|
EVE UO hybrid with an elder scrolls combat system. Bethesda need to work on this ASAP. I wrote down all my ideas of the perfect MMO a while ago but it's 4 pages long. Frog 1.0 fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Feb 16, 2012 |
#
?
Feb 16, 2012 00:50
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 06:37 |
|
|
You can generate a massive world-space without it being horribly bland, people just haven't tried very hard at it. I can count the number of games I know of with any procedurally generated terrain on my hands, and most of them boil down to 'the terrain is a noisemap'. loving Dwarf Fortress can generate cool cities now, I'm sure a game with an actual budget could figure it out. Failing that, give players the ability to buy some industrial equipment and alter the environment via heavy landscaping and city planning. You could start with a big flat plane and it'd be a unique landscape full of virtual sandcastles in weeks.Frog 1.0 posted:EVE UO hybrid with an elder scrolls combat system. I know MMOs aren't generally known for good combat, but citing the Elder Scrolls is setting your sights for improvement a bit low. Vanguard Warden fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Feb 16, 2012 |
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2012 04:08
|
|
|
Vanguard Warden posted:You can generate a massive world-space without it being horribly bland, people just haven't tried very hard at it. I can count the number of games I know of with any procedurally generated terrain on my hands, and most of them boil down to 'the terrain is a noisemap'. loving Dwarf Fortress can generate cool cities now, I'm sure a game with an actual budget could figure it out. Failing that, give players the ability to buy some industrial equipment and alter the environment via heavy landscaping and city planning. You could start with a big flat plane and it'd be a unique landscape full of virtual sandcastles in weeks. I complete agree this is possible. Now just to find the imagination and motivation to do it
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2012 18:30
|
|
|
Vanguard Warden posted:I know MMOs aren't generally known for good combat, but citing the Elder Scrolls is setting your sights for improvement a bit low. I was thinking more of a FPS action-rpg style of combat system. Perhaps Tera will deliver what I'm thinking will work better than the old Target and click. A combat system where skill play a bigger role than just gear.
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2012 23:30
|
|
|
Frog 1.0 posted:I was thinking more of a FPS action-rpg style of combat system. Perhaps Tera will deliver what I'm thinking will work better than the old Target and click. Does anyone remember Neocron? It was a MMORPG that handled like a shooter; the mouse controlled where you look, the controls walked that way or strafed. Although the game 'rolled dice' to see if an attack hit, you also had to be in range and aim the crosshairs at the target. It was a pretty effective system, it added some skill without making it a twitch shooter. Neocron failed for various other reasons, but this looks like something an upcoming MMORPG could totally borrow.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2012 00:13
|
|
|
Gynovore posted:Does anyone remember Neocron? It was a MMORPG that handled like a shooter; the mouse controlled where you look, the controls walked that way or strafed. Although the game 'rolled dice' to see if an attack hit, you also had to be in range and aim the crosshairs at the target. It was a pretty effective system, it added some skill without making it a twitch shooter. APB borrowed it I believe and well... Also Neocron was amazingly fun to play in the early days.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2012 05:44
|
|
|
Cicero posted:The thing is, is that doing something EVE-like but not set in space would be vastly more challenging. Creating enough content to have an open world that players can screw with in meaningful ways would be incredibly hard to do on land (in fact, don't nearly all open-world MMOs have a horrible track record?). The thing that Terrain would add would basically be entirely cosmetic, but people would value it more because "thats my bush". If they wanted to take EvE to the level that would make it a true "world simulator" that it sort of is right now (that is, make it so that the governments/corps/whatever actually worked like they do today, and had attachments to their areas) would be to institute some form of NPC popular support for the corps, and/or make resources only show up in certain areas. Thus you have REASONS for people to stick to/own certain areas, once that happens you'd need to also make it possible for smaller corps to survive more easily (for example, small clusters of systems that are mineral rich, but tough to crack because they have very few routs in and out... a space equivalent to a large valley with impassible mountains surrounding it). Once you start shifting EvE to be more nationalized and regionalized, you'd probably end up with some rather interesting changes to how things would be done. And personally, I'd try to design out mega-corps like the Goonwaffe and such... make it so that they had to act more like NATO than anything else.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2012 08:23
