The Survival MMO sounds good, sortof a story like Lost or something.
But the Problem with this is:
Somewhen, it's no challenge anymore.
You built your city, you have medical treatment, food sources, safe water, something to easily survive all kinds of catastrophes.
And then?
I'd sure love such a game if it found some way to always keep you on a relatively low civilization status, so that you always have to fear all kinds of stuff
You are not alone. But by reading your post I can tell you think like a PVPer. we do not need gear / levels. we love balance. for us our dream MMO has no levels, no classes, and no boundaries.
But the newbies? As soon as they logon and they dont have a level or new uber baubble to show off they probably gonna log
I dream of the day of what u say will come to past. I love Starport for thinking outside the box and look forward to Darkfall (which is in reality a Player Run Sandbox)
your post will fall on deaf ears and get lost in a swarm of excited newbies posting about their latest Everquest clone. would be much better if such quality stories could be read about in a blog
There are games with no levels, gear, and balance that you can play online. They are called first person shooters.
If you put any other activity into a game (mining, crafting, character development in general) you're going to have to include some kind of reward for the player in order to get them to do it. That's where things begin to change and each character becomes unique. From that point on you're not going to have balance.
I don't know why anyone who likes PvP would buy a MMORPG anyways. It never made sense to me to buy into a genre that is all about exploration, socializing, advancement, stories, and role playing. It's like buying something you know you're not going to like but doing it anyhow.
You are not alone. But by reading your post I can tell you think like a PVPer. we do not need gear / levels. we love balance. for us our dream MMO has no levels, no classes, and no boundaries.
But the newbies? As soon as they logon and they dont have a level or new uber baubble to show off they probably gonna log
I dream of the day of what u say will come to past. I love Starport for thinking outside the box and look forward to Darkfall (which is in reality a Player Run Sandbox)
your post will fall on deaf ears and get lost in a swarm of excited newbies posting about their latest Everquest clone. would be much better if such quality stories could be read about in a blog
There are games with no levels, gear, and balance that you can play online. They are called first person shooters.
If you put any other activity into a game (mining, crafting, character development in general) you're going to have to include some kind of reward for the player in order to get them to do it. That's where things begin to change and each character becomes unique. From that point on you're not going to have balance.
I don't know why anyone who likes PvP would buy a MMORPG anyways. It never made sense to me to buy into a genre that is all about exploration, socializing, advancement, stories, and role playing. It's like buying something you know you're not going to like but doing it anyhow.
even FPS games have progression (BF2142, Quake Wars) you dont understand what im talking about or have no clue how FPS games wortk nowadays. All the popular ones have progression- rainbow 6: vegas, lost planet, etc. I think I'm what- Level 30 in lost planet right now?
if you need to question why a PVPer wants to play an MMORPG then you're really lost + have no clue how the market works + have no clue how current FPS games work
I am suggesting progression but still let player skill factor in thats it
whether the MMO has PVP or not is not the point here lol. we are discussing 'systems' not 'implementation'
Without character progression it would be a 3d chat program. You would have to add some kind of progression in the game. Maybe you could make it more time consuming to customize your character look. Eve done character progression with money... sadly I don't want to play real life in a game.
I guess you could do a lot of things with guild progression with city's or such but I don't enjoy huge raids. I'm sure by the % of raiding players in wow that majority don't ether. So find an idea that will work with an mmo without an advancing leveling/skill system.
i think you and I misunderstood each other we're both talking bout progression. but to clarify when i speak of no progression I mean dont let stats drive my skills. more akin to Starport. Whereas my player skill decides whether I win a fight- not my stats or my ship
we're on the same page I think.
I merely suggest all the tools in the game world should be viable to some purpose. like real life a dagger gets the job done just like a sword or a gun
I guess, no big company will ever make one of those games, without a game which proves that something like that is successful.
They follow the money, and only the money. But we have some hope, that at one time a more independent developer, or even a well funded singleplayer developer will bring something new to the table.
Darkfall and/or PotBS could be the first success, and i have some hope about Raph Kosters new company and project, not really a lot information around about this, but it will be more a virtual world than the cooky cutter mmo we are used to. He is known to be a sandbox fanatic(worked at UO and SWG), and also Richard Bartle is a consultant of this, as much as i know. And he has the right ideas about virtual worlds, and what a virtual world should be.
Up to now we can just wait, the last mmo i played was 2 years ago, and i will not play another one of those item/level grinders. And anyway, there are a lot of other things to do, and nowadays i play more normal multiplayer games like RTS and so on. They are at least honest, you join, you play, you leave.. nothing happend, but fun for a lil bit.
