MMORPG's Idea Thread

#1 Noncombat skills are useful in RPGs. They allow you to screw around doing stuff after you've run out of quests to do.

I would also like areas that get randomly reset every month (or so). It would be a regular old hack-and-slash dungeon that changes. MMORPGs do have new quests every so often, but I would like a simple hack-and-slash area. It could be randomly generated, but it would be good if new monsters and treasures were added there.

Another thing about MMORPGs is that they're too big for people with putzy little modems. I don't really think that can be fixed without making the games bad, but it would be nice.

Dragon Court (at ffiends.com ) is a pretty cool game though it's mostly just single player. And I don't think it works with the newer versions of Java for some reason.

But how you just click on a place, and then you're there is cool. There's no pathfinding or walking around or anything.

#2 Resisting the the urge to post a sarcastic Hamlet quote...

Ryan, both the points you mentioned aren't even close to new. Ultima Online had "houses" and Castles etc. and they were a good element then. Somewhat strange but where fairly important in the 'end game'. I can't think of a MMORPG that doesn't have level variable quests, just in most games you have to work that out for yourself. Anarchy Online (and others) has a quest 'generator' but it really is rather dull.

Steve, stangely most MMORPG's are actually modem friendly since the "refresh rate" are fairly low. Even 'realtime' ones such as Planetside have fairly low data transfer requirements. If you can half your data transfer you half your hosting bill. Which hits the MMOG providers the only place they seem to care about... in the wallet. The side effect is they're modem friendly.

If you can think of anything "New" in a MMOG you can bet it was done an eternity ago in a MUD/MU* etc. Give or take the graphics bit :)

Note : This post is not a flame, and may contain traces of nut.

#3 Gareth Davies:
Tell me if you have ever had a game do this?

The spell system in the game will be very Player involved. There will be alot of speel in the start of the game but in to go past those spells the player must Research them. The way player research is the buy or build a lab and hire Researcher/s (who will have a skill level which will depend on how much it cost per/month to work for you). As you research you gain research point to use toward creating any magic they choose (the option for magic will seem endless). Also during research you researchs may need item which some you can buy but alot you will need to to a quest for your researcher to get it (this will hopefully give poeple something to do besides the quests)

Plus those to ideas are just this that are in other games, I never siad they were "new", i just wanted to start the ball.

Steve Fletcher:
The team is planning to have H&S (hack&slash) Zones (most likely they will be mostly caves and dungeons). I dont know yet but i hope that we will be adding new quest few often to make the game none boring.

To ALL:
This game is going to be one of the most Player involved game ever created (or atlest that is our goal). Takes for the ideas so far and hopping to hear so more.

Thank You
Ryan Zec

#4 Yes, I don't think you should worry too much about whether the ideas are new, just about whether they're good.

Ryan:
That spell system is fine, but it's not all that new. Most people have an idea that is roughly similar when they want to make an RPG, but no one has been really able to implement having very many different kinds of spells.

The problem you're going to run into is that you're going to have place some limit on what different spells you can cast to cut down on the artwork for the spell effects. Or you can just make the spell effects not appear, but that's not great.

As for having to research some of the spells, it would only be a minor change. It would be a nice feature though.

Try to refrain from saying things like "This game is going to be one of the most Player involved game ever created (or atlest that is our goal)." That says nothing about the game except that it's not a movie or a book. It's just one of those things that people always say. It's more appropriate for an advertisement than for asking for ideas in a forum.

Gareth:
I think you're right about modems not having problems with MMORPGS. Thinking back, I have tried a couple of MMORPGs that worked pretty well. There were others that didn't work, but these were all freeware or beta games. So that may have been the problem.

Unfortunately, the ones I really wanted to play were the ones that didn't work. :(

So just ignore everything I said about modem speed.

#5 Let me just start out by saying that I am IGNORANT when it comes to MMORPGS, however, I am a veteran of independent game development in the mobile market (but I am still largely ignorant). Sorry if this post seems long-winded, but I hope something will be gained from it.

I don't think any game designer starts out with the goal: "This will be one of the LEAST INTERACTIVE and MOST UN-interesting games of all time" (unless you work for a publisher)

Game design is a careful balance of give and take, and not everything we dream up can be implemented. Keep in mind that you would probably like to launch the game sometime this decade.

