Out of the Past

Ha! You thought I was going to talk about the cool Robert Mitchum film from 1947, didn't you? Well, actually I just have, so you'd be right I guess.
However, in my noir mmo (just like in this and numerous other cool-azz films) the past always catches up to you.

How would this work?

Here's what I'm thinking:
At some pre-determined level (say level 40/80), a person from your past suddenly shows up and of course has something on you. Depending on how you've played the game so far (on a scale of coldblooded vs. sweetheart) determines how the next series of missions is constructed. For instance, you've chosen to play a Mob character and your mother shows up @ lvl 40 and you've been a sweetheart. She may be like Tony Soprano's mother and demand you to kill everyone at X location. Say you've been a coldblooded murdering fiend, when your mother shows up she only wants 1 guy roughed up a little, and you can't kill anyone at X location.

Who shows up could also be a random roll. As a Mob character there would be 3 possible persons from Out of the Past; your Ex-girlfriend Janice, your mother Eunice, or Tommy 2-Tone, an ex-business partner.
If you were playing a different race, it would be 3 other possible folks from your emerging back story.

All of this hinges on the 1 absolute fact about Los Angeles: Nobody is born here.

So everyone starts the game by getting off the bus in L.A. (or whatever the city name will be). But there is no better name for Los Angeles than Los Angeles.

Level Playing Field

The interesting thing I did when playing WoW was to create random characters of different races to see what their starting areas were like.
One thing I think Blizzard does well is flesh out the racial motivations for progressing through the game.

Case in Point: The Undead race has escaped the control of the Lich King, and they are basically trying freedom on for size, and demanding their own legitimacy. Well, this is a good noble motivation.
But from the Human side, the undead are infecting the land and need to be destroyed.
So these conflicting motivations (are supposed to) drive the actions of each.
Either way though, you start out killing 8 of x, then collecting 4 of x, etc.

In my noir mmo, this could be fleshed out as well. If you started as a Chinese male, there would be the motivation of actually owning your own property (since they weren't allowed in many places in the 30's/40's), but if you progressed enough in the game you would be able to get into real estate.

Essentially, I would like to take realities from the era and tweak them to fit a racial quest line. If we were to balance it right, there would be ample reason to choose to be Chinese despite being unable to own property from the beginning.

Granted evolving morality will not let us tackle certain realities from the era. The overt racism, terms like "chink", "nigger", "spic", etc. were common place, and didn't generate the pained flinch it does now.

There is an Irish character in GTA who says "niggers" at one point, and my flinching made me miss half of what he said. I know that people say the word, and racism is still a big problem, but it's encouraging to know that to me the "n" word seems out of place.

The other option would be to make this a Mature rated game, and deal with it. It would give us a bit more freedom in creating the hard-boiled story lines. From a creator's perspective, of course I would prefer this. But what about the children?? Oh yeah, because soooo many kids wanna be Marlowe these days....

The Goldilocks place for this mmo would be a viable business at around 100,000 people playing.
ok, if 100k people payed $15/mo, that would be $18 mil a year. If they payed $50 for the game in the first place, that's another $5 mil.
So could this game get made for $23 mil?

Would 100,000 people really want to play it?

What would level the playing field for small business MMO's like I'm suggesting?