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When it comes to online communities, few places can compete with Gaia Online. The Web site that began as a modest gathering place for anime geeks now averages more than 5.5 million unique users per month and 1 million posts per day – second only to Yahoo! Soon Gaia Online will come to life in a full-fledged massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game called zOMG!
Senior Producer Dave Georgeson was kind enough to walk Gamezebo through the key features of zOMG!, which is currently in closed beta.
Bringing the world to life
"Unlike a lot of other MMO audiences, which are 85% or more male, our site is 55% female and 45% male. So we needed to make a different sort of game," said Georgeson. "Even though we wanted to keep a lot of the mechanics of a typical MMO, we wanted to do stuff differently as well. And besides that, Gaia Online is all about being a little different anyway."
One of the differences that visitors to zOMG! will notice straight away is that even though the game offers the typical MMO trimmings – like battling monsters, collecting loot, and adventuring – many features are designed around socialization rather than combat.
Take skills, for example. Normally, you would pick a character class (like warrior, healer or tank) that has a specific set of skills, which you're stuck with unless you start a new character. In zOMG! skills are acquired by equipping rings that bestow various abilities on the character. So if you want to join a group that doesn't have a healer, for example, you can equip your heal rings and become the group's healer.
There are 40 rings in total. They can grant various attack and defense boosts as well as cast supporting and attack spells, taking the place of weapons and armor. This means characters will never have to change the way they look in order to wear the most powerful piece of equipment.
Newbie-friendly
As well, instead of levelling up your character through experience points, players level up the rings themselves. It's something that Georgeson says make the gameplay more flexible and approachable.
"You can play with newbie friends by switching out rings to newbie rings, or can loan your friend some rings that you've levelled up so he or she can play with veteran skillset," he explained. "You can play for two or three hours at a time or even one hour and still get a good experience, whereas in a lot of the other MMOs that I've played, you don't really feel like you've advanced unless you've played for four or five hours at a time."
"You can play it and play it and still find different ways to arrange your skills or group with different people, but you don't have to play it forever and ever," said Georgeson. "You aren't stuck in a situation like you are with World of Warcraft or EverQuest or any of those other MMOs where you play with somebody for a few hours and then the next week when you log on, they've played 20 hours since then and you can no longer group with them because they've levelled past your area."
The story so far
Players entering zOMG! for the first time start at the Village Greens, just outside of the game's first town, where they'll notice that something isn't quite right: inanimate lawn ornaments like pink flamingos and garden gnomes have started coming to life, and it's up to the player to find out why.
According to Georgeson, the team has literally years of plotlines waiting in the wings to be rolled out after launch to keep power players interested and engaged. And although the learning curve is nice and easy, players can get into deeper gameplay the farther they choose to stray from town.
Friends are important
Players can form "crews" of up to six and adventure as a team, or simply go into town and play mini-games like a version of Simon Says where group members have to all stand on the floor to match colors and tones. Players are awarded buffs and bonuses by charging a meter that fills up the longer they play - provided they're hanging around other players.
"The best MMOs are the ones where you make friends, and so we want to set people up in situations where they can make friends; where they have opportunities to have discussions and get to know some of these other people. Because after all, Gaia Online is a social community, and we want to make sure this is reflected in the MMO."
Once a geek, always a geek
Another aspect of Gaia Online that has made its way into zOMG! is the anime aesthetic. Georgeson describes zOMG!'s style as being "very much flavored with that Japanese influence but from a definite Western angle."
"The anime look and feel allows us to be really flexible," Georgeson continued. "It's not all elves and dwarves and it's not all blasters and lasers; it's pretty much everything we want. We want to do a time travel story, we can do that. We want to do pirates vs. ninjas we can do that – in fact we have pirates and ninjas, and all kinds of things in the game.
Keeping it free
When it launches, zOMG! will be free to play – something that the team is very serious about. Players will have the option of spending real-world currency on extra in-game items, like power-ups that will restore stamina or health.
"[Micro-transactions] are really popular in Asia and Europe, but Americans have had a little bit of nervousness about it, like they're worried that someone's going to force them to pay more than they're usually paying for MMOS," said Georgeson. "But people pay 15 bucks per month for a regular MMO monthly subscription, and you'd have to buy a lot of power-ups to get to 15 bucks a month!"
"People can pretty much pay whatever they want to pay. If they don't want to pay, the game is balanced so that none of that stuff is important."
Click here to check out some screenshots of zOMG! and learn more about this upcoming casual MMO.