|
|
|
Calax posted:I personally think that the thing that EvE is missing is that there's no real... benefits to different sectors of space. In theory, there is resource distribution like this in EVE; T2 construction components are weighted to need certain types of moon materials that are more common in some regions than others (and thus, making those regions more favourable to hold). However, that weighting fell apart with various changes and with the moon locations and the output they produce being static. The demand is skyrocketing for what they eventually produce, leading to the current bottleneck for most T2 production being a single moon material, Technetium. The vast majority of Tech moons are in the northern 0.0 regions. The rank-and-file alliance members in EVE, they don't care about that all too much. They don't personally see much, if any, of the output from those moons and other installations directly. Some alliances (Goons as a prime example) use the money those moons make to subsidise their members in various ways, providing them with equipment to help defend those moons. My point is, EVE does have some basic resource distribution that makes some areas of 0.0 far more valuable than others. But the majority of the people living in that space have effectively zero interaction with those materials, and as such, every place looks exactly the same to them, just with a slightly different layout and different system names. Putting access to those materials in the hands of the people actually living there would go a long way to bringing the regional differences to the forefront. The problem then becomes designing a resource distrubtion and gathering mechanics that make sense both to personal and alliance scales.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2012 16:33
|
|
|
Probably the best way to make people more invested in their personal systems would be to make it so that only certain systems can support shipyards. Then require there be freighter fleets moving resources from the moons to the yards. That way, you could change how wars are fought, with logistics actually mattering. That way, people have a vested interest in the systems (as their personal vessels are built in the system, and can actually have all the construction lost), and would make a more complex system for how alliances would need to be run. Admittedly I don't play EvE, but it's fun to bat experiments around to see how it'd mimic real world history/government. I think that's one of the things that people are trying to get at with many of these MMO's is to have either A) a VERY big crafting system that has many permutations and variables B) an entirely player built world, like EvE, but more accessible to the layman, and with more emphasis on stuff like territory.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2012 19:21
|
|
|
Calax posted:Probably the best way to make people more invested in their personal systems would be to make it so that only certain systems can support shipyards. Then require there be freighter fleets moving resources from the moons to the yards. That way, you could change how wars are fought, with logistics actually mattering. Personally I always thought, perhaps erroneously, that MMOs originated from Dungeons and Dragons(D&D). I am not sure what the very first MMO would have been but I imagine it was just a game in which there was a world in which the rules of D&D applied. After the game grew into a genre typical business practices of small innovations, not rocking the boat, and profit dominated the market. I think you are correct in the thinking that a VERY big crafting system combined with a player built world that "feels realistic" without sacrificing fun is a definite niche of what people want.
|
|
#
?
Feb 17, 2012 19:37
|
|
|
WEll, in the computer era, the first major "MMO's" were the old Text MUD's. Then was UO and Evercrack, DAOC and so on. On a VERY sleepy brain, a quick analysis of the current contenders points to WoW declining, and TOR not having as much lasting power as one would think, because of just how controlled and directed the entire experience actually is from 1-50. Rift is probably the biggest thing that'll soak up WoW's subscriber base (assuming Rift can get the publicity for that), as it is basically WoW2. Moving foreward I'm not sure what they could do. One of the big things that I've seen is that people can't justify to themselves more than one subscription to an MMO at a time, so as a dev you have to try to get communities to hop ship, not just single players. One thing that I think is necessary for moving foreward is heavy guild support. Maybe not to the degree of EvE, but providing locations for guilds to say "This is our home" would be fantastic (maybe have instance portals instead of blank doors in something like WoW?) Maybe, if a guild has enough power they can actually become the "faction" for a zone or something... I donno, it's 4 am and I'm friggin tired.
