I would like to see the huge emphasis on crafting in a game like A tale in the Desert merged with the massive world pvp of something like DaoC or WAR. So you essentially have a stronghold MMO.
Something where I can get 4 friends and the attack your town with our handmade trebuchet.
I would like to see the huge emphasis on crafting in a game like A tale in the Desert merged with the massive world pvp of something like DaoC or WAR. So you essentially have a stronghold MMO.
Something where I can get 4 friends and the attack your town with our handmade trebuchet.
I'd take that a bit further and try and make crafting the nigh-exclusive source for equipment save for relics of a divine or legendary nature, and make the system effectively limitless as far as potential characteristics and design. Having mobs swarming one area time and time again so they can get some legendary weapon about 500 guys on the server already have is just downright retarded, not even mentioning boring - meanwhile, letting the dudes who practice crafting and go spelunking through libraries and ruins and goodness knows what else for crafting techniques basically create whatever the hell they can imagine would create quite a bit of variety, I'd imagine.
I would like to see the huge emphasis on crafting in a game like A tale in the Desert merged with the massive world pvp of something like DaoC or WAR. So you essentially have a stronghold MMO.
Something where I can get 4 friends and the attack your town with our handmade trebuchet.
Age of conan might be what your looking for. Time will tell to see how it develops.
Also, if they change the combat so archer's dont have to aim their arrows by hand I'll be really bummed.
Basically, for me, at this point, the basic fundemental gameplay of MMO and MMO combat has to be changed before I'll be interested in one again. When I beat another player I want to feel as satisfied as when I beat someone in a fighting game, feel like I really out thought and out played the other opponent. MMO combat as is tends to have very little player interaction, it tends to just be a race between two people pressing their pre-determined sequence of buttons faster and hoping you have the better gear and class match-up.
Edit: Sorenson, there's this other MMO, I'll try to dig up the name for it that is in development that you might be interested. Almost all items are crafted, all items are dropped on death (fund the war effort!) and no boss type NPC will spawn more than once in the game ever, instead they will be weaved into the games lore book that is constantly being written.
Also, I've said this so many times, but it's worth repeating: Pokemon MMO.
No pets. Pets detract from player heroism, don't make sense in terms of game mechanics, and are just a bad mechanic. If you want a pet, fine, expect it to die immediately if it gets attacked.
Stealing ideas? That means WORK. No, we rather get the newest grapic engined licensed on the market, dumb down the usual generes a bit for *ease of use* and *streamlined gameplay* and continue to earn millions the easy way *g*
I just wish more people played DAoC. RvR feels kind of empty at some times, when it really shouldn't be. I guess I just miss it when there was weekend long sieges to steal some other realm's relics...
But if you must, I would really just love to see a GTA like environment completely empty of all NPC pedestrians and everything is basically left up to the players. All the gangs, cops, vigilantes, everything all left up to the players. So you go around, driving on the highway in your muscle car when some asshole slams into your side and scratches the whole thing up. You're initial reaction is to ram him back and as you do, he goes over the guard rail and gets stuck in between the other side's guard rail. Dissatisfied, you pull over, get out, and start shooting his car up with your shot gun. Then two other cars on the opposite side of the highway pull over and start throwing molotov cocktails at both of you and your car catches on fire. Somewhere unseen though, a sniper takes out one of the pyros while a helicopter flies over head while it's passenger is using it's gattling gun, taking pot shots at all of you. All attention turns towards the chopper but you decide to drive off in someone else's car off the highway into urban territory but are caught in between some major gang war and you hide behind several parked cars but then the police squad pulls up and starts killing anyone in the immediate area. And then you die, respawn, and shit happens all over again.
But I'm not sure how real time action fighting will work with hundreds of players all in one concentrated area.
It seems like their answer (which may not be the best answer) when there are lots of players is to limit players options through giving them incentives to form large formations like infantry blocks. Should limit player's choices until enough people die that the swirling melee ought not to be too laggy. Atleast, that's my understanding.
As for my own MMO ideas, it would be cool to ahve an MMo where the goal isnt "slay the dragon" but maybe more "advance as a civilization". Try to get the whole world from the stone age into the industrial revolution, step by step. There's no penalty for joining the game late. Sure you'd be underfunded/geared compared to the rest of people but the prevailing technologies of the time would be commonly avaliable. It's not like you'd have to research out of the stone age just for yourself.
Player on player interaction would come in the form of player conglomerates trying to control the direction of the technological evolution along with private armies to hold land and resources. Corporate espionage and sabotage would play a big role.
The repetition of content versus loss of content issue is a pretty big one at the moment. It isn't very heroic to take down a boss that will just respawn in a week, but it also isn't very heroic to wander around in a world that's completely empty because every single unique monster has already been killed.
It probably wouldn't be possible with today's technology, but I'd like to see a game where everything is either player-created or contstantly procedurally generated. You would be able to go off wandering into random wilderness from anywhere, but depending on what kind of tracking you use, you would have a chance of stumbling upon other nearby players or existing buildings that share your coordinates. If you find a point of interest like a dungeon, you would be able to create a map containing that instanced section, allowing you to come back to it later or share it with others instead of having it erased as soon as you leave the area. That way, there would always been an infinite amount of content, while still allowing players to make permanent modifications to the world.
Families instead of guilds, turfs, some sort of good hierarchy system. Set in the 1920s-30s would be a plus. Maybe add in playable police and police departments. Undercover agents, corrupt policeman. Gameplay could be kinda action rpg-ish or maybe fps-ish I'm not sure. Systems for doing hits, smuggling, raids, casinos, theft, take overs, "protection," arrests, etc. Underground economy would be important. Instead of crafting, maybe be able to own distilleries, factories, shops, etc.
