Waiting to Be Unplugged
By Brian "Ashes" Sloan

Remember how you felt when you stepped out of the theater, after seeing The Matrix for the first time? Remember how odd the world looked after that? The feeling, burning in the back of your brain, that maybe, just maybe that little feeling that something wasn't right with the world you've always had was real?

I do. It was quite a strange drive home to be honest.

Regardless, life went on, and the producers eventually released the other two movies in the series. But somehow, the wow factor was gone. The characters were no longer as identifiable, Neo became slightly less defined as the story line struggled with the various messianic qualities of “The One” and the movies themselves drifted away from their lofty philosophical stances and fell back on the timeless Hollywood tradition of lots of action and a bloody awful rave in Zion. Atypical, to say the least.

But, that aside, The Matrix remains, even with the less than stellar presentations of Reloaded and Revolutions, a beckoning story that many still enjoy. And we come finally to the present day, with all three of the Hollywood movies long in the can, with the awards and presentations over, and only the royalties left to speak for the story and the impression it has left on the world.

Now we come to The Matrix Online, a massively multi-player online game being developed by Monolith Games and co-produced by Warner Brothers Online Entertainment and Sega USA. The proclaimed “Fourth Movie in The Series”.

Being a veteran gamer of so many years now I can hardly remember a time when I wasn't playing a game on some kind of system (Space Invaders, on the Atari 2600 seems to be my first memory of game addiction.) As a MMO veteran, I can say, honestly, that any time a fresh company comes to market with a new title in development, I tend to take it with a grain of salt, because so many titles rarely even make it out of alpha development. But with MxO, I am inclined to pause, for several reasons.

First and foremost, The Matrix Online has a bit of a glaring comparison that it has to overcome. Being a title developed from a movie concept, even with it having the full resources of Warner Brothers and the Wachowskis behind it, it still begs comparison with Star Wars Galaxies, a title from Lucas Arts and Sony Online Entertainment.

Since SOE is not involved with this project in any way, the chances of success become far better. But, there are many that feel that the Wachowski Brothers fell far short of bettering the first movie in the series, just as much as many feel that Lucas has betrayed much of his earlier work in his presentation of the first three episodes of the Star Wars saga.

So, with that in mind, can a pair of production companies with no experience in the MMO market, and a software developer with a roller coaster track record as far as title development is concerned truly develop not only a successful and stable MMO game, but also one that breaks entirely new ground in MMO gaming?

Also we must take into account that another Matrix license game, Enter The Matrix, a title developed by Shiny Entertainment and Atari, co-produced by Warner Brothers, had rather lukewarm box sales, and the game play for that matter was less than stellar as well.

So with just those two hurdles alone, Monolith and Sega have quite a bit to live down in their upcoming MMO title, and that is not even where the true hurdles even begin.

As stated, I am a veteran gamer, I have had my fill of shoddy releases and broken games. I have been quite terribly abused in my faith to this date, even by developers that I believed would never do me wrong and in titles that I never believed could present a bad game (look no further than Deus Ex 2: The Invisible War for an example of such a stunning disappointment) and this extends through the industry from FPS games to MMO games.

Given the fact that MMO games are my primary focus at this stage of my incurable addiction to gaming, and the fact that when I choose to play a title, I pay monthly beyond the purchase of the title to do so, thusly disappointments in this area are always so much more painful.

So the major hurdle Monolith and Sega really has, is they must find a way to appease me, the veteran gamer that has learned through many cases of trial and error that everything must be viewed with an eye of skepticism until such time as I have their title in my grubby hands and I've not only gotten it installed, but I've been inside it and seen it first hand.

Because regardless of the first month explosion of subscriptions MxO will more than likely have because of its association with the movie titles, what is left at the end of the 30 day free trial is what they can look forward to for their real numbers.

Take Cryptic Softwares' City of Heroes, after a very extensive open beta and a nearly flawless release, their first subscription numbers were being reported at somewhere upwards of 150,000 subscribers in the first month. Cryptic and NCSoft gave themselves collective pats on the back and then went about creating new content. That seems like a good thing, unless you've actually played their game and realized what a hollow and shallow experience the entire thing is. CoH turned out to be, after being in the beta, and spending 60 days subscribed, a resounding disappointment because no matter what you did or no matter how many characters you created, the game was the same thing from level 1 to level 50 and had zero character depth or social dynamic beyond grouping.

Needless to say, the numbers for CoH's subscriber base are likely far more realistically in the 60,000 to 75,000 subscriber range now. I am sure, like me, many veteran gamers very quickly identified a situation in of which there was no character depth and no point to the end game and decided to either retreat back to titles they know support their needs in a game or to simply wait until another title comes along.

So with that in mind, we come to the next fleet of launches, with CoH and Lineage 2 both collectively behind us. We have Everquest 2, from the mammoth Sony Online Entertainment. World of Warcraft, from the incomparable Blizzard Software. And last, but not least, The Matrix Online, from Sega and Monolith Software.

