How would you go about making a next generation MMO? What new and innovative ideas would you bring to the table?
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How would you go about making a next generation MMO? What new and innovative ideas would you bring to the table?
I wouldn't. People today are anti-social/asocial and addicted dopamine drip-feeds in videogame form. Why do you think games like retail WoW and FF14 are so popular? People dont want to play MMORPGs, the majority doesn't even know what that fricking entails. They want to log-on, press a few buttons while being brain-afk watching YT vids or listening to podcasts, don't be inconvenienced by other humans and get some kind of reward after 30 minutes and then log off.
>People dont want to play MMORPGs
Wrong. People don't want to play bad mmos. That's why I made the distinction about making a next gen mmo in OP. Also, wow and ffxiv aren't popular, they're only "popular" relative to the current mmo market, which is just a shell of what it used to be in the 00s. Virtually every mmo is in decline and has lost more than 95% of its peak population, or has shut down.
>People don't want to play bad mmos
Yes they do. Hello?
yeah sure bro, everyone is playing bad games
You're delusional lol. More people play MMOs now then ever.
>You're delusional lol. More people play MMOs now then ever.
Virtually every MMO that still hasn't shut down has lost anywhere from 90% to 99% of its peak population, and that's on top of most of them also going f2p (a sign of a healthy MMO population, right?). There's only a few of them left that aren't a complete ghost town today. Don't know what reality you live in where MMOs are more popular than ever, but it's sure as hell isn't the same as ours.
Its good for the economy. Its practice for work life. And you spend a majority of your life working. Why do people make babies if not for them to be economic batteries and die and serve their nation and their tribe in the process.
In many ways the world is a far better place it is today than it ever was.
Posts like this are the reason I keep visiting this accursed place
I'm not asocial, I used to be very social in video games in the past, but these days nobody can hold a conversation and they only speak in memes. Joining parties also feels like applying for a job, you need a fricking resume.
you dont
you cant compete with great MMOs that already have 20 years of content and balacing
Why would you want to compete with decrepit dinosaurs and their zombie audience?
i mean be my guest zoomer, but dont come crying to Ganker when your new MMO is dead within a month, like all new MMOs
Lost Ark is the most popular PC mmo right now.
It's probably 90% bots by now.
So is wow and ffxiv.
The only good mmo on that list is EvE, and that one hasn't been good since 2011.
RO is top tier. Cope.
I'd make it a first person VR colony sim roguelike
I'd make an antisocial, high fantasy skillbased Action-MMO with open world PVP. Grouping up is discouraged with friendly fire and reduced rewards, chat functionality is non-existent and guilds don't exist.
You can only communicate through gestures and various grunting noises.
Black Desert Online gets surprisingly close to what you described
Simple let the player build their character their way from the bottom up. No levels. No end game raiding. They live in a fantasy world that is dangerous. You bow down to King, Queen, God, or Devil. To do any other is peril at your characters life.
>no levels
so they get to pick all the abilities from the start?
I would make a good PBBG.
Something like BTB in (classic) Halo with like 1000 players per server fighting over an objective or some shit.
I too want Planetside 3
Learn to read.
Elaborate.
>How would you go about making a next generation MMO? What new and innovative ideas would you bring to the table?
I am not asking what kind of mmo you would like to see be made (e.g. "I want runescape with better graphics and action combat"), this is not that sort of the thread. I am asking specifically for new and innovative ideas to take the mmo genre into the next generation.
>I'm not asking for runescape with better graphics
>posts image of muh graphics
You will make the next gen MMO by doing Unreal Engine 5 graphics. That's literally the only thing that would cause anyone including yourself to ever call it a "next gen MMO". Gameplay will always be a secondary thing that nobody pays attention to or understands.
Humanity is not evolved enough to talk about game design, try again in a few hundred years after society has collapsed and reset.
I specifically said I want to hear new ideas and not just "i want x game with better combat and graphics" and you still misconstrued what I said. Take you meds, schizo.
Then stop calling it a "next generation MMO" because nobody is going to see it like that just because it has different gameplay.
Says who? You're an expert on sociology? We're still in the first generation of mmos. Nothing about them has fundamentally changed since 90s and early 00s. All of them borrow design ideas from meridian, ultima online, everquest, lineage, dark age of camelot and others without bringing any new ones to the genre. I want to see what sort of ideas people have to propel us from current generation into the next one. If you don't have any and are just looking to shitpost then frick off to Ganker, you underage vermin.
When was the last time a game was called the next generation of X genre and it didn't involve next gen graphics? Never, because graphics are the only thing that matters in that.
>We're still in the first generation of mmos. Nothing about them has fundamentally changed since 90s and early 00s
Minecraft is arguably next-gen mmorpg. Its just noone defines it as mmorpg because nowadays mmorpg = wow.
Anyways, truly next-gen mmorpg will not come from tolkien->dnd->mud->wow tradition. It has to be something completely new. We have had several waves of VR and the technology still ain't quite there but if I had to make a guess I think this is where next-gen will spawn.
Perhaps sometime in 2035 or later. Right now we are just beyond the peak of tech era which started in 80s. Innovations are exhausted and we will need at least 15 years to kickstart a new era around some new paradigm. Honestly it likely won't be semiconductor paradigm anyways so I think we are stuck with what we have for long time.
>truly next-gen mmorpg will not come from tolkien->dnd->mud->wow tradition
Star Citizen is the next generation mmorpg
It's vaporware that will never come out.
okay here's my pitch for design
>simulated ecology, economy, mutable environment with npcs as social agents
>world begins in a primal state
>players have limited technology and resources and have to build an economy to advance their technology and resource output
>the world runs in cycles. beyond a certain technological level, a cataclysm eventually occurs which kills everyone and returns the world to its primal state, but also advances an overarching story and leaves scattered remnants of high technology in the world for the next cycle.
>players have to cooperate to build the largest structures
>players have to cooperate to go on expeditions to find new resource locations etc.
and here's my pitch for engineering
>core game logic runs on cache optimised ECS with lockless parallel scheduler (e.g. FLECS)
>game has a web client and a native PC client
>build the game engine before attempting to build the game
>use procedural generation to build wilderness areas in between hand-crafted points of interest (e.g. wavefunction collapse algorithm)
>graphics are functional
>code architecture is designed to be straightforward to inject new systems over a period of time (as in e.g. SS13)
come on people, hit me with some better ideas
Sounds like Rust.
I have played rust, I definitely enjoyed it for a while but it wasn't a particularly social experience
Here is a new idea that is specifically achievable within current technology: make gms actually gming the game and not being glorified janitors of hr department. As in creating events, advancing storylines, playing as boss monsters, act as in game pantheon of gods etc.
It's not new at all. Asheron's Call had that and it's one of the earliest mmos. I think Nexus also has something like that and that's the 2nd oldest mmo.
Player guilds can be merely groups of friends or raiders, or territory-owning factions composed of smaller guilds. The perks of being a territory-owning faction include high-end resource extraction; for example, endgame potions require fruit of a tree that is in three or four territories. This gives a faction that owns all of these a powerful foothold over the market, and other faction members would be "poaching" on their territory should they take it.
Factions can be in various alignments to each other; neutral, trading, cold war, peace, allied, and warring. Changing an alignment toward a faction costs Influence, which a faction gains as players kill poachers/hostile players and do PvE content. High end raids earn more Influence. As a rule, peace or indifference is cheaper than alliance and war. Neutral means you can only attack neutral players on your own territory. Trading means factions exchange a list of resources with each other every day. Cold war is conflict that can occur anywhere but neutral territory with no real resolution because no territory can be lost. Peace simply disables PvP. Alliances gives you bonus Influence for assisting them in both PvE and PvP and allows you to be summoned in defense of their territories. Warring allows you to invade a territory with intent to conquer. Conquering requires completing the Local Raid. Warring can be ended by either side declaring a Truce, which can be done once daily and costs Influence to decline.
A Local Raid is a boss encounter designed by faction or guild leaders, unique to each area. Snapped together from prefab assets in a Forge Mode/XIV housing style system with a boss/adds using a customizable moveset, Local Raids find their difficulty in their unpredictability. They cannot be used for defense until the owning faction beats it at min ilevel. In addition to a short instance time limit, pulls cost Influence, like Continues. If you fail to kill it, you cannot challenge it again for one day.
Players would figure out the best way to abuse a overcomplicate system like that. Most politics would happen outside the game on discord. The top guilds would start renting out their territories for cash and create alliances outside of the game to not deal with any downsides. You would create cartels that run your game.
Influence prevents politics being exclusively out of game. Alignments are necessary because of their tangible ingame benefits; alliances prevent friendly fire from AOEs and provide bonus Influence, which is needed to prolong conflicts and take more territories. Disabling PvP via peace also disables a less informed, seditious, or outright trolling subservient guild from starting conflict with others.
Renting out territories would be fine; there would probably be an ingame mechanic for territory transfer, but it is on the rentee to decide if he wants to return it at all and not say "come and take it". And if it was for real world cash, even more so-RWT is not allowed so conflicts arising over RWT deals gone sour would get the seller in trouble.
Plus, you act like a discord cartel wouldn't implode like any other discord community. Schisms would form frequently, especially in the biggest communities. Their ranks would dwindle as less desirables are removed if they do not totally fracture, and with a smaller population they would be unable to defend all of their territories from smaller factions, given these smaller factions can figure out raid mechanics in time. Guilds often fall apart in any MMO; make it an in-game mechanic already.
would figure out the best way to abuse a overcomplicate system like that. Most politics would happen outside the game on discord. The top guilds would start renting out their territories for cash and create alliances outside of the game to not deal with any downsides. You would create cartels that run your game.
This already happens in every PvP MMO now and devs are completely powerless to do anything about it (or completely disinterested). You have to play moronic Discord social mindgames instead of playing the actual game, which is complete bullshit.
Basically this. To really fix MMOs you have to design them with heavy RNG in mind. You can't give players a means to metagame it.
That's basically impossible outside of it being entirely procgen, which will open more can of worms than deal with. PvP focused community driven mmos are basically impossible to do in any way that won't end in it being run outside of a game entirely.
just ban people for metacomms
Good luck making a dent in the whole thing while at the same time not turning bans into weapon that can be used to essentially delete your opposition in game.
You really underestimate organizations that would come to live in such climate. Look at EVE alliances that hold together literally thousands of people and most of the biggest schisms that happened in its history is due to malicious agents acting up instead of natural implosion.