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2012 10:54
|
|
|
Calax posted:Moving foreward I'm not sure what they could do. One of the big things that I've seen is that people can't justify to themselves more than one subscription to an MMO at a time, so as a dev you have to try to get communities to hop ship, not just single players. I think any MMO being designed these days that doesn't have a F2P/micro-transactions plan from the get-go is doomed to fail. I don't think it's a matter of money specifically; as we know a lot of people are impulse buyers who have no problem spending money on micro-transactions in their game's store. I think it's more a matter of time. When you spend $15 a month on a game, you feel obligated in some way to play, and if you don't get in at least a few hours each day you feel like your $15 a month has been wasted. Similarly, because you don't want to waste your $15 a month, you play the game until you reach the burnout point, by which time you're so completely sick of the game you not only cancel your account, you don't even want to hear about it any more. (This of course is assuming you're the average person, and not a poopsocker who's content to play the same game for all eternity as long as they can brandish their e-peen at every turn.) Whereas, when you're doing a F2P game, there is no initial investment on your part, there's no monthly commitment, and no obligation to play (well, unless you join some really fascistic guild or something crazy like that). You might buy a bunch of micro-transactions, but they're one-shot items and you either use them when you bought them (like XP boosts) or they stay with your character/account (cosmetic gear, inventory slots, and so on). In no event do you feel any obligation to play until you get tired of the game. You get bored, you slow down or even quit playing for a while. You're not throwing $15 a month down the toilet and trying to rationalize to yourself that you need to play even when you don't want to. I think any MMO that's currently in development will seriously need to examine how to balance appealing to both the hardcore "grind to endgame" crowd and a customer base that seems to be increasingly more casual in their approach to games. I would venture to say they're probably going to focus on the latter in much more detail as they're most likely the larger of the two customer bases.
|
|
#
?
Feb 18, 2012 20:31
|
|
|
As an outsider to MMOs, I'm interested in these ideas, but I'm not sure I understand something: Many of these ideas seeem to lead in the direction of "I can be a hero and my decisions actually have lasting changes for the entire world." But what do you envision the role of the other players as being in your own journey? As competitors? As possible party members? What separates the idea from a really well done small-scale co-op or single player rpg? How does the crowd of players interact?
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2012 02:06
|
|
|
Yonic Symbolism posted:As an outsider to MMOs, I'm interested in these ideas, but I'm not sure I understand something: To Grandpa Pap: I think you're right... mostly. I think that a game could get away with being subscription from the get go, but they'd need to provide more time from the initial purchase to the player being forced to set up the subscription. While yes, people are more casual in their play, you tend to see MASSIVE subscription drop when that free time runs out because of bad things that have been heard in only the first month. Right now I have the free time and money to sub to three games, TOR, Rift, and WoW. I'm thinking of dropping my TOR subscription because it doesn't FEEL very fun after the first toon, and my character that I have at a higher level (a Jedi Guardian) feels vastly underpowered. Add to that the ridiculous variety of rumors about what's doing what and where and you just feel like the game isn't ready for prime time. Now, if I drop it I'm telling myself that in a year, I'll come back and play it again to see how it's changed, but a part of me is saying "no you won't... there won't be any reason to keep playing". And I sort of expect that servers are either going to be unbalanced as HELL (like they are now) or Ghost towns by the time I get back so a good portion of the content would be locked out (because of a lack of targets for PVP and a lack of partners for PVE). This is why I'm saying that having a way to draw entire guilds between games, or providing extra time for "free" players to see how the game changes over a short period would be fantastic for the business.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2012 02:54
|
|
|
