A true PvP game.
Hello, I am a 17 year old aspiring game programmer with very little MMO experience but big dreams. I want to tell you guys about how I think a PvP MMO should be done. I have taken inspiration from a lot of different sources, from Starcraft and other RTSs to MMOs like EVE, Pirates of the Burning Sea and even SWG. As I said my MMO experience is small and the only one of these that I have any longtime experience with is Starcraft, which in many ways baptized me into gaming, and a short time in PotBS beta almost a year ago.
The preset is simple. The only way to create moments that will stick with a player for a long times is to make them actually mean something to the player, we need to care. In PvP that means that we need a reason to fight, fighting might be all fun merry but fighting for the sake of fighting can quickly become just as much a grind as raiding 3 times a week is for some. The reason in my opinion should be (just as Pyrostasis said in his great blog) property.
Now, to the game itself!
Everything from now is taken from the top of my head might be a bit specific at times but could most likely fit into a variety of settings and rule sets.
I picture a fantasy world with (initially) one big city; this city is the only place where NPCs will take a significant role. Outside this city there is wilderness, only wilderness and opportunities. In the wild however, there will be resources. These resources will consist of things like lumber, iron, stone and even horses. Lumber will be needed to build basic buildings, defensive structures such as palisades, offensive structures such as catapults, means of transportation like carriages and even for wooden parts in weapons like handles for swords or bows and spears. Iron is needed for steel armor, chainmail, blades and so on. Stone is needed for big buildings and defensive walls and also for paved roads that create easier travel and transportation of goods on a carriage.
Players would then take control of these different resource nodes, forming guilds to manage them, build cities or forts to defend them, trade it for other resources and create products like the ones above, which brings us to our next part: crafting.
Crafting is something that I think is being more and more pushed back to a “fun to have”-priority instead of being an important part of the game for most developers ever since the success if WoW, which I think is sad. Seeing as how the game I am proposing here have the economy as a big feature that cannot be the case, crafting has to engage and entertain as many as possible and to do that we need put the craftsmanship back in crafting. Just like in a lot of fps games like Unreal Tournament there will be people that feel that they can get more out of a game if they give something to the game and the people playing it, these people are the modders and mappers, people that spend hundreds of hours just to make the game a little bit more special, and their own touch to it. Crafting should bring out the same in people, and this is where I need some ideas, the best crafting system that I come up with would be some potato-head model, you choose from a collection of grips and blades but it just don’t cut it. Speaking of which, PvP.
The PvP itself would not only rely heavily on skill and tactics but also resource management and trade. I want big guild siege warfare, I want small guild mercenary bands getting paid for raiding enemy trade routes, I want scouts to spy on approaching enemy armies, I want solo players to jump on the side that they are rooting for when it is time for big battles and I want all of these things to happen in a non-instanced world with little to no fast travel, except mounts, and real time combat similar to what you can find in Mount and Blade, except with more fluent controls and movement.
Clearly this kind of world means that there would be complete FFA with perhaps the city I talked about in the beginning functioning as a high security zone in EVE, I also think full loot would fit the setting pretty nicely which also means that there would be little to no other death penalty and that gear should be pretty easy to come by and that there would be a pretty small difference on gear stat-wice.
Sadly this dream game of mine won’t be possible for many years until today’s networking technology is updated a lot and possibly traditions are thrown overboard, but until then I will fine tune of this idea and hopefully one day I can make sure it is made, you need some hopes for the future when you’re young.
User Comments
Your ideas at the core are good and I could see it working out. Keep thinking
Great idea, it's exactly what I've thought of for my dream mmorpg :P
But there would either have to be lots of servers or a gigantic world for all the castles, manors, forts ect
1. why do you need an updated networking technology? i have no clue what you even understand by that. everything you have written is easily doable today, it's practically a good and refined shadowbane.
2. a game like this will have lots of problems which you will not be able to solve to your liking:
- on each server there will be one guild stronger than everyone else, they will destroy every attempt of a new guild getting their strength very early on and will control next to all the territory on their server.
- not everyone is always online so you either need to have warfare set to a certain time which is rather weird and cuts massively on your dynamic gameplay. if you on the other side let everyone attack whenever they want, people who are online often will just raid you over night, in the morning, when you're at work.
-> this leads to either very fast switching property and destroying of a huge time investment within a fraction of that time, people leave in masses.
-> or it leads to a very very slow world with huge distances to pass and very time intensive raids etc, which will not work because people can't play that much.
i'll gladly consider to change my opinion if someone shows me fitting solutions for these problems.
Write this up as a full proposal, I could see people getting behind this if it's done properly, especially since your idea is weak in a few places (See what Zarzu said previously). It's a good idea, all it needs is some love and knowledge.
You may wish to check out W.E.L.L online. Lots of new and interesting ideas that seem to fit with what you're looking for, minus the whole real time combat thing, but I personally am skeptical of its place in MMOs as its rarely done well even in singleplayer games short of FPS titles. Theres a level of control needed over the NPC that you can't really have against players or with multiple players on screen which would turn any real time combat system into nothing more than a button mashing fest anyway.
Anyway, WELL is big on player control and has some interesting systems being put in place in regards to craft/trading and PvP combat. Oh yeah, and its skill based. Check it out here: http://wellonline.proboards99.com/
Those are the english forums and presently the best source of data on it. http://www.wellonline.com/ is the official website. Like I said, worth a look.
It's currently in closed beta but they're looking to release in 2008
I like your concept but I don't think that too much time should be put into crafting. And whole armies to send in one world? And that many castles, etc? I think this game could not be produced in the present but it might the MMO of the future. Anyway, nice idea :)
It sometimes saddens me when people think that only because someone takes 10 minutes of their time to write something down, one should encourage them and cheer, god beware one criticizes very obvious design flaws everyone would have seen after thinking about it more than 10 minutes.
it saddens me that people actually believe they or other gamers are so intelligent that they just while playing a game can easily come up with a concept that destroys every mmorpg on the market.
it saddens me that people get the heads up for abstract designs just for the hell of it, even though they are incapable to lay out a precise design which does not suffer from problems we have already seen on mmorpgs.
it saddens me that i have to write this.
sounds like darkfall
Zarzu, it saddens me that condescending antagonists like you exist. Get over yourself and maybe you wouldn't be so blatantly jealous of someone else achieving something or receiving praise.
Go and donate some cash to a 3rd world relief charity, I'm sure that'll make you feel more important. In the meantime, I'm sure you'll keep telling yourself everyone else is dirt so when you look in the mirror you don't feel so bad.
antagonist? o.O seriously what's up with you? my first comment was 0% flame and consisted only of questions because i didn't understand the content or because i didn't see a solution explained. so then you started flaming ("emotionally-crippled cretin", seriously...) in return i used your sentence structure to make fun of you, which makes me of course an antagonist... seriously wake up, please.
i won't even comment the words "achieving" and "receiving praise".
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