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[Dream on!] The Theoretical MMO thread.
Defunker
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm just going to go out on a limb here, and say that everyone here probably plays MMOs. Now I don't care what flavor of MMO you play, be it EVE or WoW or EQ or what-have-you; but I'm going to assume that you're also human. Being that, you are a creative being. Being that, as you grind through your fifty boar/pirate/rogue slain, you've undoubtedly come to the conclusion that there is just something wrong with this game, that needs to be fixed.
This thread is where we talk about this. This is where we talk about our dreams - How we would fix the MMO genre with our own creations. So go ahead and share your own ideas for your own 'WoW-killer' - your little idea that would become the next AAA title. You can ignore everything else I write. It's pretty rambly.
I'll start with my own. I call it Isolation Day.
In my theoretical game, I attempt to solve the many problems that plague MMOs; the stagnation of end-game content, boring and stale combat, and the false sense of progression that surrounds typical character development.
First, lets deal with character progression. As things are now, we're treated as such. Imagine you are a dog in a cage. You are starved for many days, only being given a few scraps to survive off of. You walk around all day with a stick tied to your back, which supports a hot dog attached to a string, which dangles just in front of your nose.
God that hot dog sounds delicious.
In every MMO I see these days, you start out with crap boring skills, and are constantly told that if you just keep pushing forward a bit more, you'll finally reach what it is you want. Only like the dog, you never get it. There's always that one thing that will increases your DPS by that little amount, which makes all the difference in the world.
INDIVIDUAL PROGRESSION should be treated as such: Every character starts out at a baseline. No character ever truly becomes more powerful than any other character residing on that baseline. Characters can only become more specialized.
In order to become better at doing one thing, you have to become worse at doing some other thing. So in order to become better at firing a rifle, you have to forget what it means to throw a grenade.
To be a better player, you have to have more skill - in lieu of simply having leveled up more.
Specialization is the key thing to remember.
Next, lets solve the problem of combat. Obviously, the select and auto-attack system that many MMOs rely on today can't be used forever. It's largely regarded as non-interactive - it results in a boring tedium that separates itself from any sort of influence of a player's skill, as combat breaks down into a series of repetitive sequences, which rely entirely too much on dice rolls for their chance of success.
The logical conclusion is that we switch to a more shooter type system of combat. A player should have to aim each individual action - this makes it unmistakable that a player's chance of success of failure resides wholly, or at least mostly, in their own hands. You could thrust the player into a first person perspective to achieve this, however I think this goes too far: MMO players aren't out for a game of counter-strike.
I believe it would be optimal for my game to be played as a 2d, camera overhead (think birds-eye view), shooter. Think arcadey-like games (like the camera angle of Defender, only with terrain and a larger environment).
This serves a dual purpose:
The player now has to worry less about environment awareness. You don't have to worry so much about what's sneaking up behind you when you have a birds-eye view of the situation.
It puts somewhat less emphasis on 'twitch' gaming, as you're only aiming in two dimensions, instead of three.
Your avatar stays centered on the screen with few exceptions, and an player adjusts their aiming or facing with their cursor.
PvP and PvE need to be seamlessly melded together. Hell, the classifications need to be done away with all together - the fact that they are regarded as separate entities reveals a huge flaw within the genre.
How do you do this? Consider the Eon of Strife type games (Think DOTA from WC3). In these games, you typically had 5v5 match ups, in which the objective was to destroy the other's base. It was wholly impossible to assault the other players base with just the five players on your team - the static defense combined with an intelligent team's reaction to an attack made an assault impossible.
Thus, players relied on the support of much weaker, computer controlled soldiers to make up the bulk of the assaulting/defending force. It was the players which would tip the scales on either side, and lead one to victory.
This is the same role that players should have in MMOs. They should be thrust into a war between nations with no end in sight. The players are the one who should tip the scales of their respective side to their favor.
You obviously can't have an MMO which has to calculate hitboxes and a somewhat competent AI all take place on a single, persistent server housing a thousand or more players. I say it's unnecessary. This sort of game would fair better to be played on a multitude of separate servers, all of which hosted by the community, much like any multiplayer FPS is. The progression of characters and the victories won by either side would be fed to a central server.
