“How many MMOs have worked in US market? WOW and Everquest.”

Scott is right. Take Two shouldn’t make a Bioshock MMO. But he’s all wrong as to the reasons why. First, let’s ask Mr. Letterman to bring up The Top 10 Games Scott Zelnick Forgot Existed:

1. Ultima Online
2. Asheron’s Call
3. Dark Age of Camelot
4. Star Wars Galaxies
5. City of Heroes
6. Dungeons & Dragons Online
7. Lord of the Rings Online
8. Eve
9. EverQuest 2
10. Guild Wars

All of these MMO games captured a fanbase, were profitable, and to one level or another, successful in fulfilling their design. I happened to work on a couple of them myself. Now, none of them were ever the most popular MMO (er, except for Ultima Online).

Nevertheless, I get Scott’s point. Making an MMO is a big money bet, and a lot of money was lost in the last decade in an effort to cash in on the MMO craze (now all that venture money is in social games, of course). Most of those MMOs never shipped. On the other hand, if we look at all those failure cases, most belong to unheard-of studios developing second-tier or third-tier IPs. And, um, Microsoft. Couldn’t we say the same thing of any game genre?

There are two real and sensible reasons not to make a BioShock MMO. First, it would be dumb to integrate persistent multiplayer into this franchise. I would expect to succeed about as well as, well, putting instanced multiplayer into the IP (hi, Bioshock 2!) And more importantly, the lesson of MMOs today could be that only the largest and most financially successful franchises will be made into MMOs. Big franchises have been turned into successful MMOs. Little ones, not so much. Bioshock is not a successful, big franchise. My personal like of the game and its outstanding ratings aside, Bioshock has never sold like a big franchise. And I’m pretty sure we can agree two years later that it is not as big as Star Wars.

So yeah, I agree with Scott’s conclusion. He shouldn’t invest the $75M+ into making a Bioshock MMO. But watch out for the Bioshock facebook ap.

Update: Scott Jennings has a different list, but he points out that Scott’s ignorance is just as absurd.

Remember the respawn system of Bioshock?

Death in the Bioshock series is just a teleport. You respawn with the same package of weapons and ammo you had at the moment of your death, plus a minimum amount of health and mana (“Eve”). The world state is preserved.

As players soon observed, in the original Bioshock this allowed you to progress by bashing through content repeatedly without any attempt at skill or self-preservation. Do some damage, die, respawn, repeat. Boss enemies fell down through this method like everything else. This seems silly, and the creative director of Bioshock 2 took steps:

But the main criticism that we derived from the first game was the Vita-thrashing exploit, which was — because there were ammo-less weapons in the game and because there were consensual boss fights in the game — the idea of just using an ammo-less weapon and playing Lemmings over and over again until the cliff just disappears. [It was] was degenerate in many many ways… It was fun for no one. So now the Little Sisters will heal the Big Daddies a percentage of their health if you don’t take them out. So you do have to invest in their demise.

Problem to solution, right? If only things were so simple.

Here’s the thing: Bioshock 2 has hard content locks — blood gates — that require defeating a certain enemy or waves of enemies. It’s impossible to progress in the game without killing these enemies. And as the creative director said, if the Big Daddy kills you on the first try (or you die defending the Little Sister as she’s harvesting Adam, etc.), you’re going to have to have to start the fight all over again. The Bid Daddy heals, and the progress bar on defending your Little Sister is reset.

See the problem?  With a relatively stingy ammo drop rate from enemies  in the game (why is that by the way? this game is a shooter, and ammo should be plentiful), after you die, you re-start an encounter with fewer health packs, fewer eve packs, and less ammo. And you failed the first time, so good luck! It seems likely you’ll fail again. Really, the game should make things a little easier the second time, not harder. In the worst case,the player may re-start a major fight with no ammo at all. Then what? Congratulations, we’ve arrived at a degenerate state: it is well nigh impossible for the player to progress. I hope the last autosave wasn’t that far back…

The prescription? In the next game, dump the vita chambers. Use checkpoints that save your full character state, and let the player try again with a starting package at least as good as the one he just failed with. For this game, a patch that forces autosaves before every content gate — and bigger ammo drops from random respawned splicers — wouldn’t seem to be a bad step.

Flash forward a decade, and I am left wondering why today’s story-based shooters feel any need to incorporate multiplayer.? Call of DutyModern Warfare, Halo? Of course, absolutely. They are rooted in shooter history. Gears of War? Okay, I guess, though it’s weird you have to strip out your iconic cover shooting to make your (competitive) multiplayer mode play well.

But then there’s stuff like The Darkness. Though not a great game, I had fun with the single player game and story. I lost my girlfriend, went to Hell, got some revenge, the end. Multiplayer Darkness? Really? Why? A pair of announcements in the last couple weeks take this absurdity further: Bioshock 2 and Uncharted 2. Better games than The Darkness. Game of the Year candidates for 2007, in fact. And the previous versions, notably zero multiplayer elements. Once upon a time, Bioshock’s website said:

“BioShock features a compelling storyline that revolves around the experiences of one man as he enters the decaying world of Rapture. Having a multiplayer component would have compromised the story we were trying to tell so we made the decision to keep this game as a single player experience.”

How has that changed? There’s significant development cost to tacking on a gameplay mode, and multiplayer is one of the most expensive you could choose. At some point or other, that cost came out of doing something else, or doing something better. Maybe, if you believe that the addition of multiplayer is going to mean more sales, and you increased the budget accordingly, then, it might not come at the expense of something else. But probably not. And as for increasing those sales, take a look at forums like this one, where reaction to Bioshock 2 and Uncharted 2 multiplayer is tepid at best.

So just why is multiplayer being added to these story-heavy shooters? My guess: The Marketing Department. Some bright MBA grad looks over at the sales of shooters such as Gears or COD4 and says: they are a shooter like us, they have multiplayer, they sold better than we did, and as a bonus multiplayer discourages GameStop resales, so let’s add it to our title. What, it wouldn’t make sense? It would cost a lot? Just make it happen. Stupid game designers, what do they know?

Yeah, so, good luck. I don’t want to get into all the ways in which Star Wars creates likeable characters, a fantasy galaxy, and an optimistic history for itself that Bioshock, with survivor horror as its bedrock, can never have. But what we can observe is the reality of entertainment today.

Not even the recent Lord of the Rings films have been or will be incapable of building a franchise that will come to close to Star Wars. And while I do put Star Wars on a pedestal, my judgment isn’t about quality of Star Wars vs LOTR or Bioshock. It’s about the realities of today vs the late 70s and early 80s. Today means having a new blockbuster movie and AAA video game every other week. It’s about having the internet, three gaming consoles, iphones, etc. We swim in so many entertainment options that I don’t think we will ever again have a mass culture event in film or console video games. Nothing as sweeping and persistant as Star Wars became after the original trilogy.

(As an aside, we will have new big cultural influences in entertainment and in games, but it will probably come in a new medium. World of Warcraft is the closest we’ve seen in a decade.)