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Olde Skool + New School
Jimmy_Scythe
Member CommonPosts: 3,586
Tonight I just feel like slaughtering a few sacred cows. I guess it's because I've been rethinking the design philosophy of Kenta Cho. But instead of trying to put modern play mechanics into older games, I've been wondering if we could put some older ideas into new games. Specifically, what can we take from older games and implement in a MMORPG.
I started near the beginning. The first video games were largely about killing endless waves of things for a score. The longer you lived, the more bad guys you got to kill and the higher you score. It didn't really matter what the “things” in question were. They could be aliens, or zombies, or cyborgs, or ninjas. They could even be alien cyberzombie ninjas!! What mattered was that there we endless waves of them that just got tougher and tougher to kill.
Around about this time, the first RPGs started showing up on home microcomputers. These were often just dungeons packed with monsters and treasure with your goal to kill some big bad evil thing at the bottom of level twenty. On specific kind of RPG did this exclusively with randomly generated dungeons. Yeah, I'm talking about Roguelikes.
Oh, and I almost forgot how many early games were co-op games. Double Dragon, Gauntlet, Ikari Warriors, Contra, there we co-op games long before Gears of War and Left 4 Dead. Now that I think about it, almost all arcade games between 1988 and 1999 had two sets of controls in their cabinet. Just goes to show that nothing is as new as we think.
Okay, so what do we have here? A co-op game with endless waves of bad guys randomly generated content....
Well... let's expand this with some more modern ideas. I'm thinking AI Wars here. We'll have a non-playable faction that is controlled by the server. This faction would be trying to expand it's territory and the strength (number and level of monsters) of this faction would scale in accordance with how much in-game real estate and resources the players control. And we'd also factor in the number of players online at any given time as well. So that takes care of the Co-op and endless waves of enemies thing...
I guess this server run empire would require forts and castles and the like. So if left in an area for long enough, randomly generated content would start to take shape. It would be really cool if some of these structures could also be destroyed.
Of course, by going with this design we have to ditch things like quests. We could still have PvP, but that would just result in the entire world being overrun. And what do we do when the world gets overrun? I'm thinking that there's a full character wipe and the server gets reset....
Fuck it, does anyone want to start a MUD and actually try this stuff?
Comments
You mean scenarios? (Hurray Im making up new words)
I am guessing you are familiar with GW2 dynamic events (These go back anf forth no matter how you view it, it is always possible to go back to step 1 as it is to go to the last step back and forth).
Say too many goblins so players in the area are often attacked by goblin parties when traveling alone but if their numbers are decreased they will frequent these places less often.
Scenarios are a one way ticket with multiple possibl endings, you cannot go back. These themselves have dynamic events inside of the,.
There is a goblin chieftain, you decide to either A) befriend him and make your race seem friendly towards his people through favors and tribute or
organize a party and pillage his village and rob him of his goods.
Depending on what you as a player decided to do will affect other players not lucky enough tto come across said chieftain before you and will either not notice or hate you for being such a mean player and making the area hostile by losing the chieftain's trust ;p.
Depending on your decision different dynamic event chains will happen (Goblins invading your settlements or goblins asking for help in exchange for their wares and riches). Since the chieftain is not dumb you will enver be able to revert to the previous scenario, but you can switch to a different scenario by KILLING said chieftain which would lead to another dynamic events (Renegade goblins being hired, attacking players and robbing them of their items (These are not lost, the goblins actually have it on them and can be stolen back) and nomad goblin camps being made).
What the OP is describing sounds a little like Tabula Rasa.
Hmm...
Personally I always pushed for mixing Gradius/Contra style gameplay with raiding.
Each boss is 10-15 mins of play, likely involving the trash prior to the boss (which, if well designed, should be as interesting as the boss itself, or nearly so.)
When you wipe you have the option to immediately rez, at full health, with full buffs, and the encounter immediately starts again from the beginning.
Basically carves away the fat of raiding and gets to the real meat of it.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
When you started off with two shmups I immediately thought of Realm of The Mad God. But yeah....
I think that's a damn good way to approach boss fights. Or better yet, tokens! In order to do a quest you have to get tokens from the quest giver. You get three tokens that you use every time you die on the quest. Lose all three and you have to start the quest all the way over and lose any loot you gained while on the quest.
Im from old school where we played "tag" with physical contact, as opposed to "shadow-tag", and where we played "tackle" football, as opposed to "flag" football.
Oh yeah?! Well back in my day we played Dodge Ball!!!! And it wasn't any O' this pansy ass red rubber ball crap either. We played like men! We used bowling balls!!!
LOL....now those were the days
Yeah I think the token thing has some merit. The trick is the right amount of challenge, and the right duration of the activity really.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Well games like MojiKan introduce sim like elements in a browser environment while games like WoW just build on existing conventions, I think its a relevant technique.