What I really want is an MMORPG that isn't just a tried and true offline genre that's retrofitted to be shoved into a massively multiplayer setting. All MMORPGs are basically dungeons and dragons and at their core every single one is about leveling up, getting gear, killing monsters, raising stats, killing monsters, exploring dungeons (while killing monsters). They are so incestuous that it's really pretty hilarious how little actual innovation it would take to make something that nobody has ever seen before.
One thing I would like to see is a SoTC style philosophy in regards to an online RPG/adventure game. Instead of killing kobolds for gold and phat loot and raiding dungeons to level up, how about a world where humanity is trying to eke out survival against these gigantic, horrifying creatures from beyond the dark edges of the map. Humans aren't the top of the food chain. Players would have to track and locate these beasts and then cooperate in a large scale effort to take them down and protect their villages before they go all godzilla and stomp the zone flat. No small monsters, maybe just hunting smaller fauna for food. Players could specialize in building fortifications and war weapons to help repel and kill these giant monsters. Maybe even the world starts out totally barren and players have to build their own civilizations and defend them from giants that lurk beyond the tree-lines. This is such a largely unexplored style of play there is nearly no limit to what you could do with it. The developers could even manually or procedurally generate new collossusi based on species that are particularly successful or have weak breeds die out. They could evolve new behaviors and body structure to combat player strategies and force the players to constantly come up with new techniques so there isn't just "Oh, it's a giant cow monster, bring in the silver ballistas and get lots of rope, I know exactly how to kill these guys" after a while.
Something I want to see in every MMORPG is some kind player modularity that rewards creativity. So much of games these days is just finding out the best gear and spec and getting those items and suddenly you're good as you can be. There's no room to be creative and come up with your own ways to do stuff. Going back to my previous SoTC style game example, maybe players who specialize in siege engineering can do garry's mod type construction and create their own siege weapons or develop specialized village defenses. In the future, advanced bandwidth and CPU power could allow an MMORPG engine to physically simulate the construction of such objects and really truly give players creativity.
Going to the extreme with that player creativity idea, how about some kind of robot-mech war game where everyone builds their own mobile suits. If done correctly it could end up with the kind of emergent gameplay where people are constantly trying to develop new configurations and styles of mech to out-do the designs that the opposing player factions are coming up with. Developing specific counters for enemy units. Instead of developer mandated "tank type" or "artillery type" or "fast light" type units, imagine if the PLAYERS were the ones who actually came up with all that variety all on their own, with appropriate counter-measures to boot?
That's a lot of patches for new graphics from different people. An open source model where submissions for new graphics would be pretty stellar. This could include monsters, equipment, environment etc. While player creativity is a cool thing to promote it has to be regulated because many idiots only care about being overly powerful and dominating everyone else in unfair matches (see WoW gankers).
I want a cyberpunk MMO where on of the skills is hacking. Hackers can mess about with everything computer-controlled in an instance - lights, security, locks, all sorts of things - without even being anywhere near the instance. So your team of elite close-combat specialists and robot ninjas would advertise for a hacker, who provides electronic support from afar in an almost puzzle-game type setup.
I also want one of the big MMO publishing companies - like, say, NCSoft - to connect all their MMOs together in one multiverse and allow characters to cross over.
Any and all of the following IPs; Cowboy Bebop, Pokemon, Girl Genius, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Discworld, the Dark Tower, Heroes, Bas-Lag, especially Bas-Lag.
One thing I would like to see is a SoTC style philosophy in regards to an online RPG/adventure game. Instead of killing kobolds for gold and phat loot and raiding dungeons to level up, how about a world where humanity is trying to eke out survival against these gigantic, horrifying creatures from beyond the dark edges of the map. Humans aren't the top of the food chain. Players would have to track and locate these beasts and then cooperate in a large scale effort to take them down and protect their villages before they go all godzilla and stomp the zone flat. No small monsters, maybe just hunting smaller fauna for food. Players could specialize in building fortifications and war weapons to help repel and kill these giant monsters. Maybe even the world starts out totally barren and players have to build their own civilizations and defend them from giants that lurk beyond the tree-lines. This is such a largely unexplored style of play there is nearly no limit to what you could do with it. The developers could even manually or procedurally generate new collossusi based on species that are particularly successful or have weak breeds die out. They could evolve new behaviors and body structure to combat player strategies and force the players to constantly come up with new techniques so there isn't just "Oh, it's a giant cow monster, bring in the silver ballistas and get lots of rope, I know exactly how to kill these guys" after a while.
