What I'd like to see in an MMORPG

Darg

Darg

Darg

Soldato
Joined
6 Sep 2006
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London
Housing!
I want a village/town life system where the villages are started by the players deciding they like the area and then living together because of the benefits it provides. I do not want preplaced craptacular buildings that you can buy off a NPC and all they are good for is a place to rest and leave stuff. I want to build my home and have it mean something to me. I want it to be able to be destroyed so I have to defend it if needed.

Crafting
Not like WoW crappy crafting.. I want to be able to build things cheap and sell them for a decent profit in an NPC run shop. I want NPC traders to bring me the ingredients if I buy them off other shops. I want to go up in skills not by grinding but by good marketing strategy and actual skill.

Technology/Research
I want to be able to learn from other players, books, from studying objects. I want a system that allows me to take a microscope/home chemistry set to objects, play around with them, use some intuition and discover something about them. I take a sugar cane, I play around with it.. hrm.. what would happen if I heated the sugar.. woah.. toffee. cool.

I want there to be so many things to learn that one person could never learn them all... but I want to let them try. That means no classes.. no racially exclusive technologys. No artificial barriers to the player. Ever.


Does this game exist? Of course there's a lot more I want too.. but I'm already feeling greedy enough as it is.

I know of one project over at www.rjcyberware.com to make a game exactly like this. In fact I've been helping out with various graphics for a few years. Unfortunately there's only one guy there coding between the two games he's working on so that's not gonna arrive anytime soon.

Is there a game like this already? If anyone says SecondLife I will flay you with my mouse cable.
 
Darg said:
Housing!
I want a village/town life system where the villages are started by the players deciding they like the area and then living together because of the benefits it provides. I do not want preplaced craptacular buildings that you can buy off a NPC and all they are good for is a place to rest and leave stuff. I want to build my home and have it mean something to me. I want it to be able to be destroyed so I have to defend it if needed.
Click to expand...

So old SWG (apart from the destroyable bit..)?

Darg said:
Crafting
Not like WoW crappy crafting.. I want to be able to build things cheap and sell them for a decent profit in an NPC run shop. I want NPC traders to bring me the ingredients if I buy them off other shops. I want to go up in skills not by grinding but by good marketing strategy and actual skill.
Click to expand...

...so old SWG?

Darg said:
Technology/Research
I want to be able to learn from other players, books, from studying objects. I want a system that allows me to take a microscope/home chemistry set to objects, play around with them, use some intuition and discover something about them. I take a sugar cane, I play around with it.. hrm.. what would happen if I heated the sugar.. woah.. toffee. cool.
Click to expand...

SWG had a good system where you could learn anything (apart from the root of a skill tree) from other players (some skills needed to be taught by other real players). That crafting idea is a little complex, I wouldn't say you're likely to see that any time within the next 10 years.

Darg said:
I want there to be so many things to learn that one person could never learn them all... but I want to let them try. That means no classes.. no racially exclusive technologys. No artificial barriers to the player. Ever.
Click to expand...
So... old SWG :(?

Best MMO ever.
 
Yea I heard about SWG but never tried it. Regret it now. Did it really have player built houses and villages?
 
Yep.

Normally when you joined a guild a crafter would give you a house schematic (of which there were loads of different types/sizes and let you put it anywhere you wanted within the boundarys set when they set up the city. You needed to be a certain way up the politician tree to start a city, with at least 10 people backing it etc.

There were hundreds of shops outside the main NPC cities, you were totally spoiled for choice and the extent at which players went to get you to buy from their vendor was amazing.

You could arrange furniture and items absolutely any way you wanted. That was really data hungry though so often you'd go into a house and it'd be totally empty, then 10 seconds later it'd suddenly fill with goodies :D

The skill tree rocked hard, there were 6 main starting professions (which you could give up at any time and pick a different one) that you could mix and match to make different classes. There were over 30 classes available due to this mix and match system, and you could choose how high to go into each tree aswell. It's very difficult to describe how stupidly flexible it was without explaining it in massive detail. In fact it this complexity that caused the games downfall, unfortunately it was simplified and now there are only 9 professions which are 100% on rails.
 
Sounds like it would have been perfect for me. If only I wasn't on 56k and completely broke at the time.
 
I played it on UK Online "free" dialup for ages, spent many moneys in phone bills :D

Shame it's a complete ****ing sham now.
 
SWG was a average MMO at best, but at the time it was better than all the rest. All its best bits were taken from Ultima Online, Shadowbane and DAOC. UO was the first real MMORPG, it had player placeable housing, the best crafting system to date, the greatest skill system and the best pvp (still true to this day, no game has surpassed any of these 4 points). The despicable state of MMO's these days are all down to Everquest.

The advantage EQ had over UO was the 3D gfx engine. It drew more people in, it was a far far inferior game but it had the eye candy. And the main point is - PEOPLE DIDNT KNOW ANY BETTER. Its like spending your whole life eating burgers and never knowing what steak tastes like. So you never miss it.

Fast forward ten years and what do you have? Games that still have the terrible levelling systems where you choose what special skills you want after you have "pinged" (god how I hate that word in that context). You get an endless grind of pointless quests which are supposed to be "content", but actually mean nothing.

You have few games with player housing (Shadowbane tried it, SWG almost succeeded), you get those god aweful atmosphere destroying instances. Almost all MMO's to date have been EQ with bells on. WoW succeeded as it had clever texturing to cover up its lack of polygons. This enabled them to have excellent framerates and other eye candy to work on very low end hardware. It had far far fewer bugs than any other MMO at release time - which was impressive to say the least.

But what do you have with most MMOs now? A 3D interactive chat room with quests to do - THANK YOU EVERQUEST (SOE) YOU HAVE DESTROYED WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN MANY GREAT GAMES!.

Bottom line? What you would like to see in games would be here today if it wasn't for SOE making EQ.
 
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swg :(, I wish they would make swg :( pretty much identical to the first early release but with FPS.

They had crafting, skill and playermade items down to a treat. A bit more flexibility and it would be a game that could be untouched for decades.
 
I've been playing MMORPG's for an extremely long time.
I started with Ultima Online (Beta) - At the time we were all on 28.8k modems and there were no UO servers outside of the US.
I played UO for a lot of years and although I've tried and played nearly every single MMORPG since nothing has come close to those UO days.

Find a vet UO player and talk to them.
They will tell you how they used to log in for a couple of hours and do nothing but chat to other people in their houses.
They will tell you that they would go out for an hour or two with a bag full of pick-axes, a pack horse and do nothing but mine mountains - sound like a grind? UO players didn't care.
We'll tell you how it took us nearly a year to get the Grandmaster Smith title or something similar.
We'll tell you how we were only the third Grandmaster Tailor on a particular server and how that took nearly a year to earn that status.

You'll be told about how death meant something - because when you died you lost more or less everything you were carrying.
They will tell you about their own houses, their own shops etc.

You'll be told about a skill system where there were no levels, to increase a skill you actually had to use it.
And you had to use it against progressively more difficult things - no smithing daggers from skill 10-100, you had to smith full suits of plate armour towards the end or you got no skill gain.
No parry practice against rabbits from skill 10-100, towards the end you had to be attacking 2-3 high level monsters at once if you wanted to gain.

SWG had potential - the skill system was a good idea, but you could just grind against low level creatures so was flawed.
Then the god awful roll-out of the Jedi system - "It will be a long and mysterious path, different for all and exciting".
So we all start searching the planets for clues, looking for something that might lead us on the mysterious path.
"Yer, so Master 5 pre-determined skills and the Jedi slot is all yours" - Nice and mysterious...
 
Craft things cheap and sell for a good profit in a shop? Er...right. Every player would be loaded, it'd be ridiculous.

The crafting system is WoW is fine atm really. You choose a profession to craft yourself and other players decent gear, can't complain about that. And you can make money through it.

But I agree with you that some other way of increasing skill would be good rather than just grinding.
 
Only the people that knew what was needed in that village at that moment would make a decent profit. Just like it is in real life. If you've got the product when and where it's needed you are sorted.