Theres a billion and a half ideas I've had and probably more you can think of to put together a real good mafia mmorpg. It'd be a nice change from the usual fantasy/scifi dealings too.
But I'm not sure how real time action fighting will work with hundreds of players all in one concentrated area.
It seems like their answer (which may not be the best answer) when there are lots of players is to limit players options through giving them incentives to form large formations like infantry blocks. Should limit player's choices until enough people die that the swirling melee ought not to be too laggy. Atleast, that's my understanding.
As for my own MMO ideas, it would be cool to ahve an MMo where the goal isnt "slay the dragon" but maybe more "advance as a civilization". Try to get the whole world from the stone age into the industrial revolution, step by step. There's no penalty for joining the game late. Sure you'd be underfunded/geared compared to the rest of people but the prevailing technologies of the time would be commonly avaliable. It's not like you'd have to research out of the stone age just for yourself.
Player on player interaction would come in the form of player conglomerates trying to control the direction of the technological evolution along with private armies to hold land and resources. Corporate espionage and sabotage would play a big role.
YES, WIN.
A kinda Machiavellian online kinda game would be made of all sorts of win too.
Edit: That mafia mmo idea sounds pretty cool as well.
One thing I wish we could see more of is developers making games designed specifically to be run on independent servers or PCs that can then be tweaked to a host's heart's content. For example, a company develops a game that's like a crossover of Survival Crisis Z and Left 4 Dead: the people who set up the server can then change all sorts of aspects of how it runs on that server, such as setting up new maps and interiors, changing zombie AI and characteristics, changing weapon characteristics and spawn rates, and all sorts of other stuff. One game then might be a more classic NotLD/RE scenario with weak shamblers set in in a sprawling city in the modern world; another might be a sort of near-future thing with DotD 2K4 sprinters in some kind of enclosure; another still will have stuff straight out of All Flesh Must Be Eaten in the middle ages or the early Victorian era; and yet another will have come up with a creative set of models and AI setups to let them come up with all kinds of crazy stuff besides zombies and the like.
Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but I just thought I'd chime in and say mini games! Make all the boring stupid crap like harvesting and crafting into a fun mini game, like puzzle pirates did.
In all my time spent playing FFXI (lolsuck, whatever) what pissed me off the most was how unnecessarily monotonous most tasks were. To mine/harvest/log all you do is trade a pick/whatever to a point, and maybe you will get an ore, maybe not. Repeat ad nauseum. Instead it would be cool if a button pressing minigame or something came up where you had to time your strikes/chops or your pick would break. Same idea for crafting. Get your forge or beakers or what have you to the right temperature, mix it right or else your materials go to waste, or create an inferior item.
I know because of lag issues and things true real time combat won't be possible in MMOs, but I think incorporating something similar into combat would be cool. Like the different limit breaks in the FF series, when a person uses a certain attack a short button pressing sequence or something comes up and the better they do the more bonus damage is gained. I think LOTR Online is on the right track with letting bards play their instruments how they want, I'd like to see more of that sort of interactivity in MMOs.
More battle tactics like the skillchains and magic bursts in FFXI that reward good co-operation between party members would be nice as well. Performing these sorts of things would also provide an experience bonus that would give people even more incentive to learn to work as a team.
I would like to see the huge emphasis on crafting in a game like A tale in the Desert merged with the massive world pvp of something like DaoC or WAR. So you essentially have a stronghold MMO.
Something where I can get 4 friends and the attack your town with our handmade trebuchet.
I'd take that a bit further and try and make crafting the nigh-exclusive source for equipment save for relics of a divine or legendary nature, and make the system effectively limitless as far as potential characteristics and design. Having mobs swarming one area time and time again so they can get some legendary weapon about 500 guys on the server already have is just downright retarded, not even mentioning boring - meanwhile, letting the dudes who practice crafting and go spelunking through libraries and ruins and goodness knows what else for crafting techniques basically create whatever the hell they can imagine would create quite a bit of variety, I'd imagine.
That's why I mention AtitD, because that game was all about crafting. You built everything, and it had the whole quality rating system to make things even more interesting. I recall people going on about their 500 quality axe or whatever.
Can someone try to explain the appeal of crafting to me? I've never quite 'gotten' it.
In DAoC, if someone crafts you something, chances are, they are going to use it for a long while. I mean even years. To some people, it's just the idea that you are part of that other player's character's development. I guess the other part of that is just being useful. I mean, most of the time, crafting doesn't take too much except time. And if the game is kind of slow, you can just invest time into crafting and get something useful out of it, as opposed to just killing monster after monster over and over to farm extra gold.
Can someone try to explain the appeal of crafting to me? I've never quite 'gotten' it.
In DAoC, if someone crafts you something, chances are, they are going to use it for a long while. I mean even years. To some people, it's just the idea that you are part of that other player's character's development. I guess the other part of that is just being useful. I mean, most of the time, crafting doesn't take too much except time. And if the game is kind of slow, you can just invest time into crafting and get something useful out of it, as opposed to just killing monster after monster over and over to farm extra gold.
It's also cost-efficient. It's always cheaper to make your own gear, and many times the gear you can create is not only cheaper but better, too. It's also relaxing (most of the time). I never enjoyed WoW more than when I focused 70-80% of my time on crafting. This leads me to my idea for some innovation:
Crafting that yields experience: You start crafting as a low level character, and as your skill becomes higher the items you need come from more dangerous areas, and as a level 1 there is no way for you to get them, except off of the market. Crafting items should yield experience so that you can gather the materials you need without external help (in many situations, even outside help isn't enough). Perhaps separate combat levels and crafting levels so that although you may be able to survive in a high level area, you're not an effective fighter.
