hue

[ThriKreen]

Try talking to the user ThriKreen. He's a bit of a Dev and likes helping people out with this sort of thing.

What do you mean "a bit"? =P

I'm not going to offer any suggestions on your ideas, it's rather a waste of time at the moment.

Instead, I'd suggest you pick up Neverwinter Nights over at GoG for $10, and look at modding NWN. It supports a MMO-like environment for players and a pretty flexible mod system to add in your own classes and rules and such. You might have to fub some combat stuff (since it's hard-coded for D&D), but the point is you just want to prototype if your systems and gameplay will work together, figure out a way to work around it, like using instant feats to by-pass the hardcoded combat system, and handle things like hitpoints, abilities, skill checks outside the D&D rules.

Will it be slower, sure, but again, this is for testing, not actual development.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Well if this was ever meant to go to market, the first step would be to pile on huge, soul-crushing amounts of grind. It's the proven method that gets around the expense of hosting fees AND that makes shitloads of money in the process by abusing Skinner-Psychology.
It also lets you drag out and reuse the same 3-4 encounters for everything, as long as you change the graphics and add in a nifty boss battle on occasion.

Pardon my jaded attitude, but what I just described above applies to every single MMORPG I've ever played (and most that I've seen in detail). It's a nasty business that forces you to forego expression and vision in favor of dirty business because of the costs involved with just hosting the game for extended periods of time.

If it's just a pet-project or exercise in design...then this might actually have merit.

Is it going to be stat-based, ala Ragnorak Online, or Quest/Pseudo-Story based ala WoW? Or is it going to be purely competitive ala EVE?
Or are you just looking for a game design that can accommodate a ton of players in some setting?

You need to decide at least a few things there before you continue.

Spoiler: One concept

How about a "Competitive seasons", MMO? Where factions compete for a set time over control of some arbitrary object or territory, and then one faction becomes the "winner" at the end, and the world resets.
Those who contributed towards that faction's victory get permanent bonuses and access to some more perks for the next season but not so much as to ensure that they would be unbeatable.

This provides a competitive incentive, and it's not based purely on grinding.
Players could join either faction, or stay in a gray "freelancer for hire" category.

Daily quests are replaced with "wet work" operations that prepare for confrontations. If team A raided a target of team B's, when they go to war during the set time allowed for that (probably weekends) Team A would have an advantage in that sector/zone.

"Warfare" is a regular event (either daily or weekly) where all teams attempt to take control of the others' territory. Whoever has more territory has more resources and options available. Whichever team has the most territory at the end of the season (among other accomplishments) has that added to their team's overall score.

The Freelancer position would be aimed at those not wanting to play (or can't play) during the week. They join either faction for the scheduled "warfare" stage. They provide soldiers who fill out the ranks of either faction. They don't get the unique weapons/skills/etc of that faction, but make up for it with flexibility and being in high demand when manpower is needed.

In this model, even the little guy can contribute on the weekends without needing to grind their brains into mush for quest chains with absolutely no meaning. Actions, rather than words. A clear, defined goal with many avenues of attack rather than an endless string of "dailies".

And a periodic "reset" to prevent the whole problem of "the rich being the only characters who can compete".

I know there are many problems with this concept, but if this topic is about game design and "what-ifs" then why not?

 

[Rack]

snip

First of all, you are extremely encouraging and I appreciate the meaningful feedback and suggestions as to how to improve my idea, other than making it less different.
When I say I don't care about the tech, its because I don't know where the tech will be in two or more decades. Even so, with the current technology and faster internet speeds (which are coming in the next 5 years, I'd wager), nothing I have in mind is ludicrously impossible. I can work.
I've gotten some positive feedback/good criticism here, at least.

I'd like to be able to give more positive feedback, but ultimately I think you're just being unrealistic in your expectations, I can't offer any advice beyond tone it down. If you can manage to balance a classless rpg system without essentially nullifying all customisation options then that's a magnum opus on its own, throwing in some musings about how to make an action MMO while completely ignoring everything that makes it a challenge would only dilute that achievement.

 

[Secret world leader (shhh)]

Make sure that the low-level players can have as much fun as the high-level ones, no "the game starts at 70" bullshit.

 

[frehls]

hue

 

[Rack]

The idea is no more an action MMO than WoW, its just a different style of combat. Both are reliant on the player's latency (try getting 1st on the DPS charts with 100+ ping, try it). The two are more similar than dissimilar, its just a matter of making combat more active and reactive, ala Guild Wars 2.
Limitations arise mainly in the realm of balancing a classless system. EVE Online does pretty well for itself with a classless system, although it is even less action oriented than a standard MMO. I believe that if I can get it to work on paper, then by the time I could actually make it (if not sooner), it would be 99% possible.

I am working on smaller projects too, that I will actually try to create within the next year. Mostly for practice, and also because I want to make a top-down 2d ES ripoff.

From what I've read of Guild Wars 2 combat it's basically an evolution of hotkey based combat, you press a button and it plays an animation but the server has a couple of seconds to sync things up and come back with results. Your description sounded much more like Devil May Cry and we're a long, long way from being able to do that in an MMO setting. Any game that handles that in the next hundred years at least will do so by masking lag with design. Long animations, careful segmentation of players to prevent huge scale PVP battles, large amounts of asynchronous design.

These are going to block off huge elements of design but design is the tool that will fix them. It's way way easier to do all this stuff than it is to balance a classless system, but in turn it's way way easier to balance a classless system than to brute force this through code.

As for your smaller projects are these things you're planning to create yourself? If so I'd again suggest to start small. It's absolutely possible for one man to do something of that scale but your first few projects should really be tiny. If you're just thinking of design documents you can code later (or not given how reality can interfere) then that sounds very sensible.