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A realistic MMO that focuses on crafting, inventions and social interaction.
Tirgon
Member Posts: 7
Ive played my share of MMOs, and Im getting sick of the "WoW" formula. All the new ones just seem like clones of the old ones. I just dont get why most game developers think its fun to grind 800 million rats and spiders before you can start improving your character. Why cant someone make a game like EVE, but with a more realistic setting like medieval Europe?
If I got to make an MMO, this is how it would be:
A huge non-instanced gameworld, and when you create your character you will start at a random location with 20-50 other people based on the collor of the skin/eyes/hair. (This is to make the gameworld more like what pre-stoneage earth was) There will also be people starting a 10-30 min walk away in similar sized groups. This will act like small clusters of groups, but the clusters themselves will not always be close. (Some even might be on different continents.) You start out with just some caveman raggs and nothing more, and the main focus of the game at this stage would be to make yourself a house. With nothing more than your hands, you would have to find a suitable stone, grind it until it was sharp, break of a small branch and tie it together with rope made of bark or some other material, to make yourself an axe. With the axe you could chop down some trees and make a primitive hut. You could chose if you wanted to live by youself, or you could make or join a small settlement with the other people you started with.
There will be no map to look at, not realy any UI to speak of except your backpack and some info about skills and stats. At this primitive stage of the game it will only be a standard /say system for chatting. Everything you say comes up as textbubbles over your head, and you have to be close enough to the player you want to talk to for him to see your bubble.
With your hut up and running, you would run off to find more materials to improve your house, food to eat, and wood to improve the settlement. (Like building walls, marketplaces++) Every type of tree, fish, animal, fruit +++ will be unnamed, but when you first gather or consume one of these items, you will have to name it yourself. This will surly be a interesting mecanic where the different settlements and clusters have to solve the issue of understanding eachother, if they want to know what they are trading and consuming.
When a settlement has enough food and building materials, NPCs will move in and build their own houses. 1 NPC for every 4 human player. These NPCs can be set to gather food, guard the settlement, work as shopassistans, shovel thrash or whatever needs to be done. To encourage social interactions, people who "marry", or move in together will be able to make 1 child. (Only if they are man/woman. Man/man or woman/woman will be childless :P (Maybe they could adopt surplus NPCs from nearby settlements who for some reason cant support their population with enough food...)) This child will grow up in one week, and join the settlement as a regular NPC. As NPCs is important to lift the burden of mundane and boring chores like food gathering and shoveling human feces from the street. (As every player and npc will have to take a dump once in a while.) Making more of them will therefore help settlements advance faster.
There will be no levels in this game, only skill and stats. You improve your skills by using them, and your stats go up when you do things that in the real world improve "stats". (Woodcutting and mining would increase your strenght and constitution, making you cut/mine faster, carry more weight and sprint for a longer amount of time.) There will be no requirments to cut or mine spesific minerals/trees, but improving your skill will make it faster, and the quality of the rawmaterials will be better. Both skill and stats will decrease over time if you dont use them. (Your woodcutting bodybuilder will turn into a wimp if you stop doing physical labour.)
When it comes to gathering, there wont be respawning nodes as in WoW, but if you cut down a tree its gone, if you kill all/to many animals of a specific species they will go instinct. Animals rees however regenerate every day based on numbers, avaivable soil/food sources. Metal have to be mined from the mountain, and even tough some of it will be found sticking out, most of it, and the good quality stuff will make you have to bury into the moutain to find.
Back to your settlement, trade routes betweene other settlements will be "required" to get enough materials to grow further. You can ofc just burn down their houses and drive them away from their land, but that could be a recipe for revenge later on. Noone will have every resource close nearby, so trading/conquering will be very important.
If you are the anti social type, you could ofc make yourself a hut all by your self, and get stuff by attacking traderoutes or killing people or NPCs who have strolled into the forest all alone and take their stuff. (Note that there will be no NPCs in this game except city NPCs and animals. No hostile NPCs walking randomly around.)
The most important feature of this game will be inventing stuff. There will be no skill req, just the limits of your own brain and knowledge, what raw material you have access to and their quality, and what kind of production facilities you have. Inventions and production templates will be made in a more user friendly 3D studio max look a like editor. If you want to make a catapult, you design it with the desired materials, and the editor calculates the weight, tourqe and gives it attributes like damage, range and playerstrenght to speed ratio. (The damn thing have to be pushed by hand, or some tamed animal.) If you design a steam engine, the program will calculate the force created, and the animation of the moving parts. There will also be a advanced scripteditor, that can be used to make cellphones, computers +++ when you have advanced enough. With this system you will be able to create advanced stuff, but the stuff you create will not be to hard on the server because it only have to work with the allready saved animations and the stats calculated by the editor, not the actual physics.
With a game where you start out as a caveman and advance into modern age where politics, resources, war and complete freedom is what drives the gameplay and gameworld, I know that I would be occupied for a long time. Invent the atomic bomb and nuke a continent back to the stoneage, and thousands of players will migrates to other cities where they live in big slums, or force less advanced sivilisations to get you the stuff you need, live in peace with your neighbours, or go to war to protect your land or your interest in oil/miner/food/"insert rawmaterial here".
