The Rampant Coyote posted a good article that talks about escaping the genre, and actually getting to the root of what your game should be about. Needless to say, we’ve been talking a lot about genres and licenses here in the office as we try to figure out what we’re doing next, and one thing that comes up a lot is actually ensuring that the game feels like it’s theme.

Earth and Beyond and Eve were both space shooters. E&B tried to be Everquest in space. Eve was more true to what the idea behind a space trading game should be. Guess which one is still around?

Here’s the Coyote on one of his own game experiences:

Twisted Metal was a game I worked on which actually created a (small) category. The “Vehicular shooter,” I guess. Several people working on it had different ideas of what it would be. From my background, I immediately put it in the box I was most familiar with, the “sim” game. I was thinking of the Car Wars tabletop game and sci-fi “simulators.” Some of the guys working on it were thinking first-person shooters in cars. Sony’s producer on the project, Dave Jaffe, was thinking Fighting Games, of all things! Street Fighter in cars. The monstrosity we ended up with turned out to be none of these things, but it also turned out pretty cool, and was a signature series for the Playstation. It also spawned some pretty cool imitators, thus becoming a mini-category of its own.

Licenses often require enormous imagination to escape being pigeon-holed. I did contract work on Highlander Online some time ago, for a company that has long since gone out of business. When I tell people that, their first impulse is to say “That license would behorrible for a massively multiplayer game.” This is a fair analysis if you agree that the only insoluble rule of the Highlander license is essentially permadeath (”there can be only one!”), but at the same time, it’s only true if you concede that all MMOs must follow the same rules. If you start with the notion that, first and foremost, the game must have the “There can be only one” vibe to it, and yet still be a game with character growth and with an eye toward retention, it’s not impossible to come up with a design that will work. But if you start with the thought that the game MUST play like WoW/EQ, you’re doomed before you begin.

The most interesting acid tests for licensed MMOs in the near future will be the upcoming Star Trek and Stargate games. Stargate, while being less famous, is a license with a lot of inherent butt-kicking involved, and is therefore easy to wrap an MMO around. Star Trek, on the other hand, is a license built upon diplomacy and politics (especially in ST:TNG). Games that have tried to turn the Star Trek license into a butt-kicking license have always felt a little wrong, even when the games have been good. Ensuring that the game feels ‘right’ to the rabid Star Trek fanbase is probably the steepest challenge ahead of the STO design team.