Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Besides Combat and Crafting...
Mister_Re
Member Posts: 142
What do/would you like to do in your mmo(s)? Do you like play some sort of sport (athletic or race), compose/play music, make art (draw, paint, sculpting?), publish books, play cards or some other type of game (gamble)?
Comments
Dont push aside Crafting
-Let me preface this by saying 92% of the MMO's out there dont do crafting right. So before pushing aside crafting alot has to be done in this area.
Boring Crafting: items in your inventory, press "Create"
Interesting Crafting: Resources should be laid out like Mortal Online, Xsyon, or Wurm. See a tree? Chop it down, cut it into logs, make a campfire or a cart, or make wooden poles out of it. Standing on grass? Pick some and weave it into string and finally make a straw hat with it. There should be variations of the crafted item based upon materials used. Plus you should be able to dye wearable items by adding dye that you created. Also I will mention you crafting should entail player buildings etc. Dont just buy a house already made. You should have to gather wood and "/build" a house as well as the furniture inside.
Ok to the original question
1. Exploration - Uncharted Waters Online has an "Exploration" system of sorts that you use skills to discover certain things. Its like going on an adventure to find an answer or to search for archeological items etc. In addition just general exploring is fun. Seeing a crypt and entering it scared of whats down there is exploring also. Exploring for rare crafting materials...see above. Hop on that boat you just made and go find islands to explore.
2. Music systems, see lotro's music system.
3. Some type of Diplomacy(VG) or Formal Clothing(UWO), or city faction(EQ2) system for access to other things to do.
4. RP type activities in inns, nighttime should be dark and deadly(if its not theres something wrong with the game). Go inside and buy a drink or drink one you crafted and listen to some music another player is playing(see #2). Play card games in the inn, and have a mechanic in the game to allow players "Comfort" stat to increase for a while after being inside an inn, increasing realism.
Addition: I like to survive in my MMO. Where you have to secure food or else you'll starve to death. (Mortal Online) Or drink if you are thirsty. Or its in your best intrest to find shelter or put on warmer clothes if its snowing. (perhaps Embers of Caerus once its released)
take everything you know about real life and literature and extrapolate that into an MMO.
that should give you pretty much a 90% coverage of what I would like to see attempted.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Diplomacy was neat in Vanguard. I'm sure if someone wanted to it could be expanded on.
Age of Wulin sounds like it's going to have some kind of painting/art feature along with music, i'm not sure what their purpose will be though, beyond entertainment of course.
What type of RP activities are you referring to?p.s. I wasn't trying push aside crafting, just wanted to focus on other activities.
Collect mounts and pets.
Play the auction house (in and out of game).
One thing I thought about today was a mount system where the mounts are player created. Only way to buy a mount is via a player who breeds them. what would be very awesome would be if you were able to breed two different mounts to create a mount that is not in game yet. Of course there would be a failure rate that the mount would come out as the original and not be a special mount. You could sell that mount or breed it to make more special mounts. Also a mount would take days to make and no mounts would be available when the mmo is released. I think it would be cool if a basic mount was in the wild and you would need to have the skill to tame it then have the skill to breed it. Obviously skill would make a huge difference int he outcome.
sorry for a such a long post, but I love the idea.
Mabinogi actually has a great music system. You can learn an instrument, write your own songs, even perform a symphony with others.
Personally I'm a craft-o-holic. Most MMOs these days, though, tend to give crafting a back-seat. I especially hate how most games lock you to only one craft. Final Fantasy XI had the best crafting system of any MMO I've played ever. Not only could you learn all the craft sills (though you could only master one), many items actually REQUIRED specific levels in multiple craft skills to create. Gathering materials took more than just wandering around a single map for an hour clicking on nodes that just popped back up after a minute. Most materials actually required you to kill monsters to obtain, and some were really difficult to get or uncommon drops.
Fishing is nice. Kind of a good break from all the fighting every so often. Especially if you have a cool guild with people who aren't afraid to just be social every once in a while.
Holiday and special events can be interesting if done well. Again, to reference FFXi, the moogle egg hunt was pretty cool. The "Fantastic Fraulein Mumor" event was interesting. You had to dance in sync with the NPC to stop an evil wraith. The game had all kinds of things to do besides just leveling up.
I'd love so see more quests for abilities/spells as well. None of this paying a "skill trainer" a couple bucks, or gold, or shillings, or whatever currency the game uses to learn an awesomely devastating spell. Power like that should be earned, not bought.
Bleh, I hate sounding like such a FF fanboy, but FFXI allowed you to raise your own chocobo. Getting one with the coloring/abilities you wanted could take generations of breeding, and raising them took weeks of maintenance. In addition to riding them, you could also throw them greens and they would dig for buried "treasure", which 9 times out of 10 turned out to be cheap crafting items.
Mabinogi also let you log in and play as your mount. You could fight monsters and level up as your mount, but mounts couldn't talk to NPCs. On your character, you could then have your mount fight along side you. I thought that was pretty cool.
In TTS I am planning on having it so that any non-Demon/Devil/Horror/Humanoid creature can be used as a mount and mounts can also carry things or pull things. Dragon pulled airships? Riding on the backs of wurms, dragging carts/caravans with behemoths or w/e. You can breed but not mix them. I thought about a magical fusion option, but that would seem kinda weird. Some creatures can cast spells that do this, like dragons creating draconian or spawn type things, but it would be strange with people.
I am still trying to work out taming of creatures like dragons that can become sentient. Maybe sentient creatures can function the same way as Faux NPCs from my other thread? I dunno, shit gets complicated.