Believe me, I get it! I totally understand. Dragons are iconic. From Tiamat to Nidhogg, from Fafner to Smaug, in mythology and literature dragons are powerful symbols, representing power far beyond the reach of all the but most heroic.
And in games? Dime a dozen.
World of Warcraft? Onyxia and Nefarion. My response to the Cataclysm expansion and its prime mover and overall bad guy, Deathwing? "Jeez, another dragon?"
Lord of the Rings Online? Hey, Tolkien gave us Smaug, they kind of have a right to dragons. Draigoch in the Isengard expansion is fine, but did they really need the undead dragon, Thorog, in the original 24-person raid? Undead and dragon?
Rift comes out with 6 different elemental planes threatening the world. And they are led by...6 elemental dragons. "More goddamned dragons!?"
Guild Wars 2...five races united to fight for their survival against the forces of the Elder Dragons led by Zhaitan, a dragon MADE OUT OF OTHER DRAGONS! (check the picture at the bottom of http://www.arena.net/blog/inside-the-collectors-edition-making-of-gw2-book where he's described) "Seriously, enough fucking dragons already!" was my response.
And I'm just talking about MMOs that are actually good! Every POS fantasy MMO out there has got more dragons offered up. Wyrms to the left of me, drakes to the right, here I am...
But all these dragons are just a symptom of a bigger issue...
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
When I was a kid, I read "The Lord of the Rings" time after time. If something like LotRO had been around then, I quite possibly would have starved to death, refusing to leave the keyboard.
I read everything I could find by Tolkien, Leiber, Howard, Moorcock... Fantasy was a tiny sliver of the books on the science fiction shelves of the book stores in those days (yeah, stores where you bought books instead of getting them through the Internet, go figure!). I was as big of a fantasy geek as you could find.
I remember seeing a pre-release version of the first Wizardry game and almost fainting.
I played Akkalabeth...the first game from "Lord British" before he started Ultimizing.
These were the first tantalizing tastes of fantasy gaming, and only in my dreams could I have wished for the fantasy MMOs we have today.
And now...enough. Please, MMO designers, MMO developers, MMO publishers...STOP WITH THE FANTASY ALREADY!
A friend of mine was jokingly begging for more science fiction MMOs, but what we really want is something different. Anything but another high-fantasy MMO stocked with the required quotient of dwarves, elves, and, needless to say, dragons.
BEING DIFFERENT MAKES A DIFFERENCE (is that tautological?)
A lot of people are surprised by how successful The Secret World has been. No, it's not blowing out sales records or anything, but a solid launch and interesting game has been met with good reviews and, as best we can tell, good sales to match.
Why? Well, it's an odd game to be sure, with a lot of different approaches to MMO standards and mechanics but to my mind the single biggest reason people have been willing to at least give it a try is because it's different. It ain't fantasy.
Sure it borrows a lot from mythology, but it's placed in a modern setting. Sure you can use a sword or magic, but you can also use a shotgun or assault rifle. And even if a dragon shows up at some point, it's not the same old thing if I've got a rocket-launcher just waiting for it.
TSW is a peculiar game, so I can't see it ever breaking out of its niche, but the biggest reason it succeeds as much as it does is because it was different enough that a lot of people were willing to give it a try, and some of them became converts.
And if you think it's just me and my friends looking for something different, here are the most anticipated upcoming MMOs according to mmorpg.com: GW2, ArcheAge, The Repopulation, PlanetSide 2, Embers of Caerus, Mechwarrior Onine, Wildstar, Neverwinter, Path of Exile, Defiance. 5 fantasy, 5 sci-fi. If I had to bet on which were going to be successful, I'd say 5-2 in favor of sci-fi.
Oh, GW2 will be a monster hit, but I can't see more than one other fantasy game in there succeeding (which one will be told by quality) simply because of the available player base. But it wouldn't surprise me if all 5 of the sci-fi games succeeded, where I'll define success as "the game still exists with a stable, profitable player base for at least 4 years after launch". Because right now there is such a paucity of quality science-fiction MMOs there's room for a big-studio game (PS2), a sandbox (The Repopulation), an IP with an existant fanbase (Mechwarrior), a cartoony semi-fantasy game (Wildstar), and a TV tie-in (Defiance).
