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The Perfect MMO (Wishful Thinking)
Rheanon
Member UncommonPosts: 130
There are so many games out there and so many complaints. Just look over these boards and you will see how disatisfied many players are with the games currently available. There is always a crucial element missing.. be it housing, crafting, pvp, pve, etc., ad nauseum. To me, the ideal MMO would be a crafter's heaven. Everything in the game would be player made, from the highest tier armor to the kitchen flatware, with lots of variety too. Of course there would be player housing with many models to chose from and the houses would be player built with total freedom of object placement in same. Player made ships would roam the seas with corresponding sea battles and, of course, players could swim underwater. PVP would be a la DAoC in its day, with armies of players zerging to enemy keeps with siege engines to bring down the walls. There would be PvP and PvE dungeons as well as raids and instancing. Rare parts would drop in them which could be used by crafters to make the best armor and weapons in the game. There would be quests and lore to the depth and intricacy of LOTRO and the graphics would be as beautiful as LOTRO too. There would be a balance where players could solo or group and still progress in the game. There would be player guilds with guild banners and colors. Thieves could climb walls and infiltrate enemy towns and actually steal things. Perhaps there could be a rares market like UO had. There would be a wide variety of mounts.. flying mounts too which could be quested.... A trading black market as in EQ2 and WOW would be nice too. Some classes could have teleporting abilities, others levitation and still others breathing underwater. The list goes on and on... So what's the point? Will there ever be a game that incorporates all these things? Not likely but its ok to imagine I suppose 
Comments
I added paragraphs for you so people will actually read it:
There are so many games out there and so many complaints. Just look over these boards and you will see how disatisfied many players are with the games currently available. There is always a crucial element missing.. be it housing, crafting, pvp, pve, etc., ad nauseum.
To me, the ideal MMO would be a crafter's heaven. Everything in the game would be player made, from the highest tier armor to the kitchen flatware, with lots of variety too. Of course there would be player housing with many models to chose from and the houses would be player built with total freedom of object placement in same. Player made ships would roam the seas with corresponding sea battles and, of course, players could swim underwater.
PVP would be a la DAoC in its day, with armies of players zerging to enemy keeps with siege engines to bring down the walls. There would be PvP and PvE dungeons as well as raids and instancing. Rare parts would drop in them which could be used by crafters to make the best armor and weapons in the game. There would be quests and lore to the depth and intricacy of LOTRO and the graphics would be as beautiful as LOTRO too.
There would be a balance where players could solo or group and still progress in the game. There would be player guilds with guild banners and colors. Thieves could climb walls and infiltrate enemy towns and actually steal things. Perhaps there could be a rares market like UO had. There would be a wide variety of mounts.. flying mounts too which could be quested.... A trading black market as in EQ2 and WOW would be nice too.Some classes could have teleporting abilities, others levitation and still others breathing underwater.
The list goes on and on... So what's the point? Will there ever be a game that incorporates all these things? Not likely but its ok to imagine I suppose
Crafting should never be manditory. If the monster doesn't have something cool why am I killing it? Did it kill my kitten or what? And if the monster just drops crafting materials... you've just pushed the loot up one "level" and made it harder for people to obtain.
And you want DAoC style pvp with stealthers climbing walls and people sieging walls/doors... Yet you want flying mounts? Basically you want everything, but you have no clue what wouldn't or would work together? Just in case this isn't painfully obvious... but unless your keeps are domed you've just made sieges pointless because everyone can just fly in. Example... imagine LOTR if the orcs just flew into helmsdeep (or whatever its called).
/face palm
Of course crafting should never be mandatory, but there should be a balance which seldom exists, except in Lotro to some extent. Conversely why should a player expend so much time and energy leveling up a crafter when dungeon drops render crafting obsolete at the higher levels. Perhaps there should be a balance between parts and actual weapons, etc, but the best should be player crafted. Yes it makes it more difficult to obtain but then again, it should not be so easy either
I guess you never played DAoC or you don't remember it if you did. The RvR in DAoC takes place in a separate zone. It would be easy to disable flying mounts in such a zone. The concept is not so different from LoTRO disabling cosmetics in the PvP zone. As to me wanting everything? Of course I do
GuildWars 2 is going to be the Perfect MMORPG
I think Ill go check out their web page
I hope so very much, ive yet to find an MMORPG to keep me playing, but GW2 does look amazing XD
I`m surprised that in this day & age, with cloud computing, internet everywhere, SDK's and IDE's that make life much easier for even the most novice of developers, IRC, Skype, free Project tracking tools... that there is not a single colocated team of volonteer fans that have not at least tried to make their common dreams happen.
