Sunday, October 10, 2010

So There's a Vampire MMO in the Works...

So, apparently, CCP, the company that makes the video game EVE Online, is working on a Vampire MMORPG. It should be noted that it's using the old Vampire: the Masquerade intellectual property. You know, the one where the end of the world is coming and the various lines don't use quite the same mechanics and all that.
I'm not sure exactly what to make of it. The fact that they're developing a World of Darkness MMO, and that it's focused on the Vampire line, just makes business sense. However, it seems that Vampire fans really like the intrigue involved, whereas an MMORPG is usually a collection of quests/missions. (Making MMOs out of missions makes sense: It's easy to add/remove missions modularly, and it's also fairly straightforward to come up with new ones.) Now, sure, quests could have story elements such that they seem like PCs are backstabbing NPCs or something like that, but that wouldn't be all that genuine.
CCP has said that it's going to be focused on politics/intrigue/player interaction (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103767-CCP-Teases-New-Vampire-the-Masquerade-MMO), which makes it sound kind of PvP, which isn't really my style (not that I was going to play a Vampire MMO anyway), so there's that. I hope that they come up with an interesting way to do it, though. The industry could stand some innovation, something outside of the MMORPG trinity of quest, dungeon, and achievement unlocked.
If I had to take a guess, I'd say that the Vampire MMO will probably end up a lot like DDO: Players will prefer the tabletop RPG, but will play the MMO if they can't regularly play the preferred game, to get their fix. (FYI: This is what got me into DDO, though an important part was that DDO is F2P (free to play).)

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