>which will open more can of worms than deal with
No it won't.
What is the point of such autistic, overly complicated systems? MMOs should facilitate organic interaction between players instead of determining it for them.
This Influence system is kind of directly ripped from the Endless series of 4X games. By having territories with resources you can fight over and trade with, it's not a stretch to say this game has stepped a toe into the strategy genre even if only few people have access to it, and it is only fair you acknowledge why those mechanics exist in those games.
Rules are meant to provide guidance and flow to gameplay. Games that are out now have so many systems to get BiS gear. Earn tokens from doing X, Y, and Z, buy a mat from a vendor after a week of farming tokens, get this other weapon made from mats from endgame of like 4 different crafting skills which require 2 different endgame gathering skills, then trade the weapon and the mat in. Is that not autistic and overly complicated? On the other hand, the process provides usefulness to almost every trade skill in the game as well as demand your time doing content with other players. If people were left without systems, they would do what they wanted as quickly as they could.
And of course, people are impulsive morons.
If people had their way, they would be in conflict all the time. The braindead DPS that stands in mechanics wants to see the big number, you know this. How do you stop him from walking into places uninvited and blasting innocent people with your clan tag on and making all of you KoS? Meeting other players would be a dreadful experience at almost every encounter because it would always be PvP. Gathering mats and travel would be like walking to the store in Detroit. By putting a cost on creating conflict, you encourage people to fight for actual reasons. By rewarding peace with the ability to pay for the cost of conflict, it becomes a rotation of events that happen in the span of a month; finding something you want, acquiring it through either trade or war, doing content to get the rest of what you need, and finishing the projects you started out with to move on to something new.
>This Influence system is kind of directly ripped from the Endless series of 4X games. By having territories with resources you can fight over and trade with, it's not a stretch to say this game has stepped a toe into the strategy genre even if only few people have access to it, and it is only fair you acknowledge why those mechanics exist in those games.
Okay, but why do you need some autistic system for it? You have your areas with valuable resources, people will naturally fight over them. I don't see the point of your systems other than adding unnecessary barriers to the game. It works great for 4x games because it's entirely different genre and type of gameplay.
>Rules are meant to provide guidance and flow to gameplay.
That's not what rules are for. They are explicitly for regulation, restriction and control. I think you should give players as much freedom to exercise their will within the game as possible.
>If people were left without systems, they would do what they wanted as quickly as they could.
What's wrong with that? Why do you think you know what's better for everyone? Leave the players be to decide how they want to play the game.
>If people had their way, they would be in conflict all the time.
There's a limit to how much conflict people can endure before they break and reach their point of exhaustion. It applies both to real life and to video games.
>The braindead DPS that stands in mechanics wants to see the big number, you know this. How do you stop him from walking into places uninvited and blasting innocent people with your clan tag on and making all of you KoS?
By punishing them? That's up to the clan how they go about it. Ultimately, you can just kick them out. Any serious guild has a screening process to find appropriate people for their group and they don't just take any random player with unknown reputation.
>Meeting other players would be a dreadful experience at almost every encounter because it would always be PvP. Gathering mats and travel would be like walking to the store in Detroit.
Do you think that's a natural behavior? That everyone's first instinct is to attack and loot anyone they see on sight? Or do you think that's a result of a poorly designed game which rewards and incentivizes such behavior? In real life you have consequences for such behavior. There should be consequences in the game as well.
>By putting a cost on creating conflict, you encourage people to fight for actual reasons. By rewarding peace with the ability to pay for the cost of conflict, it becomes a rotation of events that happen in the span of a month; finding something you want, acquiring it through either trade or war, doing content to get the rest of what you need, and finishing the projects you started out with to move on to something new.
I agree, I just don't think you need some gameplay system for it. You need a game that allows players to form societies, so they can function and deal with issues and conflicts like societies do.
>In real life you have consequences for such behavior
You don't respawn in real life, and years spend in prison are actually real and you must live through them. And people still are being shitheads here on a pretty regular basis. If you try to emulate it one of the two things happens, it will be either so moronicly severe that nobody will even engage with it, or not severe enough that it won't matter.
>You don't respawn in real life
I like the idea of manual resurrection. People would be less likely to pick a fight with random strangers if they knew they could potentially be stuck waiting an hour for someone to revive them if they lost.
>and years spend in prison are actually real and you must live through them.
There are other ways to punish people besides imprisoning them. Banishment, blacklisting, fining, confiscation of property and so on.
>And people still are being shitheads here on a pretty regular basis.
Nothing wrong with that. You need a variety of players for a healthy community. Need to make sure to design a game that doesn't incentivize everyone being a shithead because there's not much else to do after a certain point or because you have to be one in order to keep up with others. That's a mistake that a lot of hardcore full loot mmos make and where they ultimately fail.
>People would be less likely to pick a fight with random strangers if they knew they could potentially be stuck waiting an hour for someone to revive them if they lost.
That just means they'd only start fights they know they can win. Which gankers already do.
>That just means they'd only start fights they know they can win.
How would they know?
every time you kill someone, you rack up a mortal sin. if you die with sins, you go to hell, and have to complete a series of onerous challenges to escape. the more sins you have when you die, the harder it gets to escape hell.
That's been done already. It's just pointless tedium. It's actually surprising how little thought has been put into what should be one of the key elements of the mmo gameplay.
what games do this?
Rift? Or maybe Neverwinter. It was some western mmo, I think.
I know this isn't exactly Albion, but it makes me think of Albion and it's really just run by a big ass guild despite the devs wanting to decouple power from a few. Unless the devs put in super strong AI lead factions.
I could aim for an Online RPG like Phantasy Star Online rather that a proper mmo, as it does seem to bring more people together
Alright listen up
So you take WoW
And them make it in Unreal Engine 5 graphics
And then add action combat
WTF I'm getting excited just thinking about it
So you make Open World PVP and give guilds as much power as possible so they can gank noobs all daay without recourse. Basically don't innovate anything just make open world pvp ifg ytou don't like it then you're a moron who got filtered and needs to get good.
Have a game mechanic that is affected by real life circumstances like the weather, time of day, moon phases or the four seasons.
I really want a MMO that allows browser, executable, and VR play. Basically a PC only MMO, but playing it on a browser on a mobile phone is acceptable.
Also, I really have wanted an MMO that not only allows players to trade or share accounts, but one that limits the number of accounts entirely and has a market on the website for people selling their accounts. But honestly, MMOs seem to be moving into a VR future, and I don't know what that means particularly for gameplay. In vrchat, people enjoy playing chess and making art, but PVP in VR has weird creations. Pavlov sucks, and I don't know what a VR MMO would actually look like. It wouldn't look like OrbusVR or Zenith, it might be something more like GAIA Online mixed with like a turn-based game.
I would also want to create a game that even I would play if I were the GM. That's another big problem with MMOs nowadays, there is very little GM interaction. MMOs could easily create cosmetic items that are distributed by events held by GMs, and keep those items rather exclusive for a cool market to emerge from that. And then imagine if you could sell those items on the website for crypto or something, just a unified ecosystem of an enjoyable game that cares about your progress and keeps your data for a decade or more.
Right now, the multiplayer market is basically ripping assets and playing VR with avatars. There needs to be more than this
>I really want a MMO that allows browser, executable, and VR play. Basically a PC only MMO, but playing it on a browser on a mobile phone is acceptable.
That's possible, but it wouldn't be a good game. It would have to be bare bones and basic to make it work across all these platforms.
>Right now, the multiplayer market is basically ripping assets and playing VR with avatars. There needs to be more than this
Sounds like you want an MO not MMO, which is fine, but that's not what the thread is about.
Can't make a modern MMO work without fixing the players. Can't fix a giant network of spoiled and entitled players that make up the current market because there's no systemic fix other than moderation and banning morons. Even if on a personal level someone wants to do their best to approach an MMO community like it was 2002 the social network around the game would completely invalidate their effort. A new MMO needs to be authoritarian and start from the community it wants and then filter or cut people that get entitled and want a different vision. Not a fun answer but you cannot mechanically fix this mess from just designing a better game.
This is why the only way to make a good MMO is to forget about World of Warcraft. As soon as you forget about world of warcraft, the idea that an MMO can be not dead when it has """"only"""" 50k players will become a possibility. And when NOT having millions of billions of subscribers is a possibility, making more niche and interesting MMOs becomes a possibility as well since you don't have to cater to the lowest common 40 IQ denominator.
Where will you get money to upkeep and develop the game? Not to mention making it presentable and bug free in the first place. That is the cornerstone that every smallish/indie mmo hits hard.
Where do you get the money to develop literally any game and make it presentable and bug free? MMOs aren't any different, and if you think they are then you didn't forget about World of Warcraft yet.
Players don't need to be "fixed." There's already millions of people playing other genres that aren't MMORPGs who aren't anti-social metagaming shitheads. MMO devs are just failing to attract those people to their games.
post theme song
When I started playing entropia online, anarchy online, runescape and any other free mmo i could find when i was early teens, I did so because i was sick of playing MP games where all your progress got wiped when the server changed maps or restarted.
Nowadays, nearly all games have permanent progression systems, they have friends lists, chat channels etc Discord is a thing. They have large, believable worlds.
The real reasons people played MMOs are now largely catered to in modern non-MMO games.
People think MMOs were popular because of super deep character itemisation or huge grinds. The reality is lonely nerds just wanted a place to hang out and talk/play with friends and show off their spiky shoulderpads.
So with that in mind, I think any MMO I made would focus on the open world be more like a lobby/waiting room for content. This sounds like soulless modern wow group finder stuff, but I would integrate it in a seamless way. Rather than UI elements that teleport you anywhere in the world you have to interact with the world to enter games. I've also always wanted spectating games to be in-universe and lorefriendly. So imagine a 5v5 arena, where people spectating are actually in the stand watching.
Imagine you and your mates standing in game, as your character, watching a pro game stream on an ingame monitor. Or somehow in a raid zone, watching the world first race.
For the setting, for me it has to be something like Anarchy Online, far future sci fi. You look at XIVs success, people love carebear story driven aspects. You look at the staying power of WoW Arena, M+, world first races, a different group love competitive PvX.
So I guess to start to put it together good graphics, focus on optimisation and textures, rather than flashy engine features. WoW style semi-action gameplay, but Scifi, with ranged and melee builds much the same as AO had. Raids, dungeons, PVP.
