MMO IDEAS( post what u think should be in a mmo)

#21 Oops double post how did that hppen lol and yea maybe there should be like 2 or 3 modelers but no more and more like technology people should be more focused on the aspects this thread has been talking about!

#22 Hmm i think i will oepn a thread on this

#23 Ok i have made it: http://www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=80077

#24 @Cohen: If you hit the refresh button after posting, you can cause repeat-posts.

Also, I was leaning towards pure technology development using programmer art and placeholders. 3 modelers is about 2.5 too many for something where you're developing better quest generation, AI, or interaction methods.

#25 Oh kk ty lol :) hmm yea thats true but still just on the safe side it should have maybe 1 modeler lol and yea quest generation ai and interaction would be the main goal more immersion then models because if the immersion factor is like 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 then the player will be immersed whether the models are crappy or not!

#26 Okay, I read the new thread... My own opinion is that a community MMO will not work, only because people are too busy working on their own. You may want to go in a different direction (feel free), but my impression on this was that it was to be a way for the community to develop new features rather than an actual game, and there's a wide difference between those two goals. Just my two cents.

#27 Excactly i doubt that people would want to take their own time to help out the community in making a giant game would be cool though wouldn't it? If EVERY SINGLE person in the community helped make it that would be well.... kwl i think that would be the best mmo ever personally and yea i kind of strayed of topic this is just about the features in making the game

#28 I hate dragons and crap.

How about MMO BaseBall !

And well we are at it how about make it half ways realistic and ditch the cartoon style.

#29 How about MMO Postal. With church burning, puppy drowning, prostitution, baby killing, drug using/dealing, wife beating, serial killing, etc. The quest is to blend in with normal people and do normal everyday things. You gain levels by doing something boring (no change there), but as soon as you do something "bad" then the whole world knows about and it's open season on you. Maybe become captain of the neighborhood watch or even mayor of your town if you stay "good" enough.

#30 No, I definitely think that idea would me much more surreal (and funny) if the people who did good things were bad people. Like there's a guy helping an old lady across the street, and you get points if you MOW THEM BOTH DOWN!!! Mwahahaha!!!

But I think a massively multiplayer Postal game would just be too much mayhem. If that's possible.

#31 I don't have much new to add, just a bunch of agreements that other posters have stated in their posts;

For instance

I second Ovoon's opnion about a different genre. Sci Fi being my first love, more sci-fi MMO's, and not sci-fi based on movies. (Yeah, I am anticipating STAR TREK online, and have never played STAR WARS. Though I do want to check out Tabula Rasa, and Anarchy -- I heard that one is free!!!) Another type of genre is of course horror (if Hellgate:London does any good, maybe we'll see a lot more. A friend of mine had that one for months, and she claims it is actually worth the money to go out and play that game.) Next will come the super spy or spy genre. While this may be last on my list, it is certainly not the last in my favs. Yeah, I'm talking superheros. There are some men in this world who have never read a comic book, and most of us who have had to reluctantly grow out of them to put food on the table, pay the mortgage, etc. But we still love them, sometimes even more than the little woman we call wife.

With the output Marvel is doing with movies nowadays, it surprises me that DC has beat them first to come up with an online MMO. (Perhaps there is a financial agenda that I am not aware of there)

I too would like more control over my main character, but I would force the designers to give the payer a choice between a point and click control scheme and character conttrol scheme.

Yes, definitely improve the leveling up system. Less horde combat. Different ype of leveling up. More intellectual puzzles/riddles to solve. More type of gameplay than combat. Make NPC dialog more extensive.

Let MMO's characters have a friend, or a small party of two or three people. Not necessarily six, or seven, but four people as a max should do. (This would lead in to a idea I would have, more off-screen missions) its an extension of a thing I had seen in dungeon siege. You can seperate a character from your party and then later go back and pick them up.

#32 Fun, in short everyone has different ideas.

Make crafting unique but hard, not pointless, not endless farming for materials, let people farm metal, so someone else can smith etc, time spent = reward for those who spend it.

Balls - gowns dresses tux's did you get to the tailor on time.

Dress up - no bikini armor, but are you in full "Death God Armor" for a spot of tea? silly.