It's not so important that every instance of the game takes place in one server, what is important is that the effects of each player affect the game world as a whole, and that the game world continues to change regardless of a single players interaction. The fact that current game design requires that MMOs house their entire game on a single server (or small collection thereof) is really holding up the genre.
Lastly, the stagnation of end-game content. It is my belief, that every GOOD game needs a clearly defined beginning and an end - clearly defined WIN or LOSS conditions. One side must win, and one side must lose. And then everything gets reset. Everything. Your characters, your inventory (of which my game has none), your guild/clan progress. All gone. Start anew.
And this should happen often. I say twice a month.
This really isn't a bad thing. When you don't start off beings as powerful as you can be(when you start off on a baseline and never get any stronger), it's really just a fresh start. People love fresh starts. Just look at how every time Blizzard opens a new server for WoW, it gets flooded with new characters. Well, until they all leave, because they remember just how badly the early-game sucks.
Done. Could go more in depth, to what makes a game sound fun, but that doesn't lend itself to discussion.
This thread is where we talk about this. This is where we talk about our dreams - How we would fix the MMO genre with our own creations. So go ahead and share your own ideas for your own 'WoW-killer' - your little idea that would become the next AAA title. You can ignore everything else I write. It's pretty rambly.
I'll start with my own. I call it Isolation Day.
In my theoretical game, I attempt to solve the many problems that plague MMOs; the stagnation of end-game content, boring and stale combat, and the false sense of progression that surrounds typical character development.
First, lets deal with character progression. As things are now, we're treated as such. Imagine you are a dog in a cage. You are starved for many days, only being given a few scraps to survive off of. You walk around all day with a stick tied to your back, which supports a hot dog attached to a string, which dangles just in front of your nose.
God that hot dog sounds delicious.
In every MMO I see these days, you start out with crap boring skills, and are constantly told that if you just keep pushing forward a bit more, you'll finally reach what it is you want. Only like the dog, you never get it. There's always that one thing that will increases your DPS by that little amount, which makes all the difference in the world.
INDIVIDUAL PROGRESSION should be treated as such: Every character starts out at a baseline. No character ever truly becomes more powerful than any other character residing on that baseline. Characters can only become more specialized.
In order to become better at doing one thing, you have to become worse at doing some other thing. So in order to become better at firing a rifle, you have to forget what it means to throw a grenade.
To be a better player, you have to have more skill - in lieu of simply having leveled up more.
Specialization is the key thing to remember.
Next, lets solve the problem of combat. Obviously, the select and auto-attack system that many MMOs rely on today can't be used forever. It's largely regarded as non-interactive - it results in a boring tedium that separates itself from any sort of influence of a player's skill, as combat breaks down into a series of repetitive sequences, which rely entirely too much on dice rolls for their chance of success.
The logical conclusion is that we switch to a more shooter type system of combat. A player should have to aim each individual action - this makes it unmistakable that a player's chance of success of failure resides wholly, or at least mostly, in their own hands. You could thrust the player into a first person perspective to achieve this, however I think this goes too far: MMO players aren't out for a game of counter-strike.
I believe it would be optimal for my game to be played as a 2d, camera overhead (think birds-eye view), shooter. Think arcadey-like games (like the camera angle of Defender, only with terrain and a larger environment).
This serves a dual purpose:
The player now has to worry less about environment awareness. You don't have to worry so much about what's sneaking up behind you when you have a birds-eye view of the situation.
It puts somewhat less emphasis on 'twitch' gaming, as you're only aiming in two dimensions, instead of three.
Your avatar stays centered on the screen with few exceptions, and an player adjusts their aiming or facing with their cursor.
PvP and PvE need to be seamlessly melded together. Hell, the classifications need to be done away with all together - the fact that they are regarded as separate entities reveals a huge flaw within the genre.
How do you do this? Consider the Eon of Strife type games (Think DOTA from WC3). In these games, you typically had 5v5 match ups, in which the objective was to destroy the other's base. It was wholly impossible to assault the other players base with just the five players on your team - the static defense combined with an intelligent team's reaction to an attack made an assault impossible.
Thus, players relied on the support of much weaker, computer controlled soldiers to make up the bulk of the assaulting/defending force. It was the players which would tip the scales on either side, and lead one to victory.
This is the same role that players should have in MMOs. They should be thrust into a war between nations with no end in sight. The players are the one who should tip the scales of their respective side to their favor.
