Harvest Moon as an MMO?

PokemonTrainerRed

Wouldn't you love to see Harvest Moon and Rune Factory as an MMO?

I was thinking about it the other day, and it just would be really fun to play, and a lot of the game features would easily be transferable to the genre. Take growing your crops for example, make the fields a whole lot bigger, and have several people working on it at a time. The same with animals as well!

Or have various villages, which would hold a set number of players at a time - several farms on each. The events during the year naturally would be attendable. I'd love to have a cookoff between villages. Villages could be synonymous with guilds or clans.  

Rune Factory has an interesting mechanic where there is a Wifi Field, which you can only harvest other people's crops, and never your own amongst your friends you have codes for.

TheLizardbones

I'm honestly a little surprised something like this doesn't already exist.

PokemonTrainerRed

Rising Star have never really done much in the way of multiplayer support. Rune Factory 3 was their latest game to feature a multiplayer feature if memory serves me correctly where you could go dungeon crawling with up to 4 friends. I've never tried it personally however! DS multiplayer is generally underused.

 

RavingRabbid

Dont they have farmville, frontierville, cityville, and other like it already? ACH

***Twilek Vette desires the raving rabbid! he tells her no as Satele Shan already has him slighlty whooped!***

PokemonTrainerRed

I wouldn't class Farmville as being a substitute for a Harvest Moon game. Whereas they share the same setting, namely a farm. Harvest Moon has evolved to be way more then that if you keep up with the games. Yes, there's farming - but it's also about your animals, your relationships with the NPCs, exploring the environments, attending the festivals, making money, buying upgrades, fighting monsters and leveling up (Rune Factory).

Plus - social gaming is just the pits anyway in my humble opinion. Anything that limits the amount I can play which I have to wait several minutes to several hours to regain my energy bar could never compare to an online game.

PokemonTrainerRed

Oh, please god no....

http://pc.bokumono.com/

Toorima

As long as they keep the spirit of harvest moon intact sure.... but I don't see it being possible, especially as an MMO, I just think the scale would need to be too big, also if 1000's of people had their 'own' farm from there now dead old man friend.... would just kinda seem odd.... 

PokemonTrainerRed

Originally posted by Toorima

As long as they keep the spirit of harvest moon intact sure.... but I don't see it being possible, especially as an MMO, I just think the scale would need to be too big, also if 1000's of people had their 'own' farm from there now dead old man friend.... would just kinda seem odd.... 

Yeah, I see what you mean there. Would definitely been a bit strange. Could be all related or something like that. Storyline would be easy enough to accomodate. Just don't think open world would be the best way. More like no more then 30 people per village at a time.

GTwander

It's totally possible, and I've even pondered over my own knockoff spin that covers some of the problems that you think *wouldn't* work online.

It could be a single town, or multiple ones, all roads leading out could lead to instanced private farms. Every NPC in the game can raise relationship points with any player, and can arrange a 'date' where any NPC will follow you around for an hour and you can share the experience with your friends, for trickle-down bonuses.  You couldn't have the typical relationship angles with NPCs, but you could enthuse such a thing with other players. Ick, I know.

Everything that seems like it wouldn't work, can, if you think "around" it.

Why Natsume hasn't done this yet blows my mind, but it is a heavy investment to get into this gaming sector.. and to stay here.

TweFoju

i thought exactly the same of this idea 8 years ago, ever since i play Harvest Moon back in 2001, i have been hoping they would have the MMO version

well, we actually kinda have that "MMO" in existance already *cough Farmville *

i know it's very very different, and i think the closest one is Mabinogi, but yeah, how wonderful if Harvest Moon back to nature style can go to MMO... i will play it for sure

codekitten

How hard do you think it would be to code this type of program? I mean there are mmorpg flash games that are of a similar style and people already ahve pokemon mmo's coded and running .. the only thing is youd have to custum make sprites and tiles to make this a true mmo and you would have to give it a name aside from harvest moon. unless ou could work a deal with the real company.. though i doubt it.

 

I kind of want to try and pixel/sprite these now in a custom yet similar style ^^ i would love this idea and i have been praying someone will do it.

Ananamoose

I would say the Rune Factory series would be more viable as an mmo than the Harvest Moon series because it already has the RPG element to it and it wouldn't be much harder to put it into that mmo form.

 

That being said, I would love a Rune Factory MMO. I love that series even more than the Harvest Moon series (which I loved a lot) and it would make a great MMO, especially for kids.  Like another poster said, I'm surprised this doesn't already exist.

Castillle

Rune factory MMO would be SOOOOOO good @_@

 

The only thing Id want for it would be to radically change the annoying runey system to work online.  I didnt like the runey system much but the min-maxer in me forced me to get all the areas in prosperity o.o 

 

Something like spiral knights would work...But still! Rune Factory ftw!!!

 

Harvest moon would be okay too but...Thats one of the games I never wanted to play in a multiplayer kinda way. 

codekitten

either one, though if I started spiriting something like rune factory online i'd still sprite the animals as being normal ish.. i never liked where they were monsters too xD

my main issue is i can't code something like this ^.^; so the most i can do is sprite