I've never understood the concept of "owning a house" in a game. Personally, I would find it much more interesting to be a rogue, nomad or wanderer. Finding adequate shelter and food becomes a daily part of life, and it reinforces the idea that players must help each other and develop their own communities. Of course there will be those PKs (Player Killers), but with the protection of a clan, defenses will be more than adequate.

Of course, there will be clans of thieves and killers as well, for those players that are just plain mean and evil. These kinds of traits will just develop naturally, and the world sort of becomes this ever evolving "thing".

The main problem with most MMORPs or MUDs, is that the server tries to prohibit this kind of behavior, by kicking or banning players for bad behavior. This is because the game is not designed to account for this, and it tends to prevent an enjoyable gaming experience.

But what is the backbone of most games? Survival, struggle, sense of accomplishement... etc. If you allow players to be plain evil and seek to steal or kill, then you really have no need for hack-n-slash dungeons, as the struggle for defense and survival remains a constant.

If EVERYONE wants to be evil, then that is just the natural unfolding of the world- an evolution of the game. Eventually, it will just balance itself.

But, balance needs to be upheld. You don't want to be working on developing a character for eons, then have them suddenly killed in a raid and lose everything. This isn't fun- its pure frustration. Again, this is why most games prohibit that kind of behavior.

(continued...)

#6 So I would suggest some kind of a karma system. The more you help others, the more sense of community you have, the more powerful you become. If a player wants to spend 100 hours helping others in the community in order to gather enough karma (power) to kill and pillage in a raid, then great. At least they earned it.

In regard to a spell system, I would suggest spells based on very basic attributes which can be combined to develop more complex spells. Lets start simply with a couple spells:

FIRE- causes combustion or any object that is touched to burst into flames- nothing complex.

THROW- causes an object to be thrown, if possible.

Combining FIRE+THROW=FIREBALL

You could do the same with an ICEBALL. Or how about combining HEALTH+THROW to create a ball of health that can be thrown at one of your friends in order to heal them on the frontline of defense? The point is, that the results are not always known in advance. To combine attributes, the player must have a certain amount of karma and experience- and possibly invest a little time (maybe a full 24 hours to combine each attribute). Combining ICE+FIRE+THROW, and the FIRE and ICE cancel each other out. But since this kind of combination would require a full 3 days, people would quickly learn which attribute should and shouldn't be combined.

How complex is this to implement? I doubt anyone knows for sure. However, one of the games I worked on had a weapons system similar to this. I had about 22 attributes to work with, and combined them in various ways to create weapons (25 weapons in all). In order to create something as simple as a grenade, I would combine the attributes BOUNCE+GRAVITY+TIMEDEXPLODE+ANIMATED.

So I really didn't set out to MAKE a grenade, its just that when I combined those elements, thats what happened. So I implemented it into the game.

The scary part, is this kind of system is really open ended, and the results can be unknown. So seriously powerful weapons (too powerful) are a severe game balance issue.

Even with games like Everquest (which I CANNOT stand, btw), they constantly introduce items that are too powerful and end up revoking them later on- pissing off alot of players that worked very hard to acquire that item.

So in the end, I guess this whole thing should be less about gathering "ideas" and more about establishing "fun and balance".

-randall

#7 The Spell System:

The game "Dungeon Master" had a similar spell system where you combine various symbols to get spells.

It was similar to what you mentioned, but not really the same. There wasn't much variety in what the spells actually did.

But different symbols did have different effects, albeit the effects were all similar.

I had assumed this is what he meant.

I wanted to do something similar in the RPG (not an MMORPG) I'm making (slowly). But I didn't want the player to have to do various symbol manipulation. It's cooler to do configure the individual spells, but it's alot more work.

I made a big list of spells having a big menu listing spells. It's kind of annoying, but there's a reason for this. I made some COMBO spells that combine a whole lot of effects (and cost alot of MP to cast).

It would be too much work for the player to create each spell every time he wants to cast it, but it wouldn't be too bad if he just created it once and put it in a list.

I'll give you an example by telling you a potential problem I foresee in the RPG I'm making...

I think the combo spells I made are a little too powerful. I could make them cost more MP, but then you wouldn't be able to cast them at all, so why have them? I can't be sure though because I can't really test anything until there's some actual content in the game.

I think that I will just make the combo spells have fewer different effects. Maybe I will also restrict each combo spell to being within one element of magic (that would make things simpler in some other ways too). Right now, you can just completely obliterate everyone with combo spells.

