Firefly/Serenity MMORPG

So, if such a thing ever sprang into existence, how woudl you like it to be? Any specific time period (during the war, or after)? Woudl Reavers get the proper mysterious fear treatment? How woudl you want to have PC-crewed ships, if at all? Would it take time to move from one place to another? Any interaction with canon characters? How much interaction?

I was chatting with my wife about it, since SWG is dying off. I'd love it if Josh Whedon and the gang were heavily involved in any hypothetical MMORPG project.

Way to get my hopes up...

http://fireflyuniverseonline.com/

DO WANT

(I only found this after I did up the opening post. I wasn't really expecting to find anything and imagine my surprise when I did.)

edited 20th Jul '11 10:57:17 AM by pvtnum11

http://www.sggaminginfo.com/2011/06/darkcryos-craig-redl-talks-firefly-universe/

I like how this guy thinks.

Especially how you have to actually talk to NPC's to interact with them, via chat and emotes.

Looks very nifty. I'm definitely keeping a cautiously optimistic eye on this one.

The developers welcome comments and questions. I've asked a number of them on their facebook page. One of the big things I'd like to see is a variety of player-owned ships that can be customized to suit the owner's tastes and needs.

Hmmm, I would've imagined that this thing would gather more interest than just me... Especially here it trope-land and all.

Their website is allowing pre-registration. Five names per account, so that's a lot better than SWG let you do - well, depending if they all run this on one giant server or not. Whole bunch of folks registered as Browncoats, which doesn't surprise me. Good amount of Alliance, but not many of the other two factions, or simply unaligned folks. I decided to register a corporate pawn and a plain ol' civilian.

Here's hoping they can pull this thing off.

edited 24th Jul '11 5:48:50 PM by pvtnum11

This sounds pretty cool. Is it gonna be F2P?

edited 24th Jul '11 5:49:20 PM by thespacephantom

squee.

I just get so much mileage out of this macro :D

Wait is this just fanmade? Or is it official? Either way it looks interesting.

^ It's fan-made at the moment, but they've solicited Whedon and FOX to give their endorsements/agree-to-it/whatever-you-call-it so it would be officially licensed. They also really want Whedon's buy-in so that they can ask him to help with fleshing out the story and stuff like that. They've also asked fans to submit questions, comments, voice-acting talent, 3D Modeling expertise, quest-writing, and pretty much anything under the suns to help get this off the ground.

I whipped up a work page for it, but since the thing ins't even released (or even playable!) the work page for it might go bye bye. I think I kept the page free from the "THIS'LL BE SO KEWL" aspect. That said...

THIS'LL BE SO KEWL.

edited 25th Jul '11 9:53:58 AM by pvtnum11

Yeah this sounds pretty dang awesome. I am very interested in the voice acting/writing thing as both of those are fortes of mine.

\*wants to be a Reaver*

That is probably the only "wut" thing I've found - that you can play as a Reaver. I totally disagree with that. They'll have to be really careful about how they pull that off. I liked the Reavers more when they were this mysterious threat that was talked about only in quiet terrified hushed tones, because it freaking worked.

Serenity kind of spoiled that for me.

My gut reaction to Reavers as playable was NO. Give us a criminal faction to play as, instead. Reavers should be given the cold sweaty gibberingly horrified respect they deserve.

edited 25th Jul '11 11:29:54 AM by pvtnum11

Meh, I guess I'll roll shaman or something.

Yeah. Reavers are a lot less terrifying when they're players.

Will Reaver characters get the option to kill, rape, and eat other characters? And if they're lucky, in that order?

^ Just another reason to not have them, unless they're aiming for a mature-only game, now that I think about it.

Also, the correct line is "If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing - and if we're very very lucky, they'll do it in that order."

Oh, hey, now I need brain bleach.

edited 25th Jul '11 11:48:59 AM by pvtnum11

How would you play a reaver anyway? Find people to randomly beat the crap out of, drive a few of them insane, die of radiation poisoning?

Yeah, I'm just having a hard time grasping how that would even work. Do you get a huge debuff unless you feed on normal human flesh regularly? Do you get some sort of rage-type buff when a normal human is in proximity that is sort of a Blessed with Suck in that your higher brain functions go haywire, but left alone you can do high-tech stuff and speak like a typical person? How the freak does Reaver society even work?

And yeah, radiation poisoning is teh suck.

To me, Reavers are sort of like high-tech zombies, mad from either the Pax or having survived a Reaver attack.

But the only way to survive it, is to become it. Gah, that episode was all sorts of messed up. Wash cracked me up, though.

Yeah the reaver thing me. Why let them be a playable "faction"? I like the idea of having it be more then just Browcaots Vs Alliance though. I agree a criminal faction would be cool as well, maybe part of Niska's group?

I'm sure there's plenty of criminal groups, and not all of them get along with each other. Different gangs would have different customers, or be vying for the same market share, and go to blows. Assasinations, drive-by's, hacking, turf wars, and all that other fun stuff. I think Niska is just one of hundreds of highly successful criminal bosses. For all we know, he might be on someone elses payroll, even.

We asked this on their page, and they pigeon-holed criminal groups under Mega-Corps. Which makes sense if you look at it another way: A professional criminal element will be ran like a cut-throat business of sorts, and may even have a legal front to hide their ilicit activities from the law.

Nothing apparently forcing you to join a particular faction, though, which is nice. You should be able to sandbox the game as a plain civilian, if you feel like it.

\*still wants to be a Reaver*

Not surprising, based off of how you play Fallout.

You might get your wish, though. So, Reavers are playable. What does that do for gameplay balance? Will they get nerfed? Overpowered? Either option sucks.

Heck playing a Browncoat means you're willingly playing an underdog faction that already lost the war. At this point (it seems that they're goign to have the game take place post Independence War and prior to events depicted in Serenity. So you're viewed with suspicion at best, constantly trying to find work to pay the bills and just one critical part failure away from being dead in the water.

Contrast to what we;ve seen of Alliance personnel, who can occasionally flaunt their authority, do as they please and live more or less in relative comfort.

So I took a third option and went civilian. We'll see how it goes.

http://fireflyuniverseonline.com/ They're about to roll out a survey so fans can post up what they want to see/don't want to see and stuff like that. Who knows, maybe Reavers will go away as a playable faction.

edited 27th Jul '11 12:05:18 PM by pvtnum11

Hmm, so this thing actually exists and is playable in some form? I remember having a conversation with someone, maybe you pvtnum, over whether it belonged in Unpublished Works or in the main wiki — I don't know if there's a hard and fast rule about when a work is sufficiently "published", but I suspect that it might be close to crossing here.

Yeah, that was me. I'm totally in the dark about how to move it from one place to another, though. Heck, it still says not indexed.