I really need to go look up this pirates of the burning sea game sounds like my bag
ah thanks guys took a quick look at pirates. player run economy, sandbox, risk vs reward looks like, etc. looks awesome I'm a happy man. i ignored this game originally cause the setting didnt appeal but it has all the features im looking for and its coming out soon.
This is what I call wishing for an open RPG like UO, Shadow Bane, or Darkfall. Some others might call it a sandbox.
The reason we don’t have as much fun as we should is that we got a taste of an open RPG and we want more. The Everquest model of grinding and playing to advance your character endlessly is apparently enjoyable but does not last forever. DAoC and WoW follow in the Everquest model instead of Ultima Online’s open RPG model.
Therefore we don’t get player crafted events, town building, sieges, and open warfare over buildings, land, and treasure. Instead we get Great Sword + 1, per level, per months spent raiding, and the entire game becomes dedicated to the grind and permanent advancement of character items. Our adventure is built for us instead of by us.
There are a few upcoming games promising to break pieces of this mold at a time, but all of them still adhere to the character advancement and giving us our adventure instead of giving us the tools to make our own adventure. Only Darkfall promises us the moon and everything else, but it is perhaps the least funded and greatest risk for dying in any game under development. I would absolutely love nothing more than for Darkfall to get the funding a game like WoW had before it first shipped.
We can only wish that one day the developers of Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, and Tabula Rasa (who have the money to realize their dreams) will realize that the pieces they borrowed from the open RPG model are what make them successful, and that they should fully embrace the most enjoyable model of MMORPG instead of incorporating it one small piece at a time.
hmm, you have some really interesting points and I too wish there were more groundbreaking games, but... most part of the online community dont want it, they want simpleness and what they already know... and those games that are different most people have never heard of, thus they die out...
Ever heard of Ryzom? I was in beta and a long time player, the old company Nevrax had some truely cool plans for it, but unfortunatlly they never got enough paying customers to acomplish those dreams, and little by little I think the game is on it's way to die... not enough online gamers are out there yet for a moldbreaking game, imo... I hope we get there soon though, and I'd love to be in the dev team ;D
*hugs from lil me*
*Brain down for upgrade, don't try to understand my logic, I don't...*
Good post Ponzini. I agree with a lot of what you said. Especially this part: Originally posted by Ponzini Why does the game even need a progression system?
I've preached that line myself from time to time. But I don't think I ever got as good a response to it as you have.
As has already been pointed out there would have to be something to motivate players if the game didn't have any significant character progression. But it could be done.
But setting motivaters aside for a moment, just think about what a virtual world could be if developers moved away from the character progression model. Well, first think about what they are now.
Right now most mmorpg worlds are not really worlds. They are a series of stratified areas. From low level to high level. Like a flight of stairs. The world is broken up into areas of varying difficulty based on the level the area is designed for. It means that at any given point in your characters progression most of the world is useless to you. Areas you have out-leveled are just a waste of space for you to run through and areas too high level for you are certain death.
Ok, imagine a level 30 character. Let's say that he goes into a level 30 area. Alright, now let's say he has great fun there. That's nice, right? But it's such a small, limited area. Now imagine that the ENTIRE world was designed for level 30 characters. Think about that for a minute. This level 30 guy is no longer boxed in to a few small areas. He has an entire world that is just right for him.
Ok, so just throw character progression out the window. Everyone starts out within the appropriate power range that the game world is designed for. Now everybody has an entire world to enjoy right from the start and they will never out-level it. In this case the ENTIRE game world could be one huge adventuring area. You could give people quests to go from one side of the world to the other and the ENTIRE trip would be through areas designed for characters of their "level". If the developers wanted to they could design the ENTIRE world as one huge dungeon crawl.
I think it could be truly fantastic. The whole problem of traveling being boring could be eliminated because no one would ever have to run through an area that is too low level for them because there wouldn't be any areas that are too low level for anyone. If developers did this they could make a game world that focuses on having adventures. Adventures that feel like adventures and not just sitting around in a little area slaughtering the same crap over and over again.
Seriously, I hope someone tries this sometime soon. I'm so sick of these ladder climbing, linear games.
So whats the motivator behind a game like this, adventure? Most people who play MMO's play more than enough hours to finish off a gaming world, then what? Whats the motivation behind going to each of these zones and killing mobs or going through dungeons? Does your character get stronger at all as he adventures either by gear or by stats? Just some questions, as you stated there needs to be motivation, so what would be a possible motivator for this type of game? PVP/PVE
The motivation could be many things. If your in a guild you can make names for yourselves. Take land from players or PvE creatures. Diplomacy. Making a hut somewhere and crafting. Blockading resources from other players maybe. There are to many things that can be used as motivation to list.