You obviously can't have an MMO which has to calculate hitboxes and a somewhat competent AI all take place on a single, persistent server housing a thousand or more players. I say it's unnecessary. This sort of game would fair better to be played on a multitude of separate servers, all of which hosted by the community, much like any multiplayer FPS is. The progression of characters and the victories won by either side would be fed to a central server.
It's not so important that every instance of the game takes place in one server, what is important is that the effects of each player affect the game world as a whole, and that the game world continues to change regardless of a single players interaction. The fact that current game design requires that MMOs house their entire game on a single server (or small collection thereof) is really holding up the genre.
Lastly, the stagnation of end-game content. It is my belief, that every GOOD game needs a clearly defined beginning and an end - clearly defined WIN or LOSS conditions. One side must win, and one side must lose. And then everything gets reset. Everything. Your characters, your inventory (of which my game has none), your guild/clan progress. All gone. Start anew.
And this should happen often. I say twice a month.
This really isn't a bad thing. When you don't start off beings as powerful as you can be(when you start off on a baseline and never get any stronger), it's really just a fresh start. People love fresh starts. Just look at how every time Blizzard opens a new server for WoW, it gets flooded with new characters. Well, until they all leave, because they remember just how badly the early-game sucks.
Done. Could go more in depth, to what makes a game sound fun, but that doesn't lend itself to discussion.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Defunker on
0
Posts
I think you've described one set of alternatives to games like WoW, but you've ignored entire other paths games could go instead. As one simple example, if you want to replace dice-roll auto-attack, why prefer aiming instead of, say, timing? Or instead of choice of skills? Also, keep in mind that few (no?) current games rely solely on auto-attack. It is, in many cases, just the "default" action the game takes for you while you concentrate on more meta-battle things like skill combinations, managing character hp/mp/etc, or watching your teammates' status. Of course, a lot of games have gone too far, making spamming only certain skills over and over again the normal course of play... basically adding back in what auto-attack was supposed to take out.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
I've tried a LOT of mmo's, which all bored me very quickly, for essentially the same reason.
I love the idea of a persistant world, and I love that I get to play with tons and tons of other people, and how I interact with them determines what I can do in the game. Explore the world, meet new and interesting people.
What I hate is that when/if (usually when) I decide to start killing those said people, there's no real bonus or incentive to do so, beyond bragging rights. And who cares if I just owned ZeroCool2000 if it was an entirely pitched battle in my favour, (and even if it was an even fight) the worst that could have happened to either of us was one of us would have had to respawn wherever we based ourselves out of in the game.
Whether it's an XP bonus, special 'player' loot I get, or if I get to take his actual items off his cold corpse, I'd like SOME reason to actually kill other players. Otherwise I may as well go play tf2 or css if we just rush at eachother, die, and repeat ad nauseam.
+ a better persistant world, with actual cities and maybe even NPC's this time
+ more weapons and vehicles
+ better graphics
+ better and more visceral combat
+ a better endgame
+ give the players a chance to actually impact the world! True factional warfare á la EvE.
+ more planets!
I'd go for that. Planetside's biggest failing was not giving people much to strive for. Lost a lot of people early because paying a monthly fee for a larger Battlefield 1942 with no 'end' just didn't cut it. Every time I tried it out for a free trial, I had a total blast for a week then got insanely bored of doing the same stuff over and over again.
As for what I'd want in an MMO, well, everything Conan is promising. If they do it right that game will own me. I'd still kill for a UO2.
Just Finished: Borderlands (waste of $7)/Mario Brothers U/The Last Story/Tropico 4
Currently Playing: NS2/ZombiU/PlanetSide 2/Ys/Dota2/Xenoblade Chronicles
On Hold: Prince of Persia: Warrior Within/GW2/Scribblenauts
Coming Next: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones/X-Com Classic
Jesus.
Fucking.
Christ
Give me a Mechwarrior MMO. Screw them for scrapping it years ago. Bastards. I want it.
League of Legends (your friendly neighborhood support): PAPRPL8
The game's website hasn't been updated in over a year and the development has been frozen due to lack of funds.
Steam: YOU FACE JARAXXUS| Twitch.tv: CainLoveless
They've got some investors already committed and others who are interested in investing. There's a good chance that the game will be back in development soon.