Calax posted:I think that's one of the reasons people have been mainly working from EvE online's basic structure. In that game EVERYTHING is player driven. Right now, this boards player community there is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. People want to feel like they can rush into a town, take over, and have every member of the area paying tribute to them, and they'd need the other players to help form a power base to start that. I guess I'm just insane because this kind of thing sounds like the exact opposite of fun. It's the reason EVE has never appealed to me in the slightest and never will. Giving players the opportunity for "power" and "importance" in their world only ensures the biggest sperg on the server is going to camp his rear end on the throne and never let go. When I see a playerbase stratified like that I pretty quickly decide not to try. What I, personally, want is meaningful interpersonal interactions between myself and the players swarming around me. I want emergant interactions to come from the game mechanics. I don't want to be the hero of the entire kingdom. It would be much more meaningful for me to have just one other player come up to me and say "Hey, I found this treasure map. Can you translate it for me?" I want another player to jump out of the bushes and say "You got a bounty on your head for ganking a low-level player. I'm here to collect!" That makes me feel important because I am having a direct, unexpected, and personal effect on another person and vice-versa. Emphasis is on "personal." It's the reason massive guilds and 20-man raids don't really appeal to me.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2012 08:11
|
|
|
I hate EVE because it has the framework of the perfect MMO set in a space screensaver with spreadsheets.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2012 08:53
|
|
|
temple posted:I hate EVE because it has the framework of the perfect MMO set in a space screensaver with spreadsheets. This is the basic problem with doing "emergent, player-run experiences" the way EVE does it, because it's so fundamental to the experience. In order to have these systems of power and influence, you have to stratify the playerbase. In order to stratify the playerbase, you need to have a high skill ceiling. The sticking point is that "skill" is a tricky term when it comes to MMORPGs, since these are games that are based more around rewarding time invested than mastery of the mechanics. As such, the only way to have a high skill ceiling is to make "mastery of the mechanics" a function of time invested. Put simply, it means making your feature set creep to a point so bloated and obtuse that only a small percentage of uber-nerds will be capable of putting in the time necessary to make it their own. It's the same reason I've yet to encounter a type of PvP in an MMORPG which I would actually consider "fun," and I'm talking the mechanics themselves and not the metagame surrounding them.
|
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2012 04:10
|
|
|
An EVE-on-the-ground would be perfect for me. Hell, combat mechanics aren't even that important as long as you have to use your head to counter your enemy's strategy. Politics and a fully operational 100% player run world would be great. Still, i dont see any fantasy MMOs trying to really get out of the "8 class" model, or the leveling model.
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2012 18:45
|
|
|
Given the announcement of TOR going F2P, I think we've seen the last of the pay-to-subscribe games. What are the major games left that utilize that model? I can only think of Rift and WoW. Rift can pull it off because they are constantly releasing updates, and I think WoW has simple inertia (though I suspect if the new expansion has subscription numbers drop off quickly, they may even go that direction). I'd love to see a trend where there is no leveling- where all content is available to all characters and difficulty is scaled appropriately based on your group and relative power- so my newly created guy can go in alone and experience the same basic encounters as an experienced raid of 20. More controversially, all game-affecting rewards should be available in the same way. I get the same equipment rewards for completing the dungeon alone as the group of 20 raiders does. The hook for running at more difficulty or with more people would be for better cosmetic/non-gameplay items. By flipping the F2P reward model on it's head, developers have the option to then sell different levels of gear in their stores which gets people into more advanced groups more quickly, and cosmetic items are the "rares" that folks have/want to earn. This makes for a much more casual game, I think, which is a mixed bag, but in the long term I think you'd find less players become "burned out" from heavy raiding or leveling or whatever. It also allows the developers to focus on creating content for all users, especially if gear is limited in its effect. Say a fully geared person is 10-20% stronger than a new character, then it's easier to make content for everyone than if there's a wild variance in player strength.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2012 00:17
|
|
|
this is one of the reasons minecraft is so popular. You get to do what you want, how you want when you want. There is hundreds of servers with all kinds of different plugins and mods available. I think it would be wise of developers to take some pointers from the massive success that is Pixel blocks.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2012 08:22
|
|
|