1/2
A good us vs them faction system from the beginning, that still allows individuals to deal with the other side when advantageous for both.
Try not to overdo the story with big bads, and cosmic horrors beyond our comprehension, politics, greed, power struggles.
Unironically cater to people like Asmongold and Rich Evans. World first raiders, arena players. The success of AllTheThings addon in WoW curseforge com/wow/addons/all-the-things shows that people want status symbols, rare drops, cosmetics.
So think a story driven RPG where you really do feel a part of the story line like XIV, but then you constantly go in and out of competitive instances like WoWs M+ or arenas. With all sorts of achievements and cosmetics as rewards for effort and skill. When you want to relax, you and your guild mates head to your guild hall and all watch asmongold pretend to be mad he lost a roll on a rare drop. All in a sci fi universe in the far future. With all the twitch stuff integrated as closely as possible in game.
Stop copying gameplay from 90s era RPGs such as monster AI so bad that tanking is role and not a playstyle
Go the opposite direction as every other mmo. Instead of a braindead skinnerbox of fetch quests make an actual game.
Chivelry like game with melee combat where you can actually choose direction to swing your sword ect. Add ability to build castles and seige engines for pvp.
Second idea, diablo-like isometric rpg. Characters all start out with single unimpressive attacks. Work up to having 4 skills available at any time (total available much higher). Builds are created in part by the skill choice limitations. All skills require player skill to use. For example, some would be 'skill shot' abilities, some would require timing ect. Disruption skills allow you to interrupt/stun/cancel effects. The pace of this game would be very fast. Every class can run support/attack/hybrid/disruption equally well. Support characters are never nessisary and just come with pros/cons. Heavy focus on pvp battleground modes at set levels. Gear can be aquired through pvp or pve for either mode but some stuff is easier to get in the opposite game mode to encourage cross play.
Hybrid pve/pvp game modes. Example, large 'boss mob' fights opposing teams boss mob while each team fights each other. Team whos boss mob dies first losses. Support mode fights where a small army of mobs from each team fight each other. Players cannot kill mobs and can only buff them. Players try to buff/heal their mobs while disrupting the other team trying to do the same.
>What new and innovative ideas would you bring to the table
make it actually good and not putrid shit
But how?
not making it an mmo is a good start
redo new world to be more like albion
action 'souls-like' (unironically)
destructable environments
utility exploration
basically darkfall meets zelda meets darksouls but not even dark souls so much as dedicated attacks for weapons, doesn't need invincibility frames on dodging
Riot should finally something, anything about their project.
*show
Riot just copies whatever is the most popular and successful. I am certain their MMO will just be a more modern WoW. I don't know why anyone has such high hopes for these guys.
>a more modern WoW
Add the massive playerbase it will inevitably have through sheer brand recognition and you got a great themepark mmorpg.
Isn't that what most players want?
wow players only want wow. wow isn't a game for these people it's heroin. they all desperately go from mmo to mmo looking to recapture that first wow high and they never get it so they always return to wow because other games can't offer what they are seeking
>Isn't that what most players want?
Given the current state of the mmo genre, clearly not.
I guess I'd be fine with that.
It's hard to try to enjoy the social aspect with the thought of most of the people who are active look like pic related .
Meanwhile my friend group just play Moba or shooter as a group game
The last time I was in the Ganker guild is just consist of backstabbing and shit talking, no wonder why modern players just want to solo stuff then log off.
>>The last time I was in the Ganker guild is just consist of backstabbing and shit talking
That's 100% of guilds in a PvP MMO.
Will never post it enough but the MMO genre has a LOT to learn from Dofus.
>Original turn based strategy gameplay
Not everything has to be tab targeting 3D to work
>Crafting is core
Gear is only crafted making professions always relevant. You can buy that gear from the Auction House but it is usually way cheaper to craft and "enchant" it by other players which forces interactions.
>ALL the content is relevant
Mainly due to resources being all relevant for crafting. High level gear often requires some low level resources.
>Not linear progression
The game more or less guides the player but there isn't a clear path to take. Also money and gear is EVERYTHING meaning one can progress by slaying monsters or literally just israeliteing all day in capital cities.
>Overwhelming quests
Main quests (to get eggs for example) are very long and some steps can be hard if there are no known cheese strats. Also often requires rare and/or difficult to get items.
>High incentives for party play
At many point in the game you can't do things solo especially at max lvl. Grouping is mandatory to beat dungeons mostly. If you don't need to you are basically regarded as a god like Volcasaurus.
>Class synergies
There are a lot of very cool class combinations to play with big impacts. Teamplay is a huge thing.
>Builds creativity and variety
Tons of items and viable builds. There are "go-to" builds but decent players will go for very specific things.
>World pvp objectives that are not intrusive for regular players
Alliances / guilds can fight for prisms and plant NPCs to gather resources on a map when players win a fight on it (it's a bonus it doesn't "steal" items).
>Absurd lifespan
There is a crazy amount of stuff to do in the game. May it be crafting, leveling, gathering, breeding, questing or pvping. All of it is valuable and matters at any level.
Endgame means being level 200 with optimized gear and all the dofus. For a new casual player this can legit take over 1-2 years.
>Original turn based strategy gameplay
I love me good turn based combat like in Divinity Original Sin but for an mmo I can't think of anything more immersion breaking.
>I can't think of anything more immersion breaking
Any existing MMO combat system is more immersion breaking, honestly.
>immersion breaking
WTF are you morons even talking about have you ever played a turn based game with other people? The problem isn't some gay shit like immersion the problem is spending 85% of the game waiting to take your turn.
Simultaneous turns are a thing, you know. Hell, the way Runescape handles combat is actually done by making each entity's "turn" based on a personal cooldown timer, resulting in a kind of real-time turn system, which doesn't at all detract from the experience.
MMOs were all about immersion initially. A big reason why Ruenscape and WOW were so captivating is because it was like being in another world and with real human beings. Eventually people saw through the facade and moved on which is why MMOs died. Only drip-feed addicts remained which is why there will never again be a good MMO.
What was originally a placeholder and compromise to a grander vision to bring a world alive is now the standard.
I don't think it lost its appeal. On some level I think people still want all that, but they just realized you can't have it when you also have to spend all day at work or school.
I mean how much of a virtual world can you occupy when you only have a few hours at a set time each day? (because people are essentially slaves, but that's a story for another day)
So now modern MMOs are streamlined, you just follow a set of train tracks toward the end of the game and hopefully feel "accomplished" or some shit, before deleting the game and installing the next mmo gimmick.
One day people will be free, and then we'll have good mmos
>For a new casual player this can legit take over 1-2 years.
Look at black desert online if you want to know how well that goes over. People don't like being told "dude the game gets good after 3000 hours". They'll just play something else. And it gets worse. The players who ARE at endgame constantly just ask for new content, because they finished it all, meaning you either extend that endgame goal from 1-2 years to 3-4, or you risk losing your veteran playerbase who probably is the only one keeping your business afloat. The overall entertainment market is genuinely too saturated with other things to do to allow for a noncompetitive game that requires literal years of play before you reach the top.
>the game gets good after 3000 hours
that's because of gear gaps and the focus on rushing to close the gap so you can actually enjoy pvp, instead of going to grind spots looking for fun pvp and a reason to have a guild war. it's a moronic dogshit concept that plagues bdo. the game was better when the cap was +15 and people pvpd in calpheon spots. there were hardly any discrepancies between gear so you didn't get mogged by some 1shot guy who pinoyed 5k hours. the gear and the grind were secondary, player interact was at the forefront. the most you could do with excess money was fund another class to try out not boost your character to insanely unreachable levels of power over other players. there's literally no reason to play bdo anymore unless you want to throw away your time chasing nothing
>The players who ARE at endgame constantly just ask for new content, because they finished it all, meaning you either extend that endgame goal from 1-2 years to 3-4,
>or you risk losing your veteran playerbase who probably is the only one keeping your business afloat
>keeping your business afloat
This is where developers frick things up though. Hardcore or veteran players do not keep a business afloat they're just the most verbal about keeping it afloat. Hardcore/'veteran' players are a cancer that eats away at a businesses ability to bring in those new players that are the life blood of the game. Wildlands is a good example of what happens when you cater to that crowd, you realize they're a vocal minority and your business actually goes under because you can't pay the rent in upvotes
This. Happens to literally every multiplayer game. Even fricking TF2 died because it kept listening to compgays.
>compgays
Basically what I mean by NEETs
Unhealthy behavior should not be encouraged and MMOs all encourage unhealthy behavior, which is a huge part of why the genre sucks.
Video games are unhealthy behavior, the genre is fine when you're not hyperfocused on the morons who can finish new content in a week
>Video games are unhealthy behavior
That's like saying going to see a play or a movie is unhealthy behavior. Video games can and should be a social activity reserved for a specific time and place, even if few people treat them that way (especially MMO devs and their fans).
Going to see a play or movie is social behavior because you're simply in a building with a bunch of other people. MMO's by that measure are more of a social activity than single player video games, which seems like common sense. Can it be abused? Sure. Someone who spends all day at the theater sitting in the corner will probably complain about the lack of rotating plays same as a sperg who spends all his time on an MMO
I agree, and that's precisely the problem. But the difference is that something can be done about it with MMOs. The devs can shut the servers off. Yet they don't. Devs are part of the problem.
It's not about shutting the servers off, you wouldn't shut down the theater because of those spergs. You would ignore their demands and continue catering to the 90% of normal players enjoying it normally
There is no "90% of normal players." MMOs are dead and absolutely horrid games all around and it's because they're overrun with those spergs.
Agree to disagree I guess
You actually think MMOs today are good games? The theme park design doesn't utilize the multiplayer aspect properly and doesn't encourage roleplaying, and sandbox design hasn't worked well for decades, a huge reason being because devs keep the servers running all the time.
>You actually think MMOs today are good games?
I think this thread is here because they acknowledge the genre is stale and not what it could be. But to throw out the entire concept of MMO's is silly. Just don't play them.
>But to throw out the entire concept of MMO's is silly
What are you talking about?
>MMOs are dead
>unplug the server
>all mmo's are unhealthy
Just don't play them kek
Unplugging the servers is to make them better and more sandbox oriented, doofus.
wat
Have you been paying attention to anything being said at all? Sandbox design hasn't worked for ages because keeping servers running all the time attracts mass amounts of spergs who ruin sandbox games instantly. That's why devs went with theme park design instead, which is horrible and kills the whole point of MMOs.
