Redefining MMOs: The Shooter Invasion page 2

Shooters drifting towards MMOs

While graphics have improved and new twists have been added — even the ability to manipulate space and time — a lot of the core gameplay of first-person shooters has changed little since those first iterations of DOOM and Wolfenstein many of us burned away hundreds of hours playing. Once you've got a feel for an FPS it translates rather well to other titles of this nature. However, after a decade or more of playing first-person shooters, as fun as they may be, you start to hunger for something more.

Video games in general are migrating towards being online and multiplayer, and shooters are no different. So perhaps it was only natural that shooters would start adopting more RPG elements, more character customization, and add more online interaction with other players beyond lobby matchups and shooting the hell out of each other.
Many gamers want to encounter other players (or kill them) outside of their own little single-player bubble or their group of friends. This is where early MMOFPS games like World War II Online and PlanetSide came in, allowing players to group up in squads to tackle missions, achieve objectives, and fight other players in vast settings. Other titles like NeoCron arrived on the MMO scene, further showing how two formerly distinct types of games can co-exist.

While these games never enjoyed the success of AAA massively multiplayer titles, it's worth noting that these early MMOFPS games are still running several years after launch. That longevity implies they're offering something that gamers must want, and the large game companies and independent studios alike are taking notice.

MMOs drifting towards shooters

Clearly it's not just FPS players who would like to see something different from their games. Not unlike FPS titles, MMOs also have some degree of uniformity in terms of core game mechanics; injecting something "different" into them might not be a bad thing. Whether or not this marriage of MMOs with shooter game mechanics like first-person perspectives and manual targeting will become more widely adopted remains to be seen.

Two notable failures that tried were Tabula Rasa and Hellgate: London but other titles launching soon will incorporate similar systems, namely Fallen Earth. (Also, some early gameplay footage we glimpsed of The Secret World suggests the game may also take a page from shooters with manual targeting. The jury's still out on that one so don't hold us to it!)

The new breed of shooter MMOs

Beyond MMOs adopting FPS traits, gamers have a number of promising releases to look forward to in the coming months and years. These games are shooters at their core, but their streamlined user interfaces doesn't mean they won't have the depth we expect from our MMOs. These titles will have storylines, quests, guilds, character development, gear, loot, and in some cases they'll even have distinct classes. Here are a few games we think will be worth a look:

The Agency from Sony Online Entertainment is a spy-themed MMOFPS which is expected to be playable on both PC and PlayStation 3. You'll play a secret agent as part of U.N.I.T.E. (United Network Intelligence and Tactical Experts), using stealth, disguise, and gadgets to complete your missions. Perhaps truer to the whole "kill everything that moves" style of play in FPS games is the ability to play a ParaGON (The Paramilitary Global Operations Network) mercenary, relying on big guns, grenades, and other explosives to accomplish objectives.

All Points Bulletin from Realtime Worlds is one of those games that breaks the mold in terms of what we expect of an MMO. The existing terminology and the MMOFPS acronym doesn't really cover what we know of APB. The urban crime game will have players committing felonies as Criminals or pursuing them as Enforcer vigilantes. Realtime Worlds aims to eventually spin APB off into various persistent environments for specific purposes — racing districts, housing, marketplaces, and who knows what else. In fact, it will be the interests of the players themselves that determine what APB evolves into. The mean streets of All Points Bulletin are where the action will be, but the latest word we've gotten on this game suggests that it will ultimately be as much a virtual world as a shooter. As its series of video podcasts has shown, APB will have a staggering array of customization options as well.

DUST 514 from CCP Games is one of the most ambitious titles announced so far among these games. It's a console-only MMOFPS that will tie in with EVE Online, making it an industry first — the only attempt ever made by a developer to intertwine the gameplay of two distinct MMO titles. DUST 514 will be a game where player mercenaries are contracted by EVE's pilots to fight it out on the surfaces of the same planets found in the EVE Online galaxy. DUST mercs will reap rewards (especially military hardware) while taking over territories, cities, even planets for their EVE benefactors, who attain (and maintain) galactic control with the help of the ground pounders.

Global Agenda is a "spy-fi" game in development from independent developer Hi-Rez Studios. From what we've seen, Global Agenda is like the second coming of Tribes, cross-pollinated with Team Fortress 2. Not a bad way to go, and from what we're seeing, the class-based combat could very well inject a shot of adrenaline into the MMO industry as we know it today. Whether or not that adrenaline will be accepted or rejected by gamers is purely speculation at this point, but the beta testers we know have favorable impressions of Global Agenda. Persistence will exist through competition for territories between guilds (agencies), adding a dimension of world control to Global Agenda's FPS gameplay.

Huxley: The Dystopia in development at Webzen is a title we know less about than some of the others games on the way. This is something of a paradox given how long the game's been in development, but from our last look at Huxley at GDC 09 we see some of the standard MMO trappings of quests but also two types of PvP — virtual combat where players fight simply for fun, or battleground combat where the outcomes affect the game world. If your race is losing the war, your cities suffer an economic impact, reflected by the prices of your virtual goods in Huxley.

MAG or "Massive Action Game" from Zipper Interactive is an interesting title on the way for PlayStation 3. As we saw from the last time we mentioned MAG, it's a game that our readers have differing views on. MAG is significant among shooter titles in that it will have 256 players fighting it out in a given zone, and will have a "shadow war" aspect to it where the players will collectively work to influence the map.

This is by no means a complete roster of upcoming shooter MMOs and of course there are a few on the market already. No doubt other companies have projects under wraps that will compete with these titles in the next few years, but we feel these are ones to watch.