With all the great franchises that deserve a decent MMO game, there’s one that rises above all competition, Aliens. An iconic franchise in the history of cinema and still popular among gamers today, despite the recent flop of Aliens: Colonial Marines, but will we ever see the Xenomorph’s terrorize the online space?
Much like the rest of my ideal MMO articles, the realistic chances of seeing an Aliens MMO is slim. About as slim as seeing a new release of a Duke Nukem title in the next two years; but that doesn’t stop me hoping.
So what would it involve? Well it would have to be an MMOFPS game, purely due to the fact that I find them far more immersive than their third-person counterparts. I would imagine it to be similar to the system used in Warframe, a session-based approach with players unlocking new planets as they progress.
Moving through the planets players would get closer to the main hive of that particular solar system, prompting a boss fight with the infamous Queen Alien. The only difficult aspect is designing character progression while still maintaining the helpless feel we came to love from the older Aliens games. It doesn’t matter how atmospheric a game is, or how scary your enemy appears to be, that fear soon dissipates when you have access to ridiculously powerful weaponry.
The Aliens franchise itself has done a good job of sticking to the basic Xenomorph design, with the exception of a movie or two that I won’t credit enough to mention; so that’s another area the game would struggle to develop. Inventing new things for an established franchise usually fails to appeal to long-term fans, so the lack of enemy variation could be a problem.
What are your thoughts? Do you have any ideas do solve some of the problems of a potential Aliens MMO game? Leave a comment below.