Yeah, permanent death isn't something you can just add into modern MMOs and expect it to work. It's like changing Euclid's 5th postulate: the whole system has to be rebuilt from the ground up. There are a few ways to do this, one of which is to make it so each character isn't so much an investment of energy and time. Another way is to make it so that the thing you're building up, enhancing and developing isn't your character, but the community your characters exist in. I'm thinking for example being able to found settlements and improve them Caesar-style, working on industry, culture, military power and myriad other factors.
Then there's the permanent death over time system that ToA has; I think it offers most of the benefit of a permanent death system with less of the arbitrary randomness. It culls powerful players and invigorates the economy, but you can see the end approaching from a long way off.
I mean, objectively I see how you could work it into your game, it just seems like it would take a lot of the appeal of MMOs away. Even with the 100 death countdown, the day would come when your lovingly cared for character would die, and not only would you be out a lot of work, you (probably) wouldn't be able to play with your powerful friends anymore, at least not effectively.
The way to counteract this would be to make characters less customizable and easier to advance, but I tend to think that takes away from the appeal of an MMO.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
The idea that characters who have been around for a longer time are on a totally different plane of power than those who are newer is another thing that has to be thrown out for a PD game. You have to be able to get together with people and have some fun even if your characters are far apart in skill level. But there are other consequences as well: if the game has PvP, you're no longer guaranteed to win when you're fighting a lower level character. Since skilled players aren't orders of magnitude more powerful than new ones, there's a small chance that the newbie might win in a fight against the veteran character.
Of course this also means that the world can't be divided up into sections tailored to different level groups. Some places might be harder than others, but it can't be a one-to-one matchup anymore.
You see, the design shakes itself out into a different shape. This kind of stuff has to be different or it makes no sense in the new context.
Any permanent death system has to regard player characters as fundamentally disposable, which seems like it'd remove that draw.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Or forces you to play in a conservative manner instead of kekeke ^______^, and makes you consider the consequences to your actions if you're attempting something risky.
All I'm saying is that there are a number of ways to get around that and still have a fun game.
So, you're a spirit, and you're in the spirit world. An amorphous blob of energy with no focus or influence or anything. As soon as you log in, "Who am I?" and the entire game is a voyage of self-definition. As a spirit, you define yourself by how you visit the real world, and do things there.
So, at the simplest level, say I'm a spirit called Foftinol. I think it would be kind of fun to go into the forest and scare woodcutters and ambitious children. If that's all I do, I get to be a forest spirit.
What you do in the forest takes the form of traditional quests (eg. go and scare 10 children, use your tricks to make someone lost, etc) or minigames (be a fox outrunning a pack of wolves, try being a cuckoo sneaking into nests). Its all repeatable, and if you focus enough in an area, you unlock more content in that area (which you can invite friend spirits along on). And of course there's exploration and such.
Now, the amount to which your spirit is affected by the things you choose to do is pretty much up to you - operating much like the old Ultima Online skill system, where you get better at what you want to up to the limit, and when you're at an overall limit, can choose what to lower in order to raise something else.
Oh yeah, with these influences you earn, you get costume parts (or even builds). So for forest spirit, you might be able to pick up an elfin-like build, or a foxish one, or a treanty one. And then you've got leaf textures, branch-looking hands, fur, etc.
For areas of the real world to visit, obviously forests, but also cities, deserts, wars, oceans, mountains, plains, rituals (you're the spirit that gets summoned by goths), the afterlife, people in trouble (for angel cred) and any sort of general area or theme you can think of. Within these themes you can subdivide them a bit, but thats flexible.
Oh yeah, and there's no permadeath, because you're a spirit. You might get discorporated (forced out of the mortal shell you're hiding in) which would probably have a penalty, but you don't lose the character.
Oh and the spirit world is really surreal. It could be awesome, and I think it would need to be corporate policy for all artists and designers to be off their meds. And you could definitely play Twisp or Catsby.
When you die you go to the ghostlands/shadowlands/deadlands whatever you want to call it. You stay there until you succeed in getting back to the skinlands. Different classes would be able to cross and interact with the barrier in different ways. Some would start the game dead.
A game where you have a Cyborg, a Mystic and a long dead Samurai ancestor in a party. The Samurai is dead but visible as a ghost to the rest of the group, and can attack their enemies from across the fucking shroud.
Where the fuck is this game? I want to be firing bullets made of ectoplasm right fucking now!
