Why aren't there any MMOs (or really multiplayer games of any sort) that put you in the role of one of a crew of people on a spaceship? I'm kind of shocked that the videogame industry has been humming along for about thirty years now, and despite being populated more or less completely by nerds who should know these things, hasn't created a videogame that functions this way yet.
WoW and other fantasy MMOs are pretty much designed to encourage players to team up to take advantage of the diversity of character classes - if you're going to do a raid, you need your tank, your healer, some other spellcasters, whatever. I don't know too many specifics, I'm like one of the last three dudes on the internet who still hasn't played WoW. But when I was a teenager I played D&D, so the mechanic isn't totally unfamiliar to me. I think that the party-forming and raid-launching mechanic would translate beautifully to space.
You'd think that the crew-a-vessel mechanic would be a no-brainer, after being exposed to exactly that sort of mechanic for years of sci-fi tv shows: Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, etcetera. The mechanic was laid down for us in Moby Dick: some wealthy player or NPC owns a vessel and wants to send it on a specific mission, and so has it in port to enlist a crew, and thereby allow players the opportunity to grow their characters until such a point that they themselves are able to own and captain vessels and fleets, and launch expeditions and wars of their own.
The top dog of space MMOs at the moment is Eve Online, which pairs every player with their own vessel, and it's sort of developed this huge culture of players basically being shitheads to each other in the name of piracy and privateering in space. It's a famous favorite of griefers for the degree of backhanded behaviour it engenders, and one of the more entertaining scams I've read about took place there.
The skill trees and advancement paths would be familiar to anybody who's already played any kind of RPG. Bigger, badder vessels require larger crews, and as technologies available to the starship become more sophisticated, they'd only be available to characters who had developed the necessary proficiency to be able to exploit them. Communications officers could jam hostile vessels abilities to coordinate their efforts and higher-level comm officers would be able to open voice chat between a larger number of friendly vessels; tactical officers can only operate weapons they know how to use, each turret would benefit more from having a human operator than an AI, and so forth. The bigger the ship, the more minigame-style activities are necessary to be executed concurrently by several players to keep it ticking.
And on top of all the complexity that multiple-player vessels would introduce, it would probably also turn the nature of piracy and griefing in space as established on Eve Online upside down. How are you going to spam cheap vessels at your targets juggernaut if even the smallest craft requires four dudes to operate it? I'm not going to say it wouldn't happen, but I'm willing to bet it'd require clever assholes to get a whole lot cleverer.
I did some digging and it does look like a Star Trek MMO is in the pipeline somewhere, with the option of multiple players staffing a single starship, but Star Trek's legacy in the videogame sector (ha!) hasn't really been stellar (ha ha!) so I'm not holding out too much hope there. Does anybody know of any other games that have been made or are in the process of being made that fit this description?
