Why isn't there a gangster/mafia MMORPG?

neo2210

neo2210

neo2210

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23 May 2010
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123
Really, why not?

WoW and those silly ones where you bash hotkeys to cast spells have never appealed to me at all.
I've always been partial to open world sandbox style games though, GTA series etc and FPS's like red orchestra (realism).

Why has no one developed a MMO mafia style game with a giant world comprised of mainly players and very few NPC's?
I don't mean a straight shoot em up game, I mean a game with the same FPS aspect as in shooters but the community element of a real city where you could aquire property, start a gang, buy cars etc (the aspects of GTA san andreas that people loved).

Surely with todays technology this would be possible, and I can see it being really succesful aswell, it'd appeal to nearly all gamers whether they love FPSs or RPG's or strategy, it'd be awesome if it was done right.
 
FPS rarely work in MMO because of the huge numbers of players and lag.

Also, a mafia/gangster game in an MMO would throat. Spending hour upon hour of just sitting around going "You talking to me?!" is lame.

P.S. see APB for why it fails.
 
The problem is you have to leave a huge amount trusted to the "client" in huge worlds of that nature - which leads to cheating - and the logistics of smoothly syncing all the stuff up between clients in the same zone. Or you have to lock the gameworld down into lots of smaller segmented.

That and most developers/publishers don't seem to have the imagination and thinking outside the box required to make something like that sucessfully.
 
Also, voice chat would suck. Thousands of prepubescent whiners brushing up on their mafia accents would drive me crazy, if I'd ever been inclined to actually speak to MMO players through a mike.
 
No1newts said:
I would love the idea of a fps mmo, would be great fun. Not so much mafia idea though
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Yeah exactly, it doesn't have to be mafia themed but an open world/city MMO that's realistic would be totally great.

You could have course form a mafia if you wanted to... :D
Or just be that guy that strolls around going to bowling or getting drunk.

No 'classes/vocations', no leveling, no skills, no grinding, just realism.
If your good at making money you could buy stuff up or whatever.
 
Doesn't necessarily need to be RPG, and you can role play without grinding away at skills to be better than other people, the skill would be purely in how you played.
 
neo2210 said:
Doesn't necessarily need to be RPG, and you can role play without grinding away at skills to be better than other people, the skill would be purely in how you played.
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Wouldn't be an mmorpg without the rpg :)

You can roleplay without skills , but you do however require skills, abilities or statistics upon a character to improve in order to be an rpg.
 
Gangster/Mafia is such a limited field... while it would have clear PvP potential in the form of warring families, theres no real RPG to explore.

And FPSs fail in RPGs, APB already had hacks for it and i don't know how they could detect them.
 
Rroff said:
The problem is you have to leave a huge amount trusted to the "client" in huge worlds of that nature - which leads to cheating - and the logistics of smoothly syncing all the stuff up between clients in the same zone. Or you have to lock the gameworld down into lots of smaller segmented.

That and most developers/publishers don't seem to have the imagination and thinking outside the box required to make something like that sucessfully.
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it wouldnt have to be trusted to the client at all , i cant remember any mmo trusting anything to a client because everything is always stored server side.

regarding segmenting a game world into sections thats a modern thing even WOW tries not to segment anything.

usually any game that tries to split a game into loads of sections its not an mmo its just another online game like guild wars but instead of a usual lobby where you just char guild wars uses towns as a lobby instead
 
Try running something like Mafia 2 with full hitscan weapons, etc. entirely server side... the server would have to process almost every detail of every zone every active player was in - a mammoth task.

To get away with proper performance you'd have to trust a certain amount to the client and sync things up with clients in the same zone via the server - and that exposes the game to a certain amount of cheating.
 
ww2 online already does this? on a massive scale
Gameplay takes place in a single game world, which is a 1/2 scale map of Western Europe. It is the largest MMOG game world map, at over 350,000 km2 (135,136 sq mi), with most play occurring in a 30,000 km2 (11,583 sq mi) central area in which most capturable cities, airfields and ports have been placed. Two alternate servers are available for training events and beta testing the next version respectively
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eve-online is pretty much the same thing in space accept you have a slight seperation because of stargates though you could do similar with a city aslong as the transfer between areas was really fast like in eve-online....

its crazy how old mmos did stuff which aparently new ones cant though if ww2 online was never released people would be claiming it wasnt possible to do such a game

what about matrix mmo ? wasnt that a simulated city and i think neocron would have been similar, fallen earth ? earth rise ? all should be simulated worlds pretty much player driven
 
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You can't really compare eve - everything is done on a roll of the dice - no proper collision detection, hitscan, etc.
 
The wild west scenario could work aswell with lots of smaller towns to allow for loading, something very hard to put into one large city.
 
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