In short, look at how second life makes itself fun, it lets the player do basically what they want. I don't mean the lack of rules, that I dislike, I mean the variety.

Its not about becoming "god" first and overpowering all over players, its about "wow that person has a better fashion sense, or created a new dance using moves that are built in.

Bards = fun, songs and stories, contests for the best story that fits the games genre, with rewards from players.

Player generated quests, I am a blacksmith I need 300 bars of steel so I will hire someone to go mine metals for me.. that means I may undercut someones price but in the end research new patterns and level up my smith to create neat new gear, and not just to twink, too easy to twink and you get back to the plevel grind thing again.

Let groups be AS THEY WISH, Sorry the Overdragon cannot be beaten cause your group is 6 toons large...bah let groups be as they wish and code combat and magic to the realities of combat don't code combat to the realities of a group size. Thats hard coding, and anyone with coding skills will tell you, not smart.

Too many games copy eq or wow or you name it, its time to break completely away from the "tried and true" come up with something off the wall big time different, like Tekken but 3d for combat, skill based but multiple players, timer based shared strategic rpgs, where people can think out their moves (short time periods like 5 seconds so no stale play) and do combo moves

Imagine a group of 5 bards doing powerful songs in concerty/orchestra, or 5 warriors combo slashing down beasts too hard for solo etc. While you risk the "perfect group symptoms" you can have fun with it too.

Mounts, everyone loves mounts, do you have a gnome/engineer type in your game (now there is cliche) make it so nearly any critter can be built or any device make engineering really fun, make up your own rules, it takes steam to drive this mob or electric for that, based on a database/grid thats logically thought out so players can make stuff that you may not have thought of yet, but will be reasonable fast/powerful according to the limits of the tech.

Just my opinion.

#33 www.rinkworks.com/fnovel/
If you're doing a fantasy game, I highly reccomend you take the test above. It's geared towards novels, so there's tons of plot-specific stuff that doesn't really apply to an MMO, but it's just generally good advice for a fantasy setting ;)

#34 @Michael Perry

Quote:All I want to do in MMOs is craft. I want to be that guy that makes your weapons. Let me craft your full set of armor. I don't want to stop there. I want to focus on a particular line of artisan abilities.

Architect Line: Start by making toys or small furniture. Progress through the skilltree and ranks to make increasingly more difficult objects. End result would be the creation and selling of houses and town components that would allow for player run cities.

Honestly...that's all I want to do. Forget fame and glory. I want to make your houses, chairs, and swords =)

They already have this MMO. It's called Second Life.

Most genres for an MMO have been explored, in my opinion.
Fantasy: WoW, Guild Wars, D&D Online, etc.
Sci-Fi: EVE Online, SWG, Tabula Rasa (good game, badly marketed though), etc.
Historical: Mostly about pirates
Super-Hero: CoH/CoV
Real-life: The Sims Online, Second Life, etc.

Some MMO environments I haven't seen any or much of:
- Westerns
- WWII Era
- Post-apocalyptic worlds (though Fallen Earth is in the works, and Fallout 3 [not an MMO] should satisfy my craving for this for now)
- Kid-friendly MMO (if thats even wise to do, probably not - kids should be outside playing anyway :P) that teaches kids stuff like our eco-system (reference EcoQuest adventure game from years ago - my age is showing lulz).
- Alternated realities (a la Alice in Wonderland)

I guess the point would be, if you thought of it, chances are someone else has also. This shouldn't discourage anyone, however, as has been mentioned before, it is the content of the game that makes or breaks a product.

Unfortunately, this brings up a simple problem; and that is inherently an MMO needs to have mass appeal to the widest possible audience (looking at it from say, a game publisher's POV). As such, some great MMOs just might not see the light of day due to low-market-interest (or what the powers to be might consider low).

There's a pretty good list of every known MMO out there on MMORPG.com: www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm

As for the grind of killing stuff, gather stuff, collect loot, level up, rinse and repeat, well... yeah it gets boring. I agree there needs to be more community interaction in MMO games, and this interaction shouldn't be forced upon people, rather it should be the "natural choice" to better the game experience. I've often played an MMO and asked myself why the game is even an MMO in the first place - half the time I'm running around killing stuff and questing by myself anyway. PvP and dungeon instances (requiring groups in order to kill anything) are just a couple of ways developers have used to justify the MMO aspect of a game. Surely there must be more.