That would be so awesome that the word awesome is too pathetic to even begin to describe it.
Games that focus too strongly on team work become very niche titles. See FFXI.
WoW did a great job and balancing it. Solo through the levels, team work for the uber gear.
I really like the SoTC idea mentioned, but a combination of the two might be best. Maybe the big fucker that involves major teamwork could be a sort of travelling spawn point. A large elder dragon that creates nests of eggs, which hatch into whelplings? And if it has a system that allows player towns and settlements, larger towns could attract larger enemies, so that more teamwork would be involved in protecting the town (i.e. more spawns outside the town means more enemies that would have time to "age", making leveling for newbies difficult, which would encourage higher level players to go out and pwn elder dragon for phat loot).
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I had an idea that was typical medieval setting, minus the overly strong fantasy overtones. Basically players would control a single character that led a military into battle. Instead of skills like "fireball 5" or "omega slash", you'd have commands that directed your troops. A single player would lead a single type of unit into a battle, be it infantry, archers, cavalry, etc.. Each unit having their own advantages and disadvantages. We're talking about uber micromanagement here if a player wants to.
If you decided to take cavalry, you'd find that you'd often have a smaller number of units with you because of the high price involved in upkeep. Cavarly would often ride heavy chargers, and be decked out in heavy armor. Because of all that platemail, though, they're easy pickings if they lose their horse. Therefore, cavalry would be strongest on large open fields of battle.
Archery would shine most when used defensively in a player's own town/keep/castle/whatever, since they'd basically have an endless supply of arrows. Each archer would only be able to carry a certain number of arrows on the field though, so supply routes will have to play a major role. Archers would likely be lightly armored on the field, because they rely on range and advantage of the environment. They'd find their arrows would be fairly useless against decently prepared foes however. Great for ambushes in general.
Infantry would be fairly dynamic in their use. They could be used offensively or defensively fairly well, and can fight in closed in areas, or on the open field. They're main advantage would be that they could switch roles easily, depending on what weapons they were using, or how they were armored.
Beyond that, strong PvP elements, along with player towns, and an heirarchy system. The majority of how a character does would be based on their income, alliances, economy, and morale. Player towns would also have citizens that would join it based on the previously mentioned factors as well.
tl;dr
medieval minus the magic sparkles. An RPG game mixed with strong RTS overtones where you directly control a single person. Focused more on strategy, society, and economy than OMG LVL 70.
Not so much a game in and of itself, but one thing I think is extrordinarily overdue is a system to let players and groups do serious R&D for equipment and the like. Players with the appropriate skills could designate some of the attributes they're looking for in the design and spend time doing simulations and reworks and the like until they think they've got something that could work, then assemble a prototype for field testing from which they could make modifications, fix critical flaws that couldn't get picked up in the sims, or then put it into fullscale production. You could then have player-owned design and manufacturing firms who can develop specific items via contract or allow other groups to manufacture their products via agreement and then have all sorts of PVP shenanigans like reverse-engineering and hacking into databases to steal or delete schematics.
This would have actually been really neat in that one Gundam MMO, but since that got shitcanned...
Games that focus too strongly on team work become very niche titles. See FFXI.
WoW did a great job and balancing it. Solo through the levels, team work for the uber gear.
WoW's major success was letting players log in for under and hour, without any plan of what they were going to do, and get something done. Not many people here seem to grasp how important it is for people to be able to just do something and it provide them a measurable amount of success. Mindless grinding might not seem like something you think would be fun, but people want to do that, sometimes, and will get pissed if it doesn't yield rewards (see: UO).
I want a cyberpunk MMO where on of the skills is hacking. Hackers can mess about with everything computer-controlled in an instance - lights, security, locks, all sorts of things - without even being anywhere near the instance. So your team of elite close-combat specialists and robot ninjas would advertise for a hacker, who provides electronic support from afar in an almost puzzle-game type setup.
I also want one of the big MMO publishing companies - like, say, NCSoft - to connect all their MMOs together in one multiverse and allow characters to cross over.
Any and all of the following IPs; Cowboy Bebop, Pokemon, Girl Genius, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Discworld, the Dark Tower, Heroes, Bas-Lag, especially Bas-Lag.
EvE seems to be headed in this direction. A lot of their PvE elements get morphed into PvP later on. They've got hacking skills now. It'd be cool one day to be able to hack the code to the shield of a POS or so you could dock and unload some bombs on a major station causing huge damage.