Just think about it. Do you really have fun grinding? There could be other goals you can go for. They may not be as simple as a number on a character sheet. Instead you can own property or take part in battles. Thats just as rewarding as gaining a level IMO but much more entertaining.
The motivation could be many things. If your in a guild you can make names for yourselves. Take land from players or PvE creatures. Diplomacy. Making a hut somewhere and crafting. Blockading resources from other players maybe. There are to many things that can be used as motivation to list. Just think about it. Do you really have fun grinding? There could be other goals you can go for. They may not be as simple as a number on a character sheet. Instead you can own property or take part in battles. Thats just as rewarding as gaining a level IMO but much more entertaining.
And if people need to see a bar filling up it doesn't necessarily have to be an exp. bar. How about if people earned some sort of points as they play their characters and these points could be used to buy various quests. Mostly for unlockables, like different playable races.
Ok, you earn enough points to buy the quest to unlock the Oojabooja race (or whatever). Now an interesting thing to keep in mind is that with an entire world balanced to the power of everyones' characters it would be MUCH easier for devs to have a good auto-generater system to make the quests different every time. Really all it would have to do is send you to different points around the game world and key some event or mob or item to happen/spawn/appear when you get there. With the entire world balanced for the power of your character it wouldn't matter where the quest sends you because getting there WILL be an andventure no matter what parts of the world you have to travel through. Difficulty of the quest could be measured partly by the simple matter of how far you have to travel and how many legs there are to the quest.
So you earn the quest points and buy the quest to unlock the Oojabooja race. Let's say there are 5 legs to this quest which send you willy-nilly around the world. Here's the catch: Once you buy the quest if you die once before you complete it you no longer have the quest (risk/reward). You have to wait untill you earn enough quest points to re-buy it. But if you survive through the whole thing and complete all of the requirements then you unlock the Oojabooja race and can create a new Oojabooja character to play. And then depending on how the devs want to handle things it might be that when you get your Oojabooja character killed he is perma-dead and you're back to playing a boring old human. But that is a different discussion.
Ok so quests for unlockables. What sorts of unlockables.
Playable races
Playable animals / monsters
Maybe you have to do a quest to found a new player city.
Gain a one use access to a editor to design content maybe. So you invest the quest points and the time to get access to this editor. Maybe you want to mess with the people who live up in that mountain valley so you design a tower inhabited by a nasty wizard and place it right smack in the middle of the only pass leading out of the valley. Turning it into a dangerous and nasty place to be. It stays there untill someone manages to slay the wizard. And then the pass is safe again and the tower gradually crumbles to dust. DYNAMIC CONTENT....weeee. Ok sure, not everyone would want to spend their points this way but some people would get a kick out of it.
How about "discovering" a new God. Found a new religion.
Really there all sorts of things you do with this.
Besides unlockables I've also thought that something which might work is to have a bar of..uh, call it Heroic Inspiration. As you play your character this bar slowly fills up. When it's full you can activate your Heroic Inspiration to sort of turbo charge your character for a short time. This would be used for tackling special boss mobs most likely. Or if you are altruistic enough and you have a full bar of heroic inspiration you could use it to help defend your city if it's under attack. But once you use it it's gone untill it slowly fills up again. Just playing with ideas here.
But the point is that there are lots of things that could be used to motivate people to go out and do things.
I agree with almost everything that I read in this thread. If I ever play a game where gear is level based (you have to be level 25 to use that armor, for example) I think I'll go insane. I mean hell, it used to be fun in games where you could "twink" the hell out of your alt characters with nice gear.
As for another game breaking the mold, I really don't see it happening any time soon. I guess we can thank WoW for the shallow games lately, not that WoW is shallow but it didn't really do anything new, and somehow got 8 million freakin copies sold. If you were a developer, what would you do? Risk making a new style of game that some people may hate, or copy a game that sold millions of boxes?
Comments
Bans a perma, but so are sigs in necro posts.
EAT ME MMORPG.com!
But the Problem with this is:
Somewhen, it's no challenge anymore.
You built your city, you have medical treatment, food sources, safe water, something to easily survive all kinds of catastrophes.
And then?
I'd sure love such a game if it found some way to always keep you on a relatively low civilization status, so that you always have to fear all kinds of stuff
If you put any other activity into a game (mining, crafting, character development in general) you're going to have to include some kind of reward for the player in order to get them to do it. That's where things begin to change and each character becomes unique. From that point on you're not going to have balance.