So I've played and beaten Angband. Permadeath doesn't lead to conservative play it leads to paranoid play and that is in a turn based single player game.
My question for those who advocade permadeath in MMOs what happens when the doorbell rings?
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
Get to a safe spot asap, take a chance, or just don't answer the door.
XBL
What if you're in the middle of a cave with quickly respawning elite mobs and the person at the door is your long lost, very impatient biological father?
What then, smart guy? What then?
- A chargen system wherein you create your backstory as a component of your mechanical build. Those of you who have played Mass Effect are familiar with how the game has you not just pick stuff like gender or facial appearance, but also psych profile and personal history, and that those things actually have bearing on the game itself. Allow the player to make a character who is truly a "part of the world". Let them work aspects of the game's lore into their history. For example, let someone who creates a Warrior-type character pick traits like "Veteran of the Sokashi Wars" or "Trained at the Northsword Academy". These traits would have minor bonuses or negatives (as a balance factor) to them.
Perhaps the Sokashi Wars (I am pulling names out of my ass here) were a tireless campaign against undead legions, and the character has an actual in-game damage bonus against Undead NPCs? That sort of thing.
Adding an element like that doesn't just let people tweak a character to their own personal preference, it makes it their character, which I think is important to a good MMORPG (and a recurring theme you'll see in my suggestions).
- Add permanent character death as an option. Give players the choice when their character's life is imperiled to permanently kill their character. Now, the question becomes, why if it is optional would a player choose to do so? There has to be an advantage, right? One idea I have is to bestow some kind of bonus on a new character the player makes for deleting the old one, proportionate to the power and age of the previous character. It could be something as simple as "Kill off your level 50 guy, and you get to make a guy that starts at level 15" or it could be something as complex as a "legacy" type system where your new character is the son, disciple, or pupil of the old character and is following in their foot-steps (and possibly trying to avenge their death).
- Player-crafted items that actually mean something. That are actually customizable and meaningful and not just like a regular sword but slightly better. They don't have to be powerful, necessarily, or more powerful than items you'd get from random drops or whatever, but they'd have to be at least competitive for effort and unique in a way that makes the process of doing them worthwhile and prestigious. Alternately:
- Allowing players to grow with their gear, not just constantly replace it. Using some kind of skill system or something, allow players to invest power not just in their character but in their favorite weapon or staff or whatever. This ties back to the permanent death option idea above: perhaps when a powerful character dies permanently, their sword or armor or whatever enters the game's item pool, or is inherited by the player's new character. Items of legend start somewhere, right? Excalibur wasn't just a magic sword, it was King Arthur's magic sword, and was made more awesome by virtue of the fact that a legendary hero wielded it.
- If you're going to have a system where players can create their own skills, attacks, combos, or spells (ala Saga of Ryzom, for example) allow players to also create copies of those skills that they can teach other players. Allow Warrior's Guilds to open up training halls, mages to take on apprentices, etc. This is also a part of this next thing:
- Allow players to make quests. That's right, you read that right. Let the players generate content, according to a well-established system you build into the game. I mean, I'm sure we've all encountered that one guy in Ironforge, who really does need 7 pieces of iron ore but really can't be arsed to go mine it himself and is spamming the trade channel with offers. Now, imagine instead he could post a quest/mission to some kind of organized listing, and another player could go, mine his iron, and get not only money out of it but also some XP or factional bonus with the guy's group or whatever. Allow players to create their own agreements that have values greater than just the game's base currency.
I have a bunch more, but these are just some.
Sci-fi setting. So, to start with, you have two different theatres - ground war and orbital war. The ground wars play out more or less just like Planetside, except with maybe some sort of token PvE worked in; we honestly didn't care about that.
Space wars would play out like, I dunno, X-wing v TIE Fighter or whatever, but the capital ships would require like a dozen people to run well - a guy in Engineering managing your power levels, a guy on scanners forwarding targeting information to the gunners, damage control running around fixing stuff as your ship gets pulped, maybe even a detachment of marines to repel boarding actions. Fighters are one-man ships, bombers are two-man (Pilot and gunner). Assault boats are three-man (Pilot, gunner, point-defence) with the option of mounting a dozen "slots" of ground-pounders (higher level armor takes more room); they can then be delivered to enemy cap ships for boarding actions, or to the ground as jump troops.