Hell, maybe make a crafting class that mixes in some offensive/defensive magic so you can hold your own in a dangerous situation. Whatever the solution, it really pisses me off that crafters get the shaft.
There's always "drawing on the essence of the items."
It would be interesting to have a class that, say, can't swing that Axe of Smacking they made, but they can use it to cast an Axe-Smack spell based on its quality.
Man this isn't innovation, but i'm suprised it hasn't become a mainstay for mmorpgs already: Minigames.
Cmon' just make a bejewld clone or somesuch. I know it'd take some effort but I can never see why we still have growing bars for crafting (if you want to see how much better minigames make crafting, I suggest you check out Puzzle Pirates.)
More non-ish innovation but i'd like to see more platforming/puzzles in mmorpgs as well. The only noteable mmo i've seen in this respect was DDO which actually did contain puzzles along side the combat (which reminds me of when i was in a team during the beta and just fliped out and figured out this puzzle while the team was fighting spiders that were being spawned due to my efforts. )
Of course theres also Uru which i'm glad something like it exsists, but I like my puzzles to be an enhancer to my game experience not the sole focus.
Crafting that yields experience: You start crafting as a low level character, and as your skill becomes higher the items you need come from more dangerous areas, and as a level 1 there is no way for you to get them, except off of the market. Crafting items should yield experience so that you can gather the materials you need without external help (in many situations, even outside help isn't enough). Perhaps separate combat levels and crafting levels so that although you may be able to survive in a high level area, you're not an effective fighter.
Hell, maybe make a crafting class that mixes in some offensive/defensive magic so you can hold your own in a dangerous situation. Whatever the solution, it really pisses me off that crafters get the shaft.
I'd like to see more of this in general in games. You get to see lots of such-and-such amazingly powerful wizard/warrior/whatever made The Sword of Jesus that steals peoples' souls when you kill them and turns them into cash or something. Or every NPC/legendary hero has their own special attack/amazing magic spell. But what do I get at high levels? Level 96 Lightning or Sharp Katana You Found in Some Cave.
I guess I just don't like the idea that other people can do things that not only I can't do, but are amazingly outside my ability, even though I'm as powerful as I can get.
cfgauss on
The hero and protagonist, whose story the book follows, is the aptly-named Hiro Protagonist: "Last of the freelance hackers and Greatest sword fighter in the world." When Hiro loses his job as a pizza delivery driver for the Mafia, he meets a streetwise young girl nicknamed Y.T. (short for Yours Truly), who works as a skateboard "Kourier", and they decide to become partners in the intelligence business.
I had an idea a while ago for an MMO (actually a MUD, but same difference, right?) where your character was a great ape on the brink of evolving to a higher form of intelligence. Your interface with the game would be severely limited - you wouldn't be able to just say "go north" or "go west" because Gorillas don't have compasses, right? So at first your commands would be limited to a couple of very basic verbs - "wait", "attack", "look", "eat", "find food". And depending on how advanced your character was, these commands would be translated into some kind of action. Starting out characters trying to find food would basically wander around randomly hoping to stumble across something, but then as you got more experienced you would be able to smell some kinds of food, and "follow smell", or you would recognise certain sounds as coming from prey animals, &c. Really advanced characters would be able to make simple tools like spears or stone axes and to light fires. Perhaps even more advanced technology than that would be possible, but since it would take a while to reach it wouldn't need to be in there at the start.
The other major aspect would be that there is no "chat" mechanism. You can't just type in words and have everyone read them, because Gorillas don't speak English, either. Instead, when you first met other players, you would have the option to either attack them or to watch warily. Spend enough time watching warily, and you "level up" your communication ability and learn some kind of hand signal to indicate non-hostility. Again, with enough time and practice, advanced characters would have quite a complex set of hand-signals and grunts available to them to convey ideas and emotions, but they would never be able to just type words into a chatbox.
Another part of the idea would be that the game would have permadeath and unrestricted PK, but, the catch is that because PKing is a basically anti-social act, you would permanently damage your ability to develop social skills by doing it. So, going around killing people isn't "punished" by magical effects coming down from nowhere, but by acting the role of murderous thug you would end up having the social skills appropriate for a murderous thug, too, with the attendant likelihood of physically weaker but more socially capable people ganging up on you and killing you.
I guess I thought of it as a combination of various genres I love: Real-world survival (as in The Unreal World), social dynamics and ecology (as in... Gene Pool? MUDs in general?), and technology advancement and making things (as in Civ, I guess) plus my own interest in great apes.
Oh yeah, that would be the other thing, instead of "races" you would choose what kind of great ape to be, anything from Spider Monkeys and Chimps through to Gorillas and I guess some kind of proto-human, aswell. There'd be a balance of physical and mental and social characteristics so that they'd all be viable options, with different food sources, play styles, tech trees, and social dynamics...
...of course, it's not about robots or elves so it would never actually be made, but I think it would completely rock and be totally unlike anything else out there. :P
I don't mind them being crappier than raid stuff (solo versus group benefits), but I would like them to be at least equal to what one can aquire on their own. If the monster drops are better than what I can craft for the same level bracket...
The self-sufficiency of crafting was always the appeal to me. To be able to provide yourself with items and weapons has always been a draw for me.
The only shitty thing is, aside from a select number of games, crafted items are usually shittier than raid stuff. Sometimes by a lot.
I think the system should be that when an MMO starts up, there are no items in it at all. Everything has to be made; things that are easy to make end up being cheap and common, and things that are difficult to make are rare and expensive. But having a system which just churns out items willy-nilly is always going to result in a messed-up economy.