I don't know why anyone who likes PvP would buy a MMORPG anyways. It never made sense to me to buy into a genre that is all about exploration, socializing, advancement, stories, and role playing. It's like buying something you know you're not going to like but doing it anyhow.
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If you put any other activity into a game (mining, crafting, character development in general) you're going to have to include some kind of reward for the player in order to get them to do it. That's where things begin to change and each character becomes unique. From that point on you're not going to have balance.
I don't know why anyone who likes PvP would buy a MMORPG anyways. It never made sense to me to buy into a genre that is all about exploration, socializing, advancement, stories, and role playing. It's like buying something you know you're not going to like but doing it anyhow.
even FPS games have progression (BF2142, Quake Wars) you dont understand what im talking about or have no clue how FPS games wortk nowadays. All the popular ones have progression- rainbow 6: vegas, lost planet, etc. I think I'm what- Level 30 in lost planet right now?
if you need to question why a PVPer wants to play an MMORPG then you're really lost + have no clue how the market works + have no clue how current FPS games work
I am suggesting progression but still let player skill factor in thats it
whether the MMO has PVP or not is not the point here lol. we are discussing 'systems' not 'implementation'
i think you and I misunderstood each other we're both talking bout progression. but to clarify when i speak of no progression I mean dont let stats drive my skills. more akin to Starport. Whereas my player skill decides whether I win a fight- not my stats or my ship
we're on the same page I think.
I merely suggest all the tools in the game world should be viable to some purpose. like real life a dagger gets the job done just like a sword or a gun
ah thanks guys took a quick look at pirates. player run economy, sandbox, risk vs reward looks like, etc. looks awesome I'm a happy man. i ignored this game originally cause the setting didnt appeal but it has all the features im looking for and its coming out soon.
looks like I found what ive been searching for
OP,
This is what I call wishing for an open RPG like UO, Shadow Bane, or Darkfall. Some others might call it a sandbox.
The reason we don’t have as much fun as we should is that we got a taste of an open RPG and we want more. The Everquest model of grinding and playing to advance your character endlessly is apparently enjoyable but does not last forever. DAoC and WoW follow in the Everquest model instead of Ultima Online’s open RPG model.
Therefore we don’t get player crafted events, town building, sieges, and open warfare over buildings, land, and treasure. Instead we get Great Sword + 1, per level, per months spent raiding, and the entire game becomes dedicated to the grind and permanent advancement of character items. Our adventure is built for us instead of by us.
There are a few upcoming games promising to break pieces of this mold at a time, but all of them still adhere to the character advancement and giving us our adventure instead of giving us the tools to make our own adventure. Only Darkfall promises us the moon and everything else, but it is perhaps the least funded and greatest risk for dying in any game under development. I would absolutely love nothing more than for Darkfall to get the funding a game like WoW had before it first shipped.
We can only wish that one day the developers of Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, and Tabula Rasa (who have the money to realize their dreams) will realize that the pieces they borrowed from the open RPG model are what make them successful, and that they should fully embrace the most enjoyable model of MMORPG instead of incorporating it one small piece at a time.
hmm, you have some really interesting points and I too wish there were more groundbreaking games, but... most part of the online community dont want it, they want simpleness and what they already know... and those games that are different most people have never heard of, thus they die out...
Ever heard of Ryzom? I was in beta and a long time player, the old company Nevrax had some truely cool plans for it, but unfortunatlly they never got enough paying customers to acomplish those dreams, and little by little I think the game is on it's way to die... not enough online gamers are out there yet for a moldbreaking game, imo... I hope we get there soon though, and I'd love to be in the dev team ;D
*hugs from lil me*
*Brain down for upgrade, don't try to understand my logic, I don't...*
I've preached that line myself from time to time. But I don't think I ever got as good a response to it as you have.
As has already been pointed out there would have to be something to motivate players if the game didn't have any significant character progression. But it could be done.
But setting motivaters aside for a moment, just think about what a virtual world could be if developers moved away from the character progression model. Well, first think about what they are now.
Right now most mmorpg worlds are not really worlds. They are a series of stratified areas. From low level to high level. Like a flight of stairs. The world is broken up into areas of varying difficulty based on the level the area is designed for. It means that at any given point in your characters progression most of the world is useless to you. Areas you have out-leveled are just a waste of space for you to run through and areas too high level for you are certain death.
Ok, imagine a level 30 character. Let's say that he goes into a level 30 area. Alright, now let's say he has great fun there. That's nice, right? But it's such a small, limited area. Now imagine that the ENTIRE world was designed for level 30 characters. Think about that for a minute. This level 30 guy is no longer boxed in to a few small areas. He has an entire world that is just right for him.
