So because I am me, I decided to be on the bleeding edge of topicality and start figuring out how to make a Robotech MMORPG. Don’t blame me; blame the parts of my brain dedicated to sorting out the bizarre knot of Robotech and Macross fandoms, including the part dedicated to explaining to both fandoms why the other one hates you for entirely valid reasons that also aren’t your fault. It could be an article in and of itself, but it’s not really relevant to this site. But as I started thinking about it, I realized that the bigger problem was in making a mecha-based MMORPG in the first place.
It’s no secret that fantasy MMORPGs have the lion’s share of the market, but that hardly means that every other potential genre has been ignored. We’ve got MMORPGs with internet spaceships (even fantasy MMORPGs that also have internet spaceships) and wuxia MMORPGs and so on. And it’s not as if mecha video games are hard to come by. So why are mecha MMORPGs so hard to make? Let’s examine that – and also try our hand at outlining one.
Fortunately, the first question is pretty easy to answer, and I answer it with the RVB-78 Gundam Weissgeist (Missile Variant).
That model of Gundam doesn’t exist. I made it up. (Probably. If someone finds out I didn’t, I will… be surprised!) But the thing is that if you have ever looked up mecha online, you probably would assume that that particular model has specific data for its height, weight, armor type, weaponry, performance, ancillary systems, and so forth. You could see it statted out perfectly for a game that does not exist in any way, shape, or form. Mecha fans love to see every detail of these gigantic humanoid robots sketched out and extrapolated upon.
Also literally none of it matters in an actual mecha story, ever.
I have spent hours browsing through mecha specifications for various series that I enjoyed, and I also know none of this matters because they’re just the avatars for other things that are going on. In an actual anime, the Weissgeist’s missiles would matter only because they mean that Sor Valens has to get in close if she’s going to have a chance against Vendri Macno in a one-on-one contest, and the fight is actually about the fact that Sor and Vendri were once childhood sweethearts but wound up on opposite sides of a war and even though the war is over, the rifts that it exposed don’t just heal up.
So on the one hand you have an intensely personal drama that’s all about the people inside the cockpits with the mecha serving as functionally an outsized avatar for the people inside the machines. But the most game-oriented element is the giant robots, and it’s way easier to build an MMORPG around fun combat than it is to build it around gripping interpersonal dramas. Heck, the only game that is built around player drama is EVE Online, and those dramas are basically only as complex as “this group of jerks just wants to take all the stuff this other group of jerks has.”
How do we make this work? Well, I say we take a page from another game without directly adapting it. Let’s lean in on some Xenogears.
Those of you who are familiar with Xenogears probably know that could mean a lot of things. (Those of you who are not familiar with Xenogears who wish to be, well, here’s a video you can watch. It’s a quick surface-level overview. Yes, it’s three hours long. It’s that kind of game.) But in this case, what I mean is that whatever the finer details are, players are going to be both exploring and doing stuff in and out of their mechs, we’ve got a two-or-three-way faction war going on with no one having a clear advantage, and there are larger mysteries for players to investigate.
If you’re thinking those larger mysteries imply that either none of the factions is actually good or right or all of them are, you’re on the right track. Essentially, players will be playing “elite” pilots of some sort. “Elite” doesn’t mean “unique” in any sense; just by scale you’ve probably got hundreds of thousands of them running around, but it’s a small number in terms of the overall population.
Being elite means that you get to choose your own mech and customize it, from appearance to even the model. Of course, low-level players have to choose from a fairly small selection of models, but as you progress you get access to both more parts to customize the machine and more powerful machines to start with. I’m thinking a limited sort of customization rather than a full-on build like Armored Core, where your base model is still pretty important but you can swap in a few different limb variants, add on modules, and so forth.
Of course, if there are also on-foot sections, you would expect combat there too. And here’s where I’m going to potentially surprise people by saying that the ground-based combat is action-based, but the mech battles are a more traditional tab-targeted affair.
No, I’m not just doing this to be iconoclastic. The idea should be that on-foot fights are quick, brutal, and efficient. You have a couple of special abilities from gadgets (or magical abilities or martial arts or whatever – you can introduce some weird woo on top of things if you want), but fundamentally it’s more about combos with your weapon of choice. Think Skyforge–adjacent combat and you’re most of the way there.
But a mech? That can have tons of different systems, and it makes more sense that you would be controlling your attacks through a more measured means. You can even have things like cast bars for various attacks with a slow wind-up and modules that let certain weapon systems continue to cast while moving. It’s still active, but it is not as focused on twitch reflexes.
In terms of roles, think of a paradigm akin to Guild Wars 2; every mech wants to have some form of self-recovery, defense, and offense. But you do still have machines that are built better for taking hits and those that synergize well with others, just not rigid trinity roles. On the ground it’s even more pronounced, but there you probably want to have at least one player providing some recovery tools or else get very good at dodging. (Recovery would also be a good option to let players who aren’t as fond of action combat stay participants.)
Obviously, there’s a lot in there that would need to be fleshed out in details in the setting. There are mech series without anyone being more than humans; there are others where you have psionics, or magic, or whatever. But in this particular case I also think it’s important to just understand the broad strokes and the goals of the systems rather than extrapolating out an entire setting, especially since this one is more about a genre than anything. Details to be filled in later, and as always, these are more conceptual pitches.
Designing an MMO is hard. But writing about some top level ideas for designing one? That’s… also remarkably hard. But sometimes it’s fun to do just the same. Join Eliot Lefebvre in Design Mockument as he brainstorms elevator pitches for MMO sequels, spinoffs, and the like for games that haven’t yet happened and most likely never will!
