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My idea for a progression/sandbox based mmorpg
Diodem
Member Posts: 52
So if you like themepark, then this will probably not suit you, though some of these ideas could be used in themepark games as well.
One thing that i think is making mmorpg's too boring, is that the devs are giving away the things that could have been used as part of progression.
I.e. in WoW you start out with a magical item, the hearthstone, and you can start using magic at an early level.
You can also insta travel to all the dungeons and pvp areas, which makes the large parts of the gameworld dead...
So this is my idea to start out in a new mmorpg:
You start out in first person view, leaving third person view to be obtained through progression.
You cannot choose your race and gender, this will be obtained through progression.
- everytime you start a new character you will get a more or less random race and gender
this means that you could start out as anything from an animal to a monster to more humanoid races.
Everytime you die, you will - to begin with - loose all skills except one that we could call 'Insight' or 'Mental Awareness'
the possibility of holding on to skill progress would be obtained by progression ( in Insight/Mental Awareness or whatever you want to call it.)
Everytime your character die, you will find yourself in a new race/gender, instantly.
But, as you progress in Insight, a mental world start unveiling, and through progressing you'll eventually experience a death-realm where you can learn mental and magical skills.
Here you will also be able to choose which race gender you want to respawn as, and you can also choose to respawn as a similar character.
Any magical items will have to be extremely rare, and any magic that a character could perform would have to be either rare or extremely rare depending on the effect and impact it has on the gameworld.
Magic HAS to be rare, otherwise it won't be considered anything special, like is the case in alot of games where players start out with all kinds of magical spells and items right away.
One thing that should be avoided though is that skill progression becomes too much of a grind.
If the game is to have free-for all PvP and full loot, which i prefer, this is extremely important.
Also i would like to see the players make much more decisions as to how the gameworld is to be in regards to:
- settlements, cities, valuable areas
- what is to be considered a faction, a guild, a group
- everything that is player built has to be able to be destroyed by other players.
- actually everything in the gameworld should be able to be destroyed, built, moved, changed a.s.o.
- the players decide the politics and economy
- the lore is formed as the gameworld is played, by the players themselves, not a fixed story by devs.
As you can see I think devs are limiting and standing too much in the way of players, reducing the fun and making it boring and tidious.
Devs Imo should only make the tools for the players to make their own world, and the limits set should be allowed to be broken through progression.
That's all I could think of for now.,If you disagree or want to criticize something, please be constructive.
I might update some more if I come up with or remember more ideas that I used to have for this kind of concept.
Comments
Progression is all about choice. I just see throwing the player into a bunch of random situations as being frustrating without leading to any real progression. If you a basic choice of who's body you were thrown into that would be cool though: Like "You can either play as a gladiator and get some basic warrior skills or play as an apprentice and get some basic magic skills", this would allow you some choice in how you wanted to start to build your character. Sort of like a game version of Sliders:)
Seems like a game that would be very expensive and time consuming to actually develop though.
Honestly I don't think that is a very good idea because I want to be able to play what I like and not what the game tells me I have to play. You said "As you can see I think devs are limiting and standing too much in the way of players..." well your whole idea is contradicting of that statement, which I agree with.
I want progression to be a personal choice, and just like you said, developers should provide the tools and framework for the game and let players fill roles within the game world. However, Devs still have to provide the framework for multiple systems and mechanics and make sure they run and interact with each other smoothly, which is equally, if not harder, than executing a more themepark style type game. By progression being a personal choice, I mean that the player should decide what part of his character he wishes to progress and in what system the developer has provided within the game world. So for example, If I want to progress my characters ability to rule over certain lands, there has to be a system in which the developer has designed, that is able to accommodate my desire to rule over land, and do it at a balanced level with other systems in the game. An easier example to understand is the guild system, most games do it the same way. Within the system there are multiple ways to progress your character. First off, I can choose what kind of guild I want to make, I can choose to be a leader, or I can choose to be a follower. I can join a big guild and rank up too. To me, this is the best kind of character progression because it doesnt deal with numbers and stats but instead with player interaction, which is why i play mmos.
So in short, although your idea is interesting, It defeats the purpose of giving the player the freedom sandbox games go for. I do like magic being rare though.
I get the impression that you want more themepark..? I don't see how having lots of freedom to do whatever you like will be frustrating, except for people that have to be told what to do all the time. Then sandbox games probably arent for them.
Also I don't like to have classes at all in a game, I like to have the freedom to choose skills and weapons without class limitations. The whole class systems alot of games have seem incredibly dull to me.
I guess you are referring to being cast into random race/gender in the beginning, but that's part of the progression, you wouldn't stay in that situation, like I said.
As you progress mental skills you'd be able to choose what to respawn as.
But the player has to figure out how to progress, by exploring the game, what can be done and how things work.
Very few like to be a low level, I don't think anyone like to have their main as a low level, so it's a progression thing.
The thing about ruling the land - the question is, how do you rule a land?
In some games you just have to claim a spot or build a city, and if it's non-destructable then that's forever the guilds land.
But even in games where land-ownership changes it seems unnecessary to me to have systems that will decide who is the ruler of the land.
I would say this is something the players could decide on their own if a land/area is to be owned or not, and they way it's held in ownership could simply be who gets to gather the resources of a certain area.
This makes for awesome PvP battles with a purpose, or cooperation and player politics. The devs don't have to be involved in this.
You don't have to have a sign from the devs saying who is dominating in a area, you'll quickly find out if you go into it, or you could try to get some information about an area before heading there by asking other players. Players could also set up signpost that says the area is owned, but it doesn't have to be respected within the gameworld. I think this allows for much more freedom for players.
Also same thing with guild, why have dev systems for a guild? It would make PvP battles alot more interesting if you didn't have hidden chats like a guildchat.
That an enemy could overhear a conversation, to me would make for more rich gameplay.
Why do you say MMO games? I don't mean for all games to have this, and it probably won't anyway, I also like the adventure side of themepark games even if they are boringly restricting sometimes. Though I prefer as free as possible sandbox.
Again, like I said loosing the skills is part of a progression, where you have to figure out how to keep your skills.
When the death-realm, or mental part of the game opens up to the player - through progression of the one skill that doens't decay under any cirumstance -, they will be able to more and more keep their skills, that whole thing will be part of figuring out the game.
Yes the beginning may be hard, and I'm thinking of a systems where the spawn/respawn of a character will be in an area where the server/computer figures out is safer, to easy the pain for newbies being ganked.
Maybe I didn't explain it good it enough, but the idea is that as you are able to hold on to more skills you won't loose them, and if there is a skill decay it would only be for the perhaps the 20% upper part of a skill gained, so possible skill decay wouldn't hit until say 75% of that skill was gained.
But in the beginning you'd loose all except one, and that one would be the key to gain a hold of the others.
No, I like freedom in games and prefer sandbox. If I understand it properly, your system actually limits freedom by throwing players into random characters they might not want to play. I know you said later on you get a choice but why not give people a choice about what kind of character they want to play right from the beginning? I would get very annoyed being forced to play some character I didn't want to play in an RPG, even if it was for a short time.
No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up - Lily Tomlin
Ok then I see your point.
To me this is some of the problem of mmorpg's making things easymode, like insta-teleportation wherever, not needing bags, and so on.
I don't want to remove the possibility of these things, but like I said there has to be progression to gain those freedoms, instead of having them immediately or with very little effort. Teleporting could be a magical/mental skill.
Lots the games actually have alot of restrictions on the beginner levels, there's not much a level 1 can do.
what I would have opened for though is to let the newbie try whatever, unless or as long as they have the tools (weapons/gear/items) to do it.
I'm not a fan of overall levels- and class-systems, so I'd prefer to have as many non-magical skills available to begin with, and that you could raise them by using them. And also all crafting skills.
I don't think you'd feel som limited as you would do in typical class/level mmo's, though I see your point.
Another idea i have, which I'm not sure is used by any mmo out there (?) is to be able to destroy an entire race, eliminate them from gameplay, either permanently or perhaps more likely, temporarily.
Not trying to advocate any real life racism, but I think it would be interesting to see in an MMO.
Who said anything about humanoid NPC's?
If it's to be player-driven, I'd avoid NPC's as much as possible, although if players wanted to build and run a playerdriven auctionhouse, by all means.
You have to think outside of the WoW-box though, I want a new fresh slate, even from games like Darkfall and Mortal Online, where the last one does have 1.person view btw.
And when it comes to nature resources, in order to transport larger amounts players might have to build transportation devices like wagons, tame horses or beasts to do the pulling for those.
I would like to see it as self-made and self-run as possible.
What you say about being respawn a different place breaks realism, well think about it: being reborn after you've died in itself is a miracle - in other words either theres some psychic mental stuff going on, or magic.
So when you're respawning, you're not coming back as the character you were, you come in the game with a new character, - although technically if you've managed hold on to skills you'd come back as someone who had the same skills.
But "storywise" from an rp perspective your character died, is dead, and any character you continue playing is a new character.
There is the possibility of reviving another character or to self come back from the dead, but that's magical and should be rare. It should take alot of effort to do that, and perhaps have alot of risk to it.
I wouldn't want to see another game with awhole bunch of Jesus's running around on a battlefield reviving people from the dead all over the place. Then you lose the sense of magic again.
Also you say that magic being rare would mean low droprates to the point you'll never get it, but this is the same deal with items today really, the real good ones are really rare.
Making it into some routine industry to farm the most sought after items makes gameplay really boring for me.
In addition since I suggest this as a sandbox game i'd like to see full loot, so anyone with magical items could lose them over someone that killed them.
Also any magical items might have a limited amount of magic in them, or vaporize after a certain time. There's lots of ways to do this, but thinking that you'll just do your limited everyday farmgrind in peaceful surroundings with dev implemented loot-rules that's just going back to the games we already have available.
Real life things happens and interupts gameplay in many ways, but that's the way it is in many games already. You can't expect to be part of any looting if you're busy with something else.
Yea I wish I could lol, it would be awesome to make and play I think.
Nowadays I don't pay for anything anymore, I just play free mmorpgs because i don't think they're worth paying for.
But listen game companies out there:
I'd be willing to pay double the standard subscription fees if i could play a good sandbox game that didn't disappoint me as so to speak all the mmorpg's have done - the themeparks for being limited and the sandbox ones for doing it wrong.
And i prefer games with fun content.
A big world with nothing in it gives you freedom to roam around, but that is dead boring to me. I would much rather have a linear adventure with good scripting, nice stories, and fun gameplay.
Everyone likes games that are fun but people find very different things fun in games. Lots of people find puzzle platformers or CoD fun but I personally can't stand those games.
I do like a good scripted adventure but I think single player games do them much better than MMOs. I want to feel like the actual main character in a game like that, not have 1000 other people all running around doing the same quests as me and if a game has a story which ends it's not really an MMO.