[Game Dev] What do you want?

[etchazz]

Originally Posted by Kreugen

WoW gameplay in a dark fantasy setting (Michael Moorcock, anyone?)

Gameplay doesn't need to be revolutionized. I don't need to do half circle combos with the thumbstick to have better gameplay. What I want is more variety in setting.

good point, although some sort of skill based combat may be fun. allow some sort of variety in combat, aside from just hitting certain buttons when they light up.

[Draegan]

I want to play EVE with a joystick. Thats what I want right now.

[kollos]

i also dont see the need to come up with a comepletly new system of how the game works. i would also try to avoid realism, because it is boring.
there has been alot of talk about the "nextgen" game. but it will never come. nextgen is a long process, not just one title that will be released some day that will be totally new and different. i just dont see it happening. there are constantly new titles shipping with a few new ideas, built up on old ideas, and people will always say its just a clone of another game. however, when i look at todays mmos and comepare them to games like meridian 59, theyre very different.

why do you want to get rid of levels, items, raids, and whatever else? people will always be complaining. the reason: they want to have them, they want access to it, etc. and are usually hoping for an easy way to get what they want. but if you gave everything out for free it will completely lose its value.
youre basically saying you dont want the players to have those values anymore?
levels and items haven been peoples motivation throughout the whole history of gaming. you can even apply this system on rl situations. search and collect is one of the most basic human instincts.

[Vithe]

Originally Posted by Draegan

I want to play EVE with a joystick. Thats what I want right now.

I've never played Eve, but this might be something to look into:

JoyToKey English Version

[Draegan]

Originally Posted by Vithe

I've never played Eve, but this might be something to look into:

JoyToKey English Version

I basically meant that I want to play the arcade version of EVE.

[Vithe]

Gotcha.

[Lyenae]

I, and perhaps others, and just waiting for an MMO that is a shift back to sandboxes.

To me the absolute important thing is freedom. Unbridled freedom. If I want to become the leader of a city, there should be a way to do it. If I want to build my own, there should be a way to do it. If I want to stab someone in the back, there should be a way to do it. If I want to cause an avalanche blocking off a main road between two towns, there should be a way to do it. Someone has an item I want, I should be able to steal it. ETC...

MMO's should be pushing in that direction. Sure, I agree it may be a few years off before some ideas are implementable, but that doesn't mean you cannot start. There are already MMO's where you can do some of the above things, if not all. If they aren't around, I guarantee you they did NOT fail because they had the above, they failed on other merits.

I have no fucking idea what the hell is going on with giant NPC 'to do lists' that you WoW monkeys absolutely love, nor do I have any fucking clue what the hell is the obsession/enthrallment with raid tiers and super artificial raid encounters full of bullshit gimmicks that aren't OPTIONAL and are required for success, nor do I understand fake PvP in Battlegrounds or Arena's for points and munchkin rewards.

I'm above that. I might be in the minority, but if so, proud of it.

The next MMO won't beat WoW on their own merits, the MMO that will beat WoW MUST be paradigm shifting. Easily possible.

[Mist]

Ok, getting the topic back on track, a concise list:

First of all, I want a big world, with big servers. If you want the game to be action oriented at all, having one server is probably not going to work due to distances and latencies, but having 1 or 2 for the East Coast US, 1 or 2 for West Coast US, a couple for Europe, and a few more wherever else. Big servers capable of handling 15-20k concurrent players at peak times, with total communities as large as 100k players per server. And a the game world needs to be large enough to support it. It doesn't need to be massively large like EVE, requiring 3 dozen jumps just to get anywhere, and travel shouldn't be a huge pain in the ass like Vanguard was originally either, but there should definitely be some sense of scale to the world, and that one side of the world isn't just a carbon copy of the other. There should be room for wide open spaces and mountains and castles looming in the distance, or room enough for planets and moons and asteroid belts filled with derelict ships and lots of locations to explore and exploit.

Secondly, player housing/player owned structures within the game world, not in their own seperate instance. UO did this right, to a point. You shouldn't be able to plop houses down anywhere there's room, but you should be able to build them in designated spaces within the gameworld, in various locales. Some locales could be designed for sparse, remote housing like dense woods or rocky cliffsides, others in open spaces to create towns and villages. Some houses shouldn't be houses at all, they should be forts and castles erected in conflicted areas, creating places for people to fight in and around. Let players raid each others castles and get some kind of reward for sacking them, but perhaps allowing players to burn them to the ground wasn't the best idea (Shadowbane.)