A fallout MMO would be sweet. Post apocalyptic settings
I'd love to be able to hide in an old scorched building with my jury-rigged sniper rifle, looking at an Enclave patrol further down the street in my scope, while vertibirds scout the skies above me.
A fallout MMO would be sweet. Post apocalyptic settings
I'd love to be able to hide in an old scorched building with my jury-rigged sniper rifle, looking at an Enclave patrol further down the street in my scope, while vertibirds scout the skies above me.
Bethesda is leasing the Fallout license to Interplay for a Fallout MMORPG. Don't remember the exact number, but it's a timed lease where the game has to be out before 2010 or some other such shite.
Man this isn't innovation, but i'm suprised it hasn't become a mainstay for mmorpgs already: Minigames.
Cmon' just make a bejewld clone or somesuch. I know it'd take some effort but I can never see why we still have growing bars for crafting (if you want to see how much better minigames make crafting, I suggest you check out Puzzle Pirates.)
More non-ish innovation but i'd like to see more platforming/puzzles in mmorpgs as well. The only noteable mmo i've seen in this respect was DDO which actually did contain puzzles along side the combat (which reminds me of when i was in a team during the beta and just fliped out and figured out this puzzle while the team was fighting spiders that were being spawned due to my efforts. )
I think that isn't a good idea, at least not if you are using the current MMO crafting template. I played FFXI for a long time and getting anywhere in crafting in that game involved a lot of repetition. Having to play a minigame 50 times in a row so I can level my cooking skill from 50 to 52 would have forced me off crafting (and probably the game) much earlier. The crux of the matter is that so much money comes from subscription fees that keeping you playing longer (over months/years and not hours-per-day) is the main driving force behind so much of the design. New content can make people stick around but what the companies are counting on is inertia and that oftentimes results in some awful game design.
I think a lot of the ideas in Guild Wars are pointing in the right direction. Instantaneous travel, quick and enjoyable leveling, and the ability to respec anytime the player wants are things more MMOs need. Arguably GW is not much more of an MMO than Diablo II was but maybe that is telling us something. The current MMO system is mostly broken (to me) because it aims for the very opposite of most games' goal - the game is supposed to make us want to play because we are enjoying ourselves, not because we've already invested time X to get to Y.
I'm also pissed off that most MMOs don't allow you to change character class and instead force you to make an alternate. This was definitely one thing FFXI got right as it allowed the player to switch classes with no penalty or restriction (barring the initial unlocking). So many games have character-specific perks that take so long to achieve (eg. a lot of the badges in CoH/V that give things like +HP), that having to work for that again just so I can see what another class plays like is an insulting timesink.
Sorry, end of rant. I think my experience with FFXI just burned me out on MMOs for a long time. It was great and definitely the best of the MMOs I've played, but I can't imagine devoting two years to a single game again.
There's nothing wrong with minigames so long as they're appropriately designed - but that means basically "a game within a game" - you need to allow for player advancement and development, and appropriately compensate the amount of mental involvement in the task.
One of the ways I like to think about minigames is in terms of what Dystopia did with cyberspace. Cyberspace is certainly very different to the normal gameplay, but it is in fact complex enough that you can play the game purely from within cyberspace but still must evolve your talent at it in a meaningful way.
I think this is what needs to be done in terms of "eliminating the grind" in MMO's ultimately. You have your core gameplay, but then every possible source of "grind" is evolved into a game of its own, with advancement and tactics in order to get good at it. You would perhaps still allow "push butan" to give you some base level of achievement, but the really good players should be allowed to make a lot more progress.
Bear in mind, with this, I certainly don't mean "play the game to get from level 23 to 24" I mean more "play the game, and when you finish you've advanced 10 levels or so" - give people big rewards for doing well.
I think this would make really diverse and compelling gameplay - being able to show people a system of crafting, combat, mining etc. which really does reward different aspects of player skill and perception - truly making the people who are good at it unique in the world, would be awesome.
The question I think really is, what forms do you imagine this taking?
I would like to see replacing grinds with things like creating your own farmbots. While playing WoW, there was a short spurt of time that I attempted to make farm bots in VB script to farm for me. I found I actually enjoyed making and testing the scripts out more than anything in the game at that point.
If this idea was incorporated into a game, I think farming could be expansive, interesting, and fun. Farmbots might only work while you're offline, giving you a reason to do something else (like sleep).
A common theme I see in this thread and in most other MMO threads involves "creation", giving players the power to take the game into their own hands and create the game. It seems one of the ultimate goals of an MMO should be to let the player decide how he wants to play it, and then giving him the power to do so. Crafting (done well, and it usually isn't), creating your own farmbots, allowing players to create and advance their own civilization, all bring in that element of control.
No more "Go here and pick me five petals from this flower" crap. I want some really bad ass quests. "Go to *starting village for opposing faction or enemy/whatever* and kill five players." Basically, I don't want to be running around doing scripted quests.
No more "Go here and pick me five petals from this flower" crap. I want some really bad ass quests. "Go to *starting village for opposing faction or enemy/whatever* and kill five players." Basically, I don't want to be running around doing scripted quests.
You said it, I would add this list:
Go to X and kill Y # of Z things.
Go to X and gather Y # of Z things.
Go to X and kill Y # of Z things until N drops.
Go to X and talk to Y.
Go to X and kill Y things until your faction bar reaches Z.
I think all those formulas are just about beaten to death.
No more "Go here and pick me five petals from this flower" crap. I want some really bad ass quests. "Go to *starting village for opposing faction or enemy/whatever* and kill five players." Basically, I don't want to be running around doing scripted quests.
You said it, I would add this list:
Go to X and kill Y # of Z things.
Go to X and gather Y # of Z things.
Go to X and kill Y # of Z things until N drops.