Why havnt anyone made this game? They could call it Real Life, The Game 
(But it would be heck of alot more fun than the real real life...)
Comments
At first it sounded very similar to DaoC, but as it progressed, not so much. I think the reason this hasn't been made is probably because not that many people would play it. Crafting games don't have a big enough consumer group to actually pull it off. I honestly don't see this happening anytime soon.
Its no more a crafting game than a game about politics and war. Leave your life in the settlement behind to live on a big playermade ship and explore the world. Join a pack of thieving nomads who steal whatever they want. The posibilites are endless
Something a cross between Wurm Online and A Tale In The Desert would be a great game.
I like some of the ideas. Have you seen Ryzom it has some of the things you mentioned: like crafting your own items from the environment, classless skill progression, not a WoW clone, and you start out very primitive as a refugee working toward rebuilding the new civilization. Currently F2P but soon to go P2P.
Maybe in 5 to 10 years when tech is able to produce something you explain we might see it, don't expect something like this any time sooner, do you have any idea how much tech this will cost, forget that lets focus on the cost of such a game where we can't even see a one specific type of MMORPG completely working let alone we see a MMORPG that starts with cavemen and evolves into the tech age.
Sorry it does sound very awesome, but also sounds fairly impossible. Hope I am wrong, but seeing and the experiance with this genre doesn't give me any doubt that for now it's simply impossible to even create a MMORPG close to your idea's.
Also I am that crafter guy but with all the MMORPG I have played we always had only a small dedicated group of people into crafting and maybe it's was thousands of people into it but always it was the feeling of the more niche or atleast the minority in this genre, the majority either feels it's a waist of time or simply isn't in to it. So regardless how bad I want something that involves more crafting/thinking/depth/virtual world I know for a fact we are niche and the minority of people into these games even if we actualy have been with gaming since the beginning of it all. It's the masses who make out the rules as we see with most dumped down games that get delivered.
Havent tried Ryzom. Usually dont like "f2p" games beacause of crappy production quality. However I will try it in 30 min when it has finished downloading
I dont care about graphics, but if the playermovement gives me the feel of driving a omnidirectional veichle, I just cant play it...
Yes, I understand that this will be quite tech heavy, but I dont think it will be as costly as you think. The reason for that is that there will be no dungeons or scripted instances to make, or much content at all except for the editor and a system where players can make the content on their own. Its like EVE. If the developers had to make every building and station in th 5k+ different systems, it would take forever and cost alot. In EVEs case, the players have done it for free, and they have even enjoyed it.
Edit: Yeah, I know that crafters are a minority in games, but you wouldt need to craft much at all to be successfull. Go out and tame some animals and breed them for mounts to sell or get weapons for free by workin as a caravan guard. Even if everything have to be crafted, you dont have to craft to aquire these items. Buy them with coin, or trade with other items. (Be a hunter and kill tons of animals and sell/trade meat/skin/random animal part)
hehe! I think you will be pleasently surprised and then will ask me why you've never heard of Ryzom before.
Have fun!
Yes, I understand that this will be quite tech heavy, but I dont think it will be as costly as you think. The reason for that is that there will be no dungeons or scripted instances to make, or much content at all except for the editor and a system where players can make the content on their own. Its like EVE. If the developers had to make every building and station in th 5k+ different systems, it would take forever and cost alot. In EVEs case, the players have done it for free, and they have even enjoyed it.
But you where talking about starting out like cavemen and evolving all the way to a technology advance civilization, seeing games that take place in one time period and seeing how unstable and/or unpolished they are I bet such a game would be on the heavy cost.
Think about the engine that needs to be build as there is nothing of the sorts in the MMORPG space that could produce something like that, again you talking about evolution, then keep in mind no MMORPG has done this before, we are starting to see it more and more in RTS or single player games but don´t feel MMORPG´s are up to it yet.
I alway´s felt and feel that once something is perfected into a single player game, it´s time to start working towards the implementation of it into it´s MMO form
Lets just hope that in the future someone could make a game this advanced without going bankrupt. Too bad games have become so mainstream and popular. Every new MMO is a atempt at World of Clonecraft, and no one dares to try new consepts. (Not badtalking WoW, been playing that game for many years myself.)
I dont thiik many players want too much realism. Also, I believe that the majority of players dont want to craft. Sure they will craft a little, but they dont want to be fully dependent on it.
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
This game isnt for those who dont want realism, or a game for the masses. Elves and magic that way --->
You dont need to craft to get by. You are dependant on playermade items, similar to EVE, but you dont have to craft these yourselft. Sell your services for cash if you want, or just steal what you want.
The evolution from stoneage to modern world will happen over a period of years, and new players who join in when the world has matured, can try to find a advanced city to move to, or just evolve on their own. As the gameworld will be huge, and exploration will be necesary to reveal the world, there will be lots of settlements and clusters who are on different stages in evolution. (Just as Earth)