Not being a fantasy game is becoming a major selling point for game developers.
Statements of grandeur are beset by pitfalls. If a developer says its game is going to be better than Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Diablo, or World of Warcraft (WoW), odds are that it is a set-up to failure. Even if the game is good and garners a respectable audience, if it doesn’t reach the dizzying heights reached by these games, then it has failed.
In fact, trying to directly take on one of these blockbuster titles is usually an exercise in futility. These big games often suck the oxygen out of the space, not letting other titles even get hold of an audience. Success brings imitation, and that imitation more often than not ends in a pile of failed titles.
Look at Counter-Strike – numerous titles, both good and bad, tried to improve upon the inherently simple gameplay of this mod. Yet, despite decent budgets and oftentimes great ideas, the mod made by one guy in his bedroom is still one of the most dominant forces in gaming a decade after it was released. It took DICE with its more sandbox approach in the Battlefield franchise and Bungie with Halo on the Xbox to really break the stranglehold held by Counter-Strike on the online shooter audience and help create the more diverse landscape we see today.
It seems that the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) market is at a similar breaking point to the shooter one. A year or so has passed since Age of Conan and Warhammer Online made hyped attempts to snatch some of the WoW audience. And while both games have found a sustainable niche, the assault barely dented WoW’s armour – at a time when the audience was particularly jaded and a large number were yearning for a new MMO experience.
A large part of the issue was that both of these games were fantasy titles. It was even worse for Warhammer, because back when Chris Metzen and co were creating the ‘lore’ behind Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, they were incredibly inspired by other fantasy universes, most of all the Warhammer One. This has meant that no matter how innovative Mythic was, there was always the giant, visibly similar, fantasy/steampunk elephant (with orcs) in the room.
To be fair, considering the long time involved in the development of MMOs, these games would have initially been conceived without the ominous spectre of WoW. But while Blizzard has legitimised the MMO through WoW’s popularity, it has also spoiled fantasy as the topic of choice for the players. After all, if it looks like crack, tastes like crack, but costs the same and is only half as good as the crack you get from your regular guy, there isn’t much incentive to switch suppliers.
Not only is this something that a lot of gamers don’t realise when prophesying that NCsoft’s Aion will be the second coming of the MMO, it is the reason we are seeing so much money thrown behind science fiction-based MMO settings. But even before these arrive, we are seeing a trend in using the very absence of WoW’s defining elements as a selling point for new MMOs.
A few weeks ago, Hi-Rez Studios, developer of Global Agenda, released this ‘no elves’ trailer. It isn’t a bad attempt at humour, but everything from the opening music to the look of the elven mage himself are pure WoW. It is a broad swipe at the fantasy genre as a whole, the campaign making it clear that this is something very different from the norm.
Now, the developer behind the post apocalyptic MMO, Fallen Earth, has launched a new trailer that also takes on the central focus of it not being a fantasy title. Slogans like ‘quit playing with your wand’ and ‘lose the tights’ are squarely aimed at pulling people out of current games.
These approaches do, indeed, show a point of difference, however, they don’t really do much to sell the games themselves. A lot of the WoW audience is already searching for something different – even more so those who already tried Age of Conan and Warhammer Online and found themselves wanting. Plus, I severely doubt that these ads will make players suddenly wake up and realise having a night elf hunter called Legollaas makes them less manly.
For example, Fallen Earth’s biggest challenge is differentiating itself from Fallout. While the developer has done a lot of work through MMO sites to highlight the differences, this video basically comes across as scenes from Fallout interspersed with ad hominem attacks on the viewer’s masculinity.
You can bet these won’t be the only examples of this kind of advertising we see as the rise of the sci-fi MMO continues. I wonder when those behind the campaigns will realise that the audience doesn’t need to be reminded of a difference in subject matter – it needs to be sold on the gameplay behind it.
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