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Why aren't superhero MMOs more popular?
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why not? Good story. Good action combat. Lots of heroes to play.
I suppose preferences vary.
i would die for Marvel Heroes to be ported to PS4. Not only the game would be more popular by opening to a whole new player base, it would also bring people who refuses to ( or simply cant) point and click to the end and pretend is fun. I dont play enough for that only reason (point and click). I sound like a broken record with this, but i still have hopes that Gazillion will port it one day.
Really great thread. I think about this sometimes, have my own ideal Superhero MMO cooked up of course. There's a couple really good points here.
1) "When Everyone is Super, no one will be." - Syndrome
Part of what makes superheroes awesome is that they're unique, and they're allowed to be unique. Even in the massive expansive universes of Marvel and DC, if you pick up a She-Hulk comic, or even a Robin comic, they're the only hero in a thousand miles, the only one who can save the day. Everything depends on them. You see this in the stories of CoX or Marvel Heroes, but it's instantly obliterated when you see another hero passing by. Superheroes are great for team ups and crossovers, but, fundamentally, superhero adventures are instanced. There's no reason for SHIELD not to come rescue the President in Iron Man 3. There's no reason that none of Superman's villains say "Y'know... I bet I'd do better in Gotham." Except for the necessary instancing inherent in the superhero genre. What makes superheroes awesome is that they solo well. It's what they do. Even teams like the X-Men happily go out and solo or in groups of two as needed. Even sucky X-Men, like Jubilee.
So what happens when most people you run into aren't innocent but interesting civilians in need of - or at the mercy of - your superness? What happens if, instead, they are high powered supers like you? Well... nothing interesting. It's nice to have a congregation spot, an Avengers Mansion, a Watchtower where everyone can hang out and be super together in that exclusive kind of way, but just on the street. Well... that means you're not that super anymore. It's different in fantasy. You're not presuming yourself to be super, but simply braver or the chosen one in a way that is hidden and special. A superhero is, by definition, very clearly visible. They have the same kind of special you do, obviously.
So to fix this, you really do have to instance the heck out of such a game. There are ways to do it and clever ways to do it, but it does naturally invite the question: why is this an MMO? What benefit do you want each player to get out of sharing the world with millions of other superheroes? Is it purely to say that Superheroes have an MMO too, and not because MMOs are good for superheroes? Superheroes thrive off of their supporting cast: The Peppers, the Happys, the War Machines. The Lois Lanes and Jimmy Olsens. Not just as "contacts" but as moving parts of the adventure. If you figure out a way to have other players control, or otherwise influence these supporting cast characters to make it fun, you might have a really successful really deep superhero game on your hands.
I think part of why other Superhero MMOs have sucked is because they're just WoW in tights on a certain level, or as another poster put it, D&D. Leading to my next point.
2) Fantasy Gameplay Doesn't Fit Superheroes
As largely action heroes with extra powers, the D&D dicerolling, crit, trinity level up gameplay doesn't fit superheroes. When was the last time a superhero leveled up? It's a pretty rare event in a superhero's life. Often times superheroes will perform new feats but just as often, those will be temporary power ups due to the situation. Certainly over the course of several decades superheroes change, but in each phase it's seen as the status quo, whereas in a Dungeons and Dragons fantasy model, there is no status quo, the goal is always more power until you 'max out' whereas many superheroes "max out" at the conclusion of their origin.
Combat presents similar problems, as superhero combat tends to be very dynamic and moving, but fantasy genre combat demands being rooted for tanks. The knockback that makes superheroes cool makes fantasy combat tedious and uncool. Customization presents the same problems as advancement. Superheroes don't customize much, they're intended to have an awesome costume the first time. While I wouldn't say that superheroes don't have roles, their roles are nothing like the D&D classes. Hulk is not a tank. Iron Man does a lot of blasting, is he in any way the glass cannon a D&D game needs him to be? At the same time, you don't see a lot of hulking brutes with telepathy. Why do you think that is? These two genres are simply at odds, fundamentally.
The fix to this is simply a brand new style of gameplay. Look at the best superhero games out there: Batman Arkham Asylum/City/Knight. These games are action games, platforms, adventure games. You gain tweaks and new tools to your arsenal but your basic abilities are there from the very beginning, you simply get better at using them. That is where superheroes flourish, and adapting this into the MMO space will yield much more fruitful results than any Level 20 Batman could ever hope to accomplish.
3) "You can't all be Spider-Man"
And that's the other clincher. What draws us to superheroes are their deep mythic stories and our ability to identify with someone not quite like us. This is a far cry from what drives a person to create a hero, which is why so often you'll see people create superheroes which are simply their version of an existing hero, because that is who they want to be. Basically, to make this work, you have to work that same kind of deep character origin emotional work on someone's created character. They have to be hooked, from the tutorial level, on their created hero. They have to be drawn into that person's story. So perhaps character creation even shouldn't be handled in the same way but perhaps start with the character's theme instead of their bodytype. If there were a way to have the player create their character as they go through the tutorial, that could be really, really awesome, and create the same kind of investment in their custom superhero as they have in the main characters for a Bioshock or an Assassin's Creed.
For a licensed game, I think Gazillion has done an admirable job replacing character creation with stable building and customization. I think having an explicit 'alternate dimension' storyline as a core of the gameworld could mitigate all the 'multiple spidey' things in a potentially cool way.
Those are just my thoughts. These may be horrible solutions, but they sound fun to me, so... yeah.
The Illusion of Choice