>because keeping servers running all the time
as opposed to?
Not keeping them running all the time. What exactly were you expecting with that question?
It's an MMO. Are you saying you go to log in and it's not opening hours?
Yes. You play when everyone else plays. You don't sit there like a sperg playing 10+ hours a day 7 days a week setting unrealistic standards for both devs and other players and destroying others' bases while they're offline.
I think the idea is moronic in lieu of simply ignoring those spergs and not catering to them. Has there ever been an MMO with daily operating hours?
Ignoring them doesn't work and we have 25 years of evidence of this. Sandbox MMOs have traditionally never worked because of them.
>Ignoring them doesn't work and we have 25 years of evidence of this
Wildlands is evidence that they haven't been ignored for 25 years
I don't know anything about Wildlands, but that tells me whatever it's doing is hardly the success you probably think it is.
You're such a fricking moron kek. last reply
>last reply
Thank god, was getting tired of your seething.
>in lieu of simply ignoring those spergs and not catering to them
You really think just ignoring them is a good solution when most MMOs went with theme park game design from the 00s onward and sandbox MMOs are pretty much all dead? Besides, who's losing by unplugging the servers? Nobody but the spergs.
You need to find a different genre that works for you, because mmos clearly are not for you.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
>no argument
Why are MMOgays so cancerous?
>Not everything has to be tab targeting 3D to work
No, but it is a pretty firmly-established genre at this point. IOW ideas to improve tab-target MMO will be distinct from ideas that are basically a different genre of MMO entirely.
The biggest problem is MMOs don't really work in the modern internet. Too much socialization happens outside of the game itself, and you'd have to design literally every system and experience around that fact if you wanted it to be anything other than a pseudo single player game like the current MMOs.
I remember the time where you can still speak to girls, now is just gayfest.
Design reward systems that get players out in the world and interacting with one another. World quests and reputations are great for this, frick instanced content.
Stop consolizing mmos and trying to make the control scheme work on a controller, this always fails and makes the game shit.
Stop trying to trick players into thinking they're playing a different non-mmo genre. Action mmos don't exist, they've taken traditional hotkey tab-target mmo designs and awkwardly finagled them into looking like an action game when this inevitably makes the game feel like shit to play. ESO bullshits players into thinking that it's like Skyrim: lo and behold the game feels awkward to play. This strategy has never worked and pretty much only WoW has ever nailed gamefeel in an mmo.
Bring back unified servers instead of splitting everyone up. Shouldn't we have more bandwidth than we did in 2005? why do games from back then have unified servers and player bases while we can't have that now?
Let me click on things, decouple the camera from the fricking mouse please.
Give us some cool races and racials. Make an undead race with some kind of unique death mechanic. Make a race that's immune to fire. Go crazy and see what works, I don't give a frick about +.01% damage with axes.
Iterate on the mount system. Introduce mount types with unique stats. Faster mount = easier to dismount when hit and vice versa, I don't know, it's not hard to be creative with this shit.
Factions and world pvp are great, and you're a pussy if you disagree.
I agree there is a severe lack of innovation but a lot of it is sticking to this bad cargo-cult wisdom that's cropped up over the last 15 years or so.
water ballon physics on breasts.
CRAZY idea time:
What if players could fight over realms, like a "king of the hill" or something, and whoever owns the realm has access to a shitload of admin features, like moving buildings, changing textures, transforming players into anime girls (even literally uploading custom models).
It'd be like different "realms" have different laws of physics. You'd take 1 step into a realm owned by some mad troll and your longsword is now a dragon dildo.
Do you have what it takes to slay the troll and restore order to the realm?
This could work with a setting like the overall NIS Netherworld lore (Disgaea, Makai Kingdom etc.) where world are destroyed and created at a whim.
I feel like it would make a cool /vm/ mmo, something with a lot of community dynamics.
It's probably not something a big company could ever make.
And probably needs more thought to prevent too much trolling, but would still be fun either way.
I will put sex into my game so the neckbeards never leave their Mom's house.
I had this idea where the game plays like starcraft but you're just a random marine doing mercenary jobs and shit. You do jobs to help your base grow and occasionally gets raided by zergs.
By burning down the entire concept of an MMO and starting from the drawing board now that computers are 30 years more advanced.
>starting from the drawing board
That's what this thread is about you mongoloid moron, obviously you have not a single unique thought about what that new "concept" is, do you you fricking moron
Unironically the best bet would be to copy/add to Neopets. Instead of a 3d world, just have the pure mechanics and integrated systems.
Make something that is complete dogshit and then accuse all the people that don't want to play it of being racist Hitler worshipping bigots.
a combination of ultima onlina/runescape/archeage with action combat and world pvp
eve online but with wow accessibility and polish
>How would you go about making a next generation MMO? What new and innovative ideas would you bring to the table?
First I would make it make it fun to play at all levels instead of just end game, then I would make it offline and single player.
Don't plan the game being infinite. I've had this idea that instead of having an indefinite length game, you design it with a clear start and end. Market it as "this adventure will take around 2 years". Build a framework that allows you to create interesting and novel content, have devs and GM's be involved throuought the game's existance then move on to the next one after the story is done.
Based, had this thought recently as well. There are several prejudices revolving around MMOs like this that ought to be addressed because they're stagnating the genre.
riots mmorpg is going to save the genre
One global server only. Use a combat system that works well with very high ping. Build everything else around it.
I'm not a fan of having 40 servers just because your games combat needs everyone to be on 20ms ping. Lag and too many dead servers are what kills MMORPGs.
Won't matter, community will remain fractured due to language barriers.
PSO Quickchat and Symbol Arts.
>One global server only.
How would you fit potentially millions of players on a single server? Lost Ark saw over a million concurrent players on just western servers alone.
You don't, he's an idiot. The only combat that works well with high ping is turn based anyway.
I would take elements from other genres. What are other genres doing that can be emulated? People wan't quick dopamine, progression community, strategy, challenges, novelty.
Its hard to make a lasting game where you spend 200 hours to go from point a, then b, then c for a slightly better item only to find out two weeks later you need to spend another 200 hours to be on equal standing. An MMO needs to have a little bit of something for everyone with a clear goal of how to meet those individual needs.
Everyone says not to reinvent the wheel with MMO's but I think you have to. Peoples tastes have changed and so has the technology. The whole goal of an MMO is to have a massive fantasy simulation where you can experience some crazy shit. The casual needs to be able to experience shit the 120 hour a week no lifer can.
Would need to pull some type of survival crafting elements and building along with fps type balanced arenas. Mix that all together with squad based goals, clan based goals and faction based goals. The whole server needs to be a race war for certain resources and POI's. Pull shit from other games that make them great. The no life meta only appeals to so many people.
>I would take elements from other genres. What are other genres doing that can be emulated?
MMOs just need to stop being MMOs when it comes to gameplay and combat. Take a combat system like Mount & Blade, polish it up a bit and add some magic if you want, and build a MMO around that. The only thing really outdated about MMOs is the button clicking combat system.
Button clicking is just one part of the problem. People aren't quitting just because of the button clicking. I think the big issue is the genre is stale. Its like how halo infinite is dead despite basically being halo 3. People want a radically new game mechanic or experience. MMO developers are developing for MMO players. They need to be developing for people that don't play them.
Focus on going back to square one and try to get a single shard/server instance experience rather then the new instance spam garbage that is the modern MMO space.
PVP is open world but opt in guild vs guild system for control of zones of influence, which gives them perks such as building infrastructure and taxing non-PVP players for their use, such as fast travel/respawn points, upgraded crafting workshops, ect.
Crafting is incredibly important and a major part of the gear progression, however tiers of progression are locked behind upgrading local infrastucture, with time limited uber upgrades obtainable only by working together as a guild/community to achieve that upgrade, such as slaying a dragon and using its heart to imbue the forges with dragonblood, granting players the ability to make "dragonforged" armor and weapons for a limited time, these items require upkeep of a heart infused forge in order to repair, which would create economic booms as everyone rushes to make as many dragonforged items as possible before the upgrade expires.
Dungeons aren't static instances meant to be farmed on repeat, but are event sensitive that seeds a labyrinth with different encounters, treasures and rewards, one week, a dungeon might be swarming with goblins, next week, orcs, and next month, necromancers and undead.
Create special narrative team who's entire purpose is to seed the world with hidden or community questlines that takes the effort of the server to complete to unlock new things.
Biggest thing though I wouldn't make an MMO out of the box, i'd create a franchise with single player RPGs and tactics/strategy games, both to prototype gameplay designs such as combat and conquest systems, while working on the project on the side, to ensure income and growth of the studio.
It would be cool if you could put mats in a storage chest that could link up with a vr crafting game. Most MMO crafting is just about bringing a material to a crafting station and rolling. Could be cool to have some type of skill element added to the crafting like hammer strikes on a sword or something.
I would make the combat even more dumbed down and simple and minimalistic so action combat Black folk will frick off. MMOs are about socialization, if you want to feel like an epic hero and play dark souls then go play dark souls.
Then I would remove levelups so koreabrained solo grind homosexuals would get angry and confused and ragequit.
Then I would delete the game because I can't make an MMO on my own while the rest of the team is seething about how it's not like WoW.
>action combat Black folk will frick off
>MMOs are about socialization
tab target never prevented people from being autistic grinders and people socialize less than ever in modern MMOs
>dark souls
doesn't have good action combat
>remove levelups
based
The only sustainable endgame is pvp. You need good core gameplay and a complex pvp system to enable this. People should be playing your MMO because the core gameplay is fun, not because they're skinner boxed morons grinding for loot. To that end:
Nothing instanced, period. The entire point of MMOs was supposed to be inhabiting a shared world, something that's completely ruined by modern instanced garbage.
Dungeons modeled after Everquest - too big for groups to do anything but claim a small section., spawns of rare mobs or bosses on random timers anywhere from a few hours to a week.
Serious death penalties outside of pvp - exploring deep into a dungeon should make you legitimately nervous and scared.
As much forced social interaction as possible. Solo play impossible. No chat outside of close range speech. No global chat, no zone chat, no trade chat. All classes have tools to deal with all situations, so class choice is more based on personal preference than "we have to have a tank and healer and...". Since it's going to be more difficult finding people to group with, the main difficulty will just be finding them rather than finding the right class composition.