For those who are more interested in exploration and crafting, the Artisan's Guild is a neutral faction that gains experience by running around in the middle of a warzone and tagging resource nodes, as well as doing all the high-end crafting. We sort of felt that each faction would get some crafting on their own, but Artisan Guild stuff was better (if more expensive.) So now we have an interesting dynamic in that you can nuke an Artisan presence in a system to prevent your opponents from getting access to high-end tech, but you no longer have access to it either. Oh, and also, you just pissed off the people with the biggest guns. Or you can leave them alone and let them sell to both sides, in which case everyone does better. (Well, actually only the faction with the most money, and the Artisans, but that's neither here nor there.)
The thing we really loved, though, were Admirals and Generals. The idea was that in addition to people flying the ships, manning the tanks, and clearing the buildings, you'd have an Allegiance-esque overall commander (one for ground, one for space) that coordinated with each other and their respective theatre. This was back before Battlefield 2, which sort-of did what we're talking about, so it was like the best idea anyone had ever had at the time. We were really proud of it, and I still think it'd make for a great mechanic.
At the time we'd assumed that factions would be pregen, but I think Eve's faction system (or lack thereof, you pick, I don't know Eve well) would work better.
The main thing you get as a player to start out is an MCV (mobile construction vehicle) with which you can deploy a base. You are limited to 1 MCV, but can redeploy it as you wish leaving behind structures on the map. The normal RTS resourcing model would be in effect for individual player-financing, with taxes/donations allowing front line players to be reinforced.
This world is fundamentally PvP oriented. There are NPC factions which are at war with each other for RP reasons (and which serve as the "newbie zones" for players), as well as unclaimed lands and player-controllable lands. Player empires can build cities and other infrastructure to provide set incomes, and attack those of NPC factions for other resources (and naturally, go to war with each other).
The 2D structure of the map, as well as the ability to setup static defenses everywhere means whose who want to PvE can do so in relative safety, since an attacker needs to chew their way through static defenses and since attacking NPC factions is essentially indistinguishable to fighting regular players. Logistics and transport (funding a faction, managing cities and towns etc.) provides the other non-combat and market related mechanics.
Player advancement would be in the form of unlocking units and unit abilities via specialization, and would serve to get people used to particular tactics before they move on to more advanced ones.
Unit costs would be much higher then people are normally used to - the point being that individual units gain experience and survivability, so losing them takes on a new cost. Weapons would be powered much more in a realistic range - i.e. an anti-tank unit can fire a bazooka to disable a tank in one hit. Hence the major loss of combat is losing your high-experience units (and the goal of course, to rob people of them by attacking as well). Losing your MCV would also incur a cost depending on how many units/buildings you have unlocked - the MCV is more expensive the more things it can build, and without a reserve of cash to buy a new one you have to either fight with donated forces to capture a new one from an NPC empire or buy a new one by mining/adminning.
Whether or not there'd be multiple lands is something I haven't really thought about. One idea is a sci-fi setting but with space battles represented abstractly (i.e. you can have them, but there's very little control and it's very expensive - a way to represent your bling to the world essentially) and of course the other idea is just to have the one planet with various continents. Each has it's advantages.
EDIT: Oh, and of course, the sci-fi setting has the benefit that player factions get to build and launch their own superweapon satellites. So you actually do have to have the access codes for the ion cannon tightly controlled, since a good spy could co-opt it and fire it back on your own people, or steal it entirely.
I wouldn't mind something like that except in like, a zombie setting. Survivors have to scrounge together materials to fashion radios, weapons, water filters, that sort of thing.
Limited to no roleplay? Check. There's a reason I said MMOG not MMORPG.
The possibility for enforcing roleplay, however, if the producer decides to go for it? Yes, Friend Computer.
A built-in reason why people keep coming back from the dead? Check.
Violence? Check.
Instances? Check.
Group vs group based PvP? Not normally a part of the universe but easily justifiable.
World-appropriate reasons for leveling up PvP? Check.
=============================================================
My perfect game? Somebody that adjusts the HERO system into a functioning MMORPG either in the fantasy or superheroic genres. It would need some adjustments to get it out of the turn-based artifacts of being a pencil-n-paper game but has some serious strengths. In particular, it's a point-buy system so you have neither classes nor levels (unless you WANT them, and they can easily be grafted in).