Just discovered this thread and I know it's going to eat me alive. Been wasting time on this kind of thing since I was a wee lad on GEnie. I do love me some armchair game design.... The premise I always come back to when I'm thinking about this kind of design is to start from the desire to own a well-defined niche. Stake out your territory, toss out anything that doesn't embed you in the niche, and find out how many other people share your vision. The thing is, a niche is by definition not very big, so you can only afford to have two or maybe three defining aspects and everything else just kinds of falls out of there. So I want to throw out some niches that have occured to me over the years. First, I don't think that the theme park/content treadmill model is inherently dead, gone, kaput. Episodic content is hugely popular in other media, the trick is figuring out how to not fail at it in gaming/MMOs. Build a game around this cornerstone - monthly updates, no exceptions, evolving storylines that branch at the individual and global scales based upon player choices. If you take this as the non-negotiable corner of your game, what choices does it make for you? Without content tools and content pipeline for crazy-quick turnaround, nothing else matters for one thing. There's a great documentary out there on how the South Park folks make a new cartoon in six days, that's the kind of thinking you have to have. Supposedly this is a thing the Hero engine can do, but no one seems to be making good yet. Hopefully some people who are more experienced in game development could speak to where the delays come. Is it art? Debugging? Design? Sure as hell isn't the writing/rewriting. What sacrifices could you make in exchange for new content EVERY SINGLE MONTH? Blizzard and Valve have shown us how you can trade time for polish - what could you trade for time that still leaves you with a finished work people would pay for?
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2012 18:35
|
|
|
Something I don't get about MMOs is why they are sometimes such lovely co-op games. You'd think that this kind of game would be perfect for playing with one, maybe two friends. But you need to be of the same level, and have similar gear and complimentary roles. If you and your friends can't do this, you're already in trouble. Some games address these issues but a surprising number don't. But the more pressing problem is content. The vast majority of MMOs have a pretty slim selection of content for a duo or trio. Most quests / dungeons / instances will be too easy or too hard because they're designed either for one player or 4-6 (dungeons) or 10-25 (raids). And this just seems like a missed opportunity. Good multi-player co-op games have a huge following even when they don't include much by way of leveling or character enhancement. It seems a good MMO geared towards small groups of 2-4 players could do extremely well for itself. Am I just crazy, or is this something that could work?
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2012 04:24
|
|
|
Faceless Clock posted:Something I don't get about MMOs is why they are sometimes such lovely co-op games. City of Heroes can do scaling pretty well. What's dumb is that these are all number-based games: multiply some base numbers times the number of people in the group and go hog wild. The more difficult zones/raids/whatever have specific mechanisms in place to add to the difficulty: stand here, pull this, etc. It's a weird design, to me, because once you've learned how to deal with it, you always know how to do it, and then it's just menial work every time you re-run the content. I'd rather you give enemies a toolbox of abilities and have some kind of AI figure out the best way to deploy them rather than in a set pattern with a rage/wipeout timer. If you go to fight a dragon without ranged weapons, it should be able to fly up in the air and kill you from afar. But there's nothing in that model that would preclude 2 people from doing it, assuming the enemy's abilities were scaled correctly. On a similar topic, I've often wondered about games with smaller population shards: limit the number of players on a server to, say, 1-300 or so. You can have cross-realm matching tools for PvP/dungeons/etc so content is not limited to the small population, but it would allow for each player to have a more heroic role in the game world. If you're one of only 30 or so wizards on the shard, suddenly you become a much more valuable commodity. It would be very gameplay-dependent, of course, but I think it would be an interesting tack.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2012 05:38
|
|
|
I'm not sure people can build a 'perfect' MMO. I've played several and I like things about them all. I wouldn't slag them but I'm not there either. - I used to log in to EVE daily to check orders or set a skill. - I used to log in to SWG daily to look for resources. - I used to log in to PotBS daily to attend to econ. - I used to log in to LotRO daily and just move things around from bank to inventory, check Auction. All these I would then go on to play for a few hours. I'd say any MMO that gives me motive to just log in on for a reason other than to finish the game is in better shape than most out now.
|
|
#
?
