Why Highlander the MMO will be AWESOME

So here’s another thought tangent that came out of Horseshoe, even though it was not directly connected to a workgroup.

Back in Bandology, we often joked about how we were going to make Highlander the MMO, and how it was going to be AWESOME. It was entirely a joke, as the “there can be only one” nature of Highlander doesn’t really mesh with the concept of a massively multiplayer game.

OR DOES IT?

Yes, Highlander the MMO would be a fun game, and this is how…

It would involve a couple pieces of trickery:

1) The game would reset frequently, and the run of the game (essentially, the race to become the only one left) would be short. I’m thinkin, like, a week. Not only this, but the time frames would be staggered. Thus, you could easily join again when it’s at the beginning of its run, somewhere in the middle, or towards the end. It wouldn’t always begin on Monday and reset on Sunday, the shards would be staggered. If the players got down to the One before the end of the week, it would reset early and be swapped out with another shard that was scheduled to start at the new time. If the run reaches the end of the week before only One is left, the world ends. There are no leaderboards or second or third place or whatever. ONLY ONE.

2) We would plug the game onto another existing MMO. The Highlander players could move about the world and interact with the other players, but their game objectives would be separate. The purpose of this parasite model would be such that the Highlander players could exist in an active, populated world where the normal citizens had different objectives than their own. That would solve the problem of the ONLY inhabitants of the world being immortals, which would kind of kill the luster of the role. Plus, this would make it feel like it’d make sense for the world to be as big as it needs to be for all the immortals to go hunt each other down.

Jesse says I should make it a Second Life mod.

Those are the tricks, next comes hashing out how the gameplay would work. What happens when you behead another character? Do you absorb all of that person’s powers? If so, we’d have to think of a way to make it possible for a “new” player could behead someone who’d been playing for a couple of days. PLUS, we’d have to make that feel fair to the “older” player.

It would need a great many more verbs than “behead.”

Then you’d have to figure out combat or whatever.

Anyway, I’m intrigued, and maybe I’ll try and come up with something. I’d want to see if I could find a way to playtest those big ideas first. Is the parasite model even possible??

Highlander the MMO, here we come!