Have we had the obligatory zombie apocalypse MMO idea yet?
Like MrMonroe has said, safe zones need to be taken out and only player made safe zones should be allowed.
Would an MMO based around survival and teamwork actually be feasible? All my previous MMO experience points to....no.
Unfortunately, an MMO predicated around the playerbase 'cooperating or dying' seems like it'd inevitably lead to everyone dying. I guess some large, pre-existing communities might join and enforce order to some extent, but that seems like a risky assumption to make.
Although, if dying = turning into a zombie, then it'd just continue until everyone was a zombie and they'd have to either reset the surver or find some "cure" or something. That is, assuming there is still a PVE element to the game so that it doesnt end up with everyone hunting down 1 remaining living player and only one person being able to actually kill anything.
Games that focus too strongly on team work become very niche titles. See FFXI.
WoW did a great job and balancing it. Solo through the levels, team work for the uber gear.
WoW's major success was letting players log in for under and hour, without any plan of what they were going to do, and get something done. Not many people here seem to grasp how important it is for people to be able to just do something and it provide them a measurable amount of success. Mindless grinding might not seem like something you think would be fun, but people want to do that, sometimes, and will get pissed if it doesn't yield rewards (see: UO).
Well, not quite. Blizzard's genius was getting the time:reward ratio so perfect that everyone (from casual to ultra-hardcore) feels like their time is being used efficiently.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Games that focus too strongly on team work become very niche titles. See FFXI.
WoW did a great job and balancing it. Solo through the levels, team work for the uber gear.
WoW's major success was letting players log in for under and hour, without any plan of what they were going to do, and get something done. Not many people here seem to grasp how important it is for people to be able to just do something and it provide them a measurable amount of success. Mindless grinding might not seem like something you think would be fun, but people want to do that, sometimes, and will get pissed if it doesn't yield rewards (see: UO).
Well, not quite. Blizzard's genius was getting the time:reward ratio so perfect that everyone (from casual to ultra-hardcore) feels like their time is being used efficiently.
I'm pretty sure that time:reward is really rather meaningless. You need a high reward for time spent to hook people, but then you can just drop that lower and lower and people will continue to play anyway. It's basic psychology, though I can't recall the exact phenomena. However, if the reward dries up, people WILL stop playing. If you can't get any reward for half an hour of work, people really won't like it. They feel as if the game wasted their time.
I had an idea for an MMO. One that, like others on this board, was inspired by Spore. I envision it for the xbox360/ps3 or a nexter gen console.
It would start with a short single player experience ( assuming a level system that goes from 1-100) for the first five levels. (Assuming a medieval fantasy setting) Your farm/caravan/shop is attacked or you solve a mystery depending on class/profession.
This leads to an encounter that you require assistance overcoming. So you must gather fellow adventurers from you local city/town/countryside. At this point it becomes a multiplayer game. You can either join up with people in a match-making service or invite friends. Once the players have faced the power that threatens them. They are opened to an even bigger world. The town.
Players would be able to permanantly link there world to yours by forming into a guild. Linking worlds would create a Town that all linked players (possibly with a cap of 5) would work to improve and protect. (Alone all the work would be your own, but progress would be slower and less effective overall). Challenges in this stage might include quests to gather mats, defend against raiders, hunt monsters, or even pvp rival towns. This stage would last till lvl 15 typically.
*Side Note: Whenever players form into guilds, one player must be promoted to a leader position. This leader would become less effective alone but would gain powers or bonuses that would be very beneficial to groups.
The next stage would begin with the towns banding together. Either by choice or possibly force. Choice being that with each town added the size of the world map expands to include not only the other towns, but also the size of the wilderness that surrounds the border towns increases. (Once again, by joining a town with be moved to a leadership role). Force being the pvp quest. If you are defeated in pvp then you join the other town. I can forsee some problems with the force option.
The next stages would involve increasingly epic quests and pvp against larger groups and more battles needed to obtain true victory. This would continue along until you reach the size of rvr battles.
The reason to start off solo and then to small group is so that you can define yourself and then your place of origin. These things should be unique and fun to explore others homes (each could provided a few quests for passing travelers). As well, every 10 levels a personal quest would appear to go home and play solo for a few hours worth of adventure. Say once you hit level 50 the questline appears and completing it would make you level 51. Also the content of and your actions during would affect and be affected by your home town.
just an idea. no plan for endgame (liek most mmos MIRITE!?!1?)
