mmorpg Gameplay Ideas

[Fattyfat]

sort of development, but more talk:

I'd like to open up discussion for some ideas you might have in regards to gameplay for an mmorpg.

I'm about to begin implementation on a personal project and the outcome will be something along the lines of a persistent world capable of supporting 50ish players or so (general estimation). I'm going to add in basic combat, inventory, character creation, quests, tradeskills, and NPCs. I'm mainly working on gameplay, not graphics, so it is very possible to see a bunch of block people running around.

If you have some interesting gameplay ideas you want to bring up or discuss feel free to bring them up. I'm always looking for new things to try.

Right now I believe i have the tools and knowledge to create a basic 1-zone EQ engine. I'll build on it from there....

[Zaniel]

How advanced is your engine though? Probably 75% of the suggestions you're going to hear will be restricted by your engine. Say for example, morphable/buildable/destroyable terrain or say body-part hit boxes for mobs & PCs.

If your engine can't handle that then suggestion XYZ isn't worth much to you. Maybe give us a brief summary of your engine? Unless of course you're just looking for a shower of ideas to let you sort through them.

Say for example, I might suggest (just a stupid idea plucked randomly out of the air, I'm not serious) more feverish melee play, say even more than WoW to the point were it includes elements of being a 3D fighter. I'm assuming you've got a limit to your programming time/prowess.

Do you have some basic rulesets such as computer controlled hit calculation or is anything open slather?

[Fattyfat]

Its pretty open, let me give you a few ideas i have myself.

Entities in the world take up space and hav collision. Therefore you can't walk through a dragon, gnoll, or an orc. You have to walk around them. This gives way to being able to create a *front line* and perhaps the removal of Taunt. Instead of relying on Taunt, you create a barrier of players between yourself and your low hp classes. Perhaps the space you take up increases depending on your choice of weapon. A guy with a polearm or longaxe can occupy an entire hallway forcing mobs to fight him before they can reach the casters. At the same time, when your party opens the door to some room, two orcs stand guard playing defensively while their 10 goblin archers pelt you and your friends with arrows from the back of the room.

Also, combat implementation is going to start off easier. More like the typical auto-attack for non-magical attacks. While I like hitboxes and the like, I'm not ready for an action rpg involving twitch skill.

[Dyscord]

This Sci-Fi or fantasy? Because I've got lots of stupid ideas for a sci-fi combat system. The whole fantasy swing your sword thing has been done to death in my opinion.

[Fattyfat]

either, i've got ideas and desires to do both.

[Vinen]

Originally Posted by Fattyfat

Its pretty open, let me give you a few ideas i have myself.

Entities in the world take up space and hav collision. Therefore you can't walk through a dragon, gnoll, or an orc. You have to walk around them. This gives way to being able to create a *front line* and perhaps the removal of Taunt. Instead of relying on Taunt, you create a barrier of players between yourself and your low hp classes. Perhaps the space you take up increases depending on your choice of weapon. A guy with a polearm or longaxe can occupy an entire hallway forcing mobs to fight him before they can reach the casters. At the same time, when your party opens the door to some room, two orcs stand guard playing defensively while their 10 goblin archers pelt you and your friends with arrows from the back of the room.

Also, combat implementation is going to start off easier. More like the typical auto-attack for non-magical attacks. While I like hitboxes and the like, I'm not ready for an action rpg involving twitch skill.

lol@Ogre Wall that works 100% and not just for knockback!

Sweet, sweet idea.

[Khorum]

You'll prolly have tons of people making sound melee suggestions. I'm sure whatever I suggest will just be adding to a pile. Insofar as melee all I'd like to see is a more complex dual-wield combat system. Not the half-assed and basically PUNITIVE dual-wield systems that we've seen, that seems more intent on discouraging dual-wielding than anything.

But for a real challenge, here's something I haven't yet seen in any mmog: Conceive of HEALER gameplay that is as visceral, tactile and exciting as melee. I've played healers from eq to wow... and in all those MMOGs you have melee tearing shit up and flinging bits and chunks of corpses all over the place, while casters call down comets and small fusion reactions. Healers wiggle their fingers and get a gay tinkerbell shower over their target. Fuck that.

It's as if developers think that group desirabilty of a healer is MORE than enough reward for playing a healer. Even people who ENJOY healing tend to admit that playing any other role is easily more exciting. WoW addresses multi-role things that add TASK versatility to healers, because it's just no fun sitting there wiggling your fingers and watching gay particles get lost in the bloodspray and super-ninja-combo effects that the melee are doing.

As for how it's done I dunno, you'd have to toy with channelling/skill based things. It'll certainly require more attention and reactivity from the players, but I for one look forward to something like it.

[Dyscord]

Here's a really long winded, semi-stupid post for a sci-fi mmo pvp kinda game.


