Well it's dead simple and imo the only way a WH40K mmo could work and keep both lore and gameplay (and devs wallets) happy.

However it would need to break away from the WoW formula so much that I really doubt Vigil and WG would risk it. But anyway, here it goes:

You do not buy the game, nor do you buy subscription. What you do buy is RACES, just like in the tabletop game. For 20$ you buy a race such as greenskins, eldar, marines or whatever. Of course, you can buy as many races as you like but you need at least one to play.

When you buy a race you can make characters (or squads in some cases, which would be cool) of that race just like in any MMO. You can use those to PvP against players of other races AND enjoy the PvE content that takes place either in permanent world or instances that are particular to your race. (So with a Race you buy character options and PvE content).

PvE can be anything you want, really. You play with other players of your own race. Optionally, some races could temporarily ally for certain instance runs. Heck, you could even have your damn Sargasso sector in there with races neatly divided into two allied factions if you so wish.

PvP would have two forms. One would be permanent PvP planets with territorial control. Such planets would be open to particular races - You could have 2-faction planets, 3-faction planets etc. On one you'd have orkz vs marines, on another you'd have eldar vs orkz vs guardsmen, what have you. You could even have a FFA "civil war" PvP planet for teh hardcorez.

The second form would be instanced 2-faction contests, based on historical lore battles. For the fun of it you could add in an arena with all the races mixed in, like in that new WH game.

Added benefit of this rigid PvE/PvP separation and race specific content would be balancing... You can have PvE content for "weaker" races, say imperial guardsmen without having a marine barge in and solo-kill the bosses. On the other hand, PvP guardsmen could come in pairs (basically you get a companion or two comparable in strength to you) to balance things out.

Notice that I'm not mentioning servers here... The game would not operate on the system of "shards". Every "planet", whether PvP or PvE would basicallly be a world in itself that you could freely move to and from. You would be playing in a single persistent universe with all the other players, jumping from one world to another as suits your fancy.

Well, that was my 2 cents. Imo that would be the only design concept that would properly translate the awesome WH40K world into mmorpg medium.

The added benefit to this system where you buy "race" or "army" packs is that the developer is extremely free to add to and improve the game as time goes by. (And of course, design new races and content packs to sell further on) WAR got screwed because its world structure, map design etc. were too rigid. Once they realized 2-faction is killing their game they couldn't do anything about it because they'd have to redesign the whole game world from ground up. In this concept the devs would simply add new races and planets for players to slug it out (or PvE) on... and of course, if something doesn't work or isn't popular (such as 2-faction PvP planet, heh) they could simply replace it with something else without touching the rest of the game.

Your thoughts?

Not a bad idea at all, I can see how that would work.  I would only be slightly concerned with how the multiple units of guards would be controlled vs the controls of a single marine or other such heavy hitter.  Would make for some serious overhauling of the interface and ui for each instance I woud think.  And then comes the whole bit of, okay, which units are tough enough to be controlled single and which need "back-up" as it were.

Not much else I could see wrong with that idea, wouldn't be opposed if they implimented something like that.

I agree, it's not a bad idea.  It's less an mmorpg than a mmorts.  Still, i'm sure it's a viable concept.

I think it's awesome. Send it in to the devs!

I see one problem with the design of the game and one problem with the logistics. First, based on the fact that you're not splitting the game up into servers, you'd need enough planets in game to handle the game's entire population, not even accounting for the idea that some planets will no doubt be more popular than others. Server technology just can't handle the stress you'd be demanding from a system like this if DMO had even a mediocre populations.

Then there's the fact that vigil has already got quite a lot invested in their current development of DMO. There's not a snowballs chance in hell they'd be able to "finish" the game if they scrapped what they had and started over.

There IS however potential for this kind of setup in dawn of war 3, so it's not a complete loss.

Originally posted by StMichael

I see one problem with the design of the game and one problem with the logistics. First, based on the fact that you're not splitting the game up into servers, you'd need enough planets in game to handle the game's entire population, not even accounting for the idea that some planets will no doubt be more popular than others. Server technology just can't handle the stress you'd be demanding from a system like this if DMO had even a mediocre populations.

 

Yeah, I agree that that could be a problem. Basically this "planet" system is what you have in EVE but with "planets" replacing solar systems. And a solar system is much cheaper to design (at least in EVE universe) than a detailed mmo planet. You wouldn't get much of gameplay return for the content created...

However, there is a way out that, while being a compromise, still has some founding in lore. WH40K as well as WH take place in a "multiverse" where many different versions of reality simultaneously exist. (Basically that's where Chaos comes from) So.. if we make these planets huge permanent instances, with various versions of planets existing, we would still technically be within lore. Personally I don't like instancing (the multy-copy kind) but you can never escape an occasional compromise. Imo such planet instances would be pretty large and multi-zone holding hundreds or even thousands of players simultaneously and, what's more improtant, they would be permanent. So, they would be a kind of  a "mini-server" thing.

I think DDO does the same thing with their public areas, there are different instances of the world running in parallel to keep server loads low. The problem you run into there is that DDO still has separate servers for one reason: Databanks. There's some benefit from splitting up your servers according to physical location to help ping, but the biggest reason is the sheer amount of data a server must store. (There's also some amount of meta-game involved as far as trying to get into a winning instance. It happened with WAR, and it's likely to happen here.)

If there were maybe 50,000 players per region, they could probably handle that without too much trouble, but they're aiming for a million players world-wide.