Like someone said earlier, I want to see an MMO where the cities aren't just several houses full of vendors and quest-givers. Take the cities from Assassin's Creed and add interactivity beyond jumping all over the rooftops, and you'd have something awesome. I also think that an MMO (or really any game) with a deep spellcrafting system is long overdue. It would take a ridiculous amount of effort to code a semi-balanced system, but if you made it complete enough, it would almost balance itself, since people would keep finding new ways to beat the FoTM spells.
Posts
One thing I would like to see is a SoTC style philosophy in regards to an online RPG/adventure game. Instead of killing kobolds for gold and phat loot and raiding dungeons to level up, how about a world where humanity is trying to eke out survival against these gigantic, horrifying creatures from beyond the dark edges of the map. Humans aren't the top of the food chain. Players would have to track and locate these beasts and then cooperate in a large scale effort to take them down and protect their villages before they go all godzilla and stomp the zone flat. No small monsters, maybe just hunting smaller fauna for food. Players could specialize in building fortifications and war weapons to help repel and kill these giant monsters. Maybe even the world starts out totally barren and players have to build their own civilizations and defend them from giants that lurk beyond the tree-lines. This is such a largely unexplored style of play there is nearly no limit to what you could do with it. The developers could even manually or procedurally generate new collossusi based on species that are particularly successful or have weak breeds die out. They could evolve new behaviors and body structure to combat player strategies and force the players to constantly come up with new techniques so there isn't just "Oh, it's a giant cow monster, bring in the silver ballistas and get lots of rope, I know exactly how to kill these guys" after a while.
Something I want to see in every MMORPG is some kind player modularity that rewards creativity. So much of games these days is just finding out the best gear and spec and getting those items and suddenly you're good as you can be. There's no room to be creative and come up with your own ways to do stuff. Going back to my previous SoTC style game example, maybe players who specialize in siege engineering can do garry's mod type construction and create their own siege weapons or develop specialized village defenses. In the future, advanced bandwidth and CPU power could allow an MMORPG engine to physically simulate the construction of such objects and really truly give players creativity.
Going to the extreme with that player creativity idea, how about some kind of robot-mech war game where everyone builds their own mobile suits. If done correctly it could end up with the kind of emergent gameplay where people are constantly trying to develop new configurations and styles of mech to out-do the designs that the opposing player factions are coming up with. Developing specific counters for enemy units. Instead of developer mandated "tank type" or "artillery type" or "fast light" type units, imagine if the PLAYERS were the ones who actually came up with all that variety all on their own, with appropriate counter-measures to boot?
I'm crazy, I know. This is what I want though.
I also want one of the big MMO publishing companies - like, say, NCSoft - to connect all their MMOs together in one multiverse and allow characters to cross over.
Any and all of the following IPs; Cowboy Bebop, Pokemon, Girl Genius, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Discworld, the Dark Tower, Heroes, Bas-Lag, especially Bas-Lag.
That would be so awesome that the word awesome is too pathetic to even begin to describe it.
WoW did a great job and balancing it. Solo through the levels, team work for the uber gear.
I really like the SoTC idea mentioned, but a combination of the two might be best. Maybe the big fucker that involves major teamwork could be a sort of travelling spawn point. A large elder dragon that creates nests of eggs, which hatch into whelplings? And if it has a system that allows player towns and settlements, larger towns could attract larger enemies, so that more teamwork would be involved in protecting the town (i.e. more spawns outside the town means more enemies that would have time to "age", making leveling for newbies difficult, which would encourage higher level players to go out and pwn elder dragon for phat loot).
---
I had an idea that was typical medieval setting, minus the overly strong fantasy overtones. Basically players would control a single character that led a military into battle. Instead of skills like "fireball 5" or "omega slash", you'd have commands that directed your troops. A single player would lead a single type of unit into a battle, be it infantry, archers, cavalry, etc.. Each unit having their own advantages and disadvantages. We're talking about uber micromanagement here if a player wants to.
If you decided to take cavalry, you'd find that you'd often have a smaller number of units with you because of the high price involved in upkeep. Cavarly would often ride heavy chargers, and be decked out in heavy armor. Because of all that platemail, though, they're easy pickings if they lose their horse. Therefore, cavalry would be strongest on large open fields of battle.
Archery would shine most when used defensively in a player's own town/keep/castle/whatever, since they'd basically have an endless supply of arrows. Each archer would only be able to carry a certain number of arrows on the field though, so supply routes will have to play a major role. Archers would likely be lightly armored on the field, because they rely on range and advantage of the environment. They'd find their arrows would be fairly useless against decently prepared foes however. Great for ambushes in general.
