Five upcoming MMOs with indie-cred

by Brooke Pilley Apr 29th 2009 at 11:00AM

Filed under: At a glance, Fallen Earth, Opinion, Global Agenda, Earthrise, Love, Gatheryn

Eurogamer's Oli Welsh attended the Game Developer's Conference last month and took a look at five MMOs being produced by independent studios. Earthrise, Fallen Earth, Gatheryn, Global Agenda, and Love are all being developed without the support of a huge publisher. Given all the big budget competition, do they stand a chance?

According to Oli, Earthrise has many interesting features but with beta set for May and release set for late 2009, he's a little concerned with the framerate issues and lack of polish. Much like its post-apocalyptic brother, Fallen Earth shines on many levels and is also due in 2009, but it is lacking in execution with animation, combat, and AI issues. As for Gatheryn, Oli is a bit confused as to why this game is even being made at all because it lacks depth and has no clear direction (here's what we thought).

On the other hand, Mr. Welsh has high praise for both Global Agenda and Love. The former appears to be an interesting blend of adrenaline-pumping MMOFPS action with more polish than an antique car show. The latter is the brainchild of a one-man army, giving it the most indie-cred out of all the titles.

For a more in-depth explanation of his opinions, follow Oli as he takes a journey through the MMO's wild frontier.

Tags: earthrise, eurogamer, fallen-earth, gatheryn, gdc, gdc-2009, global-agenda, love, oli-welsh, opinion

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

wufiavelli said on 12:05PM 4-29-2009

Another interesting one is mortal online. Could turn into the next darkfall though. Has a very small team working on it maybe 15 to 20. But uses unreal 3 and the new atlas server side tech from epic games china.

Dblade said on 12:42PM 4-29-2009

I never see why "indie cred" even matters. Is the game good or not? Will it be enjoyable to play, and will the company behind it be able to support it with content, and not make game-killing mistakes? That's what matters, not the publisher or lack of one.

TBH I can't see why Love is even considered in this, the low amount of people it can support combined with only one person involved is going to make it a vanity game at best. Isn't it limited to only 200 people max?

Lemmo said on 1:53PM 4-29-2009

Love will have multiple servers, and comparatively, most modern MMOs don't allow for much more than 200 players in a single instance anyways.

The reason this is news, is because there are plenty of antagonists that believe, or would have you believe, that you can't create an MMO without millions of dollars and a warehouse full of programmers. These guys aren't just indie, they're an exception to what some publishers would like to consider an established rule. I mean, if anyone could make an MMO, where would that leave the big companies who want to hoard the market share?

Indie cred matters because it's commendable. It's a testament to what a single person or team of people can do with vision, inspiration and hard work. It's an example about how if you want to create something, you can do it yourself without the need for riches or commercial motive.

The guy making Love isn't out to win your approval. He's out to make his own thing. And those of us following his project respect him for that.

And if his game turns out to be fun, then hell, what have you lost from this?

Archipelagos said on 3:20PM 4-29-2009

Well said, Lemmo, well said.

Dblade said on 4:02PM 4-29-2009

And wow is a testament to what many people can create with dedication and inspiration, and it probably will be a far better play experience with more people and less hassle than love.

So what if its done by one person? That's just a curiosity. One person can make an entire broadway play. So what if smaller companies can design mmo's? I'm not playing it because it only took 50 people to make, I'm playing it because the experience is good.

Indie-cred has nothing to do with that at all. In my experience, the more you focus on the indie aspect, the more its just a cover to excuse a poor or unpolished experience. If a game is good it can stand alone on its own merits, but most "indie" games are going to struggle in the same way DFO struggles, by simply not having enough manpower or resources to realize the vision of the developers and react to the demands of the playerbase.

Indie is more about the pose. there's nothing wrong with games having a small developer team or being made by a few people: the history of gaming is that the big dev teams are an aberration. But independent is just a meaningless label to people who enjoy games, or even film. It adds a lot of bunk subtext. It's not like a good game becomes any more because its independent, or a sucky game sucks less.

If love is a good idea, seek a publisher! Get it out to as many people as possible! So you can expand and maintain it easily and you have time to work on other projects. Screw indie-ness, if your experience is good it doesn't matter.

J.C. Smith said on 4:00AM 4-30-2009

I'm sorry but you guys are completely missing the point about what indie can bring. The advantage of indie games is that they can think outside of the box, they can push to different limits than a typical game does. Publishers generally want safe, proven titles. And the result is, well we have about a zillion WOW clones out there right now. Indie developers can think outside the box and come up with something, as they are generally self funded.

MMOGs in this day and age consist of 50-200 man teams who use those huge volumes in an effort to try to keep fresh content to players, but fail to build it fast enough for most of the harder core players. They spend tons of time meticulously crafting quest storylines that players will click right by and pay no attention to, or go to sites like mmodb.com to find a quick spoiler. They hand craft dungeons that will become old after the second time through. They create bosses that everyone after the first guild will just go to a strategy site and execute the same strategy as the last guy. Yet the next game that comes out, will fall into those same traps.

I've been working on an Indie MMOG for over two years, which we will finally be announcing this summer. And the advantages I've seen from that vs. working with a publisher is that we've been able to try a lot of new things without worry about big brother looking over our shoulder at every step of development. It's allowed us to step outside of the normal boundaries and create things like a template based quest generation system that can allow for complex quests with storylines to be generated. We have a 19 step generated quest template in our current alpha test. Our dungeons feature generated bosses, traps, and monsters based on quest criteria, and it changes every time you enter. Our bosses feature random special effects so that guilds can't just execute a pre-determined strategy and must adjust on the fly. We've been able to try some different things with combat, and integrate some RTS like management systems into our regional PVP system, as well as being able to put a number of other "games inside the game" elements. Unfortunately not all indie games take advantage of their ability to think outside the box, but some like the aforementioned Love do just that. And that's what makes them notable.

If we had sought funding earlier in our development cycle, we'd more than likely have had to trimmed features, made things more like wow, and would probably see ourselves rushed to market because some marketing type thinks that we need to fall within a certain a launch window. There are some advantages to being indie.