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Interactive Audio Project Announced - World of Darkness News
Shelassa
MMORPG.COM Staff UncommonPosts: 616
Interactive Audio Project Announced - World of Darkness News
White Wolf has partnered with Earplay to bring World of Darkness to a new interactive experience. The story, penned by Dave Grossman and Richard Dansky, will see a teaser episode released, called
Comments
Unlike D&D, Shadowrun, RIFT and many other P&P RPG's, WoD is not combat focused. In fact, they call their rules "The Storytelling System" and encourage GM's to abandon the rules in favor of good story.
Therein lies the problem with creating a WoD MMO. The vast vast majority of MMORPG's are focused 90% or more on fighting things, but WoD is more focused on telling a story. Vampires try their hardest to not get in physical conflict with other vampires and especially werewolves who, unlike idiotic movies such as Underworld, absolutely shred vampires. One single Werewolf, by the game rules and lore, could walk into a den of Vampires and murderdeathkill them all without breaking a sweat. Mages are even more powerful. A mage could vaporize half a dozen Werewolves. How do you translate that into an MMORPG? Everyone would play Mages and no one would touch Vampires except the Hot Topic crowd.
To make it even more complicated, most of the "monsters" in WoD don't even know each other exist. Werewolves believe that Vampires and Mages are a myth, and the same in reverse. They rarely meet each other as Vampires rule civilization and Werewolves tend to avoid civilization altogether. Mages practically live in another plane of existence.
I thought CCP could overcome these issues and bridge all of these disparate monsters into one game, but apparently I'm wrong. Furthermore, I'm not impressed by the new IP holder at all. At this point I'd take a good single player Vampire or Werewolf game like Bloodlines.
So on a 2500 player server there would be 2450 Vampires, 49 Werewolves, and 1 Mage. Maybe it could be done as a single server, this would limit avatar customization dramatically. There would still be a cap on the number of players that can occupy one zone simultaneously. I will assume every player has at most 8 Gig of system ram, and is not running streaming software. So I would put the largest single zone population at 500 players. I reduced that number two times.
If it was a single server and the total population was 100.000 then there would be 98.000 Vampire, 1.960 Werewolves, and 40 Mages. I personally like the look of that player distribution. I never played a session of WoD, but I am a collector of PnP game manuals so I have them around. I was a fan of the TV series. I'm also a fan of Magic the Gathering (MtG). I played around with the idea of a Mage's power being tied to land ownership, and ownership being difficult to acquire. I'm also a fan of mana being stored in objects, not the body of a Mage. So like an ammo clip it runs out, and must be reloaded.
If a game was made, it would be near impossible to limit players to their cultural zones. Player werewolves would be all over civilization and mages would be walking around everywhere. For that I see players suffering a Health Wound Bleed (permanent reduction of max health over time) as long as they stay out of their cultural zone(Civilization, Off-The Grid, and Metaphysical Plane).
What ended CCPs try at WoD? How much it would cost to keep the IP over the time to develope all the SFX for the game. They wanted Hair, Clothes, and Power to flow behind a player as they walked and moved. CCP realized that the time it would take to work on those animations was just too long to keep paying for the IP. And what is the number one GPU (>60%)? Intel on chip in the 300 series. So most of the player base couldn't even enjoy the animations.
I almost forgot, "The Storytelling System". I don't think that would go over well with those who would turn up to play a WoD game. There has been too much Being Human, Twilight, Underworld, and The Strain. For a non-combat story driven Vampire MMO to go over well. Besides developer turn story and diplomacy into delivery quest and bribes. Clan Giovanni will have Brujah's help if they bring us 10 X or pay us Y in gold. That is how I see story going.
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
As for mages Vs werewolfs Vs vampires, that is complicated because the majority of all mages would get slaughtered by either a vampire or a werewolf. One with correspondence, prime & Forces could kill a whole bunch from far away though and the truly old vampires could kill several werewolf packs alone.
If you take a new character of each the "classes" the mage is far less powerful followed by the vampire and the werewolf is most powerful but as you gain power that changes rather dramatically and there really isn't any game balance since the game wasn't really intended for players to play more then one thing in the same party. A newly created mage dies very easily even against normal humans.
Translating that into a MMO is rather hard, getting players to mainly plot against eachother as the main PvP part and have combat as something rare takes a game designer that is brilliant, no matter if you make it a sandbox or a themepark. Stealing a ventrues money instead of just killing him is an adjustment for most MMOers.
Making a vampire or werewolf MMO is certainly possible, Mage would be very hard. Mixing them all in a game is almost impossible. Honestly would werewolf be the far easiest of the games to turn into a MMO.
Focus on one of the games and anything besides WW will take a really talented crew who played a lot of the game in question.
actually, it is, they bought the rights from ccp some time ago
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
As for vampires, werewolves and makes not knowing each other exist? Utter rubbish. Unless that refers to the new WoD. No idea about that, but old WoD certainly had intersections between all of them. You just had to keep them all separate for the most part. Mainly because the ruleset and societies of each tabletop game operated in a vacuum of sorts. But the denizens of each game most certainly existed and influenced storylines of other games. There were attemps to codify the rules before with varying degrees of success. There was even a GURPS version.
Now for the MMO. The plan was to base it off Vampire: The Masquerade. My guess is that they would have started with the seven clans of the Camarilla and then branched from there to the four independents and the Sabbat.