Oh, sure, it's easy to say "if you get eaten by zombies, now you get to play as a zombie character" but really, how much fun is that? Not very. What about the character you so carefully levelled up and geared and everything?
And what would be the point of the game, beyond just surviving? What would be there to do? I mean, you can't really "grind for epics", can you? So you gotta take a different approach to the concept, I think.
So here's some ideas I had:
For starters, the setting would be quite some time after the zombie apocalypse had reached it's zenith. Human civilization has essentially collapsed, filling the nations of the world with isolated communities populated by hardy survivors and protected by brave individuals who are the last hope for humanity against the undead hordes.
But you had some choices. You didn't have to be a good guy. You could be a dickish asshole, if you so chose. Essentially, you could make the choice whether to stand beside the communities of goodly folk trying to get by, or you could become a roving bandit, stealing and looting where you saw fit, killing human beings as much as you killed undead.
If you chose to help the Communities, you could go out into the ravaged world, trying to acquire resources, rescue survivors, and cull back the zombie hordes.
You'd go through ruined towns and junkyards, salvaging what materials you could, and find isolated pockets of survivors you could bring back with you.
If you were a bandit, there was still the salvage and acquire mentality, the only difference is that your motivations are purely self-centered towards you and your gang.
You'd "level-up", of course, and you'd do so through fighting zombies, rescuing (or enslaving) people, and using your skills to find salvage or build or repair items of value, amongst other things.
The Communities would be dynamic. Aside from a heavily fortified "new player starting town", all of the Communities would have finite resources and limited capability to defend themselves from a true siege. Players would be able to see the Community's amount of resources like food, ammunition, mechanical supplies, population, etc. and if they got low, they could volunteer for a mission to go get more stuff.
The Communities would be under threat from zombies and bandits (both NPC and player-controlled) and you'd have to defend them from that, as well.
So that was the "goal" of the game. Survive. Get resources. Evade the undead and other enemies. Help the people you're loyal to.
However, as I got into the theoretical process of designing this concept, a problem remained: What to do about character death?
Ultimately, the way I figured out was this:
When your character dies, either by zombie attack or bandit assault or whatever, your character is dead. Permanently. Bye bye, Paco. However! You are given the option of making a new character with slightly less skill points than the one that died. So all that levelling up you did wasn't all for naught, and you have the opportunity to try something new, or just keep playing basically the same character only maybe he looks different. Where you really lose out is whatever equipment and resources you had on your character at the time, which goes to the person who killed you.
But what about getting turned? What about playing a zombie right from the start?
Well, playing a single zombie isn't very much fun in and of itself. Instead, when you got turned into a zombie, you'd start with an amount of "Control" over nearby NPC zombies, equating to how high a level the character was in life. If you wanted to just play a zombie right from the start, you could do that too, although you'd start at the minimum "zombie level".
So if you had a high-level heroic soldier who was turned into a zombie, you could then turn around and become a zombie yourself, and because of your experience level, control a whole bunch of other zombies too, leading up to massive sieges on the settlements and whatnot.
That was just some of the ideas I had, I got others for this concept.
The second kind is EVE-like games. You've got politics, skirmishes and wars between corporation that involve hundreds, even thousands of players. I am not saying it is bad, but it is not my cup of tea.
What I imagine is a game where the main focus is making the world and the creatures in it seem alive. There are loads of ways to do this, most of which are overlooked by MMO developers. The main point is the persistent and changing world. If you do a quest, then something happens. Get a quest to stalk down and kill 10 goblin scouts and the effect is minimal, possibly limited to slightly increasing the safety rating of the surrounding area, slightly increasing your reputation with the questgiver faction and slightly decreasing your reputation with the goblin faction.
Saving a farm from goblin raiders however means that the farm will still be there the day after. Fail, and it burns down. Successfully assaulting the goblin village and killing its leader could actually drive them from the area. Of course, actually getting to this point will require quite alot of questing by players, and several friends to back you up.
By the time you have grown enough in skill to leave for a more challenging area, you may be the hero of the town. Villagers will cheer as you pass them by. And with enough players helping, a village will grow and prosper, maybe one day becoming a city. Oh, and by city I don't mean the stupid little clusters of houses they call cities in for example world of warcraft. A city for a thousand people would need at least a hundred houses, with plenty of space for shady back-alley dealers, Mysterious Men that might have a quest for you in taverns, markets with exotic goods and maybe even a small theatre or a park. A city should be a place where people could actually live, not just the "hero drivethrough" bare minimum of houses needed to have a room for each vendor, questgiver and trainer NPC.