Except for support classes, which would double as crafter/gatherer classes. They will require an escort of full combat classes to access rare materials from dungeons or pvp areas.
Endgame as faction-based territorial struggles over large areas. Build and siege castles, raid towns and farmlands, take npcs hostage, whatever. A massive overall objective broken down into smaller struggles that plays out over a season. Something like Alterac Valley scaled up much more, with dozens of tasks spread out over the area to aid your faction or harm the enemy.
Main goal to have a world that feels real, filled with real people who you come to know and recognize.
>No chat outside of close range speech. No global chat, no zone chat, no trade chat.
I feel like I need to give some more detail on this one, too. As far as I know, no mmo has done this and it seems to me that it would add a massive amount of complexity to the game, in addition to making the world feel more real.
MMOs have become a exercise in choosing between making things easier for the players and making the world feel less real. Getting a group together in a town and traveling out to a dungeon together adds realism to the world, but it's not as easy for players as it is in modern MMOs where going to a dungeon means clicking a couple buttons and being teleported across the world with your group of strangers. Making it easy is great for people who just want to be able to more quickly roll the dice again for their skinner box, but not so great when it comes to creating a shared world that feels real.
When the focus is realism and especially pvp, a requirement for direct communication is necessary. Are you in a small fort that's getting attacked by the enemy? How do you get help? We could make it easy and use global chat channels like modern games do, and you can just type "omg help me they're attacking at X" and everyone in the zone will magically hear. But if you want a realistic, engaging, and strategic pvp endgame, you add massive complexity by requiring direct communication.
If your outpost is being attacked, you need to send someone to physically get help. If you're attacking an outpost, you need to be prepared to catch and kill anyone who tries to escape and get help. Are you entering a massive dungeon? Maybe some nasty enemies have spawned and are going from room to room killing players. Rather than hearing someone share this information in the magic global chat channel, you'll have to explore cautiously until you hear sounds of combat.
how would you enforce no out-of-game comms? Feels like it'd be extremely hard to do practically. Once somebody sets up unofficial text/voice chat, group finder, auction house, wiki, etc, you're back to any other MMO.
Only way I can imagine it working is if you made your MMO "arcade-only", where you have to physically go to some location, put your phone in a locker, then log in on their hardware, no other internet access, no paper notes in or out. Which might be cool honestly, sort of like going to a LARP but interconnected with other venues; would work even better VR. but it'd also be very very niche.
>how would you enforce no out-of-game comms? Feels like it'd be extremely hard to do practically. Once somebody sets up unofficial text/voice chat, group finder, auction house, wiki, etc, you're back to any other MMO.
There's no great way to avoid people cheating the system unless you can set up a system like you describe where people are physically prevented from accessing outside systems while playing. Best you could do currently is have in-game voice support tailed to the speech range system and make using external apps to gain an unfair advantage in pvp an actionable offense.
But yeah, probably not ever going to be possible. I'm sure that even if/when we get full immersion VR, some gay is going to make a discord addon.
If you don't provide instant in-game global/faction chat, LFG tools, global economy monitoring, players take it up on themselves to create external websites/channels to do it which you have even less control over and tabbing out to use them becomes as much a part of the meta as anything in-game.
Is this necessarily a bad thing? I want my community to be engaged with each other
You still fail to understand that people at large don't want pvp. especially if it has actual stakes. At fricking all.
Not that anon, but you fundamentally do not understand mmos if you believe people don't want pvp. Just leave this thread and frick off. There's nothing of substance and value you could say on the topic.
PvP and or creative sandbox is the only content that keeps a game going. PvE toddlers just get bored and go to the next game to b***h and moan that the game is out of content. It's almost like facing the same souless npc's over and over gets boring.
Yeah right. That's why Mortal Online, Darkfall, Crowfall, Albion etc are smashing successes that have millions people playing simultaneously right fricking now.
PvP games that are popular are not what you want pvp in mmo to be though is it? Because we already have those as minigames in every themepark.mmo with various degree of success. And on that note do ask yourself if you really want to play mmo with LoL, Fortnite or even CS morons.
>And on that note do ask yourself if you really want to play mmo with LoL, Fortnite or even CS morons.
Honestly when I think of PvP I don't ever think of stuff like duels or that kind of competitive contest.
I think of it in terms of some idealized immersion. Like guild alliances/rivalries, bounty hunting, or just general shenanigans.
If I just wanted to play a short fighting game there's tons of other games out there.
The whole point of MMOs is the immersion in a virtual world, so PvP to me is more about the idea of living in a "world" where people could theoretically attack anyone they want.
I'm not really describing any MMO I've ever played, just an idealized vision of what it's supposed to be in my head.
>Yeah right. That's why Mortal Online, Darkfall, Crowfall, Albion etc are smashing successes that have millions people playing simultaneously right fricking now.
There aren't any mmos with millions of concurrent players left to begin with, in fact, there are only a few online games with that kind of popularity altogether, so I am not sure what your argument is here.
>PvP games that are popular are not what you want pvp in mmo to be though is it? Because we already have those as minigames in every themepark.mmo with various degree of success. And on that note do ask yourself if you really want to play mmo with LoL, Fortnite or even CS morons.
PvP in themepark games is an afterthought.
The problem with most of the games you listed is that they're pvp focused but also feature loot drop on death which is frankly a zero fun experience. Everyone likes the idea of free loot but no one likes the idea of gear they've spent days or weeks collecting being suddenly lost because of a single fight. Because of the nature of mmo pvp, fights are almost never fair, especially in full loot drop games. The nature of the system aggressively encourages you to only start a fight when you're at a clear advantage to avoid the risk of losing your own gear as much as possible.
I'm not saying build a traditional mmo with a pvp focus. That's been done to death. I'm saying build a mmo with a pvp endgame and a gameplay focus. The number one priority should be fun gameplay. People go back to fps games over and over because they're fun to play, not because they're getting loot. Traditional mmo gameplay is hopelessly outdated and needs to go and once it does, there's huge potential for utilizing the mmo format with enjoyable combat systems.
I've played the shit out of games like Mount&Blade because the combat is fun in and of itself. Make a mmo with combat like that where the endgame is joining up with other players to besiege castles and raid villages. Instead of loot drop, have a fame system where players can become nobility and rise through the ranks and gain skills to support larger armies and so on. You still have a risk of loss on death but just of rank, not gear, so even a player who's ranked up to being a king is, stat wise, on even combat footing with a low rank mercenary. There's no reason why a game like this couldn't have a rich pve and crafting system despite a pvp focus.
Rank based systems are what keeps people playing stuff like mobas. Make people join factions and give a rank bonus for successfully capturing enemy castles and a loss for losing your own. There's so much potential for mmo worlds if developers would just think outside the box.
cont.
In the context of a non-instanced, legitimate shared mmo world, that kind of player ranking system would bring back the good old days of player fame in mmos. You get to know the other people on your server. You build friendships and rivalries. You know the names of the player who became your faction's king, and you know the enemy kings. Maybe you're defending a fort and you're outnumbered and losing then all of a sudden the king and bunch of his knights show up to reinforce you. You don't get moments like that in pve games or in games where everyone is a stranger.
The biggest problem with modern mmos is that the endless instancing, easy content that doesn't require communication, auto-matched parties with anonymous strangers, etc. completely kills the experience of inhabiting a shared world with other people. This was more a thing in earlier mmos like Everquest but even as late as the first few years of WoW, you got to know people and guilds on your server. You'd have rivals on the opposing faction because you'd keep running into the same people. You'd see someone from a top guild and you'd recognize them.
Maybe modern gamers just aren't social enough to want to play games like this anymore where a core feature is developing friendships with strangers. When I was a 12 year old kid playing Everquest, my best friends were a college girl in her twenties and an alcoholic army vet in his forties who'd had both legs amputated. I still remember one night when we left a dungeon and stopped in a forest on the way back to town, built a fire under a tree and spent an hour sitting around it and talking. I can't imagine having that kind of experience in modern mmos because the community and the feeling of a real world just isn't there.
It may be that we're just not gonna get back to the kind of immersive world I want until full virtual reality becomes a thing.
>Maybe modern gamers just aren't social enough to want to play games like this anymore where a core feature is developing friendships with strangers. When I was a 12 year old kid playing Everquest, my best friends were a college girl in her twenties and an alcoholic army vet in his forties who'd had both legs amputated. I still remember one night when we left a dungeon and stopped in a forest on the way back to town, built a fire under a tree and spent an hour sitting around it and talking. I can't imagine having that kind of experience in modern mmos because the community and the feeling of a real world just isn't there.
this is just it. all of my best experiences in MMOs involved making friends with new people. the MMO provided the substrate that enabled the shared social experience.
how does anyone expect to make inter-timezone, international friendships if all the worlds are split into shards? this is why I liked asynchronous web MMOs so much. anyone remember slavehack? torn city?
>The problem with most of the games you listed is that they're pvp focused but also feature loot drop on death which is frankly a zero fun experience.
No, their problem is that they're poorly made games. A good full loot pvp mmo unironically has never been tried. Their vision is far too complex and would require a top tier developer like Rockstar or Blizzard to fully realize, yet it's only indie devs who ever try to make them. Then you've got these carebear pvp-hating goons pointing at these games and saying
>see, pvp mmos are bad because these low budget, buggy, broken mmos made by some eurojank nobodies failed to reach the same level of success as wow!
Other anons have pointed out that in survival games consequences can be far more severe than in these pvp mmos, yet they are extremely popular and successful. So clearly the issue is not with the concept of full loot drop on death.
Yeah, and I'm telling you that the only people who enjoy full loot pvp are people like you who get their kicks from griefing other players. The vast majority of players, even those who enjoy open pvp, will actively avoid loot drop areas or content because it's just not fun.
It doesn't matter how "well made" the game is. Loot drop combat will always devolve into extreme ganking where people only engage if they're sure they can win. It's never a fair fight and it's only fun for the winner. Most people don't get enough enjoyment from
>haha i killed that guy and took his loot
to compensate for all the
>man i was just out here trying to level and some guy waited until i was at half health and killed me and took all my loot
I've played plenty of full loot mmos, including WoW private servers like Ascension (which has one of the best implementations of full loot and encouragement to participate in it that i've seen so far) and it's only ever fun for me, regardless of whether I win or lose, when it's a fair fight and those are very rare. It's satisfying to turn the tables on a ganker but it's not worth all the downsides.
