MMOs and the Trouble Of Eternal Life

There’s been talk of a Mass Effect massive-multiplayer-online-game going ’round, much as there’s talk of an MMO any time a franchise is successful. On the surface such talk is often tempting. An open-ended exploration of a favorite franchise! Revisiting beloved locations and characters! Taking part in the ongoing story of the setting!

But like many fictional bids for life eternal, these temptations mask great peril. Let’s talk continuity.

Comic book fans are intimately familiar with this intellectual bugbear. When your favorite series’ writers can change every few years, emotional climaxes reversed for the sake of retreading well-trodden ground, and your hero can fall victim to ill-conceived redesigns whenever the suits decide to tap into their caricature of the latest zeitgeist, you learn to pick and choose the version you like and throw out the rest.

Of course, continuity can be a very good thing; an overarching narrative between related works leads to more storytelling opportunities and the potential for greater character growth. Most of all, continuity lets us tell new stories with old characters without having to retread the same well-trodden ground or invalidate past classics. But no story can last forever; the ever-wandering hero is as static a figure as the hero who never grows at all. Without an ending, can anything really begin?

A creator’s greatest challenge is knowing when to stop.

The gatekeepers of popular entertainment are basically conservative. Producing a game, film, television series or even a comic is an enormous expense requiring an experienced and coordinated creative team. When it comes to producing works, a successful franchise is a sure bet, while an untried new idea is always a gamble. Logic like this gave us the endless parade of Star Wars games re-enacting the same events (insert your favorite Battle of Hoth joke here); logic like this encourages adaptations over original scripts and discourages unconventional storytelling or conclusive ends to popular characters or challenges to conventional mores.

The results might not always be to our liking, but we snap it up anyways because the name we love is attached, promising us a return to glory days. It doesn’t take a business mastermind to do the math.

With that in mind, the economic impetus for MMO adaptations of promising titles makes enormous sense. Fans jump at the chance to wander around in their favorite fictional universes, and MMOs promise a ground-level view. They also promise longevity and an excellent rate of return; a successful MMO can run for years at a time raking in money from subscriptions or micro-transactions. Lastly, though the criticism may be unfair, MMO gameplay conventions are incredibly stable, meaning there are plenty of practical models for inspiration and imitation.

Creatively, though, MMOs present as many problems as they do opportunities. The biggest one is it’s very difficult to tell a compelling new story in an MMO format, particularly one about any character other than the player. Player characters in MMOs have all the storytelling difficulties inherent with a traditional heroic-mime protagonist, and in a world with a multitude of players no one individual can be the focus of the story in a meaningful way. Formerly dynamic non-player characters risk becoming static parts of the scenery, and permanent world changes are difficult at best.

Because telling new stories is so difficult in an MMO, it’s easier to cannibalize the material left over from previous entries in the franchise. Continuity becomes a set of conflicts to revisit and exhaust as an easy way to tie the new MMO to the past, and to preserve the supply of new content . World of Warcraft, for example, has become so tied to the Horde-Alliance conflict that it’s become an inevitable fixture, which in turn makes it very difficult to tell engaging stories when everyone already knows the outcome will probably not be permanently settled. And as the old material is recycled again and again, it evokes less and less from the player until all narrative credence is played out.

So what does this say about our hypothetical Mass Effect MMO? Well, judging by the effects The Old Republic had on Knights of the Old Republic canon, the creators would probably be encouraged to end the single-player trilogy with as many unsettled problems and as little conclusive ending as possible, the better to give their upcoming title material. (And with one story arc/Shepard canonized, expect plenty of players to get very annoyed that their outcomes weren’t.) Unlike Warcraft, whose storyline has grown over time with retcons and expansions of existing material, Mass Effect has always been a story-driven game with a less flexible canon, so when gameplay inevitably butts heads with story in the quest for more content, the damage will be far more severe.

So let’s see. Judging by precedent, expect to see an Alliance/Council and Cerberus faction battling it out forever, (a male) Commander  Shepard making cameo roles regardless of whatever Shepard’s fate in the trilogy is before becoming a raid boss, a second return of the Reapers, a vastly shrunken galaxy with extremely simplified politics and culture…oh, and expect to replay all the conflicts of the Mass Effect single-player trilogy.

Does this model look familiar? Oh, yes, we’ve seen it in any number of long-running movie franchises whose natural lives ended far before the sequels did, shambling through the popular consciousness with as much grace and dignity as the tortured undead. The memories are not kind. Putting them out of their misery was often the only humane answer.

Is it possible that a Mass Effect MMO could overcome such difficulties? Certainly. But like all bids for immortality, we should be mindful of the perils.