To reinforce this, the state of the game should be shaped by the choices the players make as a whole. For example, say we all run in and storm some castle in some fictitious MMO. "Woohoo! Hooray! We've won!" But the outcome of that battle, and every other battle is meaningless since the next content update will roll out with the same new quests, and the same new stories, whether or not anyone is even playing. Contrasting this is the one of the latest buzzwords in gaming - "emergence". Emergence in gaming is a relatively new aspect, and I would encourage all of you to read more about it if you can stomach the scientific nature of the subject. Would emergent systems make a game better? Not necessarily, but in some cases it might.

One other quick idea I'd like to throw out there is that we need more games (MMO or not) that challenges the player's mind. Sure mindless entertainment by smashing that Enchanted Two-handed Axe of Greater Stupidity into the side of a dragon's skull is fun sometimes, and a good way to take your mind off of a stressful day. But, on the other hand, the sense of accomplishment from solving a puzzle that made me think is far greater than killing 100 boars.

After all this mindless talk, let's not forget one of the most fundamental principles of any game - make it fun.

#35 One more idea I forgot to toss out there - an MMO sports game. Players could either be a single player tied into one team for a whole season, or control a franchise managing stats/trades/etc (two separate type games). Someone else would be better at thinking of this since I haven't played any sports games online. For all I know, they have something like this on XBox Live for Madden. *shrugs*

#36 I think an Alice in Wonderland MMO would be absolutely win.

I'm serious - I'd love to have any sort of game with that wierd, wonderful kind of setting. Of course, I'd never be happy with it, because, being a video game, it would have to include repetitive and ugly gameplay segments - but whatever. It's a cool idea...

#37 @D.L. - Second Life doesn't quite do it for me, and doesn't really fit the MMO Crafter design I had in mind. I get your point though.

#38 @Michael - Lol, Yeah I figured you meant more than what SL has to offer (though some might argue SL is what you make of it)... perhaps a more structured system of artisan development that follows set rules - where ones prestige is gained by becoming a specialty crafter of sorts.

Star Wars Galaxies has a crafting system similar to what you've described. You start your profession as a Crafter (I think thats what it's called - it's been a while since I played SWG) and start by making simple items such as drinking glasses, or dice. Then as you level up, you start making more complex items such as component parts, clothes, etc. As you progress, you are given choices to become a specialist in one aspect of crafting or another (armourer, weapons smith, engineer [making droids and such], and yes, even architect [homes, guild halls, city improvements, etc.]). The game even allowed the setup of your own vendors to sell your wares. It's a pretty complex system - the most complex in an MMO that I've seen. SWG unfortunately has been crippled with game play issues not related to this crafting system that has turned many subscribers away.

I guess games should have a more in depth crafting system, or even a more involved one. As it is, most systems are just a combination of skill level, raw materials, recipes, and some sort of tool (crafting station, anvil, etc), and then set specialties towards the end-game levels. Perhaps more flexible options in the items crafted to reflect the style of the crafter? The complexity cost of such a system might be too high for most games though (both in programming it to work correctly, and in data management - not to mention that a lot of people probably won't have the patience for it).

#39 Thanks for this thread. It's the sort of discussion I enjoy reading and responding to.