You can look at the gaming world and see that games with ranking systems are very popular while games with massive death penalties are not. Losing some rank when you die stings but it's only ever a small loss at a time. Losing a piece of hard earned gear (or, god forbid, all your gear) in a mmo is a large loss and that's what makes it a shitty system in a game where not only is the loss a large one but the fight that caused the loss was almost certainly one in which you were at a disadvantage.
>Yeah, and I'm telling you that the only people who enjoy full loot pvp are people like you who get their kicks from griefing other players.
There's literally nothing wrong with that.
>Loot drop combat will always devolve into extreme ganking where people only engage if they're sure they can win.
How many mmos of this sort have you played?
>It's never a fair fight and it's only fun for the winner.
Bull-fricking-shit.
>I've played plenty of full loot mmos
I don't believe you at all. You sound like a typical whiny, butthurt pvp hater.
>You can look at the gaming world and see that games with ranking systems are very popular while games with massive death penalties are not.
That's completely untrue. Games with full loot pvp and ganking are very popular. Rust is consistently in top 10 on Steam and it's probably the most hardcore game of this type.
None of those games are mmos.
You weren't talking about mmos.
>You can look at the gaming world and see that games with ranking systems are very popular while games with massive death penalties are not.
The entire thread is specifically about mmos, son. I understand that you're beyond desperate to drag the conversation away from mmos to your favorite fps griefer game but the fact remains that mmos and full loot drop are incompatible and you can look at literally every mmo that's ever tried it if you need evidence.
I like full loot but I have been on both sides of the spectrum. I can handle getting my shit punched in by an alpha group and I have been a server cluster alpha. Most of the people I have played with take a heavy loss and they are done for a few months or a year. I think it makes the gameplay fun, but its not for everyone and i think theres some middle ground. Most people can't handle starting from zero and even then there are typically server wipes. Would be a fun and interesting game but I don't think it would have wide appeal as its a little too harsh for carebears.
This. A duel can only get you so far. As shit as new world was, some of the open world PvP was pretty fun. Wars would have been cool too if they werent so broken. They ended up adding some 3v3 lobbies and they are fricking boring. The 3v3 instanced skirmishes would not go as far as there being a bounty on someone or a contested point or tower defense.
I have had 24 hour and week long raids in survival games where people were fighting in shifts trying to defend. The gameplay was dynamic and a similar fight is theoretically improbable. MMO's need to build for those experiences. A PvE dungeon is fun the first time you do it but once you finish you need another. PvP content if created right just keeps on giving. MMO's focus too much on the PvE loot grind when theres a lot cooler stuff they could be focusing on that doesn't get broken with a patch or expansion. Some of the top complaints on the New World forums for why people quit had to do with someone grinding hundreds of hours for a worthless gear set. Gears cool but the game doesn't need to be built around it.
>The gameplay was dynamic and a similar fight is theoretically improbable. MMO's need to build for those experiences.
This is what I'm saying too.
PvE = Player vs. ENVIRONMENT
Most MMOs just treat it like "player vs. mobs", totally forgetting what the E stands for. It doesn't just have to be fighting mobs and doing quests (which are basically just fighting more mobs).
I wish they'd take some lessons from MUD games. For example, you can have a swamp that nobody can cross without a party, and it doesn't have to be because of strong mobs.
It can be because of dangers like falling in quicksand or something, and if you go alone you have nobody to pull you out. So you can die no matter what your level is.
That's what it means to be "vs. Environment".
New world is the only MMO I have played, but I have to say that ARK felt like I was competing with the environment much more. The environment and mobs were much more challenging. I think the reason survival games are so popular is that they are better simulations than MMO's.
When new world launched you could kite mobs onto bots and noobs and steal nodes and it was removed in a later patch. Now bots can basically juggernaut beginner zones. For a game that pivoted to PvE theres really no risk. Something like ARK though still requires you to be aware of the environment and your personal stats. There are tundra and dessert biomes that will absolutely wreck your shit if you don't have the right gear or stats.
If the PvE element of ARK was easier I think PvP would slightly suffer. Meanwhile MMO's have neither.
You are a fricking moron who doesn't understand why exactly survival games are popular and how people play them. They are not popular because of pvp, pvp servers in fact are the least popular in all of them. Those who engage in pvp servers play it as zerg central, claiming the entire server for their group and kos everyone who refuse to join that group. The entire appeal of survivalcraft shit is how much you can frick with it, official servers are not the way people play it. It is either community hosted or private ones, almost always with different server settings that makes away with moronic grinding slog they have by default.
I like both, but I think PvE could be made a lot more interesting.
The best co-op game I've played is a "hardcore mod" for Sven Co-op (basically half-life co-op) where everyone has 1hp. Anyway, the point is that it becomes fun because it's so fricking hard that even people who've played the map 100x before still die, and it's up to newbs to save the day sometimes too.
So everyone is important.
And some of the funnest times I've had doing PvE in MMOs was trying to get to places that my character wasn't ready for. I remember having to be "escorted" to a far away town by higher level players. We'd have to travel through a bunch of high level mobs that could 1-shot me.
And vice versa, I remember doing this for other lower level players too.
This also reminds me a bit of MUDs, where you could really have a challenge from the environment. A game where the environment presents a real danger, even at high levels could definitely remain playable for a long time.
I think the problem with PvE is that it's either too easy, or just grind grind grind.
There's other ways PvE could be handled, but nobody seems to be innovating. And I keep saying that the big companies don't actually want to make a game re-playable. They want to give you a disposable MMO so you'll eventually get bored and jump on their next flavor of the month one.
PvP has a lot of potential too. Again it seems to be a lack of people wanting to think outside the box, and they just keep thinking of PvP as being whatever bad experience they had getting griefed that one time and they can't let it go.
Most people who hate PvP don't understand that my desire for PvP is not about me killing other players but about other players killing ME. I like the idea that that can happen.
I wouldn't mind an open world PvP where it's very easy to escape, so 9 times out of 10 it doesn't matter but just knowing that you CAN be attacked by other players adds something to the immersion.
I agree that games are too easy, but I dont think upping the difficulty is the silver bullet. Nobody wants to play a needle threading simulator. Also I think these big companies are starting to realize that there are other forms of monetization and a game doesnt necessarily have to be disposable.
I think tribal mechanics are pretty under looked. A good example is sportsball gays coping and saying "we" when they have frick all to do with a team or their win but they still vicariously take joy in the sport because somehow they think they are a part of it. Games like fortnite can only handle 100 concurrent players on a server while something like new world could handle close to 2000 concurrent players. I don't think amazon properly capitalized on a feature thats pretty unique to MMO's. MMO's need to play to that strength. Theres PvE'rs in Ark under the protection of PvP players. The relationship is symbiotic. I think MMO's should be similar. There wasn't any danger in new world and bots could just farm nodes all day. You do something like that in ark and you are getting stuffed in a cage and force fed until you make a new character.
All of the most popular games on the planet are "pvp" games. Every fps game is a pvp game. MOBAs are pvp games. The point is that the best content that keeps people playing because it's fun rather than because they're grinding their skinner box is content that directly pits you against other players.
This guy gets it. Having a pvp focus at endgame doesn't mean that there can't be pve too, but developers can spend literal years designing endgame pve content and players will burn through it in less than a month. It's just not viable if you want sustained endgame content.
People generally don't play mmos because they enjoy the gameplay and the solution for bringing in new players, like
said, is to stop developing for "mmo players" who clearly just want the same recycled shit over and over.
Everquest briefly had a system where you could choose to log in as a random mob somewhere in the world. You could wander around as you wanted, use its abilities, and basically try to kill players. A game based around a system like this could be interesting, especially if players controlled bosses, but balancing would be a b***h.
>solo play impossible
>all classes have tools to deal with all situations
Really makes you think...
Anyways, how does a priest tank a mob as well as a warrior or paladin? If everyone can tank well, aren't melee classes useless in pvp? How is group a shared experience when all classes can do anything?
>have to be supp class to be able to gather/craft
>forcing a player into a role
Good luck with this one.
>pvp is massive objective which plays out over a season
Seasons are cancer. They make the objectives meaningless.
>Really makes you think...
You can give every class the ability to fill any role within a party while still to weak to solo. Use your brain, anon. The point is that you should be able to form a group with any composition of classes rather than being forced into trinity cancer.
>forcing a player into a role
Every class based mmo forces players into roles, so...
I'll also accept a primary combat class having to switch to a dedicated gatherer class like FFXIV does. The goal is to force gathering to be a group effort rather than a solo one. Any kind of solo content should be discouraged in a mmo. If you want to play solo, go play a single player game. Everquest made soloing impossible or at least overwhelmingly inefficient for everything but a couple classes and the result was a game with the richest community of any mmo I've played since. You can also grossly reduce the grind this way, since greater effort can equal greater reward so one group gathering expedition can return a lot of resources. I've never seen any game make gathering fun.
>Seasons are cancer. They make the objectives meaningless.
So in the context of a territory struggle endgame, once one faction manages to dominate and take over the map, the servers should just shut down? I guess you could give the dominant faction a stacking debuff the longer they're in control to encourage power struggles but that just feels arbitrary and cheap. Every player should have the opportunity to experience everything from the start and the only way you provide this in a game with map takeover as a focus without fricking over everyone who wasn't there at launch is seasons. A system like Path of Exile where new seasons bring new gameplay mechanics is how you keep your game fresh and relevant.
>game with the richest community of any mmo I've played since
Correlation does not imply causation. EQ and every other wanked web 1.0 mmo were what they were because it was web 1.0 time, not the other way around. You had the community and nostalgia about it because mmos were the social media of the time, it was novel, it was mysterious, nobody knew how to play them, interacting with random strangers online was mind blowing concept on its own. You will not get there no matter how much of mordor tier tyranny you put into community moderation and making sure everyone have fun only in approved ways. Times and people have changed, we have social networks on top of social networks, your grandma has a fricking phone with on broadband internet access and facebook account. You will not get web 1.0 back no matter how much you wall the garden, accept and enjoy what we have for what it is or move on.
lol god damn son, triggered much?
You build a community within your game by structuring your game in a way that encourages community growth, simple as. I understand that you've only ever played instanced theme park garbage mmos but you don't need to do much besides providing a non-instanced world that requires grouping. Not only is this the best way to encourage players to interact and help one another, it should also be the basic foundation of all mmos.