Go to X and talk to Y.
Go to X and kill Y things until your faction bar reaches Z.
I think all those formulas are just about beaten to death.
I'd not ditch them outright as make those types of quests actually interesting ('cause really, you can boil a whole lot of things down to those basic archtypes). Let's say, for example, you're tasked with killing a dude in Anarchy Online in an instance in a skyscraper: now, you could go in with guns blazing and take him and any goons out the old way, or you could do it in a more interesting way. Perhaps the dude's apartment has a nice view he likes to enjoy: if you're good at sneaking, you can get up behind him while he's enjoying the scenic view and give 'im a nudge over the railing and spawn the dude outside as he falls screaming to his death for passers-by to witness; if you've a good hand with explosives, you could jury-rig a bomb to a door, a bed, a chair, a toilet, or some other item he'll have to use, and then leave the instance and get a notice later of him being blown to smithereens; if chemicals and the like are your thing, you can spike some food or medicine, or maybe make a little poison gas thing and bum-rush him when he's in a small room and lock him in with the thing; and so on and so on and so on. Having the way you approached the task affecting your reward would also be neat - sometimes the employer wants it to be a blatent hit, sometimes they want it to look like an accident, and others still would have different conditions of their own, or reward you for doing the job creatively (placing a micro-corrosive on the massive chandaleer hanging over the dining table that activates when he's sitting down to a meal and resulting in him being cut to ribbons as it falls, for example).
This also reminds me of one of my bigger gripes about certain games: the lack of signs of actual human activity. Nothing annoys me more in an instance where I have to go kill a bunch of humanoids than finding them standing around in a building devoid of any kind of furniture or objects or anything else that shows people actually live or work somewhere. People are lazy sods who desire comfort and all sorts of crap, and if there's using a place as a hideout then there should be things indicative of that nature: beds or bedrolls, tables and chairs, tools and clutter and knickknacks, food, and just all the other crap you expect to see when you enter a home or office.
No more "Go here and pick me five petals from this flower" crap. I want some really bad ass quests. "Go to *starting village for opposing faction or enemy/whatever* and kill five players." Basically, I don't want to be running around doing scripted quests.
You said it, I would add this list:
Go to X and kill Y # of Z things.
Go to X and gather Y # of Z things.
Go to X and kill Y # of Z things until N drops.
Go to X and talk to Y.
Go to X and kill Y things until your faction bar reaches Z.
I think all those formulas are just about beaten to death.
I'd not ditch them outright as make those types of quests actually interesting ('cause really, you can boil a whole lot of things down to those basic archtypes). Let's say, for example, you're tasked with killing a dude in Anarchy Online in an instance in a skyscraper: now, you could go in with guns blazing and take him and any goons out the old way, or you could do it in a more interesting way. Perhaps the dude's apartment has a nice view he likes to enjoy: if you're good at sneaking, you can get up behind him while he's enjoying the scenic view and give 'im a nudge over the railing and spawn the dude outside as he falls screaming to his death for passers-by to witness; if you've a good hand with explosives, you could jury-rig a bomb to a door, a bed, a chair, a toilet, or some other item he'll have to use, and then leave the instance and get a notice later of him being blown to smithereens; if chemicals and the like are your thing, you can spike some food or medicine, or maybe make a little poison gas thing and bum-rush him when he's in a small room and lock him in with the thing; and so on and so on and so on. Having the way you approached the task affecting your reward would also be neat - sometimes the employer wants it to be a blatent hit, sometimes they want it to look like an accident, and others still would have different conditions of their own, or reward you for doing the job creatively (placing a micro-corrosive on the massive chandaleer hanging over the dining table that activates when he's sitting down to a meal and resulting in him being cut to ribbons as it falls, for example).
This also reminds me of one of my bigger gripes about certain games: the lack of signs of actual human activity. Nothing annoys me more in an instance where I have to go kill a bunch of humanoids than finding them standing around in a building devoid of any kind of furniture or objects or anything else that shows people actually live or work somewhere. People are lazy sods who desire comfort and all sorts of crap, and if there's using a place as a hideout then there should be things indicative of that nature: beds or bedrolls, tables and chairs, tools and clutter and knickknacks, food, and just all the other crap you expect to see when you enter a home or office.
Hell, I want to be able to fly a plane into the apartment.
I think this is what we all can agree on, we want to handle quests our way. Give us ragdoll (and not that shitty Havok engine) and the ability to create. If I want to create a bomb I should be able to do it. Let's say you are in an instance and you have to kill the guy. Why not make it interesting and make the instance a copy of the world but more of a playground for you. You coerce the guy into going to a bar which you have rigged to explode with the help of that handy bomb. Now you couldn't have the building blow up in the original copy so instead you give buildings or areas stats that show how many times the building or area has experienced a massive explosion for a quest, etc. Would this be incredibly hard to make? Sure. Would I finally be ok with paying $15 - $20 a month for that type of game? Fuck yeah.
I honestly like the way EVE crafting is done, especially on the low end. Get a blueprint (recipe), get the materials, hit 'go.' Come back when it's done. Think about how crafting worked in D&D-it's just a time based thing, i.e. 'come back tomorrow.'
I honestly like the way EVE crafting is done, especially on the low end. Get a blueprint (recipe), get the materials, hit 'go.' Come back when it's done. Think about how crafting worked in D&D-it's just a time based thing, i.e. 'come back tomorrow.'