Ok, so just throw character progression out the window. Everyone starts out within the appropriate power range that the game world is designed for. Now everybody has an entire world to enjoy right from the start and they will never out-level it. In this case the ENTIRE game world could be one huge adventuring area. You could give people quests to go from one side of the world to the other and the ENTIRE trip would be through areas designed for characters of their "level". If the developers wanted to they could design the ENTIRE world as one huge dungeon crawl.
I think it could be truly fantastic. The whole problem of traveling being boring could be eliminated because no one would ever have to run through an area that is too low level for them because there wouldn't be any areas that are too low level for anyone. If developers did this they could make a game world that focuses on having adventures. Adventures that feel like adventures and not just sitting around in a little area slaughtering the same crap over and over again.
Seriously, I hope someone tries this sometime soon. I'm so sick of these ladder climbing, linear games.
So whats the motivator behind a game like this, adventure? Most people who play MMO's play more than enough hours to finish off a gaming world, then what? Whats the motivation behind going to each of these zones and killing mobs or going through dungeons? Does your character get stronger at all as he adventures either by gear or by stats? Just some questions, as you stated there needs to be motivation, so what would be a possible motivator for this type of game? PVP/PVE
The motivation could be many things. If your in a guild you can make names for yourselves. Take land from players or PvE creatures. Diplomacy. Making a hut somewhere and crafting. Blockading resources from other players maybe. There are to many things that can be used as motivation to list.
Just think about it. Do you really have fun grinding? There could be other goals you can go for. They may not be as simple as a number on a character sheet. Instead you can own property or take part in battles. Thats just as rewarding as gaining a level IMO but much more entertaining.
And if people need to see a bar filling up it doesn't necessarily have to be an exp. bar. How about if people earned some sort of points as they play their characters and these points could be used to buy various quests. Mostly for unlockables, like different playable races.
Ok, you earn enough points to buy the quest to unlock the Oojabooja race (or whatever). Now an interesting thing to keep in mind is that with an entire world balanced to the power of everyones' characters it would be MUCH easier for devs to have a good auto-generater system to make the quests different every time. Really all it would have to do is send you to different points around the game world and key some event or mob or item to happen/spawn/appear when you get there. With the entire world balanced for the power of your character it wouldn't matter where the quest sends you because getting there WILL be an andventure no matter what parts of the world you have to travel through. Difficulty of the quest could be measured partly by the simple matter of how far you have to travel and how many legs there are to the quest.
So you earn the quest points and buy the quest to unlock the Oojabooja race. Let's say there are 5 legs to this quest which send you willy-nilly around the world. Here's the catch: Once you buy the quest if you die once before you complete it you no longer have the quest (risk/reward). You have to wait untill you earn enough quest points to re-buy it. But if you survive through the whole thing and complete all of the requirements then you unlock the Oojabooja race and can create a new Oojabooja character to play. And then depending on how the devs want to handle things it might be that when you get your Oojabooja character killed he is perma-dead and you're back to playing a boring old human. But that is a different discussion.
Ok so quests for unlockables. What sorts of unlockables.
Playable races
Playable animals / monsters
Maybe you have to do a quest to found a new player city.
Gain a one use access to a editor to design content maybe. So you invest the quest points and the time to get access to this editor. Maybe you want to mess with the people who live up in that mountain valley so you design a tower inhabited by a nasty wizard and place it right smack in the middle of the only pass leading out of the valley. Turning it into a dangerous and nasty place to be. It stays there untill someone manages to slay the wizard. And then the pass is safe again and the tower gradually crumbles to dust. DYNAMIC CONTENT....weeee. Ok sure, not everyone would want to spend their points this way but some people would get a kick out of it.
How about "discovering" a new God. Found a new religion.
Really there all sorts of things you do with this.
Besides unlockables I've also thought that something which might work is to have a bar of..uh, call it Heroic Inspiration. As you play your character this bar slowly fills up. When it's full you can activate your Heroic Inspiration to sort of turbo charge your character for a short time. This would be used for tackling special boss mobs most likely. Or if you are altruistic enough and you have a full bar of heroic inspiration you could use it to help defend your city if it's under attack. But once you use it it's gone untill it slowly fills up again. Just playing with ideas here.
But the point is that there are lots of things that could be used to motivate people to go out and do things.
As for another game breaking the mold, I really don't see it happening any time soon. I guess we can thank WoW for the shallow games lately, not that WoW is shallow but it didn't really do anything new, and somehow got 8 million freakin copies sold. If you were a developer, what would you do? Risk making a new style of game that some people may hate, or copy a game that sold millions of boxes?