But with a customizable spell system, it would be impossible to check thousands of variations (though you wouldn't need to check all of them - just possibilities that are significantly different).

So, in conclusion, if you want to use a customizable spell system, at least restrict what effects you can combine. Or only allow them to combine 2 or 3 effects into one spell.

My only other advice is to make it only take a few mouse clicks to create the spell so that you don't have to create them in advance.

#8 Yeah, I meant that they have to combine the spell only once, and then the formula is stored in their spellbook. So theoretically, not all fireballs would necessarily look and act the same if you had a wide variety of attributes, and each magic user would have a unique spellbook. Blue fire or red fire or white fire. With or without smoke trails. Volumetric explosions, radial explosions, or explosions blowing shards and hot coals.

When creating the weapon set for our game, I just started combining attributes to see what they did. Oh, that acts like a heat-seeking missle... this one acts like a shotgun...

Besides the attributes, we also had variables which could be set. So we could adjust the amount of damage, the sound effects, the explosion gfx, projectile gfx, etc. Of course, these attributes weren't modifiable in-game, it was basically a config file that the engine would load and parse when the game started. So it wasn't a dynamic system.

Combining runes would be a neat idea... basically the players need to seek the runes in order to create spells. They can even trade or sell them. The runes could even hold a depletable energy source, so that the search for runes remains constant.

#9 Randall: the trouble with a "karma" system like you mention is that computers are notoriously bad at determining situational ethics. ;) For instance, attacking someone is "bad", unless they attack you first. Right? But players have in the past usually found sneaky ways to use such a feature to make other players take a hit for it. A more clear example: a thief stealing something is wrong (bad karma), right? But what if he is stealing back something that was stolen from him? What if he is helping to return stolen goods to someone else? Or maybe he is stealing the item to prevent something far worse from occuring?

Stuff like that makes even decent AIs dizzy, from what I understand. Nevermind the fairly primitive AI abilities that are implemented in most MMOs.

It's a great idea. But in practice, it's better to simply give the players the tools they need to police their own communities. Give them tools to identify and punish those who transgress against the community as a whole, and they'll use them. In general, trying to get a policeman to play judge just doesn't work; ethics and morality require a human frame of reference still.

#10 Karma doesn't have to mirror the real world. In fact, we as humans even have severe difficulty in determining this ourselves. Its a pretty difficult process to explain to the judicial system that your thievery and killing was warranted, and for the good of society. We can't possibly hope to integrate something so complex into AI.

Rather, what I was proposing is that certain tasks are always bad, regardless. Even if you are attacked, killing the opponent is bad. Stealing is always bad, even if it was your object to begin with. Its not those things that are difficult to keep in line, its the GOOD deeds that are difficult. You can't award good karma points for giving objects to people- players would just stand there exchanging the same object over and over to boost their points.

All systems can be broken, and we would be foolish to think that we could create a system that was foolproof. The best we can hope for is a system that doesn't fall apart when it fails.

#11 I have no idea why this double-posted.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

#12 I'd like to share a bit of wisdom for everyone here. #1 I found out last week at IGC(thanks Jay), it's only right to pass it on:

1) People run away from you when you say MMO(just say it in the Help Wanted ads and you'll see what I mean). Say PW(Persistent World) instead. I just learned that acronym last week myself, and it's very useful. Besides, you may launch and be successful, and never be a *massive* online game, but you'll *always* be a PW ;) And it's nowhere near as hard to type, hehe...

2) You want to make a good game? STOP DESIGNING AROUND FEATURES! Sorry, had to shout that because noone ever listens. Make a story or world, and then decide what you want you player to do in that world, and from there, your features and gameplay will evolve. Don't say "let's put this feature in!" and then try and figure out a good application for it later, because it makes the game less interesting. Like Tolkien said, make the map first, and the story will come naturally. Make your map first, and then the story, and then the game features/mechanics.

3) Don't start right away. You can do most of the design work without taking on artists and coders for the first few months of your project, and you'll have more docs to give them, which means they'll take you more seriously and stay longer, giving you a better chance to suceed. Don't underestimate the power of documentation. Noone cares how cool a game is if it's written on half a napkin. FWIW, I gave my coders/artists 100+ pages of design docs when I started my project, and since 8 months ago, the docs have doubled in size. PW's are hard to design for(and those docs aren't even the lists of items yet).

