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We’re not sure why people love Buffy so much, but it’s somehow made Josh Whedon a cult superstar. Whether it’s Sarah Michelle Gellar’s magical broken nose, or her bouncing ta-tas pursuing evil vampires, the show was clearly a financial success, even though we maintain it did little for the vampire genre, and was little more than a typical teen pop drama infused with horror fantasy. This distaste we have for the show is in stark contrast to the Buffy movie that we actually liked, perhaps because it didn’t take itself seriously (and because Buffy was hotter, despite the lack of magical broken nose).

Nonetheless, the Buffy franchise has spawned a ton of derivative products, like figures, comic books, and apparently now, an MMOG. In some weird twist of idiotic fate, this announcement comes at us in conjunction with the announcement that the previously proposed Firefly MMOG won’t be finished after all.

Don’t get us wrong, we found plenty of faults with Whedon’s Firefly too, but at least the concept of the IP was intriguing. That is to say, we find no fault with space cowboys, merely with the casting/execution of the short-lived show, which portrayed what should have been a gritty science fiction world with dirty rapscallions, with rather pretty, overly-polished characters. Nonetheless, the theme and setting for the show is perfect for an MMOG, whereas a Buffy MMOG is, well, dumb.

Supposedly, the Buffy MMOG will follow where the show left off, but as others have already pointed out, Whedon’s worlds are generally “light” settings developed purely for his characters to live in, while the brunt of his efforts are put into the development of those same characters. In other words, an MMOG based on the Buffy fluff wouldn’t necessarily be attractive to thousands of people somehow interacting directly with the storylines of the core Buffy characters. Does anyone really find the idea of a Buffy MMOG attractive, when the IP is much better suited to a single-player game?

While the concept of IP built around a small group of characters could support the structure of an MMOG, as in the case of Tolkien’s well-developed Middle Earth, Whedon’s worlds simply don’t show the same level of promise, especially when it comes to Buffy. Ironically, the one Whedon experiment that might have been a solid foundation for an MMOG (and a science-fiction MMOG at that), is now not going to be.

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