I am well aware of the difficulties a professional colocated team faces (heck, I`m coordinating one), let alone volunteers that would work on spare time. Yet, this is not an impossible task.
As the OP stated, I see disgruntled players comments in every forum, asking for THE sandbox game they all dream about. Why not act on it?
Better to be crazy, provided you know what sane is...
Well ... I dont think a game needs to have everything craftermade. Its enough if everything in the game can be made by crafters, like it is, for example, in Lineage 2.
After leveling 5 crafters to Tier 5 in Vanguard (and the 6th one was at tier 4), I dont think I will ever want to repeat that experience. Its just boring in crazy amounts.
My "ideal" MMO would therefore have crafting bound to adventurer class. You would get better skills in crafting by leveling your character, your crafting skills would be determined by said class. You would still need to make some special quests to progress as a crafter, but it would be quests with a large amount of adventuring. In fact the best crafters would absolutely need guild support.
The crafting process itself would however look a lot like in Vanguard. But instead of trying to get an item to 100 points, I would make it an open process. You can reach "any" value, and you can repeat the attempt. You could make the item always even better, in fact you could spend hours trying to get the best possible sword or whatever. The better your skill is, the lower your chance to break the item and the higher your average crafting result.
Otherwise: Whow, never seen this thread before, and the remainder is totally not my standard answer (again reviewed and improved) to this kind of threads:
INTERFACE
- Skinnable
- Configurable (hotkeys etc)
- But NOT fully scriptable ! One keystroke, one action !
RULESYSTEM
- Highly customizeable character.
- Races could be : Human, Giant, Dwarf, Gnome, Elf, Mammal-like (Cat/Wolf/Fox/Bear/Pig/etc-like with tails)
- Races get subraces (like Highelf, Darkelf, Woodelf ...). Races get their own pool of racial talents, from which each player can choose a subset.
- There is a number of classes. Each has signature abilities and its own complex, unique, distinctive gameplay.
- Classes could be : Paladin, Darkknight, Berserker, Ranger, Rogue, Bard, Monk, Cleric, Shaman, Druid, Wizard, Psion
- There are also subclasses and further class customization options. These can be reset if the player wants to move into a different direction.
- All full tank and healer classes all are about equally good at their primary task.
- No customization of tanks or healers changes their performance in their primary task, so they are free to choose.
- No class is just "pure". Especially tanks and healers get secondary tasks they need to fulfill to excell in their primary task.
- Combat is highly dynamic. Abilities return with a certain random variance. One cant just learn one sequence of skills, even less just spam the same button.
- Many classes will also get point systems where certain abilities and conditions accumulate points while others use them up.
- There are two kinds of buffs: (a) automatic buffs on your group. Almost every class has some of these. (b) sustained buffs, which can be put on specific targets. They have a cost in your energy reserves, though.
- Opportunities like critical hits, successful feint, identifying opponent spell, opponent staggers, self is staggering etc open special abilities or change existing abilities.
- There are class synergies - like, one class may be able to make the opponent stagger, the next may be able to exploit the opponent staggering.
- Classes are balanced for PvP first, but also for PvE. No ability is useless in either PvP or PvE, even if their value and even effect might differ.
- Crafting is a complex and powerful game in itself, but not independent of adventuring. The basic leveling of crafting is rather quick, but your maximum crafter level is your adventuring level and you will also need to find recipes to learn.
- There are crafter classes which specialize into certain crafts, and the choice is limited by race and class. For example, berserkers cant learn to produce enchantments, and only dwarves and elves may learn to produce magic runes.
- Crafting anything but the most simple items requires products from other crafters as well.
- Getting the better recipes and the better ingredients requires help of others. The best recipes and ingredients drop from full guild efforts like raids.
- Each crafted item is unique, depending upon the crafters and materials involved, and upon a certain amount of random.
- The crafting process itself is a complex game. Necessary actions are performed and ingredients added, but also the crafter works at quality. The later is unlimited, so a sword with 400% quality is perfectly possible. There is always a chance to break the item.
- Crafted items can be enchanted. Especially they can be overenchanted. You can attempt to enchant an item even more, but there is a chance to break it. High quality items can hold more enchantments without a chance of breaking them, and their chance to break from overenchantment is lower.