Aug 31, 2012 06:21
|
|
|
Everquest is a great MMO pretty that up, make it hard as hell. I don't want a glowing line that shows me how to level. I want to be dropped in the woods. I want to hail a priest of discord but press q on accented and hello Ex loss. Having to talk to npc and find quests that are vague. eq 1 was amazing, poeple still play it. Oh the whole you can't go in alone even at level 4 is awesome.
|
|
#
?
Sep 2, 2012 18:10
|
|
|
You know what MMO I'd like? An MMO where you do not actually play as your character. You have to build it and program it. It makes trades, forms parties, spends money, etc, without you. Every day, your character writes a journal entry telling you what it did. If it dies you only salvage some of its parts. You can only rebuild it and give it new program on the weekend when it visits you, though there are test chambers to try stuff out.
|
|
#
?
Sep 2, 2012 18:27
|
|
|
I'd like MMOs to be as good as games in other genres. When you talk about the qualities of an MMO, you always have to qualify it. "It's got good graphics... for an MMO. The combat's good... for an MMO" etc. So what about an MMO where the enemies have AI like an FPS game from over a decade ago, rather than just walking up and down in a straight line, before running at you in a straight line and going through a rotation. What about an MMO where the combat feels like actual combat like a fighting game, rather than pressing buttons in a rotation, managing cooldowns and resources like a chore rather than something fun. What about an MMO where the NPCs do their own things like in an RPG, rather than just standing there handing out quests. What about a crafting system that isn't total garbage. What about an interface like a normal game that is minimal and doesn't get in the way, rather than fifty icons and thirty bars and six hundred lines of text all over your screen. What about quests that are something you want to do, rather than a chore someone else wants you to do? Should a hero adventurer who slays dragons for a living be collecting things for some nobody?
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2012 02:38
|
|
|
Some other random thoughts: An MMO world should feel alive. NPCs should react to the player. Let's take for example WoW. When you're in a desolate neutral zone your faction may have a safe point with a flight point, repair-mob etc. When you walk in, everyone just stands there silently and inactive. Instead there should be guards, you should be challenged when you go near, and only let in when they establish who you are. With modern technology there should at least be collision detection with the NPCs. When you walk through a busy town it should be hard to get through the massed crowds. If you're a low-level nobody then citizens should charge past you and knock you out of the way. If you're a high-level people have heard of people would move out of the way as you go past. Mounts should be an actual NPC rather than just a picture of a horse under your character. The whole world should be more physical. How many MMOs actually have a concept of momentum, where if you're running at full speed you can't just stop and immediately run at full speed in the opposite direction? When you play FIFA, characters knock each other over and trip over each other, you feel like the player is an actual presence on the field. In an MMO your player is just a picture that floats around, you're not really immersed. The camera can help in this, you should only be able to see what your character can see, if you're in a tight area the camera should be close up, only moving back in open areas. When you get hit or hit someone hard, you should feel it, the camera should shake, the bass should shudder. In many MMOs a giant can fall to the floor and there's barely even a noise. There's never enough weather either. You never encounter wind that blows leaves around and slows down your character, the rain never whips around you, makes the ground soggy and slippery, you never slip on ice and snow, thunder never shakes the speakers, lightning never illuminates an otherwise dark terrain, NPCs never run inside when a storm breaks. I guess what I'm saying is, an MMO should be more immersive and visceral, rather than staring at an avatar from a distance surrounded by icons and numbers. Surely the technology is available to do it, after so many iterations of Moore's law.