I'd go so far as to say that a lot of people will be interested in four or five of those games. But something like ArcheAge, another port of a game designed for Korean gaming tastes, up against Guild Wars 2? One need only look at the underwhelming successes of Aion and TERA who didn't launch versus opposition like GW2 to see the future of that game.
So with sci-fi looking strong in the near future, why don't we see more games that try to do things differently? Why aren't there more "Secret World"s being launched?
RISK AND REWARD...PRACTICALITY AND PRAGMATISM
MMOs, generally speaking, cost a shit-ton of money to develop and launch. Any time you start looking at throwing a lot of money around, people get very risk-averse, very fast.
Look around at the MMO landscape...pick out the successful games (won't take long). In the west at least, there aren't a bunch, and with WoW and (seemingly) GW2 at the forefront, no wonder fantasy is the default answer to "what sort of game should we make?"
And so we get more goddamned dragons.
Even something like Star Wars: The Old Republic, with the vast expenditures made to get it to launch, was basically a fantasy game with blasters instead of crossbows. I mean the iconic image of the game is a (laser)sword.
SWTOR had to hew fairly closely, not just to the fantasy tropes (and make no mistake, Star Wars has never, ever been science fiction), but the game mechanics people were used to from games like WoW and LotRO. Why? Risk and reward. If you do anything "different", you risk alienating potential players. And they came to the logical conclusion that doing anything different was too big of a risk given the investment.
And the game they released was, in design terms, pure vanilla. If you had played WoW or LotRO you could pretty much sit down and play SWTOR. The accusation that many have made that they spent $200M to create WoW with lightsabers was an insult...to WoW. At the very least, WoW took standard MMO mechanics and burnished them to a blinding degree of polish. SWTOR had voice-overs that usually end up getting clicked through.
This same sort of risk aversion pervades the gaming universe, just as it does in the movie and television industries. Nobody wants to try anything too "out there", even though it's often the "out there" things that become breakout successes.
I mean how much money has Notch made from Minecraft?
Where is the MMO equivalent of something like that?
To be perfectly fair, there are some good reasons why the MMO industry sticks with fantasy, and I'll give you an example. Combat. Most MMOs are driven by combat (not Glitch though!). That's what most of the players time is spent doing...running quests and killing mobs. I mentioned a few weeks back that I'd probably done 200,000 quests in my life. Might be 300k or more too. Imagine how many combats I've gone through in MMOs...
2 million? 5 million? 10 million?
And combat in fantasy games works well. The well-established dynamics of range and melee have been done so many times we all have a feel for it. And it has a logical consistancy to it as well...magic and bows, swords and shields.
Switch over to EVE Online and most of your enemies look like a plus sign because the ranges are dozens of kilometers. Missiles and beams and shields and armor sound the same, but they're not.
It works in EVE because that kind of combat makes sense to us as well...it's like a lot of sci-fi movies we've seen, crossed with World War II naval footage.
But something like PS2 or Defiance is taking a chance because in a science-fiction MMO, combat has to make sense...and with a laser rifle, logically, how can you miss? The dynamics we accept in a fantasy MMO (throw a couple spells at a monster as it runs up, then stab it until it busts open like a loot pinata) make a lot less sense when you've got guns and planes and artillery.
The further you get away from the norm of the fantasy game, the more you have to come up with innovations in play or you just end up rationalizing it away like Anarchy Online does with its "magic system" of nanos.
For practical reasons then, most science fiction MMOs end up feeling a LOT like fantasy MMOs. Because unless you're going to go with something where combat is infrequent or absent entirely (look up the late lamented MMO "Seed"), your options are limited.
But on the positive side, if you go with a science fiction setting and replace bows with lasers and magic with psi powers...
You don't need to put in a dragon!
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