One thing I aws thinking of was actually showing a character in the process of creating their item. Instead of simply spamming items left and right for minimal skill gains, you would have a set of animations the character would go through showing the various steps (IE pouring the molten metal, and having it sit until it solidifies, taking it out of the mold and tempering the blade, then putting on finishing touches like decorations and wrappings and the like) with the crafting time being dependent on the general size and complexity of the weapon - a small knife or sword would be maybe a minute, a larger weapon or some lower-tier armor would be two or so, and then really high-end things like plate armor, composite an crossbows, and so on could take as much as five depending on how much crap's going into it. Balance it out with giving comparitively-massive skill gains for those kind of activities, and you could be rid of the hordes of junk weapons built in bulk while also making crafted items more valuable.
I honestly like the way EVE crafting is done, especially on the low end. Get a blueprint (recipe), get the materials, hit 'go.' Come back when it's done. Think about how crafting worked in D&D-it's just a time based thing, i.e. 'come back tomorrow.'
One thing I aws thinking of was actually showing a character in the process of creating their item. Instead of simply spamming items left and right for minimal skill gains, you would have a set of animations the character would go through showing the various steps (IE pouring the molten metal, and having it sit until it solidifies, taking it out of the mold and tempering the blade, then putting on finishing touches like decorations and wrappings and the like) with the crafting time being dependent on the general size and complexity of the weapon - a small knife or sword would be maybe a minute, a larger weapon or some lower-tier armor would be two or so, and then really high-end things like plate armor, composite an crossbows, and so on could take as much as five depending on how much crap's going into it. Balance it out with giving comparitively-massive skill gains for those kind of activities, and you could be rid of the hordes of junk weapons built in bulk while also making crafted items more valuable.
So crafting would be done like A Tale in the Desert?
Posts
Something where I can get 4 friends and the attack your town with our handmade trebuchet.
Age of conan might be what your looking for. Time will tell to see how it develops.
Also, if they change the combat so archer's dont have to aim their arrows by hand I'll be really bummed.
Basically, for me, at this point, the basic fundemental gameplay of MMO and MMO combat has to be changed before I'll be interested in one again. When I beat another player I want to feel as satisfied as when I beat someone in a fighting game, feel like I really out thought and out played the other opponent. MMO combat as is tends to have very little player interaction, it tends to just be a race between two people pressing their pre-determined sequence of buttons faster and hoping you have the better gear and class match-up.
Edit: Sorenson, there's this other MMO, I'll try to dig up the name for it that is in development that you might be interested. Almost all items are crafted, all items are dropped on death (fund the war effort!) and no boss type NPC will spawn more than once in the game ever, instead they will be weaved into the games lore book that is constantly being written.
Also, I've said this so many times, but it's worth repeating: Pokemon MMO.
Starcraft Universe MMO with a Deus Ex style interface that is PvP focused.
But I'm not sure how real time action fighting will work with hundreds of players all in one concentrated area.
But if you must, I would really just love to see a GTA like environment completely empty of all NPC pedestrians and everything is basically left up to the players. All the gangs, cops, vigilantes, everything all left up to the players. So you go around, driving on the highway in your muscle car when some asshole slams into your side and scratches the whole thing up. You're initial reaction is to ram him back and as you do, he goes over the guard rail and gets stuck in between the other side's guard rail. Dissatisfied, you pull over, get out, and start shooting his car up with your shot gun. Then two other cars on the opposite side of the highway pull over and start throwing molotov cocktails at both of you and your car catches on fire. Somewhere unseen though, a sniper takes out one of the pyros while a helicopter flies over head while it's passenger is using it's gattling gun, taking pot shots at all of you. All attention turns towards the chopper but you decide to drive off in someone else's car off the highway into urban territory but are caught in between some major gang war and you hide behind several parked cars but then the police squad pulls up and starts killing anyone in the immediate area. And then you die, respawn, and shit happens all over again.
It seems like their answer (which may not be the best answer) when there are lots of players is to limit players options through giving them incentives to form large formations like infantry blocks. Should limit player's choices until enough people die that the swirling melee ought not to be too laggy. Atleast, that's my understanding.
As for my own MMO ideas, it would be cool to ahve an MMo where the goal isnt "slay the dragon" but maybe more "advance as a civilization". Try to get the whole world from the stone age into the industrial revolution, step by step. There's no penalty for joining the game late. Sure you'd be underfunded/geared compared to the rest of people but the prevailing technologies of the time would be commonly avaliable. It's not like you'd have to research out of the stone age just for yourself.
Player on player interaction would come in the form of player conglomerates trying to control the direction of the technological evolution along with private armies to hold land and resources. Corporate espionage and sabotage would play a big role.
It probably wouldn't be possible with today's technology, but I'd like to see a game where everything is either player-created or contstantly procedurally generated. You would be able to go off wandering into random wilderness from anywhere, but depending on what kind of tracking you use, you would have a chance of stumbling upon other nearby players or existing buildings that share your coordinates. If you find a point of interest like a dungeon, you would be able to create a map containing that instanced section, allowing you to come back to it later or share it with others instead of having it erased as soon as you leave the area. That way, there would always been an infinite amount of content, while still allowing players to make permanent modifications to the world.
Families instead of guilds, turfs, some sort of good hierarchy system. Set in the 1920s-30s would be a plus. Maybe add in playable police and police departments. Undercover agents, corrupt policeman. Gameplay could be kinda action rpg-ish or maybe fps-ish I'm not sure. Systems for doing hits, smuggling, raids, casinos, theft, take overs, "protection," arrests, etc. Underground economy would be important. Instead of crafting, maybe be able to own distilleries, factories, shops, etc.
Theres a billion and a half ideas I've had and probably more you can think of to put together a real good mafia mmorpg. It'd be a nice change from the usual fantasy/scifi dealings too.
YES, WIN.
A kinda Machiavellian online kinda game would be made of all sorts of win too.
Edit: That mafia mmo idea sounds pretty cool as well.