WoW also had a great community before blizz started forcing instanced zones and server merging and whatever the frick else. The entire community changed overnight when you'd go out into the world and instead of seeing players you knew and had been interacting with since you began playing, you'd just see random strangers from random servers who you'd never seen before and would never see again. You can't build a community or the feeling of inhabiting a shared world without familiarity and you build familiarity by having systems that encourage people to spend time working together.
>You had the community and nostalgia about it because mmos were the social media of the time, it was novel, it was mysterious, nobody knew how to play them, interacting with random strangers online was mind blowing concept on its own.
You know we had tons of chat and messaging apps, right? The mmo crowd in the EQ days absolutely knew about and used message boards and forums and mirc and whatever else. EQ forced you to group not just for dungeons but for basic leveling. Grinding mobs for xp has never been especially exciting, so people passed the time while grinding by talking and getting to know one another. You got to know people and that's how you build a community. Even games like WoW that only required groups for dungeon content still developed a community in this way, at least when server populations were still isolated from each other.
>You can give every class the ability to fill any role within a party while still to weak to solo. Use your brain, anon.
Give a priest tank ability which is useless solo and does not break pvp balance.
>trinity cancer
Trinity is pretty good. Trinity + classes make players know what to do from the moment they step into dungeon. Without bickering. Imagine anyone can do anything you come into dungeon and pull a mob pack. Everyone dies cause noone knows what they should be doing. Then people start blaming each other. LoL lobbies used to be even more toxic than now and created hate between teammates even before map loaded cause noone wanted to play support. It got better after riot forced everyone queueing to pick a role they would play.
>once one faction manages to dominate and take over the map, the servers should just shut down?
something something EvE Online Band of Brothers vs Goonswarm.
>Imagine anyone can do anything you come into dungeon and pull a mob pack. Everyone dies cause noone knows what they should be doing.
Because you're still imagining some basic ai, button clicking mmo. Threat based ai that just locks onto players and deals out unavoidable damage is intensely outdated and not fun. Each class gets damage mitigation abilities and enemy attacks are either something that needs to be dodged, the way some attacks work in FFXIV, or player targeted attacks that need to be mitigated. That or combat is just radically different from standard mmo gameplay and is more like Mount&Blade or fps gameplay.
The problem is structuring gameplay in a way that support classes are necessary. Give everyone mitigation and heals, just put them on lengthy timers so they can't be spammed. Make most enemy attacks avoidable. Everyone is expected to be doing damage and dodging attacks and managing their own health. Maybe some classes can have party heals but again, on a long timer so you can save someone from a single frick up but they're on their own after that.
I want people to find each other, get along, and go adventuring together. It's a weird and awkward system when you can have two different groups of 4 people but only one of them can viably experience the game's content because you have to have a certain class composition. It also leads to the kind of cancerous min-maxing that mmo endgames, especially pve focused ones, always devolve into. Devs have to implement nonsensical features like enrage timers to work around the awkwardness of classes that can just endlessly heal or soak damage.
>The problem is structuring gameplay in a way that support classes are necessary. Give everyone mitigation and heals, just put them on lengthy timers so they can't be spammed. Make most enemy attacks avoidable. Everyone is expected to be doing damage and dodging attacks and managing their own health. Maybe some classes can have party heals but again, on a long timer so you can save someone from a single frick up but they're on their own after that.
This is how raids, even dungeons in mainstream mmos work already. Trinity, threat and spammable abilities are the basics and what you just described is put on top of it to provide actual challenge.
Besides, most pve content being brainless is actually desirable - it leaves cognitive capacity to engage in socializing.
>Besides, most pve content being brainless is actually desirable - it leaves cognitive capacity to engage in socializing.
this is an excellent point. having some basic grind is underrated. it's how wurm's long actions were tolerable, you're never just chopping wood but also talking to your friends
>Seasons are cancer. They make the objectives meaningless.
No one who likes sports agrees with you.
Good thing we're talking about MMOs and not fricking sports.
Both are games, you fricking moron.
sports != videogames, esports and appealing to broader audiences contributed to the decline, go frick yourself
People have lives. You're fricked in the head if you think no MMOs should be designed to appeal to people who enjoy seasonal plays over neverending shit that requires you play 24/7 to keep up with all the sweaty NEETs out there.
>People have lives.
Then they shouldn't waste their precious time on mmos.
Fun is never a waste, but MMOs are rarely fun because they're usually designed by and for idiots and NEETs
>and NEETs
Maybe normalgay NEETs. But not for truNEETs.
For a truNEET who rejects the system why would they want to immerse in a virtual world that constantly reminds them of what they left behind with bullshit real money in-game stores?
You want to know who MMOs are really designed for?
#1 is the developers pocket books.
#2 is the average normalgay on the go.
Both kinds of NEETs are a problem because the "truNEETs" are the ones who turn the games into skinner box treadmills. Basically, anyone who doesn't balance their gaming with a healthy social life is actually damaging to gaming in the long run.
Archeage already has most of that and it has the most toxic playerbase in any online game ever made.
MMO PVP will always be shit unless it's group vs group, because it's power-asymmetric between any 2 given people due to level and equipment differences.
First of all, so what? Secondly, two people can be of same level and gear.
i wouldn't, MMOs are dev traps
Dont. Stop playing MMOs.
Why the frick is there no good roguelike MMO? Oh right, because this genre is made by and for losers.
Dungeon of the mad god? How about you explain what would make a good roguelike MMO in your view. Provide something constructive.
>Dungeon of the mad god?
It's very mediocre.
A good roguelike MMO could be everything the average MMO isn't and it would need permadeath, grid-based movement, turn-based combat, full pvp, full open world building, a strategy layer, and a world that is randomly generated and constantly regenerated to work. Basically, trash every preconceived notion of MMOs that you have besides the number of players involved. Think more like Haven & Hearth crossed with For the King.
>turn based, grid based mmo
i dont think you understand what a mmo is
Please explain to me what's wrong with an MMO being turn-based or grid-based. Or have you never heard of simultaneous turns?
How would you fit any of the other aspects of a mmo into that combat system? Are you no longer able to explore the world in first or third person? Is the exploration done via a grid as well? Or is this some jrpg cancer where you're walking around normally and then you get teleported into an instance for your little grind combat minigame? Have you ever played a mmo before?
Also, randomly generated environments are the epitome of soulless content. There are plenty of garbage korean mmos with procedurally generated dungeons and nobody plays them because they're soulless trash.
>Are you no longer able to explore the world in first or third person?
Turn-based and grid-based games are usually third person. Runescape is a grid-based MMO, even if it's not a roguelike, too.
>Or is this some jrpg cancer where you're walking around normally and then you get teleported into an instance for your little grind combat minigame?
There's nothing wrong with having that at all, especially if it leads to a better experience.
>Also, randomly generated environments are the epitome of soulless content.
Good roguelikes aren't 100% randomly generated, and most MMOs are already soulless, even without any random generation, so that's a funny complaint. The point isn't the pve but the pvp anyway.
All I can tell you is that there's a reason why people stopped making the kind of games you're describing decades ago.
There aren't any roguelike MMOs besides Realm of the Mad God that I'm aware of and that game is nothing like what I'm describing, and people still make and play roguelikes, so...
People are too busy trying to emulate the past. If that worked then next gen COD and Halo arena shooters would be dominating. Instead we have survival games like rust/ark and fortnite/apex dominating the multiplayer space. Games require more depth now. If WoW dropped today it would be an absolute flop. Halo 3 basically dropped a few months back as Halo Infinite and it was a disaster. Shooters have had to evolve yet people are still making other genres with the same tired script. For an MMO to work it needs to be radically different from anything we have seen. The guy you are responding too seems to want to pick and choose stuff that was successful decades ago. The MMO genre either needs to be scrapped altogether or it needs to become some hybrid genre like how survival/battle royales are still basically shooters but are their own genre.
Its clear that whatever has been tried so far doesn't work so just rehashing it isnt enough.
>The guy you are responding too seems to want to pick and choose stuff that was successful decades ago
See
>If WoW dropped today it would be an absolute flop
You are fricking clueless. Classic was a massive hit, especially in asian region.
>For an MMO to work it needs to be radically different from anything we have seen.
It needs to evolve. There has been virtually no innovation in this genre since the 90s.
If anything MMOs have gone backwards. I read some description of the features of Ultima Online a while back, and it sounded revolutionary by TODAY's standards. The game was made 2 and a half decades ago and having it described sounds exactly like the "next generation" of MMOs that we're looking for.
MMOs have been going backwards for a very specific reason: because the internet is currently democratic by design and almost everyone involved in software development thinks this is an essential aspect of all internet-related activities. Point is, by keeping servers online 24/7 and trying to appease everyone at once, MMO developers made it impossible for sandbox game design to thrive. If we want sandbox game design to thrive again, we have to rethink what's possible in terms of gatekeeping using server and software infrastructure.
A mmo with randomly generated content/dungeons I can’t think of one mmo that does this
>randomly generated content/dungeons
Not enough to be a roguelike, if that's what you're implying. It needs permadeath, grid-based movement, turn-based combat, and map regeneration too, all of which would also make open world building possible too, and what this anon wrote
for what would be a new kind of MMO experience.
Realm of the Mad God, all the maps are procedurally generated.
Fully randomly generated would be moronic.
I think rotating series of challenges/events based on regional narritive would be better.
Enter a dungeon during a goblin invasion and its full of goblins and their shamans and other bigger goblinoids, but enter during an undead plague and you'll find it full of necromancers and undead abominations.
Would be better if the layout only changed minorly, such as a collapse tunnel for one event, making you have to take the long way around, or another path is opened expanding the dungeon.
Runescape Dungeoneering (released 2010)
Focus on fun combat. Stop having random enemies that just stand in field all day. More diversity in biomes I don’t care if I walk from beach to jungle to desert in 10 mins just make it fun and have stuff that Keeps me out in the world.
>Op asks for innovative ideas
>"What the mmo genre need is full loot pvp so i can gank newbies" for the Nth time.
I say we need to downscale the mmo as a game and rebuilt it from zero, I could make an action PSU inspired mission based semi-animuh semi-western MORPG.
>an action PSU inspired mission based semi-animuh semi-western MORPG.
you mean like vindictus or dragon's dogma online?
Then that wouldn't be mmo anymore, which is what this thread is about.
