It's so early in development that it doesn't have a name yet, but I'm already quite intrigued by the new massively multiplayer online game from the creators of Neopets.
Adam Powell and Donna Williams struck it rich with Neopets, an online virtual-pet site that grew so popular with kids and female gamers that the pair sold their creation to Viacom in 2005 for $160 million. Now, as founders of a startup called Meteor Games, they're working on something markedly different for an encore: A new MMO game that blurs the lines between traditional massively multiplayer games, social networking and casual gaming.
"We're *World of Warcraft *players ourselves," says Powell, "and we wouldn't want to compete with them. The game is really more casual -- we want players to be able to play it for five, 10 minutes at a time."
Imagine sitting down for a game of chess inside the 3-D virtual world of the MMO. Your opponent is a real live person, but they're playing the game in a simple Flash browser window, without all of the fluff around it. Or imagine playing a version of the classic cellphone game Snake, but at the end of the game, the snake comes to life in the MMO and starts attacking enemies for you.
Neopets, Williams and Powell readily admit, is often seen now as a child's pastime. But that game's original target audience was an older set -- teens and young adults. After the pair launched Neopets in 1999, the game took on a life of its own and became so popular with the younger audience that the twosome didn't want to sacrifice the intensely lucrative market.
The goal of their unnamed new project is to capture traditional gamers. The art style is going to be cartoonish, certainly, but unlike Neopets it won't trade realism for saccharine sweetness. Instead, Williams and Powell are drawing inspiration from a litany of sources near and dear to children of the 1980s.
"It's sort of traditional high fantasy with a little bit of sci-fi," says Powell. "It's like a lot of '80s films that we love, like Labyrinth or Legend."
"Or The Dark Crystal," adds Williams.
So, then, is this game merely lifting ideas from the lucrative well of collective nostalgia to compete with World of Warcraft? Apparently not. The game itself seeks to target a demographic somewhere in between the hard-core MMO fan and his 7-year-old younger sister. The word "tween" was mentioned, though I picked up on an obvious distaste for the term.
Key to attracting this audience, say the designers, is the game's reliance on a hybrid financing plan. Players will be required to pay for a subscription, though Powell was very quick to point out that it won't be nearly as expensive as those of traditional MMOs, which generally run in the neighborhood of $15 per month.
Instead, the stated goal is to offer players a monthly fee of less than $10, making up the difference and more with the ability to buy in-game items with small microtransactions. But kids with more pocket money won't be able to power up for cash.
"We are strongly against letting players buy an advantage," says Powell. All of the microtransactions, he says, will augment the player's looks, not powers: new houses, new clothes, new pets.
Neither subscriptions nor microtransactions are anything new in the world of online gaming, so what sets this unnamed MMO apart from the rest of the pack? Synergy. Don't worry, they didn't actually drop that buzzword during our conversation, but after describing the way the game would span several different platforms in real time, there simply isn't a better word for it.
As an example, Powell detailed one possibility, involving a simple game of chess. At launch, the game itself will span both a traditional MMO client as well as a social networking website, and that simple game of chess can be accessed through either, he explained.
Let's say one player is sitting inside the MMO. He's at a table in his own fully 3-D virtual house and in front of him is a chessboard. He moves a pawn, waits and the opposing side moves against him. Only instead of challenging another player within the MMO, he's playing against someone who is playing chess via a simple Flash application embedded into the website. Each of their moves is relayed in real time, and both receive certain levels of virtual reward for the activity.
To explain how the reward system would work for someone interacting with the MMO from the outside, Powell offered another example the group has planned for the title.
Remember Snake, that game where you maneuver a squiggly line around a board to collect pellets in hopes of extending your line's length? (If you don't recall, check your cellphone. I guarantee it's on there.) The new MMO's website will have a Flash game similar to Snake built into it. But instead of simply hoping for a high score, players maneuver the snake around the board in a hunt for pellets with the ultimate goal of making the snake come to life.
Once you've collected enough points in the Flash game, your snake would spawn within the 3-D MMO world and start attacking foes on your behalf, earning experience points for you whenever it successfully kills something.
Besides the basic versions of the mini-games, the social networking site will also contain your standard Facebook-style features. It's unclear how in-depth the system will be, but expect messaging, friends lists and everything you've come to love and/or loathe from the MySpaces of the world.
At launch, the game's technology blending will only stretch as far as the MMO itself and its official site, but the duo also plans to eventually roll out cellphone software that works with the system. Powell and Williams said that they have not yet decided how the phones would be implemented into the overall world, but giving players the chance to interact with the game while away from a computer is the sort of idea that could result in unforeseen levels of MMO addiction and devotion.
Normally I'd be very cynical about a game relying so heavily on this sort of technological confluence -- particularly given the hyper-adorable, kid-centric current state of Neopets -- but assuming that these creators can actually deliver on the ideas they have for this game, it could be huge.
Of course, since the game is extremely early in development, no one outside of the 40 people on the development team will be playing it any time soon. Powell and Williams say they hope to publicly demo the title for the first time at Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle this August. If things go well, they plan on releasing something playable, whether it be the final game or a public beta, in early 2009.
Images courtesy Meteor Games
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