Of course, all the scripting would lead to problems without end. An immensly powerful system would have to be designated for the creation of new randomly generated quests, the movements of monsters and evil factions. The truly dynamic player driven happenings such as troop movements, new trade routes, city planning etc. could probably be supervised by a GM with a very modest amount of time spent per day.
Instances would still be useful, to a degree. Particularily for the end game where high level players struggle to gain ground in wars of attrition against opposing NPC empires, raiding elemental plains and exploring the innumberable caves of the underworld.
PVP is a bit trickier. I would imagine that different player factions could eventually go to war against one another. Such a war would not be an ongoing full-on conflict though, but rather a huge prolonged event over weeks or months eventually climaxing in the assault of an important strong point or city. Numerous randomised quests to help the war effort with resources and the protection of strategic locations and supply lines, raiding missions on enemy positions, battlegroundlike skirmishes both instanced and out in the world, and finally one huge battle involving both NPC's and players eventually ending in either the capture of the city or the agressor abandoning the campaign.
Of course, change could not happen too quickly. Players have to feel that they are making enough of a difference to actually care about what they are doing, while at the same time the world must not change so fast that their achievements feel temporary and hollow. And it is important that while new enemies have to appear continuously to keep the game populated and interesting it must not just be a repetition of the same old. Of course, the fact that enemy NPCs, rare quests and final showdowns with big badguys are one time occurences and not everyone will experience them. While it will annoy many players though, I think that makes them that much more profound. You can sit in a tavern chugging beer and tell your friend that just returned from far north that you were there and helped slay the goblin king.
Just as the world must not change too fast or too slow, NPCs must seem real enough to make helping them survive feel worthwhile, while an AI on a level where they could invite you for a hot coffee would be quite unreasonable in an MMO (or any game, look at oblivion for examples of horribly failed attempts at dynamic AI). I'd settle for a fairly basic number of responses from a NPC not currently involved in any quest activity, with responses guided by your general renown, your reputation with his faction and how well he kniws you (hostile, unfriendly, stranger, met before, friendly, revering).
A game like this would be the devil to code, but I do believe that it is within our reach with todays technology. Of course, all the dynamics of the world would be rather useless without well made combat, decent graphics and so on. I do believe that a focus on the world and your place in it would mean alot to many players though, regardless of the overall quality of the game.
Which would then promote people grinding out mobs/loot via the path of least resistance....which would get mind numbingly boring and tedious. It would kill just about any sense of exploration or risk because people would avoid it due to the consequences.
This is a really awesome idea. I was thinking of something very similar a while back, but never really thought about it in detail. I love the idea of playing a superhuman entity that gets to help / interfere with humans and human events. There's a ton of potential for conflict among the various entities and with humans (nature spirits protecting a forest, pro-human vs anti-human forces fighting over a city and its people).
A couple of the things I'd like to see in MMOs:
-- More interactive environments
In WoW, the only way to effect change in the place you're in is usually to flip a switch or something. I'd like to see stuff like movable blocks, deformable terrain, collapsing platforms, and stuff along those lines. It'd also be great to see player abilities modifying things as well, like a player using frost magic to create a wall of ice or to make a surface slick to trip up a large enemy.
-- Small group focus
Raiding can be a lot of fun, but my friends and I just haven't really had the time or desire to find a new guild that raids and work with them. What I would like to see instead is for a large part of the content to be focused around groups of less than 10 or so people. Raids would be made into encounters that relied on coordinating multiple small groups instead of one large cohesive group. Each group is mostly independent of the others, except each group has a certain goal to accomplish so that the others can progress. So, entering a dungeon with 40 players divided into a bunch of different groups could all split up and take on different tasks (group 1 opens a gateway for the rest to pass through, group 2 distracts the guards while another slips by, etc.). Each player would only need to form a small group to be able to participate and then join up with others doing the same content to form a raid.
It'd be awesome if there were collaborative dungeons, where two or three 10 man groups needed some sort of help from the others to progress, especially if the progression could take place throughout the raidweek.
And when farming it got boring, you could change around which group was responsible for doing what.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget