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How about an MMO built specifically for Role Players?
CodenameXen
Member Posts: 13
Does such a game exist?
Most games these days are really catering to PvP players, and that's fine. However, cuthroat faction battles don't excit me. I can't be the only one. Honestly though, I'd really like to see MMOs move beyond combat. Not entirely, but not such a focus either. It's always about the new dungeon, the new boss, with other things thrown in as an afterthought.
I want to see a game where I truly have control over my character and his life. Let's cut down on the number of NPCs, and instead opt for more player-run cities. Perhaps I'd like to become a crafter, and open up a shop selling the goods that I make. I'd like a way to advance my character in that manner. Let's see some rewards for just going out and seeing the world, interacting with other people, or doing specific feats that don't involve shoving my sword down a rabbits throat.
I'd like events to happen regularly, but always different, set to appeal to a different demographic. I'm not saying there should be NO combat, of course there should be. As well as numerous classes for combat and healing. Sometimes a terrible threat would be placed upon the world, but then all players could work together, contributing in the manner that they can. I provide free goods to take care of outgoing warriors, a blacksmith provides the amor and weapons, the baker provides food for stat buffs, and then the fighters of the world face the oncoming threat.
Other days it might just be a chili cookoff :P
Essentially, I want to see a game that delivers on the typical MMO promise: I want to live in another world. I don't want to just fight in another world, but live in it. Every player has a place. When I get up in the morning and log on, I don't want the only option to be "grind mobs for a couple hours." Even now, in games with crafting systems, it's just crafting to advance the fighting.
Does any game like this exist? Has one ever existed? More importantly, would a game like this interest you, or am I the only one?
Thanks for reading!
Comments
Sounds like "Second Life".
Human evolution and advancement has never been measured in terms of our ability to grapple one-on-one with bears.
There was a game called Seed which was about a space colony. The concept was really good, but it was just released too soon.
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ARG! Second Life has been mentioned! Before this thread continues I need to arm myself with a cross, a wooden stake, a necklace made of garlic and some silver bullets. God only knows what horrors we may face before this thread ends.
Seriously though, Second Life does not have the features you are talking about. Its just a chat room with graphics and sadly many of its users use it as a sexual simulator. The rest are just trying to make a profit off the sex addicted weirdos.
The only game I can think of which has something along the lines of a "terrible threat would be placed upon the world, but then all players could work together" would be the original Asheron's Call, during the early years of its life when it had monthly updates to the ongoing storyline. Most MMOs these days do not put that much effort into in-game events, which is sad.
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I have to agree a more Role playing focused MMO would be nice to see. There are alot of other genres that do PVP better like fps shooters and RTS games. SO why focus MMOs around PVP? We do need a change in this market as every game that comes out feels like iv seen it all before
. Lets hope we get some bold developer to make a game that is based of Role playing and immersion into the game world.
why not? the more types of mmo's the better! and yes, that does sound like an interesting concept.
It's a proven historical fact that beer saved humankind.
As much as I'd love to see one, I'm not holding my breath of any ever actually existing because most people who play MMOs couldn't roleplay their way out of a wet paper sack. They want a very straightforward system where you push a button, fight something, collect XP and loot and move on. How they act in a fight or how they interact with others is entirely irrelevant to most people, heck, most MMO players couldn't spell if their lives depended on it.
Actual role-playing, the stuff that goes beyond fighting monsters and getting XP, is far above your average MMO player and so long as MMOs cater to the lowest-common-denominator, it's just not possible to ever see a game where mature, intelligent adults can get together and actually RP on a large scale.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
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I seriously doubt there is a big enough market for such a game for it to be economically viable.
To make a game like this work you need to invent a lot of new ideas and develop them to a playable state. This combined with the need to create a visually interesting game too for it to be noticed makes it expensive to make. Seed folded because it had a 14m Dkr budget (about 2m US dollars at the time) and when the money was gone the people behind it was told to release or they would be closed.