In all my time spent playing FFXI (lolsuck, whatever) what pissed me off the most was how unnecessarily monotonous most tasks were. To mine/harvest/log all you do is trade a pick/whatever to a point, and maybe you will get an ore, maybe not. Repeat ad nauseum. Instead it would be cool if a button pressing minigame or something came up where you had to time your strikes/chops or your pick would break. Same idea for crafting. Get your forge or beakers or what have you to the right temperature, mix it right or else your materials go to waste, or create an inferior item.
I know because of lag issues and things true real time combat won't be possible in MMOs, but I think incorporating something similar into combat would be cool. Like the different limit breaks in the FF series, when a person uses a certain attack a short button pressing sequence or something comes up and the better they do the more bonus damage is gained. I think LOTR Online is on the right track with letting bards play their instruments how they want, I'd like to see more of that sort of interactivity in MMOs.
More battle tactics like the skillchains and magic bursts in FFXI that reward good co-operation between party members would be nice as well. Performing these sorts of things would also provide an experience bonus that would give people even more incentive to learn to work as a team.
That's why I mention AtitD, because that game was all about crafting. You built everything, and it had the whole quality rating system to make things even more interesting. I recall people going on about their 500 quality axe or whatever.
In DAoC, if someone crafts you something, chances are, they are going to use it for a long while. I mean even years. To some people, it's just the idea that you are part of that other player's character's development. I guess the other part of that is just being useful. I mean, most of the time, crafting doesn't take too much except time. And if the game is kind of slow, you can just invest time into crafting and get something useful out of it, as opposed to just killing monster after monster over and over to farm extra gold.
It's also cost-efficient. It's always cheaper to make your own gear, and many times the gear you can create is not only cheaper but better, too. It's also relaxing (most of the time). I never enjoyed WoW more than when I focused 70-80% of my time on crafting. This leads me to my idea for some innovation:
Crafting that yields experience: You start crafting as a low level character, and as your skill becomes higher the items you need come from more dangerous areas, and as a level 1 there is no way for you to get them, except off of the market. Crafting items should yield experience so that you can gather the materials you need without external help (in many situations, even outside help isn't enough). Perhaps separate combat levels and crafting levels so that although you may be able to survive in a high level area, you're not an effective fighter.
Hell, maybe make a crafting class that mixes in some offensive/defensive magic so you can hold your own in a dangerous situation. Whatever the solution, it really pisses me off that crafters get the shaft.
It would be interesting to have a class that, say, can't swing that Axe of Smacking they made, but they can use it to cast an Axe-Smack spell based on its quality.
Cmon' just make a bejewld clone or somesuch. I know it'd take some effort but I can never see why we still have growing bars for crafting (if you want to see how much better minigames make crafting, I suggest you check out Puzzle Pirates.)
More non-ish innovation but i'd like to see more platforming/puzzles in mmorpgs as well. The only noteable mmo i've seen in this respect was DDO which actually did contain puzzles along side the combat (which reminds me of when i was in a team during the beta and just fliped out and figured out this puzzle while the team was fighting spiders that were being spawned due to my efforts. )
Of course theres also Uru which i'm glad something like it exsists, but I like my puzzles to be an enhancer to my game experience not the sole focus.
I'd like to see more of this in general in games. You get to see lots of such-and-such amazingly powerful wizard/warrior/whatever made The Sword of Jesus that steals peoples' souls when you kill them and turns them into cash or something. Or every NPC/legendary hero has their own special attack/amazing magic spell. But what do I get at high levels? Level 96 Lightning or Sharp Katana You Found in Some Cave.
I guess I just don't like the idea that other people can do things that not only I can't do, but are amazingly outside my ability, even though I'm as powerful as I can get.
The other major aspect would be that there is no "chat" mechanism. You can't just type in words and have everyone read them, because Gorillas don't speak English, either. Instead, when you first met other players, you would have the option to either attack them or to watch warily. Spend enough time watching warily, and you "level up" your communication ability and learn some kind of hand signal to indicate non-hostility. Again, with enough time and practice, advanced characters would have quite a complex set of hand-signals and grunts available to them to convey ideas and emotions, but they would never be able to just type words into a chatbox.
Another part of the idea would be that the game would have permadeath and unrestricted PK, but, the catch is that because PKing is a basically anti-social act, you would permanently damage your ability to develop social skills by doing it. So, going around killing people isn't "punished" by magical effects coming down from nowhere, but by acting the role of murderous thug you would end up having the social skills appropriate for a murderous thug, too, with the attendant likelihood of physically weaker but more socially capable people ganging up on you and killing you.
I guess I thought of it as a combination of various genres I love: Real-world survival (as in The Unreal World), social dynamics and ecology (as in... Gene Pool? MUDs in general?), and technology advancement and making things (as in Civ, I guess) plus my own interest in great apes.
Oh yeah, that would be the other thing, instead of "races" you would choose what kind of great ape to be, anything from Spider Monkeys and Chimps through to Gorillas and I guess some kind of proto-human, aswell. There'd be a balance of physical and mental and social characteristics so that they'd all be viable options, with different food sources, play styles, tech trees, and social dynamics...
...of course, it's not about robots or elves so it would never actually be made, but I think it would completely rock and be totally unlike anything else out there.
I adore crafting, but few MMOs actually manage to make it feel worthwhile.
The only shitty thing is, aside from a select number of games, crafted items are usually shittier than raid stuff. Sometimes by a lot.
I think the system should be that when an MMO starts up, there are no items in it at all. Everything has to be made; things that are easy to make end up being cheap and common, and things that are difficult to make are rare and expensive. But having a system which just churns out items willy-nilly is always going to result in a messed-up economy.
