So, based on one of my comments in my last post (http://www.psychochild.org/?p=288#comment-115221), this challenge will be about licenses for MMOs. What makes a good license? Oh, let’s also talk about the potential trainwrecks since those are fun to…

Star Trek, I would run away screaming. BSG, I’d just laugh and say “good luck with that.” I’m a fan, but precisely because I am a fan I know that what makes the franchise compelling would be impossible to deliver in an MMO: The confrontation of the unknown. In an MMO, nothing can ever be unknown for long, and faking it won’t cut it for those liscenses. Max Max and Buffy, on the other hand, are essentially a dark mirror held up to our familiar world, each in different ways.

Auto Assault will probably poison the well for post-apocalyptic vehicle-based games for a while, much as Earth and Beyond poisoned the well for space exploitation and combat games (Eve not with-standing, do you see a line to make more of them?).

But the Buffiverse…That would be cool.

–Dave

Star Trek is WORSE than BSG\’e2\’80\’a6 it is hopelessly saddled with a strict command hierarchy … Stargate (You know, that show that totally kicks BSG\’e2\’80\’99s ass is practically ideal.

Er, no. Stargate has the exact same disadvantages (strict command hierarchy) and advantages (unlimited number of worlds to explore) that Star Trek has.

Both would be best adapted by stepping sideways from the show’s main emphasis and going with non-government independents functioning within the universe but not under the command hierarchy. Except, oops, that easy out doesn’t work in Stargate, where stargate access is the exclusive domain of the military! An independent ship (e.g. Federation but not Starfleet) works just fine in the Star Trek universe tho, and moderately well in the BSG universe.

Don’t get me wrong. I really like the idea of taking a team of friends through a stargate to explore a new, totally unknown world every time we play. I don’t think that current content-generation capabilities are up to that tho. Another really cool IP to explore along those lines would be C. J. Cherryh’s Morgaine book series (Gate of Ivrel, Well of Shiuan, etc).

But back to our “what if” mind games, another interesting twist in these SciFi universes would be to set up each server as one large starship (would work great for Star Trek and could maybe be streched to fit BSG anyway). The players on that server are it’s crew, and every week or two all the ships move to a new system/world/encounter (parallel universes, and all that). At the end of each “episode” the servers are ranked according to how each performed against that episode, and some kind of minor reward is granted to the players on the best (and maybe worst???) performing servers for the next episode. Meanwhile all the old episodic content is available to everyone via holodeck/simulator sessions for use in character development, etc. It just doesn’t count towards the starship’s “real” performance awards. But there could also be competitive stats showing which ship had the highest score on a given holodeck/simulation, etc, for bragging rights and such. And maybe invitations to fleet-wide competitions (a la Top Gun flight school) or opportunities to accept reassignment to an elite ship where the best of the best get to tackle the next episodic content with higher difficulty (and reward!) settings.