Read part 1 here

Read part 3 here

Part 2: Make it Objective.

~nox

Nice ideas. You should mail them to Jack. He's not that hard to reach. Posting them here, you'll only fall on deaf ears, mostly. Good luck, and good job thinking and writing this up clearly.

Thanx!!  I guess I will email him the whole thing once I have written part three.

~nox

The latest GenCon videos shows ChampO as having quite a bit of potential interaction with in-game objects. There are some bugs on show, but the idea is there.

i hope so.  To me, its really hard to get a sense of a game from a video that someone shot of a screen while it was being played.

Meh.  One of these days I am going to be able to attend in person.

I beleive what your looking for is called "simulation based gameplay", other games like what your thinking about are force unleashed and cellfactor revolution ( the force unleashed with objects breaking nice and cellfactor with it's wonderfull physics system), personally I would love to see a MMO with something like DMM and havok mabye even euphoria.  It would be undoubtably cool, though I would just be happy if a MMO had DMM and some sort of physics so you can break things and have a use for DMM. 

Hi Dracain, thanx for your comments!

Yes, I am definitely for simulation based game play.  If there was anything I was trying to get across it is the need to get rid of the static world that MMOs seem to be built around. 

As for physics, I guess, the more comprehensive the physics engine, the better.  I come at this from the perspective of an amateur game developer (although I have been coding for most of my adult life, I have never worked for a professional game shop. Wah.) and am not familiar with every physics package out there -- just the free ones!  So I will take your word about DMM and euphoria.  Honestly, though, they sound way cool.  

Anyhow, I tried to address physics specifically in part 3 (you can read it here if you haven't already).  My main point is that physics, regardless of which  engine is used, has to be central to the game play.  It is physics, after all, that lets a super hero be super.

I haven't had the chance to play The Force Unleashed yet.  I don't own a console, so it may be while before I do.  But from what I read, it seems like it embodies the type of combat I have in mind. 

~nox