World of Darkness MMO

So, apparently this is gonna be a thing.

I have next to no information on it, except that it will start out focused on Vampire The Masquerade, and will indeed be using the Old WOD as a basis.

Any more details so far?

Oh, this is a thing? Cool. I'll look forward to it.

It's being developed by Crowd Control Productions, the developers of Eve Online.

Eve's dirty (not-so) secret is that the Incarna expansion will be a prototype for the WoD engine.

If Eve Incarna is anything to go by, WoD will look great, but have high-ish system requirements. And be severely delayed.

If EVE in general is anything to go by, CCP may end up breaking their backs trying to run two metaverses at once.

What I'm wondering is how they'll deal with the balance issues. They're focusing on Vampire at first, which means that they'll be expanding into other lines later.

If they don't do some serious tweaking, Werewolves and Promethians will dominate the game. :/

If it's using the old WOD, then I know what I'll be playing - go go Clan Malkavian!

I'll bet everyone is going to be a Malkavian and it will be hilarious.

Yeah, it'd be like a totally off-the-wall Rave/Mardi Gras/Mental Hospital Riot combo.

It's gonna be the best MMO in the history of history.

If they ever do expand it to the other gamelines, I am totally going Mage.

Eat fireba- erm... convienent car explosion, bloodsucking fiends!

Forget fireballs. Technocracy, Fuck Yeah! Saving the motherfuckin' world! :D

The Technocracy would be interesting to play as. Despite using Nineteen Eighty Four-inspired propoganda, regularly killing innocent mages and the like, wanting to destroy creativity itself, and having higher-ups who are probably planning on taking over the world... they still manage to somehow be almost good guys.

And in the World Of Darkness, that's practically Incorruptible Pure Pureness.

No mention of OWOD Werewolves? Sad panda.

You know, I don't know much about Wo D, but I did see a thing or two on this site. Isn't Wo D very role-playing heavy, which is almost impossible to bring to the MMO world?

Just asking, really.

They might have special roleplaying servers like a lot of MMOs, but it would raise the question of "why isn't that Hunter randomly killing all the vampires/werewolves/etc. he sees?".

They'll probably be a lot of sidequests with ultimately unimportant choices, just so the player does feel free to do anything they want.

edited 2nd Aug '11 12:05:23 AM by MangaManiac

If done well, there can be SOME roleplaying in-game.

Plus, you can roleplay. Come up with character backstories, act in-character. . .

Given a large enough degree of player-setting interaction, it could actually be pretty good.

All I can say about werewolves is fuck werewolves, the game-breaking bastards.

No doubt the Werewolves shall be balanced.

I wonder if you can drink the blood of NPCs...

Oh, the werewolves will indeed be balanced. And by balanced, I mean "blasted into atoms by whole guilds of Technocrats." :D

I wonder why they're using the outdated version of the brand as the basis. Wouldn't it have made more sense to either launch this years earlier, while the first WOD was still being supported, or to use the rebooted setting instead? People who're new to the game could get awfully confused with discrepancies between the paper material and the mmorpg material.

All that aside, really looking forward to how this turns out. WOD is the closest we've got to serious competition against the D&D brand in the overall roleplaying scene, and its notably different atmosphere and mechanics could do a lot to expand innovation in gaming.

From a market-standpoint, doing the old one gives some fans a squee-ish moment and helps you sell to the ol' geeks. Also, I'd say more people know what Vampire The Masquerade than Vampire The Requiem, so you can go around parading "Vampire The Masquerade MMO!" and most will understand.

On the other hand, the creator's might have just been big fans of the Old World Of Darkness.

I think White Wolf, for various reasons, views the Wo D 2.0 as being a mixed bag, in terms of success. In particular, they seem to have decided that Vampire2.0 wasn't as popular as Vampire1.0.

Me, I tend to think this is because they refused to establish any "bigger picture" in that line. It had a lot of good ideas, but they never really wanted to develop much beyond the random arbitrary city level. Whereas Mage2.0 had the Council/Seers conflict spanning the globe, and Hunter2.0 had the third tier conspiracies doing crazy awesome stuff.

I hope that, while they seem to be reverting to 1.0 for Vampire at least, that they back port some of the better stuff from 2.0. Like say, Hunter.

If I don't get to be a fucking Ventrue, I don't care.

I hope they take a The Lost approach to Changelings. The Dreaming was good and all, but Lost is absolutely amazing story-wise (IMO).

edited 2nd Aug '11 10:02:19 AM by MangaManiac

I'm going to have to disagree with that. Dreaming hit the perfect balance of wonder and horror, it just had game mechanics as clunky as anything else 1.0. Lost gave us Mary Sue villains that piss in your soup on a regular basis, P Cs that are crippled relative to basically every other splat, the repeated and flagrant violation of 2.0 setting design premises to the point of retconning stuff involving other lines, and the joys of playing a PC where your only two choices are "die" and "become a rape monster."

I'd prefer NWOD anyway. First, the werewolves are a bit more balanced (there's that *jumps off a tenement block* *SPLAT* *gets up, dusts off, walks away* crap going all over the place, but at least smacking a vampire doesn't deal aggravated damage unless you have a stupidly expensive Gift), second, the dumber-with-each-splatbook vampire bloodlines are limited (there's actually next to no chance you'd meet one), and third, humans aren't THAT gimped. Yes, the Hunters got a humongous nerf as compared with Reckoning, but considering that one of my NWOD vampires got almost killed by a human (.40 S&W ammo is not that awesome when YOU get shot with it), they're no slouches.