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Where the hell is my future?

So. Here we have a list of upcoming MMO games. I have a serious issue with this. WHERE THE HELL IS MY SCI-FI, damn it? Of the umpteen games discussed there, there are maybe three which can be called sci-fi. One is 'post-apocalyptic', which is always code for 'haha you get crappy melee weapons and maybe if you're really lucky you find present-day tech and if you are INCREDIBLY FORTUNATE you find something that might be a computer but there's no electricity so you're screwed.' Bzzzzt. One is a Star Trek MMO, which might be good, so I'll reserve judgement, but it has no announced release date - and given the hole into which the Star Trek franchise has been driven by Berman and Company, I'll believe it when I see it. The last is a Warhammer Online game, which, okay, is science fiction - but is really more of a Total War game dressed up in sci-fi. It's not so much a plot-driven or even exploration-driven game. I suppose there's content there, but really, the game is derived from a miniatures-based tactics tabletop game. Release date, "maybe 2007." Sigh.

Up against this field there are no fewer than around *ten* pirate, barbarian, generic-fantasy-medieval-magic crapola games. What the hell? When did imagination and computers come to mean 'elves and unicorns and magic' to the exclusion of all that's fucking holy to a man raised on blaster pistols and starships?

Speak not to me of EVE Online or Space Cowboy. If you can't get out of your spaceship and walk around and moon somebody, forget it. It's just a big flight sim. Damn it.

I miss Anarchy Online. It was a grand fucking attempt. It just didn't have the tech to produce enough content to fill the space it had, or make the world fungible enough - and it got boring fast. But God, if it could have fulfilled its promise, it would have fucking ruled. And it *did* hold me for around a year, exploring if nothing else - WoW is prettier, but the thrill of managing to get somewhere new in AO is something WoW just doesn't have for me. Making it into a new zone, finding a pointless-and-non-interactive-but-pretty crashed starship way the hell out in the middle of nowhere on Rubi-Ka - that showed me that the game designers thought like me - they wanted a world, not just a vessel for an adventure module. Those crash sites and random encampments were a hopeful investment for the future, as well as easter eggs for those of us who would spend time just flying around the planet in our Yalms, sightseeing.

Damn, I miss it. But not enough to go back and realize that there really wasn't enough interaction to make me stick around. If only AO's content was sitting on top of WoW's platform...oh, man. The weeks I would lose inside.

Update: I'm wrong. Warhammer Online is not Warhammer 40,000 online, which would be sci-fi. Nope. It's a big-tusked-orc-type fantasy war MMO which looks a lot like...um...world of...no...couldn't be...sigh.

Posted by jbz at May 4, 2006 11:57 AM | TrackBack