No the closest game atm you have to what you describe is Lotro. In that game you can sit around at your local inn and play music with your local band of fellow musician players, hang around the local lake or river and fish, hang around you local village and enjoy some rest, have fun with lots of different social clothing, get extremely drunk (the game engine changes how the world looks depending on how drunk you are), take part in competitions (like cake eating and dances) and horse races, craft some of the best gear there is in the game and the only PvP is if you want to go to a special PvP zone where some players on your server can switch to evil chars and you can battle each other. Hell you can even become a chicken and run around the country side and do chicken quests if you want to....
"You are the hero our legends have foretold will save our tribe, therefore please go kill 10 pigs."
That does sound appealing, and it is pretty similar to what I was saying. I love the freedom to do things other than fight. However, the primary problem is that, ultimately, I'm going to have to go out and kill stuff to advance my character. It's not that I mind fighting things, from time to time that's exactly what I want, but it irks me a bit that the only way to advance is to engage in combat. Remember back in SWG when you could level up a hairdresser by cutting peoples hair? I love that concept.
Neverwinter Nights was more or less that. A RPG for roleplayers.
It was made so the "Game Master" would be able to dinamically spawn/despawn monster for the party.
It was also made easy to create "modules".
You can play it now, join any internet NW server, and you see user made game-master stuff. Often is deep and creative.
OK, ok, NW is not MMORPG, more like MORPG.
We don't need live events and many of the features we would want have already existed in MMO's but were left out of more modern MMO's. Is that too much to ask for?
But for me PvP does not cause problems for roleplaying. As long as it is restricted to certain zones which you go to for PvP or RvR that works fine.
Yeah I remember, my first 3 weeks in that game was spend in a cantina with all kind of people telling me about their adventures out in galaxy while I restored their combat fatigue. So the day I ventured out myself I had heard about many of the places already and it made the exploration much more fun.
I agree that improving your abilities through mastering individual skills instead of lvling up does sound attractive. That way you can choose for yourself how you want to play your char and whether or not you want to fight at all.
The problem for developers here is pvp balance, but I think we should say to them let people themselves find out about pvp balance. Give players the choice themselves and you will get rid of the endless balancing dance of PvP.
Btw you can still play a non combatant in NGE SWG, the entertainer and crafter classes are non agro, it means that they lvl up by using their abilties and mobs don't attack them and they can go everywhere.
"You are the hero our legends have foretold will save our tribe, therefore please go kill 10 pigs."
It's not just the lack of a market, but the fact that you'd need a seriously controlled playerbase to be able to do it. If you want to get actual roleplaying done, you have to give up the idea of leveling and XP and loot as MMOs do it, those are somewhat extraneous concepts in RPing. It's not necessarily about what you do, it's about how you do it and that takes a certain type of player who is concerned with the experience, not the gear.
I agree that you'd have to make serious changes to the way the game is played, the biggest addition, as someone else pointed out, is GM control, sort of like NWN did and the ability for truly player-created content within the game world. It would probably be done in private little pocket-realities where a group of people could go to play and those who are not invited would not be able to get in unless the group decided all comers were welcome, it would really require giving players access to the same tools that the developers use to create the game world and I don't know that most devs would be all that happy to do that.
As much as I'd like to see it, it's a concept doomed to failure and as such, I'm not really advocating anyone actually do it.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
I'm going to give Mortal Online a whirl. I made the decision late last night to go ahead and pre-order.
Yes, it's being billed as a Free-for-all PvP game with full loot, but when you think about it, a world offering freedom to do whatever must include this as well if it's to be truly free. I already know what the main response to my mentioning Mortal Online will be: Gank squads and deathmatch dumbfuckery a la Darkfall. I will not refute that, as it's a real possibility.
However, MO's developers have a distinct advantage. They've got DFO to be a pre-alpha alpha. What I mean is that they can see what game design mistakes were made and how the public reacted to it in order to adapt. One simply needs to go to Forumfall, spend an hour making notes and a complete "Stuff NOT to do" design bible can be written.
I've also been spending some time on the official forums, and the Roleplay and Lore subforum there makes my inner RPGnerd giddy. There are people who actually care about roleplay, and a few are putting the effort into organizing safe havens for roleplayers in the form of player city-states. A lot of the plans are speculation, as the game is still in early beta and not all of the features are active yet, presumably for incremental testing purposes. Rather than trying to explain all that's being planned, I'll just link you directly to that forum and let you see for yourselves, if interested
www.mortalonline.com/forums/roleplay-lore/
I don't want to come off as some sort of MO fanboy, as there is a lot about the game that I don't know, short of what's been said. I, too, want a game that's a mmoRPG first, with combat as a feature, but not the focus. MO will attract the unsavories, make no mistake, but as for me, I'm willing to give the game a shot based on the really positive attitudes with the roleplayers in the community there. The developers mentioned that many of them were in the beta of Ultima Online. Aventurine name-dropped Ultima Online in their Darkfall pre-release hype, too. I'm willing to grant Star Vault $55 worth of faith that they can take it further by actually living up to the hype their closest competitor couldn't. I'm hoping after release that they'll earn a steady $15 per month's worth of faith from me too.
"You'll never win an argument with an idiot because he is too stupid to recognize his own defeat." ~Anonymous
This person makes an excellent point. The first time I was ever introduced to roleplaying was actually on a NWN server by people telling me please use [ooc] if I was going to keep talking about random real world stuff. I had no idea what that meant, needless to say I thought it was entirely stupid but went with it and ended up absolutely enjoying fleshing out a story and interacting with other players while becoming an avid roleplayer.
I also don't know of a MMORPG that has exactly what you are looking for and I haven't played NWN since its first or second expansion (now there is NWN2 with several expansions I believe, although I believe most people still consider the first to be better and is more widely played still). The game came with an amazing tool where GM's or world designers could build their own world as they see fit. The community did a great job of coding thousands of scripts, modules, artwork, etc.. to all be added into each GM's world as they see fit to incorporate what they wanted to. You could easily find a server that catered to a strong roleplayer element. Good GM's would even reward players that roleplayed well. Experience, unique quests and items etc... whatever the GM wanted.
I remember one random day in town spending almost an hour interacting with various townspeople (that the GM would take over and make them speak and move). It went from casual conversation to becoming a fully spontaneous and exciting quest to gather information from clues from gossip and heresay that ended in saving a child's life. At the end the GM rewarded me with a good amount of experience, an [ooc] good job /tell, and all that without ever unsheathing my weapon. This was one of only many unique events and ever changing story that would evolve with the created world.
Not sure if you could still get the same community involvment and quality servers and roleplayers but it might be something worth looking into. Unfortunately I think the server cap used to be 64 simeltaneous players, not sure if it still like that or not.
Early on I posted endless theories about how to make MMORPGs more conducive to roleplay, how to make them more like a Paper 'n Pencil game where people played a role.
I have now come to the conclusion that MMORPGs are simply not the best form of game for this, for one specific reason.
I think that the best roleplaying occurs when there is a real human being that plays the opposing side, but also acts as a story teller and guides the players along a story, with the ability to react to the players and modify the story as needed.
This cannot be accomplished with PvP. In PvP there is no guiding storyteller, just players trying to beat each other.
This cannot be accomplished with computer dialog NPCs. NPCs do not react to player actions and pprovide feedback for roleplay, and they cannot adapt to situations which provicde fun and unexpected roleplay opportunities.
This is roleplaying in PvP:
"Let's defend our territory, and go take over that castle! Arm yourselves for battle!" etc., etc.
Then the actual fight:
Either no talking because enemies can't communicate in RvR like DAoC, or lot's of "I pwned joo!!!!11 noob!" Not really roleplaying of a high caliber.
This is roleplaying with NPC's:
"We will kill the evil villians and keep the city safe!"
