Ask Massively: Babies, rings, and the Wild West

Thursday again, and that means its time for round two of our new advice column, Ask Massively. This week we're tackling what will happen to Lord of the Rings Online in 2008 (with guest shots from almost all the Massively staff), as well as creating some MMO offspring, and why cowboys and indians haven't jumped on the MMO bandwagon yet.

If you'd like to ask a question of Ask Massively, it's super simple-- just leave your question as a comment on this post to get it answered next week, or leave us a note via our tipline. This week's Ask Massively kicks off right after the jump, so click the link below!

Dear Massively,

You can have babies in Second Life, but are there any other MMOs where you can have babies?

-Moo Money

First of all, just in case you're not an SL player, yes, it's true-- you can have babies in Second Life. I'm not sure why people would want to go through a virtual birth (complete with baby supplies and maternity clothes), but as with most things in SL, it's a case of if someone wants to do it, they'll eventually be able to.

In other games, however, creating progeny is not all that common. The Sims is probably the most popular game in which you can have children, but even though EA tried to go online with The Sims Online, that game was all about making a character and not a family, and so I don't think you could even have children in TSO. Harvest Moon (and its various sequels) is another non-MMO game that allows you to get married and have children, and while having children was rumored for Fable, it never made it, and now the feature is rumored for Fable 2 (neither of those were MMOs either).

So: no. In my searches, I can't find any MMOs that allow you to actually have children and put together a family. You'd think a game called Lineage would let you do that, but apparently not-- even though people can definitely get married in MMOs, and playing MMOs might even help you have children in RL, no one that we know of has actually put the idea (which many people have had) of having a family and offspring in a virtual world into practice.

Why are MMOs so constricted by two styles, Fantasy and Science Fiction? I want my Wild West MMO!

-Vince

As you may have heard, "Why fantasy?" is a perennial question around the MMOsphere, and our own Kyle Horner is doing a bang-up job trying to collect all the thoughts on it in his Digital Continuum column-- be sure to give that a read for sure.

But you're not asking "Why fantasy" so much as "Why not Westerns?" Good question. It's one that's been asked a few times, and one that's even gotten a few attempts at answers already: from Wild West Sim, a piece of vaporware from 2004 that promised dueling shootouts and players towns (and offspring, coincidentally enough) to Frontier 1859, a game that claims to be "The Game of Life meets Monopoly, meets Erector Set, meets Sim, meets Action-Adventure!" One of the creators of that one says that the reason he went to the old West was that he wanted a "virtual frontier," a place where the virtual world could shine without heavy laws or civilization.

So it seems that a Wild West MMO isn't too far off the mark-- the genre and conventions are there, the ideas are floating around, and all it will take is a developer smart enough to stick the thoughts into code and make them work. There are probably all kinds of arguments against doing it-- pistols and shotguns are much harder to code and create a usable interface for than swords and shields, and it's a tough thing to give players enough freedom to feel like they're in a dangerous era without letting it devolve into nothing but shootouts. But it's not hard to believe that sooner or later, someone with the skill to do it will put a great WoW-style Wild West MMO together.

And until then, you can try Bang! Howdy. From the makers of Puzzle Pirates, Three Rings Design, it's a casual MMO with a cartoony Wild West theme. Sure, there are more "Logging Robots" and "Wendigo Attacks" than an more realistic Wild West MMO might have, but if you want to get your online craving for steampunk filled, that's the best we've got right now.

This is for Ask Massively...

Do you think the player base of LotRO will grow or decline in 2008?

-Jeremy

This came in on our tipline (which is where you too can send us questions for this column), and I couldn't keep our writers from talking about it-- they pretty much insisted that they all should get a chance to answer this one. So here's what some of our Massively writers said in response to this one:

Chris Chester: My experience with LotRO is that even the most casual players are coming to the end of the current content, and that if Turbine wishes to avoid a slow exodus, they need to pick up the pace on releases. As hard as it is to keep rolling out good content (and they do have good content), it is even harder to win players back if they feel they are done with Turbine's take on Middle-earth. PvP, trait grind, and alt-itis only go so far...

Dave Moss: The only way to keep everyone, and get a subscriber list longer than WoW's would be to hire me as an in-game Sauron. It's obviously the best, and only answer.

Dan O'Halloran: The lack of a new area to explore in the next major content patch combined with the launch of Age of Conan will mean diminishing subscriptions for LotRO in the first half of the year. But the player base should turn around and grow afteer that with the expected announcement of an expansion with a level cap increase. The launch of Warhammer Online and the next World of Warcraft expansion in the second half of 2008 may slow down this growth, but players love more than the game, they love the world of Middle-earth and will come back when there is more to do.

Chris Colon: No, I think they have a pretty decent core of world lovers, and that the game itself is good enough that it will hang on through 2008 barring unforseen issues. I agree that it will be a bumpy year, even if they get out new content pretty briskly, because of Warhammer, Age of Conan, the WoW expansion, and so on. But I also know that I see a fair number of bored first-generation players when I log on, and I want Turbine to give them reasons to stick around.

Mark Crump: One dark horse in LoTRO's favor is they hired Walt Yarbrough away from Mythic. Walt did a lot of good things to extend DAoC's life and he might do the same with LoTRO. For me, the biggest "draw" they can do is put Moria in.

Elizabeth Harper: I like to play while listening to my unabridged audio recording of Lord of the Rings. *squee!* It's like walking through my favorite book! Fangirlism aside, as previously noted, it's going to come down to content. Without feeding your players regular doses of new zones to explore, they'll grow bored and move on. The MMO itself has solid gameplay (nothing madly innovative, but it does everything you'd expect an MMO to do without major flaw) and an excellent and well-thought-out setting (thanks to Tolkien who knew way more about Middle-earth than was ever written in his books). If Turbine succeeds in adding quality new content every two or three months, the game's population will stick around and gradually grow.

So there you have it-- according to the Massively staff, Turbine needs to start pushing content out the door, and make sure to add in all those things that people love about Middle-earth in the first place-- Sauron, Moria, and all of the other environments that make the world so compelling. If Turbine can stay on top of what players want and give the content they're looking for to them, they'll do great. But if they can't get content out fast enough, they'll get lost in the big mix coming this year.

That's it for Ask Massively! Be sure to leave us questions for next week-- we'll see you then.