MMO's are the way of the future. Just my opinion. Millions of people want to play them for the Fun and the escape from reality, and glorified chat room factors.
One reason MMO's are popular is the Chat channels. Many of you remember sitting in a Yahoo chat room where the disucssion was the XBOX or the next Cart game?.. perhaps the chat room was more sleezy for those that are sexually frustrated, or maybe it was for those people that have been alone so long they just wish to chat ( and boy can they talk on and on ).
Well, MMO's can cater to the interests of those Chat room flies ( as opposed to bar flies ). But chatting must be easy to enter and exit from. An example of NOT easy to enter would be: To chat press the Enter key twice, click on the text bar and press Enter when done. ( yes I know an MMO like that. ( i don't play it anymore now that my fingers have grown back ).
Make the chat channels responsive, because nobody likes entering text on a bar just to see that keys they are pressing are not showing up on the screen as fast as they can type.. a short delay is a hassle for the typist.
Another reason MMO's are popular is the Tradeskills as Mr Perry mentioned.
Tradeskills are alot like a model airplane hobby, or gardening, or electronics tinkering.. it takes the mind off of things for awhile, requires skill, and often means collecting the components to achieve an end result which is very addictive especially when the Tradeskiller has finally made something they have been attempting to make for the last 2 weeks.
One tradeskill i used to like was Farming.. really.. you had to literally plant your crops and gather them up to be made into various products or sold to other tradeskillers for their interests.
Some MMO's offer Jewelry making, Boat building, Armor and Weapons, Clothing.. pretty much the basics, and the items are often better then the NPC bought versions ( as they should be ).
One thing I have always said to online friends in these games is to keep inter-dependency alive. You need the Alchemist to make and item for your end result.. the Alchemist needs a Potter to make the Vials, the Potter needs the Miner to produce materials.. etc.

Make trades between players fast and painless.
Nobody like going to a lag ridden zone to purchase from a Player-Vendor, and nobody likes standing out in the middle of a frozen terrain with enemies bereathing on you just waiting for the trade window to accept the items or to complete the trade due to bad coding.
Make the trades secure for each of the players involved, so that when a player clicks the Accept button nothing can be removed from either side of the trade window.

MMO's often have a virtual Ecomomy which should be balanced..This means the game should remove from the society as much as it produces from monster loot, or quest NPC's or whatever means of generating currency is. Too many times I have watched game economies take a dive for the worst in just the first week out of beta, because the Players goal will be to amass all the money they can, horde it, and when selling items to other players they will jack up the price to some outrageous amount.. knowing people will pay it if they want it bad enough. This usually happens from the Higher level players who's sole intention is to die with the most money in a virtual economy. Those same players will offer high prices for something very small just to get people used to seeing that items sold for high amounts, and before you know it.. the semi rare Tin Dagger that does 12 damage for a level 5 player is being sold for 100 gold and what level 5 player is going to have 100 gold just hanging around ?

MMO's need policing, if a community is left to themselves, they will eat each other alive. Before you know it your players are dropping out of game because there is no Referee to stand in and make the call / decision.
MMO's that depend on players to police themselves are ok if the game is written in such a way that it's possible to punish a severe case of the cussing or harrassment some players will do, just because their own lives are so uneventful that they need to ruin others enjoyment of the game, To feel better about themselves.
( this happens far too often ).
At the very least, there should be some people designated as a referee that can step in and be the bouncing board for those few with a hot temper.

MMO's need real PvP. Not some half baked player kill player either. Real PvP is a contest of strength or cunning or speed, coupled with skills and usually is for those that are somewhat of a match in levels and skills. Don't make the mistake of letting your highest level players get to be so bored that all they have left to do is find as many young players and defeat them as quickly and inconveniently as possible.
This might be fun or funny to the killer, but it ruins the game fun for the receiver who cannot defend or even run away from a greater strength like those that play the "end game".

MMO's need vast amounts of resources for tradeskillers, which should be dynamically increased depending on the number of people that are at the same area and attempting to get the same item or resource.
Who like to travel across the game world for the rare resource just to find it's empty and won't regen fast enough to supply 20 people all needing the same thing.

MMO's need to maintain a Society of sorts, not just the game story, but the Players that help bring the game world alive. This society is collectively the NPC's and Players, Players interests change, so should the NPC's quests change every so often. It keeps the players interested and when done right it can appear as if the NPC's are aware the seasons are changing, or aware that the Beast has been slain a million times this month so the NPC will alter the quest for some other unused or rarely used zone where a different Beast lurks... you get the idea. Guess that means Depth.. as mentioned above from other folks.

Since my fingers are cramping now, i'll just sort of leave off here.. but I have a huge list that could write a book in this Thread.

#40 This is exactly what I mean by my post above. MMOs get a bad rap because of all the kids that come in here off their WoW high and have a vision in their head of making the next great MMO, which is undoubtedly almost identical to WoW just reskinned. But looking at all the ideas here shows that an MMO could actually be GREAT, not just a great seller.

It's one of those things that makes it nice to see things from the indie perspective. Now, the only downside is that we're also working on an indie budget...