Trey Walker Platform Editor	Recent Favorites: Heroes of Might and Magic IV, Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights Most Wanted: Max Payne 2, Age of Mythology, No One Lives Forever 2

Time for Online Games to Team Up

Project what you want about growth in the online game community, but three or four years from now I don't think we'll even remember half of the massively multiplayer games that are currently in development. Salon.com recently posted an interesting article about the online game situation that made me think again about how crowded that market is going to get in the next couple of years. The few successful online games out there have the potential to make incredible amounts of money. I know there are lots of costs associated with running a huge online game, but with hundreds of thousands of subscribers paying upward of $12 per month, there has to be some profit in there. How else can you explain the dozens of copycats waiting in the wings, hoping to run off with a piece of the pie?

While I'd like to see all these games succeed, there are too many factors that point to a massive collapse. First, even taking into account the growth in the market over the next few years, there are a finite number of people who will be interested in the typical fantasy role-playing game, and there are already some good choices with a huge head start on any competition that will be coming out in the coming year or so. Second, the games themselves are set up to almost guarantee that players won't play more than one or two. Most people don't have the time or the dedication to devote four or five hours a day to a game for months on end, and those who do have even less time to devote to a second game.

Star Wars Galaxies is one of something like 5,000 online games coming out in the next two years.

First let's look at games that have already launched, made a splash, and have since petered out. World War II Online, Strategy First's massively multiplayer online war simulation, launched in the midst of enormous fan anticipation but sputtered and fumbled due to massive technical difficulties. The majority of the game's problems have since been resolved, but the game is still having trouble attracting new players. Similarly, Anarchy Online, FunCom's sci-fi online role-playing game, launched and built up a fairly large subscriber base, only to have it dwindle due to numerous technical difficulties. What these games need is a new edge--something that will make people take another look at a game they thought they had already seen. It's time for World War II Anarchy Online, the game that lets you fight Nazis on an alien mining planet, the game that lets you assume the role of an Allied soldier with bionic implants.

OK, so that match may not be ideal, but there's another alternative. The developers could make a character-conversion portal system that lets you take a character from one game and import it into another game. This way players who have put a lot of time and effort into building up a powerful character in one game won't have to start from scratch in the merged game. Instead, they could translate their existing character into the correct format for the new game, and various items and attributes would be transformed along with the character into the new game's equivalent items and attributes.

This system would partially solve at least one of the problems with playing multiple massively multiplayer online role-playing games, since players already in a game wouldn't have to start from scratch in order to get to the cool stuff in the new game. Players making a switch also wouldn't feel like they had wasted all their time in the previous game and would be able to switch back later if they wanted to, so that time spent in the new game, along with the items and experience gained, also wouldn't be wasted.

I'd be more willing to try this online game if I knew I could transfer my hard-earned character into another game later.

While there are games that have implemented similar systems--Baldur's Gate players were able to import their characters into Baldur's Gate II, for instance--this system seems especially appropriate for online games, since players tend to devote such incredible amounts of time to building up their characters. I think it's time for the small fish in the massively multiplayer pond to band together and take a crack at the whales.