Infantry would be fairly dynamic in their use. They could be used offensively or defensively fairly well, and can fight in closed in areas, or on the open field. They're main advantage would be that they could switch roles easily, depending on what weapons they were using, or how they were armored.
Beyond that, strong PvP elements, along with player towns, and an heirarchy system. The majority of how a character does would be based on their income, alliances, economy, and morale. Player towns would also have citizens that would join it based on the previously mentioned factors as well.
tl;dr
medieval minus the magic sparkles. An RPG game mixed with strong RTS overtones where you directly control a single person. Focused more on strategy, society, and economy than OMG LVL 70.
This would have actually been really neat in that one Gundam MMO, but since that got shitcanned...
WoW's major success was letting players log in for under and hour, without any plan of what they were going to do, and get something done. Not many people here seem to grasp how important it is for people to be able to just do something and it provide them a measurable amount of success. Mindless grinding might not seem like something you think would be fun, but people want to do that, sometimes, and will get pissed if it doesn't yield rewards (see: UO).
EvE seems to be headed in this direction. A lot of their PvE elements get morphed into PvP later on. They've got hacking skills now. It'd be cool one day to be able to hack the code to the shield of a POS or so you could dock and unload some bombs on a major station causing huge damage.
No doubt they will think of something cool...
Although, if dying = turning into a zombie, then it'd just continue until everyone was a zombie and they'd have to either reset the surver or find some "cure" or something. That is, assuming there is still a PVE element to the game so that it doesnt end up with everyone hunting down 1 remaining living player and only one person being able to actually kill anything.
Well, not quite. Blizzard's genius was getting the time:reward ratio so perfect that everyone (from casual to ultra-hardcore) feels like their time is being used efficiently.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I'm pretty sure that time:reward is really rather meaningless. You need a high reward for time spent to hook people, but then you can just drop that lower and lower and people will continue to play anyway. It's basic psychology, though I can't recall the exact phenomena. However, if the reward dries up, people WILL stop playing. If you can't get any reward for half an hour of work, people really won't like it. They feel as if the game wasted their time.
It would start with a short single player experience ( assuming a level system that goes from 1-100) for the first five levels. (Assuming a medieval fantasy setting) Your farm/caravan/shop is attacked or you solve a mystery depending on class/profession.
This leads to an encounter that you require assistance overcoming. So you must gather fellow adventurers from you local city/town/countryside. At this point it becomes a multiplayer game. You can either join up with people in a match-making service or invite friends. Once the players have faced the power that threatens them. They are opened to an even bigger world. The town.
Players would be able to permanantly link there world to yours by forming into a guild. Linking worlds would create a Town that all linked players (possibly with a cap of 5) would work to improve and protect. (Alone all the work would be your own, but progress would be slower and less effective overall). Challenges in this stage might include quests to gather mats, defend against raiders, hunt monsters, or even pvp rival towns. This stage would last till lvl 15 typically.
*Side Note: Whenever players form into guilds, one player must be promoted to a leader position. This leader would become less effective alone but would gain powers or bonuses that would be very beneficial to groups.
The next stage would begin with the towns banding together. Either by choice or possibly force. Choice being that with each town added the size of the world map expands to include not only the other towns, but also the size of the wilderness that surrounds the border towns increases. (Once again, by joining a town with be moved to a leadership role). Force being the pvp quest. If you are defeated in pvp then you join the other town. I can forsee some problems with the force option.
The next stages would involve increasingly epic quests and pvp against larger groups and more battles needed to obtain true victory. This would continue along until you reach the size of rvr battles.
The reason to start off solo and then to small group is so that you can define yourself and then your place of origin. These things should be unique and fun to explore others homes (each could provided a few quests for passing travelers). As well, every 10 levels a personal quest would appear to go home and play solo for a few hours worth of adventure. Say once you hit level 50 the questline appears and completing it would make you level 51. Also the content of and your actions during would affect and be affected by your home town.
just an idea. no plan for endgame (liek most mmos MIRITE!?!1?)
TLDR
spore+d&d+mmo=kinky three-way
Jump to Lightspeed al a cart (no ground interaction from SWG, just a persistent Star Wars space sim with ship customization, etc).
Yup.
Either one of those I would take.
I wish they make classic 2d side scrolling action games like old arcade D&D by Capcom online...