Shooting:

Done like SWG. Get something in your sights, click the mouse. The rest is decided by your stats, to hit, weapon type, etc.

Hand to Hand:

No more cyber ninja shit. Hand to hand is last ditch desperate affair. Lots of damage is done fast. Have it so the player 'can' have an advantage, such as bayonets, etc, but charging headlong into a horde of enemies is a surefire way to get yourself overwhelmed and killed.

Cover:

Here's a big mechanic in the game. Assign certain areas as 'cover'. If a player is within the cover area, he gains the benifits of cover. Cover grants improved armor. Wood crates for example, would be good at stopping, or lessening the damage of small arms, however, do nothing to stop a plasma cannon. If two opposing players enter the same cover area, the cover no longer grants bonuses to either.

Supression:

Each cover area has a certain supression value. The more fire a cover area receives, the more its supression value raises. When it reaches certain thresholds, the cover begins to provide less and less bonuses. For example, 'light' supression gives -hit, while 'heavy' supression makes the cover useless, as its getting blown to shit by incoming fire. Naturally wooden boxes have a low supression value while a bunker has a very high one.

Classes:

Two main classes, Soldier and Support. You're weapon choice however, determines heavily your role in combat.

Soldier: Standard weapons expert. Much better at using weapons than the support class. There are of course standard rifles and lasers, the prime all around damage dealing weapons. But then come the 'special' weapons. Here are two kinds of examples.

LMG: Very inaccurate, low damage. Has lots of special abilities designed to drive up supression values, debuff chance to hit, etc.

Flame Thrower: Very short range. Its meant to keep assaulting forces away, or to drive them out of cover.

The soldiers main role is to deal damage, drive enemies from cover, and supress.

Support: Can use weapons like a soldier, but not well. Main role is to 'heal'. Two kinds of heals, armor/health and ammo. Health is of course a give me, but ammo depletes constantly as soldiers fire. To keep them firing, the support needs to make sure everyone's stocked. Give support lots of buffs like 'weapon cooling' to increase rate of fire, or 'ammo hopper' to make someone not have to reload for x amount of time.

The Game:

Two factions. Each one has a central mothership hub. This is where each faction can hang out, group up, equip, etc. Then there are various 'battle' zones. When enough people enter a queue to enter a zone, both sides will deploy into certain areas of the map. Basically, spawn at a drop ship. The objective is to hold the command center of the map. There are various other objectives too, like power stations, com-stat nodes, etc that grant bonuses to the command center if held, and penalties if lost (no power station means force fields and turrets protecting the command center go down).

When a player dies, he is 'cloned' at a drop ship (fast) or at a facilitiy (much slower). The objective is for one team to destroy/capture the other's drop ship, thus granting them control of the battlefield and victory. Holding the command center, of course, grants lots of bonuses to make destroying the other team's drop ship easier/possible.


I know this all sounds like a lot of rambling, but there is some interesting tactics here. Like concentrating all of your team in a bunker makes it so that the bunker will be very hard to assault in hand to hand, but it also makes you very very easy to supress (thus limiting your ability to return fire/supress). Spreading out makes your team nearly un-supressable, but very vulnerable to assaults.

Cover makes interaction with the environment important. For example, a small team of machine gunners could position themselves at a choke point to hold off enemy reinforcments. Open charges across fields are suicidal unless the enemy has been supressed enough. This game is totally about teamwork.

Anyway, I'm done rambling for now. I realize this game is reaaaaaally different from any MMO out there now, and probably not something that anyone would want to tackle. But I digress..

[dub]

Well, I think you are spot on with collision detection. Why that hasn't really been implemented before surprises me, because any kind of situational combat is based on geography. Why hasn't this been true in our MMOs?

Although I can't really give you answers, I would like crowd control to be dealt with differently. Oh and major healing. So healing and CC would be my two suggestions of where to focus your attention.

* I didn't mean to be so vague. In my opinion, mez/stun/root/etc can be handled differently. Too many MMOs have basically the same system of "pull group, CC certain mobs/adds, burn 'em down in a timely order." I think that increasing the survivablity of certain generic classes, and maybe all classes in general, would be a possible solution (casters dying in a few hits for example).

Healing sucks in every mmorpg I have ever played. Sure, a priest can kick more ass or has more options than a cleric, but compared to other classes, everything pales. I enjoy that a group's success is heavily dependant upon my skills, and I like being wanted to a certain degree, but it's always the same: Watch health bar, and spam heal when needed. An alternate to the formula would be nice, like deflecting incoming damage, allowing all classes to heal (themselves?) in one way or another, aside from consumables, or maybe remove in-battle healing altogether and focus on something completely different/new like a "damage prevention" system.

