‘Marvel Universe Online’ – Why They Killed It
That’s weird. We were just talking about Marvel Universe Online a few days ago. The massively multiplayer online role-playing game (think World of Warcraft
Basically, Microsoft owned up to the fact they don’t do MMOs well.
"We don’t have a heritage of MMOs," said Kim. The article went on to list several MMO attempts that Microsoft attempted that failed. "It’s a hits-driven business … it’s all about quality, all about hits."
A link to a Gamasutra.com piece shed more light:
Given the rumors of confusion on the dev team about what the game was going to be like at a fundamental level, pulling support from the project seems like a no-brainer. That said, I think MUO’s death highlights Microsoft’s sordid history with Massively Multiplayer games.
I think that the fact that we’re still talking about Marvel Universe Online several months after it was officially canceled shows that the concept is still compelling and viable. But there’s no arguing that outside of a few MMO hits, the landscape is littered with flops from many different companies. Remember The Matrix Online
I like to imagine, though, that Uatu the Watcher is spying on one of his "What If…?" universes where Marvel Universe Online game out and was more popular then Warcraft. Of course, the game would be populated by a thousand variations of Spider-Man and Wolverine with names like "5piDer-MaN" and "Wolverine Gets High."
The question I always had about it was what characters would people be, because, as you pointed out, there are only so many characters in the Marvel U, and a handful are substantially more popular than all the others. So would it be a bunch of the same characters? Or would people have to create new characters? And, in that case, how would that be different from something like City of Heroes?All that said, I'm not a gamer, and I couldn't care less if this comes about or not.
I always thought it would be cool if the premise of the game was a big alternate dimension crossover. You could be the same hero, just from different universes with slight customizable tweaks. Like the all Wolverine squad from Exiles #85.
I can't imagine having a team of 40 Wolverines would work very well. You'd almost have to have the system running multiple separate realities, at which point it's no longer everyone playing in the same MMO and might as well be running on your Xbox at home.