I'd love to be able to hide in an old scorched building with my jury-rigged sniper rifle, looking at an Enclave patrol further down the street in my scope, while vertibirds scout the skies above me.
Bethesda is leasing the Fallout license to Interplay for a Fallout MMORPG. Don't remember the exact number, but it's a timed lease where the game has to be out before 2010 or some other such shite.
www.doomsday.no
www.myspace.com/sunjammer
I think that isn't a good idea, at least not if you are using the current MMO crafting template. I played FFXI for a long time and getting anywhere in crafting in that game involved a lot of repetition. Having to play a minigame 50 times in a row so I can level my cooking skill from 50 to 52 would have forced me off crafting (and probably the game) much earlier. The crux of the matter is that so much money comes from subscription fees that keeping you playing longer (over months/years and not hours-per-day) is the main driving force behind so much of the design. New content can make people stick around but what the companies are counting on is inertia and that oftentimes results in some awful game design.
I think a lot of the ideas in Guild Wars are pointing in the right direction. Instantaneous travel, quick and enjoyable leveling, and the ability to respec anytime the player wants are things more MMOs need. Arguably GW is not much more of an MMO than Diablo II was but maybe that is telling us something. The current MMO system is mostly broken (to me) because it aims for the very opposite of most games' goal - the game is supposed to make us want to play because we are enjoying ourselves, not because we've already invested time X to get to Y.
I'm also pissed off that most MMOs don't allow you to change character class and instead force you to make an alternate. This was definitely one thing FFXI got right as it allowed the player to switch classes with no penalty or restriction (barring the initial unlocking). So many games have character-specific perks that take so long to achieve (eg. a lot of the badges in CoH/V that give things like +HP), that having to work for that again just so I can see what another class plays like is an insulting timesink.
Sorry, end of rant. I think my experience with FFXI just burned me out on MMOs for a long time. It was great and definitely the best of the MMOs I've played, but I can't imagine devoting two years to a single game again.
One of the ways I like to think about minigames is in terms of what Dystopia did with cyberspace. Cyberspace is certainly very different to the normal gameplay, but it is in fact complex enough that you can play the game purely from within cyberspace but still must evolve your talent at it in a meaningful way.
I think this is what needs to be done in terms of "eliminating the grind" in MMO's ultimately. You have your core gameplay, but then every possible source of "grind" is evolved into a game of its own, with advancement and tactics in order to get good at it. You would perhaps still allow "push butan" to give you some base level of achievement, but the really good players should be allowed to make a lot more progress.
Bear in mind, with this, I certainly don't mean "play the game to get from level 23 to 24" I mean more "play the game, and when you finish you've advanced 10 levels or so" - give people big rewards for doing well.
I think this would make really diverse and compelling gameplay - being able to show people a system of crafting, combat, mining etc. which really does reward different aspects of player skill and perception - truly making the people who are good at it unique in the world, would be awesome.
The question I think really is, what forms do you imagine this taking?
If this idea was incorporated into a game, I think farming could be expansive, interesting, and fun. Farmbots might only work while you're offline, giving you a reason to do something else (like sleep).
A common theme I see in this thread and in most other MMO threads involves "creation", giving players the power to take the game into their own hands and create the game. It seems one of the ultimate goals of an MMO should be to let the player decide how he wants to play it, and then giving him the power to do so. Crafting (done well, and it usually isn't), creating your own farmbots, allowing players to create and advance their own civilization, all bring in that element of control.
You said it, I would add this list:
Go to X and kill Y # of Z things.
Go to X and gather Y # of Z things.
Go to X and kill Y # of Z things until N drops.
Go to X and talk to Y.
Go to X and kill Y things until your faction bar reaches Z.
I think all those formulas are just about beaten to death.
This also reminds me of one of my bigger gripes about certain games: the lack of signs of actual human activity. Nothing annoys me more in an instance where I have to go kill a bunch of humanoids than finding them standing around in a building devoid of any kind of furniture or objects or anything else that shows people actually live or work somewhere. People are lazy sods who desire comfort and all sorts of crap, and if there's using a place as a hideout then there should be things indicative of that nature: beds or bedrolls, tables and chairs, tools and clutter and knickknacks, food, and just all the other crap you expect to see when you enter a home or office.
Hell, I want to be able to fly a plane into the apartment.
I think this is what we all can agree on, we want to handle quests our way. Give us ragdoll (and not that shitty Havok engine) and the ability to create. If I want to create a bomb I should be able to do it. Let's say you are in an instance and you have to kill the guy. Why not make it interesting and make the instance a copy of the world but more of a playground for you. You coerce the guy into going to a bar which you have rigged to explode with the help of that handy bomb. Now you couldn't have the building blow up in the original copy so instead you give buildings or areas stats that show how many times the building or area has experienced a massive explosion for a quest, etc. Would this be incredibly hard to make? Sure. Would I finally be ok with paying $15 - $20 a month for that type of game? Fuck yeah.
One thing I aws thinking of was actually showing a character in the process of creating their item. Instead of simply spamming items left and right for minimal skill gains, you would have a set of animations the character would go through showing the various steps (IE pouring the molten metal, and having it sit until it solidifies, taking it out of the mold and tempering the blade, then putting on finishing touches like decorations and wrappings and the like) with the crafting time being dependent on the general size and complexity of the weapon - a small knife or sword would be maybe a minute, a larger weapon or some lower-tier armor would be two or so, and then really high-end things like plate armor, composite an crossbows, and so on could take as much as five depending on how much crap's going into it. Balance it out with giving comparitively-massive skill gains for those kind of activities, and you could be rid of the hordes of junk weapons built in bulk while also making crafted items more valuable.
So crafting would be done like A Tale in the Desert?