4) Do read a sh!tload of books on this subject, or else you may make a HUGE mistake during design or production. And small mistakes in other projects may have little impact in the end, but here, the impact is large. Very large.

5) Be original. There's a million Mideval PW's out there, and the worst thing to do is try and put one out that has no originality to it. Why not a fantasy world or something totally off the wall, like a comedic PW? Do something people would look at and say "Gee, that's pretty cool, lemme try that"-and then spend cash every month for it.

6) Don't see launch day as the end. Remember, it's an online game, and launching it only "begins" the job of working on it. It's not a boxed game you can leave alone on a shelf to fend for itself. You have support, taxes, colocation fees, bandwidth fees, more team management, bugs, fraud complaints(you'll be dealing with credit cards, right?), lawyers, etc, etc, etc...

7) Write every single thing down. Save those half-napkins for when you need to flesh out an idea and put it in nicely ordered and formated Word docs. And use simple, to the point wording. Your coders and artists don't care if it's cool, they're already working on it, so you don't have to sell it to them. Don't use l33t speak, and use spell check, or else your team will lose respect for you.

8) Stay with your vision.

9) And spend 90% of your free time for the next few years on it, to see it work. I spent 2 years on the docs, and now almost a year in production, and it's still a long ways off, but I'm not stopping. It's a long, hard road, so think on that before you step into these projects.

Just a bit to think on, and it's all general info that anyone making a PW can use and benefit from, even myself =)

#13 I'll add some stuff to that list:

Go to the NRG site (www.newriders.com) - several very new, VERY great books on game design, and some of the only recent online game design books on the market today. Of note: "Developing Online Games" is a gem, and there is another called "Designing Virtual Worlds" by none other than Richard Bartle himself (of MUD1, MUD2, and the "Bartle Test" fame). Both well worth reading.

Next, go look up a book in the business section of any good bookstore - Guerilla Marketing (actually, several nice books in that series). Read it, live it. I'll admit - I am a businessperson/entrepreneur first and a coder second. But because of that, I see things from a different angle. You are NOT going to compete with the big boys at their game. You probably do not have the dollars, nor the personnel, nor the genre experience, nor the brand recognition, nor the hot licenses. You want to win against the giants, play it smart and CHANGE THE RULES. Find that neglected niche. Market in a new and creative way. Work together to add value to your products. And, um, read that book - it's full of an incredible amount of business sense info that you can use to help fuel the new ideas that will make things happen for you.

#14 About karma...

Karma is usually annoying because the designers' opinions on what's good are probably different from yours. And then you find yourself trying to find the sneaky ways to do bad things without losing karma, as someone else mentioned.

But this is related to #2 in Ted's list. Don't just put karma in because you can. Only put it in if it's related to the game. Also, it would be good if you kept a few things in mind:

A) Don't make karma gain or loss from one particular situation be really important. Always have some way to catch up elsewhere. Make sure that the player knows that this is the case.
B) In some cases, you may want several categories of "karma", like in Ultima IV. Ultima IV was popular (though I personally didn't like it much). It had 8 different virtues, and sometimes you would lose some of one virtue when you gained some of another. Look it up on google.com if you don't know what I'm talking about.
C) Don't make karma be just some random stat. If it's just a stat that doesn't affect the game, there should be no way to lower it. People will go out of their way to try to go through the game you want them to and not enjoy it. If karma is in the game in the "standard" way, it must be an important plot device of some sort. For instance, look at the Ring in the Lord of the Rings series. It corrupts its owner. Whenever you use it you get "impurity" or something (i.e. the opposite of karma). If you use it too much, it will change the storyline - maybe you'll end up doing things you don't want to in dialogues.

#15 About Ted's list...

6) is a good reason not to do a MMORPG. There are after-development costs to other games as well, but MMORPGs are expensive to maintain even for major corporations. And if you think your game is going to be better that Ultima Online and its ilk, you are either wrong or have years of experience and a professional team already gathered.

8) needs more explanation. Keep the main ideas of your game - do NOT change those after you have some programming, art, and music. But any minor detail of the game should be reviewed constantly and changed if necessary.

[deleted some junk that wasn't really applicable]

#16 Sorry Ryan I'm going to divert this thread a bit.