"Yes, we are the defenders of justice!"
etc., etc. You talk amongst yourselves, but don't intereact with the NPCs because it's liike talking to a brick wall. It's sort of roleplay, but not really. You pretend to be a character, but no real interaction exists with the opposing side.
I think roleplaying is best left to smaller online games like Neverwinter Nights, where someone can play the dungeon master and roleplay the opposite side, and be the guiding storyteller.
The problen with NWN2 was it was difficult to log onto player made worlds. If they solve that problem, it would make for a great roleplaying game, like the first NWN was.
Face of Mankind totally reminds me of a game for role players.
Exactly what I was going to say. Even though some might find a more RP-centric MMO appealing, the majority would most likely not buy the idea. Although, this thread reminds me of Dana Massey's article the other day (http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/3342/Subscription-Fee-Creativity.html):
"And, if people start making discount MMOs, it stands to reason that eventually, the other side of the coin would come up. What about a luxury MMO? Really want a game with a full time staff of 30 writers creating fresh story? How about a Mercedes of MMOs?
At a monthly fee of $30.00, a premium MMO would assuredly not bring in millions of players, but it really wouldn’t need to. This would allow for highly specialized niche games that appeal to a hardcore audience and thrive off it. Sure, that mystery MMO I threw around last week wouldn’t be for everyone, but if those playing it were paying more, it might just make someone a lot of money."
If you made a RP-centric MMO, it would probably have to be this kind of hardcore, niched game since, well, you wouldn't attract enough people to make a new WoW.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
All these games have a problem creating enough content to keep the players happy.
I think new games are (excessively imo) weighted towards PvP, especially endgame PvP, largely because if it's implemented well, PvP can provide almost infinite amounts of player-generated content.
A think a game designed for role-players needs to be based on providing players with the tools to create their own content i.e players take on the role of DM and create and run their quests or even whole zones.
I'd imagine the core of a game like that might involve some hub-town with farmland surrounded by a handful of physically distinctive zones and the toolset to create quests/dungeons/mini-zones.
Wow. cool discussion with cool possibilities. I think there is a huge market for something like this, but hey, I used to play on Firiona Vie. In the post WoW days, I think our yardstick for markets has been unnaturally inflated. I think fifty-thousand subscribers would be plenty to float a single-server, community-centric MMO.
Couple of things that I would want to see:
It would have to be Skill based: advance by doing what you want and unlock more advanced specializations. Characters could become masters at whittling or checkers if they wanted. There could be several ways to gain experience in skill use and exploring and interacting with other players. I've seen games award titles based on how many time an avatar was hugged or kissed ot bowed to...
Combat would have to be more dangerous and more meaningful. It couldn't be the popular, mindless grind that it is today. Hardcore death penalties would have to be explored. The tank, healer and nuker would have to make way for the adventurer, the explorer and the soldier. And I am not saying combat should become the silly strafe-and-twitch fest of Darkfall or other PvP oriented games. No, combat should be more like something decent people want to avoid and actually mirror its real dynamics. Being uber won't immune you from a noob's lethal attacks (it should still take at least three solid hits) and neither will strafing in circles.
Reputation, Influence and Faction Systems that mean something. The world needs to actually change in accordance to the dynamics in it. Cities and towns could change and develope, NPCs availability and attitudes towards Players should change as well. Some skills would only be attainable to those with enough reputation with that faction. Want to become a master weaponsmith, better gain influence with the Swordmaker's Guild. Some of the factions could even be player driven.
My mind explodes with possibilities. I see MMOs actually becoming educational and informative, trying to mirror how things really work, not just a popular brand of mental bubble-gum that they are now.
Sure, it's a niche market, but that kinda the point, neh?
TSW, LotRO, EQ2, SWTOR, GW2, V:SoH, Neverwinter, ArchAge, EQ, UO, DAoC, WAR, DDO, AoC, MO, BDO, SotA, B&S, ESO,