Oh, and more skill-based gameplay please. The game mechanics thread over in mmorpg disc said it best. Not necessarily twitch-based, but the badassness of my character shouldn't be entirely dependant on how much time I can sink and have sunk into him. Maybe something like 40% time, 60% skill, if that makes any sense.

[Fattyfat]

Originally Posted by dub

Well, I think you are spot on with collision detection. Why that hasn't really been implemented before surprises me, because any kind of situational combat is based on geography. Why hasn't this been true in our MMOs?

Although I can't really give you answers, I would like crowd control to be dealt with differently. Oh and major healing. So healing and CC would be my two suggestions of where to focus your attention.

elaborate on Major Healing...

I know being The Healer is not the most entertaining class in a game. I would rather see the healing class be more about control over life/death/restoration/disease. Maybe even a throw back to the days where healers wore heavy armor and wielded furious blunt weapons infused with the power of their god wiping out scores of undead with a single command or raising them to control.

[Jait]

Just off the top of my head, special ability and attacks should focus on specific areas of the mob. For a rough example:

Exposure options:

High attack +50% dmg - to hit
Low attack - 25% less dmg + to hit
Normal attack

High attacks do massive damage, but rarely hit. A successful low attack causes a high attack exposure for 2 seconds. Successful high-attacks have a small chance to knock the mob down for a second or two. Failure on high attacks leave the player exposed.

Something like this gives dps classes something to do other than leave on auto-attack, or spam abilities as they refresh. Tank classes would focus on aggro/normal attack. Because of which, it's almost worthless solo, except as a last ditch effort.

[Zinke]

Originally Posted by Fattyfat

elaborate on Major Healing...

I know being The Healer is not the most entertaining class in a game. I would rather see the healing class be more about control over life/death/restoration/disease. Maybe even a throw back to the days where healers wore heavy armor and wielded furious blunt weapons infused with the power of their god wiping out scores of undead with a single command or raising them to control.

I have played a healer or mage in most MMORPGs before WoW. I've spent time thinking about this, because I switched from my normal healer/mage to a rogue in WoW, and I had to examine why. There is a couple ways I feel would make healing more interesting. One, is the dark healer idea that was done in City of Heroes and, to some extent, shadow priests in WoW. A class that DPSes, and heals in the process. A dark mage in essence. He nukes a mob and heals his group for a % of the damage. He can cast a buff (link) on a certain person to channel all the healing from his nukes to that character. He can steal mana from casters for the group. He can use his own health to heal a single character, and then steal some from another enemy. Debuffs on enemy that makes any action they take heal the priest, or his linked target. Combine all the necro/warlock/dark priest type abilities into a character basically. But, his DPS needs to be good enough that he's actually a valued DPS source. This can impede your DPS classes if you don't have some interesting utility things for them to do, though.

Another angle to take healing is preventing damage, through cc, buffs, preventive shields and heals to fall back on after all that. Casting runes on players is more interesting then whack a mole with health bars, if only barely. The proper rune for the proper damage is one idea to toy with.

Or, as you talked about position and collision being important for tanking, the 'healer' could summon stationary shields that prevent damage from certain directions or sources. A wall of air that blocks ranged attacks from a certain direction, summoned in front of the healers, and those goblin archers can't touch them. A slowing shield, stationary, that reduces all melee damage done to the person who stands within it. A water rune that douses fire spells as they are cast etc..

In essence, the healer becomes a puzzle solver. He sees a fire caster, 2 archers and 2 warriors attacking. His group's tank intercepts the two warriors in a spot that makes it impossible for them to get around. He places a melee shield on the warrior, but now he can't get close enough to the fire caster to place a rune. He can put up an air wall to prevent most of the archers damage still, but the caster is free to cast. He'd need to have the warrior let him through, get close to the fire caster to cast the rune, then come back and replace the warrior's shield and the wall of air to protect his group from the archers. For more difficult encounters, you could make it impossible for all the damage to be prevented like that, so the healer has to choose the easiest way to prevent the most amount of damage, and then just heal the remaining damage with his regular heal spells.

[Malakie Torsade]

Here is an idea to make healing less tedious. To start, think about D&D, where being the Cleric isn't a bad job at all. Why? Though you can heal, you also bring other important things to the group which are fun; melee damage, great utility spells, etc.

For starters, make healing more of something you do during downtime or in emergency situations. Make healing innefficient in battle while giving them tools that make it less necassary for healing in the first place; short duration mitigation buffs, crowd control, etc. Of course, there is the whole "balance" can of worms, but something really does need to done.

Basically, I think the Healer role should be done away with and replaced with the Supporter (for lack of a better term.) This person has heals, sure. But his main role is to keep the group alive and killing efficiently, which, until now, has been the same thing as healer. Make healing a tool that this character uses to keep others going, not his entire arsenal.

