It's time for another one of my what-if prognostications... 

Stypica and I were talking about the state of the MMOG industry a couple weeks ago and he asked me when they would run out of MMOGs to make. My reply was ‘when there are only 10 players per game.’ But then we got to talking about what might be the next phase of the MMOG.

One Game to Bring Them All

I jokingly said that all the MMORPGs out there would combine into one multiplayer multiverse where you could do battle as an Elf from Norrath against a Warcraft wizard or load up your army from Middle Earth into your EVE Online BattleCruiser and use it to go lay waste to Hyboria only to be stopped by a group of superheroes from your favorite comic book universe (DC, Marvel, City of Heroes, Heros Online).

It would be unbelievably cool I’m sure. Stypica was worried about game balancing because the characters in some games would be more powerful than those in others. But there is no balancing in life. All people are not of equal power and force and so it would take wide-sweeping alliances of disparate gamers banding together to either carve out a piece of the multiverse to call their own or to maintain a safe area for the livelihood of them and theirs.
Sure not all people would be totally into the ultimate cross-over. Maybe the players of Hello Kitty Online would be angry that their beautiful landscape was marred by the ugliness of war. Maybe the anti-PVP people would cower in their safe zones, not daring to step out into the chaos that swirls around them threatening to engulf them. But just imagine loading up a dragon into a space freighter, taking it to the cutesiest Asian MMORPG (Elf Online?) available and stomping them all into mudholes, lighting them on fire and generally causing massive disarray…oh the glory of it all. Cute little cat people with their fluffy little pets scurrying away from your massive dragon as he flies, chomps and burns a swath of destruction in their cartoon-like world of happiness. Oh..huh? Where was I?

One Game to Bind them

Then I had an even better idea, the generic MMORPG. Stypica hates the cutesy and wants the blood and guts and grit (like Age of Conan) that make a game darker and more real. His wife on the other hand loves the cuteness that is Hello Kitty. So why can’t they play together? Why can’t a game be made with meaningful storyline and questing but be totally removed from the actual look of the game? Think of it like skinning your MMOG.

Adult gamers might like to see some blood and gore and real violence in their game but not want it for their children. So, on their account they install the ‘dark version’ or the ‘adult version’ or whatever ‘skin’ you want to call it where they get a more intense version of the game visually. Meanwhile, on their children’s account, in the same game, they have the ‘It’s so cute’ skin pack that makes everything in the game look like non-violent, non-aggressive Saturday morning cartoons. Then the parent and the child would be able to game together, even in the same room on separate computers and each would have a unique experience yet the same game.

Most MMORPGs simply send necessary data through the network to cut down on bandwidth requirements and most of the graphics are stored locally on the client computer. So what’s to stop someone from taking a black and white generic game engine and offering up different visual experiences? Think about the potential market for such a game. Provided you had good gameplay and storyline, had non-violent options and quests or totally non-violent areas of the game there would be no reason that the game could not appeal to…well, to EVERYONE. You could even create specific PVP areas. In the ‘It’s so Cute’ skin pack the combat might amount to play fighting with pillows and water guns, while in the ‘dark’ skin pack you could be slicing enemies into pieces and spraying their body parts all over the landscape.

It would take some work on the graphics end. For example the blood spray in the ‘dark’ skin would be feathers or bluebirds or something in the ‘It’s so cute’ skin pack. Bullets would need to be replaced with water cartridges. Body parts would have to turn into or disappear altogether. It could be done; it could be the most massive of all massive multiplayer online games. It could be the one game to bind all gamers together from all walks of life, all age groups and all tastes…

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