t is no secret that the Wachowski brothers first conceived their virtual-reality philosophy and kung-fu epic as a video game. And that the first Matrix video game, Enter the Matrix, was as much about expanding on the story of the first two movies as it was about driving and shooting puzzles. So it is completely in keeping with the Wachowskis that despite their having ended the movies with the third, they are now carrying on the story of the Matrix in video-game form with the launch of The Matrix Online.
MxO is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Players take the role of newly awakened "red pills"; to create their characters, the game walks players through an abbreviated version of Neo's recruitment and training in the first film. In voice-over, Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) presents each player with the red pill/blue pill choice, and very shortly a character is "awakened." The player now literally has a role in the continuing history of the Matrix and its heroes. Basically, that means doing missions to build influence with one of the game's factions (Zion, Machines, Merovingian) to unlock cinematics of and interactions with the characters from the films. In addition, the game also has "live events" where the developers play characters within the Matrix and change the state of the world based on how the players perform in various "contests." The first such event had players collecting fragments of Neo's consciousness and included Morpheus appearing on the street along with a glimmering echo of Neo's body.
In keeping with the movies, the characters do "learn" skills; they have them directly uploaded into their memory. The result is that in MxO, and unlike other MMORPGs, characters can literally change their "class" on the fly. By clicking on any hardline, a player can access a menu to change the character's program loadout, transforming from (for example) a kung-fu master to a master hacker in the time it takes to move the icons around. The characters are literally blank slates whose versatility is limited only by the size of their memory and the skills they've purchased or crafted. Memory size increases with level.
Combat and character interaction in MxO are unlike any other MMORPG currently on the market because the client computers actually know where each other's characters are. In practice, this means that the characters act together instead of simply running parallel animations: They can both grapple and embrace. They can shake hands and block punches. And so on. Hand-to-hand fighting looks like an arcade fighting game except that it also includes bullet time. A particularly effective strike or move will result in the game slowing down to bullet time to show the results.
Hardware demands are worth it
As with so many PC games, players will save themselves a lot of headaches by running MxO on a computer with the recommended system specifications, particularly the 1 gig of RAM. As of this writing, the game is still getting the technical refinements that all MMORPGs are subject to immediately after launch. There are still missions with bugs, and death occasionally triggers untimely disconnects, but those are minor things compared to the lag and stutter that are common to players using computers close to the minimum hardware requirements. The game world of the MxO is graphically rich and detailed and gritty, but it takes some real power for a computer to display it in all its glory.
The ability to swap skills in and out of characters' memories is one of the places where MxO really shines. Several current MMORPGs give players options for retrofitting their characters if they decide they've missed the rails at some point, but MxO is the only one that allows characters to (for example) be crafters at one point, soldiers at the next, healers at the third and back to crafters ... all in the same evening. Even better, players can tweak their skill loadout as time goes on within a session, trying to find the right combination to meet each mission.
Characters still have to earn experience so they can raise their skills in level, and the skills themselves can be purchased only in certain places. In addition, many of the ultra-high-level skills can be crafted only by and then purchased from other players. Character improvement is still a matter of travel and interacting with other people. Also, while instant class shifting is great, you have the same problem that multiclass characters have in any game: It takes twice as long to get good at two things as it does to get good at one. Players can focus their characters on just one "profession," but that is ignoring one of the great strengths of the game.
No other MMORPG has combat as good as the MxO's. Not only can characters punch and kick and throw each other instead of swinging at the air while five feet away a monster reacts as if struck (as happens regularly in other MMORPGS), but characters can use guns in this close combat as well. If both characters have guns, then they dodge and shoot at one another. If one has a gun and the other doesn't, the hand-to-hand person will close the distance (usually with an acrobatic) on a successful attack and the gun person will increase it (usually with a throw or push-off) on a successful attack. Disarms are frequent, and rearming is an option, so the circumstances of the fights are very fluid. And even when a character has its gun out, it can still do its special hand-to-hand attacks.
All that holds the Matrix Online back from being the best MMORPG on the market are its relatively high hardware demands and the fact that it is still shaking out performance-wise. Both for fans of the Matrix and for fans of online role-playing games, MxO is a terrific choice that is only going to get better.
For some reason, I've found less casual chit-chat in MxO than in any other MMORPG I've played. Finding a ship, joining a faction and tuning the in-game WMP to Radio Free Zion made me feel much more like an actual part of the saga.
—Eric
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