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2012 03:00
|
|
|
Mount and Blade would be cool if it were in some sort of MMO environment. it had mounts, attack areas [high, low], ways of blocking, horse mounts which you can kill and even knock players off of, and the weapons were pretty varied.
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2012 11:13
|
|
L
|
pisshead posted:Some other random thoughts:
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2012 12:19
|
|
|
Baibai Kuaikuai posted:Bro, reading this just makes me excited with how good MMOs will be in 10-20 years, if they still exist (I think they will). You're right; our presence in the game should feel more like Assassin's Creed/Dark Souls/adventure games than the just floating nothing we have today. The ability is there, look at how Skyrim NPCs interact with the environment without your help what so ever? The only issue I see with this is latency and dysyncs. What would pull you out of the game faster than a rubber-banding vendor.
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2012 12:59
|
|
|
Ularg posted:The ability is there, look at how Skyrim NPCs interact with the environment without your help what so ever? The only issue I see with this is latency and dysyncs. What would pull you out of the game faster than a rubber-banding vendor. Technology gets better all the time though. Everquest came out in 1999. Since then, according to Moore's law, our computers should be 256 times as powerful, and so should the servers, but I'm not seeing gameplay that's 256 times as complicated. We've also moved from dialup to broadband. Latency will always be an issue but that's an issue of net-code as much as anything. You get rubber-banding in WoW so much because so much trust is put into the client. Fifa isn't as bad because it doesn't trust the client at all. I think the reason MMOs don't progress so much is because there's so complicated to make and there's so much to do that gameplay innovations take a back seat. Look at SWTOR, they apparently spent nine figures on development and it all went on voice acting and animations, the gameplay was just the same tired old poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2012 14:05
|
|
|
Open world PvP where players battle over territory and resources ala Shadowbane, except done right.
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2012 19:15
|
|
|
Recently I've been thinking about how one could implement perma-death without it being actually permanent, and got some inspiration from Multi-table tournaments in poker. These can have thousands of players and last many hours, but once you lose your chips, you're out. Perma-death is an interesting concept because then there's something at stake; without it all you have to worry about ever is maybe a bigger repair bill or a corpse run. However it is critized - quite validly - as being too harsh and unfun, especially in MMOs where you can have hundreds of days invested in a single character. If you lose that you'll probably just quit playing. I think the solution could be to abandon the idea of characters you use ages on perfecting and instead focus the game on shorter rounds of gameplay 'tournaments': scenarios that last a certain amount of time and then ends, erasing whatever happened in the time they took place. They would be massive PvP arenas, lasting maybe up to a few weeks, where perma-death is in place. The idea would be that a new one would begin fairly regularly, so that if you die in one you can begin a new one right away, instead of having to wait weeks. Like Poker tournaments, if you lose you're out, but you can always start a new one. They could even have rewards as well to the winners, to give a greater incentive to stay alive until the end. Scenarios could be something like a campaign during WW2 (anything to do with war, really), or maybe a zombie apocalypse. It doesn't have to be last man standing either. It could just as well be based on performance. I'm just getting a bit tired of every MMO being about the 'Epic saga' of this one guy (your character) who's the hero and eventually he'll reach level gazillion and kill End Boss. I think MMOs could be a lot more engaging than that.
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2012 22:05
|
|
|
Just take Dwarf Fortress and make it into an MMO somehow, that's basically my dream MMO. More than anything, I'd love such an elaborate crafting system and legends that are created by players. Also, since you probably die fast and the fortress also dies relatively fast, people don't get too attached to their characters (the one worst horrible flaw of all MMOs is character attachment, which supports grinding), so they're open to experimenting and actually having fun instead of making numbers increase.
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2012 22:55
|
|
|
Ovenmaster posted:Recently I've been thinking about how one could implement perma-death without it being actually permanent, and got some inspiration from Multi-table tournaments in poker. These can have thousands of players and last many hours, but once you lose your chips, you're out. Doesn't that end up with the same problem though? If you're not invested in the character then you still don't care that it dies? Theres nothing at stake there, not really. Sure you would lose the tournament, but you'd do that without perma-death as well.
