In 2007 Flagship Studios and EA teamed up to release the game Hellgate: London. Hellgate: London was a 3-D FPS Dungeon Crawler that much like an MMO had enemies that dropped loot, delicious color coded loot. There were rare enemies, hard to find items, bad ass weaponry that was unique to your character, and yes XP grinding. The difference between Hellgate and a proper MMO was that it could be played single player, like with no Internet connection, and yet it would still feel like an MMO. It was a fantastic experience, but sadly after about a year Flagship ran out of cash and the game was shut down. It failed for two reasons, one the MMO space is very crowded on the PC and two they offered a free to play version and a pay to play version online. Yes, even though you could play it single player, you could also play it online with friends, but the experience was not as rich if you didn’t pay the monthly fee. Well guess what? Not many people paid the monthly fee. The perks just weren’t enough and the game didn’t sell as well, probably due to poor marketing of the different fees and ways to play.
However, MMOs that do succeed are huge successes and it’s no wonder that even start up companies try to make an MMO their first game, cause if you can hit with an MMO you will be jumping through your vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck, but with PC gaming becoming a niche and console gaming becoming the norm(I can’t think of a house that doesn’t have a Wii or Xbox 360 in it)why hasn’t there been a successful MMO in the console space? Well if I have told you once, I have told you a thousand times, console gamers don’t want to pay monthly to play video games. MMOs work because they are addictive. Players love grinding out XP to level up, and making their character unique with a skill tree, they love finding better weapons, and armor. So maybe Hellgate: London was on to something, maybe what consoles need are faux-MMOs.
This week the game Borderlands was released and judging by the popularity on my friends list, and well….the fact that it appears to be sold out in several markets means we could be on to something. Borderlands plays EXACTLY like Hellgate: London or World of Warcraft for that matter. Pick up a quest from a quest giver, go out and do the quest, pick up loot that drops off of fallen enemies, turn in quest, bathe in XP, rinse, repeat. It’s fantastic and can be played with up to 3 friends online, or you can host a public game over PC, Xbox Live, or Playstation Network and have people just drop in and out of your game. It FELLS like an MMO even when you are playing by yourself! I’m sure many people who bought the game don’t even realize they are playing an MMO, cause they have never played one before.
Many people described Eldar Scrolls IV: Oblivion as an MMO without the Online part, Borderlands is the next step and if it does prove to be the success we think it is, we might be looking at a whole new genre on the consoles. Imagine if you bumped up the player count to 12 or 16, or 64. I mean….that’s kind of massive, right? What if these were MMOs-Mini Massive Online games? You know, not quite as massive as a World of Warcraft, but more massive than Fallout 3. How does a real MMO compete in the console space now that I’m getting a similar experience from a $60 Xbox 360 title? A game that I could see myself sinking just as much time into as an MMO character I pay monthly for.
And who says Borderlands couldn’t be monetized? DLC is coming and it’s going to be plentiful. New questlines are already confirmed, but what about more classes? What about new weapon types? There could be a pack of new Borderlands content every month. That’s like an optional monthly fee. Although……….optional monthly fees killed Hellgate: London. Maybe for now we should just be thankful that we are getting such an amazing experience out of Borderlands, then determine if we want more content. With the faux-MMO are we seeing the beginning of something new, or are console players going to want the true MMO experience? If a true MMO is ever successful on consoles, maybe then we would have something to compare it to, but in the meantime Borderlands is all we have.