ythic Entertainment, a Virginia-based developer that develops "massively multiplayer" games for various sites and services, has been responsible for several online movies-based-games such as Aliens Online, Starship Troopers: Battlespace, and Godzilla Online. Their most recent release--ID4 Online--is playable exclusively on the Mothership.com Web site (Mothership.com and SCIFI.COM are both owned by USA Interactive).
ID4 Online, as the name implies, is a multiplayer online space-combat simulator based on Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's 1996 blockbuster Independence Day. The game is available on the recently released special edition DVD of the film, but it can also be downloaded from Mothership.com for free. Playing the game on the Web site, however, will cost $9.95 a month. The "story" of the game is set a generation after the film, when humans have had enough time poking through alien technology to develop their own fleet of starfighters. And it's a good thing, too, for the aliens have been spending the interim building massive bases throughout the solar system, preparing for a decisive assault on the world that dared stand up to them years before.
The aliens seem to have done the human race a favor by leaving their gargantuan saucers behind. Instead, the aliens go for the "endless waves of starfighters" strategy. This manifests in the game in team death match and "protect the cargo ship" shootouts that allow up to 20 players at a time. Game play is pretty straightforward for anyone familiar with the genre--fly around, shoot the enemy, upgrade the ship between fights--and players can take on the role of aliens or humans in combat over 3-D-rendered heavenly bodies.
We are not alone ... or are we?
The new human ships show a believable blend of human aesthetic and the movie's cool alien tech. The ships in ID4 also boast innovative control features--once a ship is directed to head in a given direction by the keyboard command, it continues to move in that direction, whether it be forward, backward, or side-to-side. During the rare instances that it was possible to locate another player, ship combat was fast and furious.
"Rare instances"? Yup, ID4 Online suffers from several problems, some that may be fixable by the designers and some that may not. First and foremost, there never seems to be anyone online playing the game. Since the game has no solo play feature, there's no way to practice space combat skills other than chasing down a computer-controlled mining ship. During recent weekend gaming sessions there were only six players online at one time, and that was only for a few hours. This title has been out since mid-August, and it should have built an audience by now. Maybe it's a slow starter--but a bot patch, or even a couple of Mythic employees whose job it would be to provide opponents as needed, would probably do wonders for ID4's popularity.
Another annoyance is the game's inherent lack of originality when it comes to level design and story (and each term is used loosely). With only two types of games, players might expect a multitude of arenas in which to fight--perhaps an asteroid field, a radioactive nebula, or a simple mined area of space. Instead, only the locale and background of the game changes. The story itself is hardly a story at all, and has little to do with the film with which it's packaged beyond the look of the ships. ID4 smacks of uninspired effort.