Create an extremely robust toolset for custom content creation and build a decently-sized generic fantasy MMO with it. Let other players purchase server space and host their own worlds, using my dev team to assist them with content balancing and asset creation.
The #1 thing is to accept that socialization and communication is going to be done outside of your game on discord/reddit/Ganker/etc. So I had the idea of an MMO where the only in game communication is stock phrases, like a combo of FFXI/XIV auto-translate and Dark Souls messages. Also add no partying mechanics and friendly fire everywhere.
I feel like nobody would use them unless they were funny, or if the game regularly required that you cooperate with strangers
A basic VGS system would be fine.
But removing basic fricking communication like text chat would be moronic, since most players play with randoms.
>How would you go about making a next generation MMO?
I wouldn't. The genre deserves a graceful death. It's been anything but. You have to let it go. It's not your fault.
It's slowly getting. Nearly every mmo since 2015 has flopped and there's about 15 of them altogether that can be considered alive. We will see the death of mmo genre or its revival in the next ten years.
Character death is permanent. Characters who die join the AI faction, the undead.
No "leveling" part, all the content is accessible from character creation. Some might be too hard for level 1s alone but nothing is hardlocked to prevent level 1s from participating.
>but players will automatically refuse low levels and only take high level players
No player limit, the more the merrier.
>but lag!
That's a problem but there are ways to solve that.
10 "levels", you advance to the next level of your class by doing big class questchains that teach you your class gameplay and lore.
No gear/magic loot, you harvest material that can be used by players to craft armor and weapons. They have basic stats like armor and damage. Enchanters can give them cool special effects like a flaming sword but nothing savorless like "+4 str +4 sta".
I have tons of ideas but I'm on my phone right now
>doing big class questchains
You had some decent ideas but lost me here.
Why?
Class quests were the only quests I liked in WoW.
See it as a progression bar that fills itself as you play or a side goal to guide you when you don't know what to do.
Focus on the one thing that can't be replicated easily by the other genres, a living world that actually changes based off of what players do.
Elite Dangerous tried this but it failed spectacularly due to how they implemented it (people could jump into a solo, singleplayer version of the game and affect the main public game's economy and story)
A key part of that is making sure that actions, no matter how big or small, can have consequences. Your party of heroes defeated a necromancer terrorizing the outer villages? That necromancer's attacks stop, the kingdom praises your party of heroes, and the world knows that you were the people who defeated him.
Of course none of this would be possible in the current state of gaming, better to front load 22-odd currencies that are connected in various ways to a single purchasable one and milk people for all they've got
I agree with this line of thinking, but not sure your example goes far enough. Because GW2 actually does that.
The spawn areas of certain mobs will occasionally start sending their mobs to nearby areas (I think into towns even, but it's been a while since I played it), and that starts a quest to defeat them, which ends their attack.
It's definitely more fun than standard grinding but didn't give me any sense of "making a change in the world". Probably because it's not a permanent change. Even if they go attack other towns instead of the one I saved for now, maybe in a week they'll cycle back around to this town again (I think that's how it works, it's been a long time since I played it).
It would be great if there was a way to affect permanent change, preferably something that also effects other players, and how they interact with things.
I like the idea of having permanent effects on the world. think effects that are more social. what if NPCs were individual agents within a living economy? what if you could influence an area to become more attractive by building certain amenities within it? etc.
Another angle along this line I've toyed with is ecological shifts directly caused by all the miney-crafty-buildy-techy that people get so hooked on. Deforestation, soil erosion, drought, and so on should be a direct consequence of player activity, causing mobs to migrate to more abundant areas and also reducing local gathering node spawns as mineral veins are exhausted.
Technically Minecraft already operates like this, but the volume and level of resources needed for a settlement there is exceptionally low, and trees are readily renewable on a scale of minutes. An MMO employing this same idea on a scale intended to affect hundreds or thousands of players will need to harshly limit regrowth potential in case players want to reclaim or reforest land, and even then the mineral content of underground caverns would either be strictly finite or logarithmically capped. Perhaps opening mines deeper and deeper into the earth would break into ruins or hellzones that unleash high-power monsters that make endless mining exhaustingly inconvenient at best, or an existential threat to highly-developed settlements at worst.
The main thing that minecraft has going for it is that it doesn't have levels or xp, it's all organic and the interaction is purely dynamic with the world.
What if you made an MMO that embraces the fact that people are using discord and other third party tools to communicate?
You can't see people's names or levels, you can't guarantee who anyone is by in-game means. The equipment is mostly dark and not very distinctive so even visually it's hard to tell people apart unless they specifically try to look distinctive.
There's no in-game method to contact or coordinate with someone who's far away, and you can't "whisper" in-game to prevent other nearby people from hearing what you say. Even normal chat can only be heard by people who are close to you.
Make people spawn in a random location so even if you join the game with your friend, you have to communicate outside of the game to find each other.
There's no auction house so people have to contact other people outside of the game to find trades. The more people are speaking in the same place, the shorter your hearing becomes, so people can't even congregate in a location to trade because your hearing will get fricked and can only hear the people who are directly next to you.
Also, no official forums. People have to figure out their own ways to communicate.
The other side of this coin is that people expect all of these features to be in-game already, simply as a quality of service thing. It'd be like going to a restaurant where you have to clean off your own table. At best folks will find it odd, at worst you'll have people shitting all over you. Gamers are entitled little pricks and will shit all over you if you take anything away from them.
Another issue is that this means the dev/publisher has no social media over which they have direct control - but they could still be found liable for bad behavior, since social engineering, espionage and hacking will be encouraged to gather information on opponents and rivals. Gamers are entitled shitbags and will come screaming to you to fix things, before eventually moving to lawsuits.
Play one without base building. Other than Rust or VRising which games punish you for going offline?
>Play one without base building
It's not a sandbox RPG without base building
Next gen mmo: skill based combat no armor or weapon stats just skins for clothing and weapons, no classes.
No leveling you just improve at the game. Loot drops frequently but it's all cosmetic based and made up of individual pieces like Morrowind armor. More like the variation mabinogi has with it's equipment. furniture items and such also drop. Player driven economy, slice of life high roleplay gameplay with heavy emphasis on just hanging out and talking to others around a campfire style slice of life gameplay and life roleplaying. Shit ton of life skills like RuneScape allow for "skilling" style grinding. No private chat. No guild chat. No other chat except proximity voice and over the character bubble chat. All local no chat boxes. No gay systems such as quality of life bullshit like fast travel. Open world, no abstraction of things like shopping from a menu u need to walk into a store and shop like u would in real life and bring shit to the counter. Lots more..
No levelcap and each level gives only some more stats.
Level means estimated power of you or your enemies, in which gear gives bonuses so you are always "stronger" than same level mobs.
Only pve coop, or coop competitive, because most of the times pvp brings out the toxic and there is enough mmos for the pvp players.
Open world safe areas, warzone where evil NPC factions hunt you and war each other.
Players can capture castles and progress deeper, but eventually success of players triggers NPC invasion, that mercilessly wipes out player control and "resets" the progress.
Until game is like 5 years old with enough playerbase to actually fight the armies.
No level cap means there are always harder endboss to raid.
Man this is a good thread I stopped giving out ideas a long time ago but I'll gladly take yours
I don't like mmos. I want to, but idk. I have to blame the setup. I tried elder scrolls online and it's like the area it put me in was very linear, but didn't bother to shove me along. When I pick up a game I just play it, however the game leads me to play. So if the first thing I do is start killing these random enemies, but they just keep respawning, and the game doesn't do anything, well apparently that's the game. And maybe I'm moronic but fr if a game doesn't tell you to go do something and lets you grind at the very beginning well that leads me to believe maybe the whole game is just grinding. How you gonna make a game be linear but also no direction you know. It just seems blegh. There are all these quests n shit but it's like not much uh cohesiveness it just sorta suffers from being a video game if that makes sense. I been playing survival type games with sorta long persistence. 255 players, maps are not wiped very often. Games like rust and minecraft. 2b2t has been up for a decade. It's not like my dream game but it's close to an mmo. It's crafting surviving home building and pvp. Not all that much pve, but hypothetically could. There are just real limitations and you have to compromise. I like no rules and chaos gnome saiyan but so yeah only 255 players and map gets wiped every month and no character progression
just bring back tera please
There's a reason it died.
My problem is that virtually no MMO is actually dynamic in the slightest.
You'll never see any cults, factions, or really anything persistent in any MMO, and even if they do, it's usually group the same group as the last.
Minecraft had huge potential to do this properly, but around beta 1.2 it was kind of of heading in the wrong direction, and then B1.8 came out and the game merged into another generic grindfest.
>Minecraft had huge potential to do this properly, but around beta 1.2 it was kind of of heading in the wrong direction, and then B1.8 came out and the game merged into another generic grindfest.
MMOs looking to Minecraft for inspiration isn't a bad idea, but why do you think they should specifically look at the versions beta 1.2?
> but why do you think they should specifically look at the versions beta 1.2
Sorry, meant to say b1.3
The addition of beds was a total gamechanger, probably the biggest one before b1.8, now the difficulty loop of the night was thrown off because now you could skip it, effectively eliminating the threat and wait if you had a few wool whilst traveling or were in your home.
Also the fact that placeholders were never finished and notch became lazy af
They're not made to be dynamic. MMOs are the dictionary definition of lazy and low effort. That's the main reason why they suck. Most mmo devs just wing it and have no actual plan or realistic vision for their game.
> You'll never see any cults, factions, or really anything persistent in any MMO
Excuse me?
https://bitcraftonline.com/
Just found this game today. Raised $22m from A16z (Andreesen Horowitz) I don't think theres any cryptoshit involved either. Other investors include Unity co founder, CCP, and supercell. Haven't looked too deep into it yet but it looks like its trying to be a minecraft MMO. Not sure if its going to have any PvP though which is what will probably keep me from playing or sinking any real amount of time into it. Could have some potential.
doubt they will pull it off. the actual implementation of mechanics governing settlement influence on surrounding land and internal settlement contest is where they will fail.
Has anyone here even joined the Discord or whatever to look at their ideas for addressing those issues?
waste of time
concrete mechanics this early in dev cycle? methinks no
studio HQ is in San Francisco and by looking at Team page on their website you know they are woke. ngmi
No npcs (or very few of them). Let people be classes that are not combat based and have real people be merchants and the like. Would be a huge undertaking to make these different systems but would make the world feel much more massive if everyone you interact with is a real person.