Sorry the post is all over the place, keep getting interupted with phone calls. You get the idea though.

[Khorum]

Originally Posted by Malakie Torsade

Here is an idea to make healing less tedious. To start, think about D&D, where being the Cleric isn't a bad job at all. Why? Though you can heal, you also bring other important things to the group which are fun; melee damage, great utility spells, etc.

For starters, make healing more of something you do during downtime or in emergency situations. Make healing innefficient in battle while giving them tools that make it less necassary for healing in the first place; short duration mitigation buffs, crowd control, etc. Of course, there is the whole "balance" can of worms, but something really does need to done.

I touched on this in my post above about adding "Task" versatility to the healer classes in WoW. But the problem isn't the Healer classes themselves.

Noone will argue that Ret Pallies, Balance Druids, Shamans or Shadowpriests aren't FUN to play solo in WoW---because they _are_ fun to solo. The problem isn't their repertoire of skills, it's the fact that the _activity_ of healing is both mission-critical and totally unrewarding as a gameplay activity. You can throw more and more abilities to a given class, let my priest backstab and mortal strike and it would NOT make a difference, because at some point people or circumstances will require me to heal---and among today's EQ-alikes, that's boring as shit.

I can farm with my priest in shadowform all day and I wouldn't get too bored. I sit there mindflaying and mindblasting and sometimes even wanding and it's almost as fun as any other class. It's when I'm in a raid HEALING mode (or even in an instance) that it's no fun. The problem is neither the class nor a real or imagined deficiency of capabilities---the problem is that the fundamental activity of HEALING, in everquest and its successors, isn't as tactile and exciting as the other group/raid roles like DPS or hell even CC.

Suggestions like Zinke's would help a lot. Make healing an immediate and interactive experience. Make sure that the GROUP sees the effects of the healer's efforts. A lot of vets take it for granted that the healer is a crucial core of their group, but you have to admit that seeing a giant chunk of a mobs life go poof after an ambush generates a bigger group response-- nothing intrusive, just something simple that makes the healer's contribution obvious.

But I also think even SIMPLER mechanisms, like making the healing effects visually engaging and impressive, would go most of the way to accomplishing this. Basically just make the healing EVENT as momentous and impressive as the activity of healing actually IS during an encounter. Why should the melee and casters get all the cool audio/visual rewards when healing is just as mission-critical to the group effort?

Originally Posted by Malakie Torasade

Basically, I think the Healer role should be done away with and replaced with the Supporter (for lack of a better term.) This person has heals, sure. But his main role is to keep the group alive and killing efficiently, which, until now, has been the same thing as healer. Make healing a tool that this character uses to keep others going, not his entire arsenal.

Sorry the post is all over the place, keep getting interupted with phone calls. You get the idea though.

I thought about that for a PNP game I was working on a few years ago but we went even further... just get rid of healers altogether. Just distribute the healer's survivability contribution as various skills, spells and abilities among the other classes.

Think of healers and healing as a value, and that a priest would bring a net survivability value to a group of 100. Now distributing that survivability "points" would have to be fairly even. Though of course the execution and the semantics would be wildly different. Something like:

Give tanks an ability to shield other players to the tune of 25% of a healer's total value. Or maybe they can even spec a cross-parry skill that's like another 10% of a healer's value.

Give rogues an ability to poison or disable a mob's offensive capabilities that yields a survivability bonus that's close to 20%.

Give mages an ability to cast a magical bubble on a player that yields 20% survivability.

Give chanters an ability to create mirror images of a player that comes close to 20%.

Basically with the right tactics and coordination, the party wouldn't lose survivability because a healer isn't there. And if done correctly, it would even make for more interesting gameplay (it actually did on paper). It actually started as a conceptual solution to the problem of tank stacking in everquest-alikes. Best part is you don't end up SHORTCHANGING a player with all the tedium and thankless work that comes with healing.

Ultimately though, the conclusion was that none of this would be necessary if healing wasn't such a dull, thankless and unrewarding activity. We shouldn't be looking to remove a class or role and diminish the richness of the whole system, but find ways to fix and enhance it.

[Hatorade]

I have had an idea for a long time. I reactive combat system. You get 3 main offensive skills. One is for melee one is for ranged and one is for caster. Then all your skills you get are merely options. They stay maybe greyed out until the mob does something. Then you have like 3-4 choices to make.

Example Melee pulls using his main offensive. The mob charges and uses a berzerking move with full strength. You options are to try to parry/block/counter/dodge. Because lets say you picked dodge it would make a check depending how heavy you armor is or how good you are at dodging. If you fail to dodge you take damage and then it is your turn. IF you are successful it then gives you more option to attack/strong attack/defend..and so on.

This could work like a real time turn based system. Kinda turnbased with maybe a 3-5 sec timer on what to do next.