Now, as a veteran gamer, I've already been a few places and I know I don't want to go back. Everquest 2 has already been written off as known territory, by a developer I've developed a very deep love/hate relationship with. Subjecting myself to EQ2 would be equatable to me burning my hand on the stove, and then doing it again on purpose just to make sure I wasn't dreaming the first time.

World of Warcraft, to me, is uninteresting because I've slightly burned out on swords and sorcery after four years of EQ and another two years of DAoC. And I've no real interest or point of reference within the Warcraft franchise (much like I didn't with Final Fantasy, and thusly I never bothered with FFXI).

That Mister Anderson, is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of my money eventually being in Sega and Monolith's pockets.

So what am I looking for, you ask? Well I'm glad you asked, because the veteran gamer is looking for quite a lot. Monolith and Sega have to out shine the good things about the titles I've already played, and also have to avoid the damning pitfalls the titles I have played have fallen into.

I'm quite demanding, for my fifteen dollars a month. From what little we know about MxO, we've been promised stunning combat, a player dependant economy and crafting system and a unique mission system. They've also boasted more clothes and customization options than any other game to date. And a wide cityscape that boasts more actual play area than any other game to date.

But these are just words, and even now, in the small presentations of video footage they've allowed to the public, there are glaring discrepancies between the combat we see in a live combat demo from E3 and the more exciting combat we see in the Official Matrix Online trailer.

So what can MxO do to ensure it has me, the veteran online gamer hooked? First and foremost, a flawless release can do astounding things for positive impressions. After suffering through the release of so many broken games, when CoH was released, other than a slight login server jam right after the servers went live, everything was flawless. There were no huge game-affecting bugs that had made it to release, there were no massive game halting content issues or class deficiencies. CoH was like a breath of fresh air in a market that has had broken release after broken release.

What made that possible was NCSoft's extensively large closed beta, and then an even larger open beta which stress tested the game and the servers to actual realistic levels. Monolith and Sega could learn quite a bit from NCSoft America in this area, and follow their pre-release model.

Secondly, a game must have engaging and challenging content right out of the box. It is very easy, for the first few days of play to be in constant wow mode because everything is new and everything is slightly different from what you're used to. But, most people cannot stay in wow mode forever.

If within a week, I start feeling like theres no depth to my character and other than running around killing bad guys all the time I've got nothing to do, more than likely within a month I'm starting to think about letting my subscription lapse.

To ensure this does not happen, MxO is going to have to drag me into the story almost right off the bat. I have to feel immersed. I have to feel like what I am doing is affecting the world around me in some way, and not sit around killing an endless stream of a_giant_rat001's until such time as I've gained enough experience to go somewhere else and kill a_giant_rabid_rat001 in a lather, rinse, repeat kind of fashion.

And thirdly, the game has to create a social network easily and without too much trouble. Many people come to MMO games as part of an already established group of players, or with family and friends. But there are quite a number of gamers that float from one game to another and only occasionally keep in contact with former guilds or clans. MxO is going to be a highly faction dependant game from all evidence, so the process of being recruited and recruiting people into established factions and crews will have to be for one easy, and secondly, something that people will do actively.

In many of today's MMO games, guilds are largely just social networks, they have no real benefits other than having another channel of chat and some people you might group with regularly. But, the problem with that system is that it never puts the guild itself in a position of needing to recruit people. They'd recruit who was “cool” or who they thought could do something for the guild, but beyond that, the good guilds were never really forced to look for new blood. So, MxO has to make its guild/clan/faction system a step above the standard social network in order to make the game a fun and functional experience for everyone. I am more than sure that the people not in factions will miss out on quite a bit of the game.

And lastly, (well not really lastly, but I'm just covering things generally here), MxO has to feed my need for my character to be more than just a bit of pixels in a game I play. This is something that is hard to encapsulate in a game all the time. For as much as I enjoyed Everquest while I played it with my significant other, neither of us really felt very attached to our characters. They had no depth beyond their skills and abilities. They had no where in the world that was “theirs”, so other than endlessly adventuring, they had no character. Whereas in SWG, due to an extensive character creation system, and player housing, and a broad professions system and fairly good social content, we grew more attached to our characters there, because what we did affected the world around us. We had a place in the world even if it was just a pair of tents with a campfire, we could make a place that was “ours”. And that was what made SWG a game we went back to after leaving it to check out new titles instead of Everquest.

Can Monolith live up to this? Can anyone for that matter? I would like to hope so. Can they teach me Kung Fu? And furthermore, can they make me love it? MxO has made, what the standard, jaded MMO gamer would consider, the usual outstanding and amazing press release claims of how ground breaking and new everything is in their game. But the process of milking a cow is to get milk, and I'm afraid so far, all we've got is moo from Monolith and Sega USA.

Guest Editorials and the opinions expressed therein are those of the author and not necessarily the views and opinions of the staff or editors of The Matrix Online Stratics.

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