General Discussion

The team at MMO Magic has provided us witha great Developer Journal that gives us all an idea of what their upcoming MMORPG, Citadel of Sorcery, is all about. Today, we provide you with Part One of this journal, the introduction that will whet your apetite for Part Two, where the devs go into more detail about their plans.

We’d like to welcome you to a new type of MMO experience, Citadel of Sorcery. We would like to ask you to suspend your preconceived ideas of what should or should not be in an MMO game and give this new concept a chance. We’re attempting to create a new experience, one that we hope you will enjoy. In fact, one of our biggest hurdles will be to get you to try the game without thinking about other games you have played, and just experience this new style of game play. Give it a chance and we believe most of you will enjoy your adventure.

So what is so different? Many of the current MMOs are like some kind of Ground Hog’s day, repeating the same day over and over in a static world setting. No matter what you do, the world is the same the next day as it was today. The opposite is true in Citadel of Sorcery; each day is new, as time flows on and change comes about the lands. The game world moves onwards with evolving history like a true living world.

Let us give you an example: if you are in a village when it is attacked by evil creations of Morphael, you may choose to help defend the town. If you and your companions are successful in the defense, the town may survive, if not, it may be burned to the ground. Whatever happens…happens. The following day the town will not pop back into existence. It may be slowly rebuilt, or left as a ruin. It may become the haunt of evil creatures, or grow into a booming new town.

Read it all here.

The concept sounds like the future of MMOs, where characters are not grinding the same quests for the same equipment. We all want to play the game to be special. We want to be the heroes or villains or some ambiguous in-between. I would love to play an MMO where the experience was my own and my actions had lasting consequences upon the world.

All that being said, I have serious doubts about COS. All those game mechanics sound awesome, but do you guys know how you're going to pull it off? Do you have this awesome quest generating engine developed or is this all a fantastic pipe dream on paper? Are you as far as alpha tests? Do you even have a program to test at this point?

Will the game world be large enough that all players, casual and hardcore gamers alike, will have access to unique events? What happens if the player base completes all the objectives and establish relationships with all the NPCs before your dev. team can develop new content?

Will there be "instanced" content? If not, how will you control multiple players attempting to accomplish the same goal? If two people arrive at a town in conflict, how do you decide which one is the "hero" of the day in the eyes of the townsfolk? If content is "instanced," how will you account for the myriad of different experiences players have at the same locations?

Unless you're in alpha testing and have actually created all the functionality you promised, I'd say you're blowing smoke and building hype for a game that will under deliver. I foresee a lot of things getting stripped from the game as you hit the hard realities and limitations of your technology and resources.

Please, please, please, please... prove me wrong.

The art is rather bland. As you said, it's early though, so you have time. There are no transitions, the models are incredibly... wrong. Nothing fits where it's put. The art is too all over the place. I hope you can fix that.

Other than that, the game sounds like a great idea. But we all have heard hundreds of games that sounded amazing, and never came to life. Never made it anywhere. Never delivered.

There are many promising games out there, promising much like yourselves, that have never made it to a formal test. Too much vision, and not enough implementation will kill you.

Good luck though, lets hope you don't fall into the void like 99% of companies who have 'great ideas'.

How exciting!  GO FOR IT !

I hope for them they have enough cash and time to realise all those made promisses.

Many MMO dev's before you had lots of vision and idea's and never realised them.

4 examples:

Matrix Online

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Auto Assault

Tabula Rasa

Just to name a few ;)

They either ran out of money or just stripped their promisses into oblivion and delivered the same cookie cutter MMO as we have plenty of today already.

I get the feeling these folks played a lot of Second Life, that or they're big fans of the Myst series.

This sounds pretty cool.  I'll be interested in seeing how the game develops.

With five years of development, maybe this is possible. Maybe. There are a lot of things that I kinda doubt you can do at this point in our technological history.

The thing that bothers me, though, is that this sounds a lot like a good single player experience. If this is an MMO, what's the point to having all this stuff if friends, parties, guilds and the such are not included? Yeah, that's great that you can take control of a town and command it's forces, but why you? Why couldn't someone else do the same thing? Would you still be able to take control? You shouldn't, but it takes away from the fun if you can't at the same time. That's a problem. If every event is instanced just for you, that takes away from the fun of the multiplayer experience.

I'm interested to see where this turns up, though. Even if it doesn't succeed (and you guys honestly mean it when you say your engine can do all this stuff) then at the very least other companies can use the engine and improve on what you guys have. That's if you don't succeed, though. I'm saying you won't.

I'm interested to see where this game is going.

Originally posted by Vexe

With five years of development, maybe this is possible. Maybe. There are a lot of things that I kinda doubt you can do at this point in our technological history.

The thing that bothers me, though, is that this sounds a lot like a good single player experience. If this is an MMO, what's the point to having all this stuff if friends, parties, guilds and the such are not included? Yeah, that's great that you can take control of a town and command it's forces, but why you? Why couldn't someone else do the same thing? Would you still be able to take control? You shouldn't, but it takes away from the fun if you can't at the same time. That's a problem. If every event is instanced just for you, that takes away from the fun of the multiplayer experience.

I'm interested to see where this turns up, though. Even if it doesn't succeed (and you guys honestly mean it when you say your engine can do all this stuff) then at the very least other companies can use the engine and improve on what you guys have. That's if you don't succeed, though. I'm saying you won't.

I'm interested to see where this game is going.

i dont think things are going to be instanced. from the sounds of it every players decision could impact another player in someway or another which would make it a true mmo.