Like stories, games need a solid opening. MMORPG Tycoon 2 understands this well.
A sequel to the original MMORPG Tycoon from 2008, the Aussie-made sandbox game launched in early access on Monday. The premise is pretty simple: you’re a game developer and you’re building, Planet Coaster-style, a MMORPG of your own.
That means you’re responsible for placing all the buildings, mob locations, respawn points, doodads, guards, NPCs, assigning quests to NPCs, working out what zones are meant for what levels, managing the development staff, bandwidth for everything in the game, and more.
I’ve only spent a few hours with the game, and the building controls are solid enough if a little stiff; there’s no option to increase sensitivity on camera rotations or tilting, which would be super useful when you zoom all the way in to get the players’ perspective.
But it’s a good start for an early access game. And what’s especially rad is how the game actually opens.
After picking a name and an icon – I went with Barista, because I had this stupid idea in my head about a social MMO where everyone runs around trying to become the best maker, or a more WoW-style MMO where coffee is the main liquid powering players and the game’s economy – the game gives you some basic archetypes.
If you choose a casual MMO, you’ll get more casual players who are harder to monetise. If you pick a story-focused game, you’ll get players that are more liable to wander off the beaten path and explore things you’ve left in the world. PvP means you’ll get players seeking out other players more, and if you go free-to-play you’ll have to tailor the game in other ways to keep things profitable.
What’s neat about the whole thing is that the menu is styled like a desktop window, and the default mouse cursor has a wonderfully slick trail animation:
And once you’ve selected everything, there’s this wonderfully slick animation flying you into the in-game world, a little like Sword Art Online or The Matrix.
For an early access title, that’s a slick open.
But it’s not the actual opening of the game, funnily enough – it’s just the start of the tutorial. After about 15 minutes going through the various steps necessary for setting up your first MMO, from placing the respawn point, inns, quest givers and so on, the game has a super late title card that kicks in once the game actually goes live.
The in-game world looks a bit sparse and bland because, well, it’s the tutorial and I’ve put bugger all scenery in. But when you’ve played the game for a bit and start a fresh MMO, you’ll be able to properly remake Durotar, Tirisfal Glades, Azuremyst Isle, or another zone, and get the full fly-over effect with the name of your MMO at the end.
MMORPG Tycoon 2 is out now on Steam for $36. I haven’t mucked around with it quite enough to have full impressions, but there’s some short gameplay below to give you an idea of what to expect. (Small note: the video might still be processing by the time you read this, but that’s a YouTube thing.)
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