Pumping Irony

Earlier this week we had Activision CEO Bobby Kotick’s arrogant statement that it would take $1 billion in development to stand a chance at competing against “his” World of Warcraft.

Now we learn Activision is floating around the idea of turning the Call of Duty franchise into an MMO? Kotick cites that COD4 was a huge hit for Activision and is constantly on the top played games list on Xbox Live, easily toppling the much-lauded Halo 3 not only in games played but sales.

… and your point is?

Just because you own Blizzard now, who by all rights and admissions, stumbled across success accidentally with World of Warcraft, does not mean Blizzard — and therefore Activision — is sole proprietor of The Magical Formula for Success in the massively multiplayer genre.

NPD data flatly states that, while COD4 is a huge success overall, it’s primary sales were on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with PC units trailing significantly behind. (There’s Darren’s cue to barge in screaming obscenities and incoherent babbling that consoles suck and PC gaming is not dying… :grin: )

Yes, a few MMO’s are being targeted at consoles, and wisely so, such as Funcom’s Age of Conan and The Secret World for the 360, SOE’s The Agency for PS3, Huxley for 360. But, this is largely an unproven market, especially the 360. Anyone doing “real” gaming on Xbox Live is a Gold Member, already paying $50 per year to use Microsoft’s matchmaking and other services. MMO’s have their own subscription fees, and it’s going to be an interesting firestorm when the first batch of console MMO’s hit the 360. Silver members are able to play subscription games (ie. MMO’s) because they’re simply being redirected to the MMO’s servers, but Silver members cannot play their retail games over Xbox Live. That rule has always been in effect, but has never been put to the test yet aside from Final Fantasy XI and… it’s FFXI, did anyone ever care?

The MMOFPS genre is largely unproven territory as well. In my mind, the only true MMOFPS ever attempted to date was SOE’s ill-fated PlanetSide. I hear it was fun back in its day, but SOE has a habit of letting their titles wither and die, and that has certainly been the case with PlanetSide. Some may jump in with Neocron but… nope, sorry, I played that one, and it was Tabula Rasa in first-person: all RPG die rolls behind the scenes, all you do is aim the targeting reticle. That’s a difference between RPG and shooter. Now, throw in “massively multi-player” numbers into the picture and… you’re looking at one helluva lag-tastic experience. Shooters are all about player skill, reflexes and muscle memory. Latency is absolutely critical. I love the (compared to other “normal” shooters) huge battles in the Battlefield series but I just don’t believe we’re to a point in network technology and broadband distribution to support a true, honest-to-gods MMOFPS. From what I’ve been able to read about Huxley, it isn’t really massively multi-player, it’s a graphical matchmaking lobby where you run around, shop, trade, train up, then queue to instanced battlegrounds. In other words, it is a FPS version of DDO or Guild Wars, which most say aren’t really MMORPG’s…

My personal opinion of COD4 is the single player campaign is excellent, immersive, and probably one of the best single player shooters ever. Multi-player, on the other hand, has left me with a rather strong sense of “meh” that for some strange reason just doesn’t manage to drag me back. That brings up a huge red flag with the whole concept of the MMOFPS: compared to the thousands of free-to-play online shooters out there over the past 10+ years, what exactly would be so compelling about an MMO shooter that would draw people back and make it worth a monthly subscription fee?

Shoot. Shoot. Bang. Bang. Frag. Die. Respawn. Rinse. Repeat.

That is the sum of a shooter experience. Yes, given that my adrenaline gets going in the huge battles in Battlefield 2142 so obviously I’d be pumped to have even larger battles. But… perhaps it’s just my mindset that if I’m paying a subscription, I want varied content; I want the virtual world, I want the character advancement, etc. In other words, I want the RPG. Turning the Call of Duty franchise into some watered-down RPG seems shameful. Nothing but PvP battles 24/7 with nothing else to do just doesn’t sound appealing to me. Yet. :grin:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 8:37 pm and is filed under MMO Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.