- Items can be made soulbound. They henceforth always only work with one specific person. Quest rewards are always soulbound. Soulbound items cannot be dropped except intentionally.
- Items get damaged by combat and need repair afterwards. To repair an item, the player either needs to pay a repair NPC or give the item to the right kind of crafter. Player crafters need to carry extra ingredients to repair an item, but they have, depending upon their skill, the chance to repair the item far above 100%. Items that are repaired above 100% are much harder to damage and get a small temporary boost in their quality.
GRAPHICS
- Three dimensional graphics with reuseable models, textures etc.
- Low polygon counts, allowing to support many characters at the same time on screen.
- Comfortable Facegen and Bodygen at character creation, allowing to create a uniquely looking character.
- All details visible, including worn rings, amulets etc
- Seamless world with realistic viewing distances
SETTING
- Classic fantasy
- Huge world with all kinds of environments (jungle, iceland, desert, tundra etc, and many fantasy environments like flying cities, cloud castles, crystal mountains, lava pits etc)
- Dynamic quest system that generates quests at random from quest templates; nobody has the same quests as you have.
- Support for groups, raids, fellowships, guilds, alliances
- Mass pvp events over ressources and nation control
- Players can go playerkiller and join the bandit faction, unable to enter normal cities and starter areas, and trading at hefty disadvantages with fences
- Player housing, player city building, player nation building
- Ressources outside of player controlled areas are better, but more risky
There is no such things as perfect MMO, yes not even GW2 will be perfect. I think a lot of players are just setting themselves for disappointment when they look for perfection.
Err ... I'm perfectly happy if other players are happy with GW2. Good for them. I am not interested, though.
What about trying any, and I really mean ANY, remotely neutral source ? Like checking out the Wikipedia page ?!?
A few reasons:
1) Most of the people complaining don't have skills necessary to make a decent game. Some fields can be learned with practice and time like programming (but a good programmer would be leagues apart from an amateur, and you'd need lots of lots of practice), but things like art design, sound design, and game design are not talents everyone possesses even with practice and application it's possible you'll never be able to do well in these fields.
2) Most of the people complaining don't have the drive necesssary to make a decent game. It's much easier to complain about it, but it's a lot harder to go and do it.
3) People have. There are a lot of sandbox games out there. The budgets just weren't big enough, and you are often left with shoddy and buggy gameplay, technical issues, poor graphics and sound quality, etc. It's not easy to come up with the ~$20 mil required to form a studio and put out a decent game.
4) They don't agree with one another. Just try to make a game where there is no set vision. No project lead. It's utter chaos. You need someone managing the idea and keeping a game on track. Nobody agrees 100% with someone on everything. You just wind up agruing whether this texture should be blue or pink or whether the jumping let's you jump 20 units in the air or 30.
Mostly because sandbox fans are a minority.
I'm a programmer and I like the idea of creating my own game. I have very little experience with artwork, though, they already have great open source game engines like this one: http://www.ogre3d.org/ - and I definitely wouldnt want to make a sandbox.
Player created dungeons which based the loot and difficulty rating off a point system that would be calculated up by the number, type, and level of creatures and their statistics. Of course, give me scalable instances which scale based on your level as well as your party size. And also have random generated loot. Combine that with great housing, crafting, collecting (not just loot, but trophies), and some really deep character customization. Throw in a huge world and all the standard features for an MMORPG, and you're good to go for a very long time.
I forget where I said this before... doesn't matter I guess. I think my perfect MMO would be some sort of Aion/WoW combo. When I am subscribed to both it feels like I have my primary draw of MMOs in a nutshell and don't need anything else (at least from this genre). It's like a combination of a more grindy, challenging, beautiful-looking serious MMO versus very casual, easy to play, grindy in a very different way, and funny in art style, non-serious MMO. I haven't been able to find one balanced MMO between the two and not sure if I would even enjoy something between the two. I think having two to choose from depending on my mood each day is as good as it might get.
Uhm.. what you've just described is every adventure aspect of an MMO and nothing else..
if you want the perfect soup, try not simply throwing a bunch of vegetables and soya-sauce flavoured broth in a pot.
Actually I have done that and it's pretty good lol
Vanguard with Rift's polish and Guild War's price point.
The perfect mmo for me.
"TO MICHAEL!"