong IP lends itself to a fanatical fanbase and it seems that a somewhat threadbare MMO (especially a sandbox one like SWG) lends itself to a fanatical fanbase capable of filling the vacuum on its own.

To support these players, MXO also had a history of live events run by official personal that kept people playing.  The combo platter of official/unofficial in-game activities beyond the standard fare was one of the strengths of the game.

So why didn't MXO survive, let alone prosper?

TIME AND RESOURCES MISSPENT

To my mind, that's the long and short of it.  When MXO was released (too early, but when aren't MMOs released too early?) parts simply weren't ready for primetime.

The first time I moved in-game, my immediate response was "Jeez, that's ugly."

In my long time playing MMOs, only two games have "gotten it right" from the first instant you move.  In WoW and City of Heroes, movement feels natural and responsive from the get-go.  In WoW you can run and jump and land on the mailbox at level 1.  No, the character doesn't have the ability, just about any player will be able to do that.  Action games don't have the feel and ease of use and precision that moving does in WoW and CoH.  Hell, in CoH it only takes a couple of minutes after choosing the Super Leap ability before you can leap two blocks and land on exactly the balcony railing you were aiming for.  Effortless.

A few other games are pretty good at this sort of thing, LotRO and SW:TOR for instance, but it's not as precise, not as controlled, not as natural.

And MXO was absolutely abysmal.  It was a terrible start to the game.  Movement in-game felt like something from a poorly made 8-bit platformer.

First impressions really matter in an MMO.

Perhaps the most defining shots in the Matrix movies are those done in bullet-time, the super-slow motion bullet-dodging and Trinity-kicking-a-guy-in-the-chest moments.  Unsurprisingly, the MXO devs felt they wanted/needed to do something similar for the game.

And this is where I want to make my point about misspent time and resources.

In an MMO, outside of a few rare instances, everything happens in real-time, especially combat.  In a single player game, it's perfectly OK to go to super-slo-mo because all of the players (i.e. "you") are involved.  In a multiple player persistant world, you can't stop time for one person.

Common sense says that you can't do bullet-time as a general purpose game function.  You could implement it as an occasional goodie tossed into single-player instanced gameplay, but it should not, CAN NOT be a major element.

But they spent a LOT of time developing the bullet-time gameplay.  It was called the Interlock system, and while I found it interesting, it felt totally out of place in an MMO.  Major design and animation assets had to have been assigned to achieving something that could never, ever have been anything more than an ancillary part of the game.

Early in the design, this needed to get thrashed out and shitcanned.  As we've seen recently from SW:TOR, clinging to an early design decision (real choice matters!) can lead to untenable results (players screwed by early/uninformed "real choice" later on).  In TOR's case they "fixed" the problem by making choice not matter at release.

But in MXO the resources spent on implementing bullet-time were desperately needed elsewhere in the game.  Animators needed to make basic movement fluid and natural.  Dev time could have been used to flesh out a wide variety of game systems which, at launch, needed a lot of work.

The game was also generally lacking in polish and deeply deficient in content.

Some of this could have been remedied by a later release (for every game ever), but some simply needed the design priorities to have been different.

Game designers need to remember that they are making an MMO, and even if your primary goals emphasize story (like TOR) or a particular "feel" (like the combat of bullet-time in MXO) you have got to make them work within the framework of the MMO.

There's a saying about MMOs that "Content is king".  But "Gameplay is king" is true too.  In fact, MMOs have lots of kings, including story and feel.  I'm a big fan of King Polish (that's not the nationality, btw).

To succeed an MMO needs to kowtow to all of the kings, even if they choose to favor one (or more) over the others.

If you spend too much time on one and little or none on one of the others, especially in the big-money AAA arena, you too will vanish, forgotten until the next time they show your movie.