Thoughts on MMORPGifying Wing Commander

[tangaroa]

I wrote this a couple years ago and don't remember posting it online. The timestamp says January 2007.

Thought: Wouldn't a Wing Commander online RPG be cool?

I've been wanting to play networked Wing Commander ever since I was first introduced to Wing Commander 2. It was a fun stand-alone game, but as a fan of multiplayer-friendly Nintendo games such as River City Ransom and the first two levels of Battletoads, I realized that Wing Commander would be great for cooperative play.

Since then, the MMORPG has become a popular gaming model. The thought comes to mind: Why restrict network play to only you and one buddy flying scripted scenarios when you can have a larger universe of pilots flying together and even against each other?

The problem is simple: it might be hard to make it fun. That which makes a good stand-alone game does not necessarily translate well to an online RPG. To imagine a successful Wing Commander MMORPG, we must answer the basic question: What makes Wing Commander fun?

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I recently copied the data from my old 386's hard drive onto a newer system and played a little bit of original Wing Commander. I found that the game had serious problems. For instance, the AI is noticeably poor. Enemy ships often just hang there waiting to be shot and it's not uncommon to win 4-1 matches against superior craft. Another problem is the bugs in the script, where for instance in after-battle reports the commander says the wrong ship was destroyed when you lost one of two transports or where the bartender Shotglass tells you the mass driver has a longer range than the laser cannon (the opposite is true). Also, the appearance of capitol ships is diminished when you realize their flak is harmless and they otherwise don't shoot back at you.

Despite the flaws that Wing Commander had, it is still one of the better games of its age. That's because the game was a lot of fun. What made it fun, and how would that translate into an MMORPG?

Battle

Blasting apart waves of weaker ships

Translation to MMORPG: Poor. Any player would be superior to WC1's AI. Differing levels of AI from poor to mediocre could be added so that players can command fleets and their enemies can have the pleasure of destroying them.

Defeating a hard-to-kill enemy.

Translation to MMORPG: Good. This would happen much more often than in the game, which only had a few Kilrathi aces. An online universe would be full of aces.

Destroying a capitol ship

Translation to MMORPG: Fair. Capitol ships could exist, but there would have to be a lot of them and they would have to be tougher to survive in a large-scale MMORPG. Otherwise one side could sweep the other within a few days of real time.

Battle damage affecting ship's capabilities

Translation to MMORPG: Good. I see no reason why this wouldn't be doable.

Flair in ship -- panels exploding when hit, etc

Translation to MMORPG: Good. No change of gameplay here.

Communicating with wingman

Translation to MMORPG: Good. The game can offer pilots a set of base face designs and some text and symbols to put on their helmet. [Edit 2012: modern bandwidth is high enough for voice chat; the game would then need speech recognition for allied AIs]

Choices of weaponry, guns or missiles

Translation to MMORPG: Good. Likely even more ships with more choices.

Afterburners, the magic Stay Alive button

Translation to MMORPG: Fair. The game can easily have afterburners, but human players are likely to use them offensively to diminish their use as a defensive panacea.

Large, slow, easy to hit ships (before Armada and WC3 when things changed)

Translation to MMORPG: Good. This is doable.

After Battle

Seeing ship's damage on landing, crewman comments on it

Translation to MMORPG: Fair. The sequence could be copied over as-is whenever a player lands, but people would get bored of it. Players would also want to be able to show off their battle damaged ships to their friends, which would be impossible if it was just a cut sequence.

After-battle report

Translation to MMORPG: Poor. Unless the ship's commander is another human player, any after-battle report is going to be a few simple phrases sewn together. That will get boring and repetitive after a while.

Receipt of medals and promotions

Translation to MMORPG: Fair. You might get medals, but after a while everybody is going to be carrying a Fort Knox worth on them unless we allow player characters to be killed permanently.

Reassignment to different ship/squad

Translation to MMORPG: Fair. An AI can assign you to a new fighter as easily as a scripted sequence can.

Moving up to better ships with better weapons

Translation to MMORPG: Fair. A line of ship quality from worse to better can easily exist, but this might serve to make players concentrate fire on their better equipped enemies. [Edit 2012: and what's the problem with that?]