Third thing to consider; archetypes, not specific classes. Theres no reason why your game, regardless of setting, needs more than 4 or 5 'class' archetypes. Then allow players a lot of customization and horizontal advancement within those archetypes, and honestly I'd love to see a game with some kind of dual-classing system as a mid-to-high level option, combining two archetypes. Guild Wars tried to do this, but I didn't feel like the classes had enough core characteristics to make them feel complete in and of themselves, everyone being dual classes just means all of the classes are watered down. FFXI does it too, but that game has way too many other problems. As an example, I'd like a fantasy game to have an armored tank archetype, a physical DPS archetype with ranged and melee paths, a casting class with various damage and utility paths, and a healer with healing and support paths. Each of these paths would have a lot of abilities that you could choose to get in them, and then specialize or modify those abilities further. And that's it for classes. If you want to be a 'paladin' be a healer and a warrior dual classed. If you want to be a 'shadowknight' be a melee DPS with the dark themed caster abilities and debuffs.

Fourth, I would like to see lots of different types of gameplay and advancement. From highly structured dungeon areas (split between some instanced and many non instanced areas) to freeform zones filled with little more than raw material resources to fight over. I would love to see general exploration rewarded, with NPCs appearing and roaming the land via randomly branching paths giving time sensitive quests or generous offers to people who happen to find them in the right place at the right time. You can use instancing in smart ways. Create caves and ruins with instance portals that allow for generating random, Diablo-esque dungeons as endpoints for randomly generated quests. I want to see randomly generated quests, even if they are far simpler than the static storyline quests and treasure hunts sending groups of players to far corners of the world, and dynamically generated PvP missions sending players deep into enemy territory. But I do believe, fundamentally, that the game systems should provide this stuff, not depend on players to create the emergent gameplay systems. The emergent gameplay will happen as a result of players following random and dynamically generated paths along with the static paths, encountering each other and creating cooperation and conflict.

Lastly, I want to see less limitations. No insurmountable language barriers between factions. No BoP or no-drop items. Infact, I want to see items that can be upgraded over periods of ownership, items that you want to trade or pass on to someone else someday. There should be specific systems to allow players to create items. Not totally unique items, but items that have specific value to a given player, with upgrades recieved via partipating and conquering various avenues and levels of game content.

In conclusion, not a sandbox, but big worlds with lots of paths for players to participate in various activities both static, dynamic and sometimes just plain random. Give the players the tools to interact with each other in various ways, but don't expect a fun game to miraculously spring up from that interaction without other content to drive it.

[...]

Originally Posted by Lyenae

nor do I have any fucking clue what the hell is the obsession/enthrallment with raid tiers and super artificial raid encounters full of bullshit gimmicks that aren't OPTIONAL and are required for success

I didn't like any of the hoop jumping in the few WoW raids I did or read about. I'm sure it's better than tank and spank, but I just hate raiding as a dayly habit, I always had a lot more fun grouping.

[Dennadyne]

I read through the first couple pages and saw people bashing the OP for asking for ideas and brainstorming and what not. I found it kinda funny b/c I don't recall ever reading any bashing of Ngruk asking for opinions and stuff.

I don't care much either way, just wondered if I'm the only one who thought that.

[erethizon]

I would have to say that the number one most important feature to try to put into an MMORPG is a system that allows for endless (or nearly so) character advancement. I have to point out that when I say character advancement I mean the character, not his stuff. Hitting a level cap and having nothing to do but collect “epic” junk is absolutely no fun whatsoever. I want to see a game designed so that a team of players playing a single character 24 hours a day the most efficient way possible would take a minimum of 5 years (10 would be better) to actually finish all the ways to advance the character.

This would likely be accomplished in two main ways. One is to simply have a lot of ways to advance a character. You mentioned Vanguard’s diplomacy in the opening post. Diplomacy, crafting, and adventuring can all be broken up into multiple skills each of which can be raised. Just by gathering ideas from other games you can easily come up with a list of hundreds of potential skills that can each be developed.

The other main way this would be accomplished is by diminishing returns. Rather than having a person get a huge bonus to power each time they “level” or gain a skill or whatever, make the bonuses get smaller and smaller each time they gain more skill. Maybe the first 100 points of swimming skill give a big increase to speed, but after that each point starts adding less and less so that someone with 500 skill will not really be going all that much faster than someone with 300 skill. This is important because it is this fact that allows people to group together. When you have an endless skill system people will inevitably develop different amounts of different skills at different rates. It is important that people can continue to group together even though their skill totals are far apart. A person that has 5000 hours played with a character should be able to group with a person that has 2000 hours played.

