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If you want to get anywhere in the MMO business the major thing you need is innovation. But the trouble is that there are so many ideas floating around out there that it’s damned difficult to come up with a truly unique approach to gaming.

Most browser games suffer from ‘copycat syndrome’, a condition where game designers flat out lift ideas from other, more successful games. Crime RPG ‘Biker Battles’ is one of the few games that actually seems to be innovating, at least at the moment anyway.

Inspired by his love for the TV show Sons of Anarchy, Biker Battles is the brainchild of one Stefan Gaasbeek and is currently in open alpha, meaning anyone can register a character and get playing – just remeber that because game is still developing you currently only have the bare bones to play with. However, Gaasbeek had a spark of ingenuity when creating the game, deciding that the players themselves should play a big role in forging the gameplay of the new MMO.

While you can play the basics of the game, which is a fairly simple crime RPG as it stands, you can also join other players on the forum, who are constantly coming up with new ideas to implement. Although the feature is still in its infancy judging by the small amount of threads it has, you can quickly see how crowdsourcing and MMO gaming go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Gaasbeek professes to reading every suggestion and will implement the ones that he thinks will work best. This amount of collaboration between player and designer has massive potential, especially if it continues through to the end product and beyond. Instead of one or a small team of designers racking their brains to come up with fresh and exciting features to get players rushing to sign up, Biker Battles could have hundreds of gamers pitching their own ideas, and with so many that could potentially be thrown out there, the liklihood is that there will be a couple of gems that will set the game apart from the rest.

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