Before Battle

Chatting with wingmen and crew

Translation to MMORPG: Poor. What used to be a scripted set of statements to give information to the player and add depth to the storyline would likely become yet another unremarkable chat room. If this feature was not the heart of Wing Commander, it was one of its major organs.

Mission Briefing

Translation to MMORPG: Poor. The fun stuff that made each briefing new and different would be replaced by a semi-randomized grab bag of phrases.

Red alert / ship launch animation

Translation to MMORPG: Fair. It's boring and skippable. If the ship's internals are presented as a 3-D environment, the rush to the fighters and their preparation and launch can be presented in real time.

Etc

Autopilot, going to battle instantly at the press of a button

Translation to MMORPG: Poor. Anything with multiple players in the same universe is fundamentally resistant to having some of them jump around vast distances in an instant. This becomes another problem if these players are supposed to be patrolling. One possible resolution is to turn autopilot into a kind of "warp drive" that lets players travel at faster than their maximum speed and without danger of collision, but still at a speed that other players can hail them to turn autopilot off. All in all, this is one of the critical issues preventing multiplayer WC.

Colorful artwork

Translation to MMORPG: Good. Call me strange, but I like the WC1/2 artwork better than the darker Armada/WC3 artwork. So it's not realistic? I don't want realism, I want a video game where space is blue and all the ships are brightly colored from every angle without any visible source of light and they're big enough to hit easily. There's no reason this can't happen.

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Let's also consider Privateer as a model for our MMORPG, since it was more of a free-form RPG than the other WC games.

Privateer features

Building up your own ship with better equipment

Translation to MMORPG: Good. A lot of MMORPGs do things like this.

Taking on missions for profit

Translation to MMORPG: Good. Missions might even be spawned by activities happening in the game. So far, I've yet to see a game where it's less work for a player to create missions for other players to follow than to take on the mission themselves, but then again I've been out of gaming since Half-Life came out.

Joining guilds for access to more missions / features

Translation to MMORPG: Good. The theoretical MMORPG might even go deeper into this than Privateer did.

Buying and selling goods to make money

Translation to MMORPG: Good. Trade Wars did this fifteen years ago. A good supply and demand model might be necessary to make this work well.

Smuggling contraband past Confed

Translation to MMORPG: Good. In some war-stressed places Confed might even be more interested in keeping any confed ships in space at all than trying to enforce the law.

Running up against the war in a civilian ship

Translation to MMORPG: Good. The war and the privateering can happen in the same universe.

Pirates and fundies and other assorted third parties

Translation to MMORPG: Good. Piracy could become a viable option for players if the game is designed well. If players are allowed to establish bases or manage AI-run traders, they could become powerful third parties of their own. Designing this aspect of the game well could be the most difficult part of the game development.

Game model ideas

Attempting to make a WC1 style MMORPG will require sloughing off much of the storyline material that made the game fun. Furthermore, such a game will run into the barriers of autopilot problems and a limited character upgrade path.

I see two ways to go. One is to make a game on the Privateer model, where a pure WC1-style mode might be available as a subset of the game if a player chooses a military instead of civilian career. The other is to continue throwing out stuff until we've left with a pure-combat game.

Privateer model

You earn money by transporting stuff and use it to buy better ships, hoping you don't get PK'd.

Advantages of Privateer model: Allows for role-playing and building up of characters, ships, and fleets.

Disadvantages of Privateer model: Much more time required to play, not to mention develop. Gets boring when you're not fighting.

Combat model

All pilots fly straight into a combat zone and attack each others' carriers. The model is based on a WWI game that Zib once pointed me at where the two sides were matched up on a small map with 5 airfields to a side. In a WC version, they would be carriers or space stations and there could be additional capships flying in and out every so often.

Advantages of combat model: Instant gratification.

Disadvantages of combat model: The game can be entirely played out within an afternoon, unless one grants rewards to successful players such as a choice of better ships the next time they die. [Edit 2012: By "played out", I assume that I meant the player would have gotten all of the fun that the player could have possibly gotten from the game. The scenario getting played out could easily be fixed by resetting the map or jumping out to a new map.]