Ideas for skills abound in many games, but one place I would look for more ideas is to break every single type of damage into different defensive skill types. If every single source of damage has it own skill then it greatly increases the number of skills there are to raise. For me, a game is over the moment I no longer have any way to develop my character (and items do not count as character development to me) so I usually spend my time finding ways to slow my progress in games so they will not end too quickly. I want a game that I can play for years on end without having to feel like it is going to end on me because I am about to run out of ways to improve my character.

[Burkex]

Originally Posted by Lyenae

To me the absolute important thing is freedom. Unbridled freedom. If I want to become the leader of a city, there should be a way to do it. If I want to build my own, there should be a way to do it. If I want to stab someone in the back, there should be a way to do it. If I want to cause an avalanche blocking off a main road between two towns, there should be a way to do it. Someone has an item I want, I should be able to steal it. ETC....

That sounds fucking awesome.

[Laerazi]

Originally Posted by Dumar

i think you misunderstand. i'm not saying code the political system into the game. but the system has to be there. someone has to be mayor of this town. i'm all for making the game as free as it can be. if you want to argue the merits of making that system vs no system whatsoever and letting the players decide, that's a good argument.

there doesn't have to be 'focused paths of character progression'. that's a buzzline that needs to die. i want to progess HOWEVER i want to. i don't want a path.

but if you call it boring.. you're crazy. i remember absolutely nothing at all in wow. no memories whatsoever. i remember every fucking day in uo.

This is nice in theory, but could you give an example of an ideal play session in this type of environment.

To me the absolute important thing is freedom. Unbridled freedom. If I want to become the leader of a city, there should be a way to do it. If I want to build my own, there should be a way to do it. If I want to stab someone in the back, there should be a way to do it. If I want to cause an avalanche blocking off a main road between two towns, there should be a way to do it. Someone has an item I want, I should be able to steal it. ETC....

That sounds nice on paper, but what exactly would your player do when first logging in? What's the purpose of the game? Sandboxes can be fun at times, but why should I log into this game day after day. It sounds like you want to get rid of the PVE aspect of games, which is fine and everything, but I didn't hear what would replace it.

I suppose it might be cool if you started in either a dark futuristic setting or post-apocalyptic world where your main goal is to be on top, through backstabbing, killing, politics, hard-work, whatever. This type of game would seem very turbulent and fast-paced though, and victory would be short-lived since, while you're ganking and lying to everyone else, the same is happening to you. I don't know how fun of a game that would be to play. Main goal would seem to be acquiring power, and being able to retain that power (from a simple item all the way up to being a faction leader or owning land/ships/currency/whatever).

In this type of game though, power would almost always be given to those who have the most time to commit, and not very casual friendly.

[Mist]

Originally Posted by Laerazi

I suppose it might be cool if you started in either a dark futuristic setting or post-apocalyptic world where your main goal is to be on top, through backstabbing, killing, politics, hard-work, whatever. This type of game would seem very turbulent and fast-paced though, and victory would be short-lived since, while you're ganking and lying to everyone else, the same is happening to you. I don't know how fun of a game that would be to play. Main goal would seem to be acquiring power, and being able to retain that power (from a simple item all the way up to being a faction leader or owning land/ships/currency/whatever).

In this type of game though, power would almost always be given to those who have the most time to commit, and not very casual friendly.

Even this doesn't work, because there needs to be something to be on-top of, some resource to own, and that resource has to be something that's fun to have, fun to acquire, and that still requires PvE content. You can't have a game that's solely PvP, because if there isn't some quantity in play then what is there to fight over?

[Mist]

Originally Posted by Lyenae

To me the absolute important thing is freedom. Unbridled freedom. If I want to become the leader of a city, there should be a way to do it. If I want to build my own, there should be a way to do it. If I want to stab someone in the back, there should be a way to do it. If I want to cause an avalanche blocking off a main road between two towns, there should be a way to do it. Someone has an item I want, I should be able to steal it. ETC...

Assuming this is even possible, which it probably isn't, what point is the avalance if there is no specific content on the other side of the avalanche to get to? What reason do players have for crossing this road, if there aren't quests or some other system built into the game that requires crossing it?