I have been thinking about this a bit more.. I'm going to try and describe a theory I'm forming..

Basically at the start of the game on it's very first release there would be an auto-generated land, auto-placed resources, herds, rivers, lakes.. all the shebangle that's needed. The first 100~ players would be placed into this land of around 10km^2 (to keep it manageable). The next 100~ players would be placed into a new land next to this but blocked off (for now). The next 100 players would get their own land.. and so on.

The people in these lands have to work together to build up a village and gain not only personal points but upgrade their village as well. The land they are in would be graded by the status of their village. Once their village reaches a certain level they can create a road system to link them to the villages next door that are also of the same grade or a grade above.

Basically this would limit access from villages too high up to those too far below them. But anyone in a grade 2 village for instance would be able to get to a grade 1,2 or 3 village just by using some sort of NPC travel system to get between these lands (essentially each an individual server).

The benefits of this would not only be that each 100 people have a sense of working together to build up their village. They would not be mining ore just for themselves but so that their village would benefit once the ore has been processed and can be turned into useful things.
It would also mean that each new player would go into a new world, completely fresh and able to be worked however that particular group of people want it to be worked. I would suggest some sort of town elder system whereby a player from 2 or 3 grades above can volunteer to lead this new group of settlers and guide them in how to build up their village. I presume there would be quite a demand to lead these groups so the best people for the job could be voted for by their own villages. Maybe the village the leader comes from could benefit somehow by how well the new village is doing.
The idea of being a pioneer in a fresh landscape where there isn't already a level 70 ubermonger of the umpteenth order is very appealing to me and I presume others too. As your village rises through the grades you would get access to these higher level people and can trade in their villages to get the higher level armour and such. You could apply to emmigrate to a village but each village should have a population cap determined by its grade so that there isn't a 'brain drain' from the lower level villages.
There could be alliances and wars between villages, robbery within each village (which can be punished harshly if caught). I believe there would be a sense of pride from each small community that would help motivate them into doing the best for their village not just for themselves. Obviously there would still be lone wolves and I have nothing against lone wolves but there would be such a large land for each 100 people that you could have your house out in the wilderness if you choose and play the game just for yourself.


The more I think about this idea the more I want to see it made. If I ever get to work in a studio capable of making such a game this'll probably be the idea I pitch at them.
 
I have to agree with Stoofa and Jbod...UO was just phenomenal. I've played pretty much every major MMO, and UO knocked socks off them all. SWG was really just an attempt to copy what UO had already done and pop a star wars label on it for mass appeal.

Hell, in the early days of UO, you could kill another player, use a skinning knife on them, cut off their flesh and cook it as "Human jerky" and eat it. Sadly that was eventually taken out after complaints about cannibalism in a game...but even so, it showed the sheer level of freedom in UO. You could do things in UO , that you simply couldnt do in any MMO that was released after, even the so called "next generation" mmos
 
Got to admit, its the MMO that I played the longest, played that for 4 years from 1997-2001 on the Catskills server, was part of a large player run RP village called Kinship. Best MMO times I have ever had so far.

(I think the 2nd longest one I played was either Daoc or WoW, both around 2.5 years...just waiting for Warhammer or Age of Conan now really, though I would be surprised if either last me 4 years as UO did :) )
 
stoofa said:
They will tell you how they used to log in for a couple of hours and do nothing but chat to other people in their houses. - Tick!
They will tell you that they would go out for an hour or two with a bag full of pick-axes, a pack horse and do nothing but mine mountains - sound like a grind? UO players didn't care. - Tick!
We'll tell you how it took us nearly a year to get the Grandmaster Smith title or something similar. - Tick!
We'll tell you how we were only the third Grandmaster Tailor on a particular server and how that took nearly a year to earn that status. - almost Tick!

You'll be told about how death meant something - because when you died you lost more or less everything you were carrying. - Tick!
They will tell you about their own houses, their own shops etc. - Tick!
Click to expand...

Damn I miss that game =(

Nullvoid said:
Although an otherwise flawed game, I've always found the tradeskilling system in Neocron to be rather good.
Click to expand...

Agreed!
 
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