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2012 23:18
|
|
|
Nephthys posted:Doesn't that end up with the same problem though? If you're not invested in the character then you still don't care that it dies? Theres nothing at stake there, not really. Sure you would lose the tournament, but you'd do that without perma-death as well. The idea is to make your tournament life what's at stake, not your character. The value of your tournament life rises the closer you get to the finish line, given that there's a higher chance of a reward, and thus you become more invested the longer you stay alive. Obviously if no one cares about winning in the tournament then it wouldn't work, but I don't think that's a flaw in the concept, just the incentive.
|
|
#
?
Sep 3, 2012 23:34
|
|
|
The perfect MMO would probably be one where the content was created as fast as players can consume it. I think world of warcraft is probably the closest game, in its early years, where content was created at just the right pace. Naxxramas for example came out right before an entire expansion so almost noone even saw that dungeon until Lich King. The only way it is possible for small budget is to create tools for community to upload content, but there's a ton of disadvantages to that approach. Game companies just have to realize that MMO take a huge amount of content before players are willing to spend that 15 bucks a month.
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2012 08:24
|
|
|
An MMO I'd like to see would be one that takes the model of an MMOFPS, and fleshes it out considerably. I've thought about something like that recently, the it'd work would be a fair bit like EVE except based with actual humans performing corporate espionage on a planet instead of spaceships shooting each other for resources. The setting would be thoroughly cyberpunk, the players being cybernetic agents hired by corporations or owning a corporation, and it would be based on claiming facilities and resources for whatever mega-corporation you would work for(be it player or NPC controlled.) There would be two different ways to play this specific game, both leaning on the other to make each others lives easier. The first is a strategic based game which is browser based more than anything. Then there would be the FPS style game, based on taking over different kinds of facilities or stealing information based on different objectives. The way it would work is that within the browser based interface, crafting new kinds of weapons, managing resources, politics, and even playing the market would be key. Also, when you wish to attack to hold a facility it would be possible to hack the facility. Maybe you could spike cameras to give the players that would attack the map later a kind of radar, or you could disable the security system. If you fail a hack,m nothing could happen or it could notify the other side. Even if you succeed in a hack, if the other side has high enough awareness through their own hacking skills they could be notified that a hack took place. On the FPS side of things, you could always against NPC corporations if that's you prerogative(it would certainly offer faster gratification and would have more of a pick up and play style to it) but there would be much less gain in it compared to taking a player controlled facility. All facilities would mostly have NPCs in them ranging from security guards to workers, and possibly enemy players if they knew when you would attack(there would be about 10 minute window for both sides to queue up players to defend or attack the facility if the enemy found out about the attack.) And it would become a game of protecting multiple objectives depending on the type of facility. Even if the players fail they could hamper that facilities capabilities for a long while. All of this would be wrapped up in a player controlled economy, with enemy corporations trying to one up each other in quality goods and trying to undercut one another in prices. Which would hopefully create a game both FPS and RTS junkies could both play and enjoy for completely different reasons. devilmaydry fucked around with this message at 09:54 on Sep 4, 2012 |
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2012 09:49
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 06:37 |
|
|
Ovenmaster posted:The idea is to make your tournament life what's at stake, not your character. The value of your tournament life rises the closer you get to the finish line, given that there's a higher chance of a reward, and thus you become more invested the longer you stay alive. Obviously if no one cares about winning in the tournament then it wouldn't work, but I don't think that's a flaw in the concept, just the incentive. Doesn't really seem like a MMO at all though. I guess in the sense of purely "a lot of people playing" maybe. Everquest had a server for awhile where if you died you went back to level 1 but kept all your gear/skills (so it was a lot easier to level back up if you were far along when you died.) I thought that was a pretty good idea
|
|
#
?
Sep 4, 2012 15:20
|
|