Steve, I've said this before in other MMORPG threads but I'll clarify it here. I don't see what's so hard technically about building a MMOG. MUD's (Multi. User. Dungeons. and their many other acronyms.) existed since before "PC's" did. The main issue is the vast amount of art content required. Gameplay has been all but irrelevant in most of the MMORPG's I've played, with design errors a 2 year old could spot. I think if you could build a "great game", you could easily knock the big boys off their horses. MMO games should be driven by their communities, since this is what most of the players stay for. And with the exception of the vast marketing budget, there's no reason an indie can't do that. Probably not a great first project though ;)

To overcome the 'content' issue the avenues I'd take are:

1. Procedural content generation, if you need to do something manually then it's probably going to take too long. Try to let the player play the game they want to. If it's a hack and slash, give them as many dungeons as they want, tailored to their choices. If it's a grass cutting MMORPG make sure they can find the kind of lawn's they like ;) With the basics built on the fly it leads to...

2. Emergent gameplay. This kind of goes hand in hand with 1. If you can procedurally generate a good level of detail then let the gameplay build itself, you can create a very large play area if you want it. But I think detail is far better than quantity...

3. Downsize, I'd take 1 busy detailed city over a 1000 planets with a 1000 cities if they all look the same, which is what you get if you follow 1 blindly ;) Since these games are community driven, you need to start that early. Build one area really well and release a demo. Then go from there. You probably can't win the technology arms race, have the best graphics etc. But you can manage the best gameplay!

4. Don't follow the mainstream examples. Can you name a MMORPG that would actually be interesting as a single player game? Everquest would be insanely dull without the other people. If you can build a game that you could enjoy playing on your own, then adding a community of people must be a step up!

The server infrastructure for a decent MMO isn't as expensive as you'd think. It does have an ongoing cost, but to support an initial launch it wouldn't cost much. Then with luck the player base can support itself (be it with subscriptions or their own servers).

I don't think any idea in a game should be considered carved in stone, if it sucks bench it. Just look at the time you spent developing as a learning experiance and move on, it'll save you and your game in the long run. Probably not a good idea to change your FPS into a RTS a month before launch though ;)

Well enough of my 'insights', i'll go back to building my DragonSphere'z MMORPG!!!11! ;)

#17 I have to agree with Gareth on this, there's a few things people overlook when they talk about MMO's:

1) It doesn't have to be massive: There's PW's out there with only 2-3 thousand subscribers that are "floating". If you can do a bit better, you can grow, so it's not that hard. I've heard of Tribes servers hosting up to 1000 players, so it can be done for cheap(build your own clusters instead of buying $200,000 ones from EMC).

2) Procedural content: Maybe not the models(well, you can, there's ways to do that), but the stats, which is how Anarchy Online did it, and saves you a lot of time, because it's relatively easy to do.

3) Story: Gareth covered this, as did I. Story is king in games, and if you can pull off story in a PW(as quite a few MUD's did), then you'll make money.

4) You don't have to unseat EQ or SWG to be a sucess: Fact is, without millions of dollars, you probably can't pull it off, just because you'll need 24-hour teams and a NOC and a sh!tload of other stuff. I did the budget... 8.5 million over 5 years, and while you'll make it back easy, where're you getting it from in the first place? Publishers will screw you, and you'll see *maybe* a tenth of that profit. Go the guerilla route(Kevin's idea is very good) and build up a small fanbase you can serve on 2 or 3 servers.

PW's can and have been done by indies. Just don't look to unseat the big boys and concentrate on the game. If it's that good, everything else will fall into place...

#18 I not saying that this game will only work with 10,000+ poeple (like everquest), the game would be good even with a player based on a few thousand.

#19 I'd say you can have an awesome game with less than 20 active people (maybe not commercially viable, but definatly good). Take NeverWinterNights as an example. The single player was ok, but a good multiplayer game is awesome.

A "few" thousand players would make any indie game a titantic success. 20k - 30k a month subscription... that would do nicely :)

#20 @Gareth: I heard about one PW that had broken even at 2500 subscribers, but I can't remember the name for the life of me... He also mentioned that in Korea(where Lineage is king), there's a bunch of smaller ones that come and go, almost like boxed games, PW's with shorter lifespans that are sucessful. It's a niche that can be tapped by indies here too, though I won't knock the NWN multiplayer, because I've heard lots of good stuff about it, and it definitely has merit(or else it wouldn't have done so well).