Let's build an MMO.

[Asher]

He left blowjobs out of there.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by FrostyBoy
Enjoy the show Spike, I am pretty good at this sort of thing.

No - I actually want to hear what your plans are for getting any MMO you design off the ground.

Otherwise this is just a bunch of people on the internet trying to best each other at being teh cleverest by arguing about career lists and so on.

[FrostyBoy]

You don't visit the Off-topic forum Spike?


Darkcloud, I certainly won't go down the path of SecondLife, you are right that it is boring.

And every suggestion you have given, I have actually already planned to implement, I just need to prepare the basics first. I need to figure out how a person progresses and what type of path they can take. I thought about it lastnight, and I am definitely taking medical out, who wants to be a doctor? No body, it's boring.

[FrostyBoy]

Originally posted by DarkCloud
Spelling quibble:
Enthusiest=Enthusiast
---


How, necessarily, are engineers more important than geologists? That is a question you will have to answer.

It might be better just to allow the game to have more freeform flavor- which would allow players to experiment more.

Rather than having everything under the sun- abstract things a bit.

You are right, I am aware there are titles all over the place, my mission now is to organise them or find a better way for a person to progress. Perhaps it should be more of a tree diagram.

I also need to figure out what each one gives you, if you reach Geologist, what happens? You can find more iron? Bringing the real world to an MMO is not easy, but I think it can be done. It would be like Civilization, The Sims, Sim City, GTAIV all as an MMO.

I also foresee the future for expansions, where instead of starting from 2000ad, the server starts from 4000BC and the players work the game up to say 2100ad. - in the sense that everyone is contributing (or not) to the progress of human kind, some in big steps, some in small steps. When it reaches the end, it will stay there for a few months then the server would reset itself, and I imagine this kind of gameplay could last up to a year long. (e.g. 4000bc to 2100ad could take an entire year or more to achieve). So you would see the world change around you, some zones progressing very well, others not at all, or going backwards, depending on how the zones are governed, wars, etc.

[LDiCesare]

who wants to be a doctor? No body, it's boring.

Indeed. I mean, playing the surgeon and having your character be able to save the life of another character looks way more boring than farming or mining for instance, which are activities people apparently love in MMO's...

btw your map of Europe region shows Corsica in Italy instead of France, which is quite wrong. And why is Berlin so small?

Also, do you have any clue on how you'd get the hardware to support a MMO server and how to maintain it, have gamemasters, bandwidth and so forth?

[FrostyBoy]

I'm not gonna bother repeating myself. If you really need to know, I made a thread in the off-topic forum that will answer your question.

And you're right, I should fix Corsica; Asterix had me all confused for that moment. Berlin is small because there are too many big cities around that area. But don't worry, I will make it a big town.

[DarkCloud]

And every suggestion you have given, I have actually already planned to implement, I just need to prepare the basics first. I need to figure out how a person progresses and what type of path they can take.

I sort of thought the underlying philosophy of the game was more basic and important than the titles for jobs?

I'll reiterate my idea that perhaps it would be best just to have three extremely general advancement trees- similar to the RPG trees of MAGIC-FIGHTER-THIEF... in this sense, they would sync as RELIGION-POLITICIAN-BUSINESSMAN; and have well-defined differences.

To avoid ethnocentrism, you could have immense levels of detail in regards to different religions people could advance in, different governmental systems, different business types, etc.

And you don't necessarily need levels, you could just have amounts of competency.

IE: You follow White Wolf's Storyteller system and have different levels of "points" in skills as people advance and complete "quests" like registering people to vote, catching criminals in their neighborhood, etc.

People 'create' their own jobs by whatever skill-set they have. Someone who takes a lot of crime-fighting skills on an eventual path toward politician, might become a FBI agent or something of the sort- but they could also progress and become director of the CIA first (like US' George Bush I), or MI-5, or the Mossad, etc. In this way, the player chooses how to progress- not the game designer. It allows for more emergent gameplay!

[DrSpike]

If all the answers are in the OT thread, then we may as well close this one.

[FrostyBoy]

Thanks DarkCloud, you at least are getting the gist of what I am trying to accomplish.

I am still working on this France map and at the same time thinking up a skill tree, everyone will start at the same loser title, but as they play the game, do various quests, higher skills will become available to them, allowing them to do more stuff.

[Jon Shafer]

Originally posted by Nostromo
I think you got it backwards. Think of the gameplay first, then think of the setting. With all due respect, what you've been describing so far is, gameplay wise, a pretty humdrum MMO that curiously takes place on 21th Century earth. I use the word "curiously" because that kind simplistic hack & slash gameplay is best suited IMO for fantasy or maybe SCi-FI settings. I'm not sure how you'll make it click in a real world setting.

I have to echo this sentiment. If you're serious about actually making a game, a much better route to take would be to determine what you want players to do, and then tailor the game to that. This is particularly important because of your subject matter. As DarkCloud said, the real world is honestly... pretty boring. That's why people play games that are so UNLIKE reality. It's hard to imagine a game about the modern-day world having much success or attracting much attention, but you seem to have your heart set on this subject. Turning something relatively boring into a game that people enjoy playing means that it's all the more important to identify what players will be doing and why it's fun. Something that the games industry will often do to accomplish this is to develop a complete "vertical slice." This is a short, say, a 5-minute very precise sequence of gameplay that illustrates exactly what makes the game tick and what is appealing about it. You need to identify whether or not being an "Errand Boy" is actually going to be something players actually want to do before you can flesh out the development tree with any confidence.

To further rain on your parade, Space05us is right. MMOs cost a ridiculous amount of money to create. Particularly when you say things like "it'll be like World of Warcraft, just bigger" it sets off alarms for me. I suppose if you have $100 million at your disposal it won't be as much of a problem, but of course you have to make all of that money back too...

Good luck.

Jon

[Nikolai]

So, you've got a world map, but no gameplay?

[Nostromo]

It's hard to imagine a game about the modern-day world having much success or attracting much attention, but you seem to have your heart set on this subject.

Some examples come to mind: the Sims, Rainbow six Vegas, Call of Duty, etc, etc. It doesn't have to be ****ing fantasy, for God's sake. I'm sick and tired of mother****in' elves and those damn freaks with hairy feet, but the average moron who's into computer RPG's never seem to get tired of that ****...

[FrostyBoy]

Thanks for your input Jon, I agree with you that real life is boring, no one wants to play it, but what I have found when playing games is that people want to feel important, or they want to play a role they could not normaly play in real life. The game I am proposing would allow a single person to raise up to President level (for example), and actually carry out Presidential tasks, like declaring war on another zone, so all players would suddenly be affected by that change in rule.

Of couse, "Erands boy" is not something fun to do, unless perhaps its funny or for short bursts of time. However, I was playing AoC lastnight and I wondered to myself, who the hell thought that grinding would be fun? Yet millions of people bother to do it?

Like I said, I think it can be done, it just needs a team of thinkers to set it right, to make it fun, but not to go down the path of fantasy. I mean we all play Civilization right, which is based on real-life, why did we all play it? To take on the role of a leader? Maybe it's due time to take Civilization to a higher level, where we all contribute in our own personal ways, yet, our actions all effect each other. For example, I might like to play as an Assassin, in the game I am known as the Jackal, you might prefer to be a business man trading cocaine, an illegal trade in most of the zones (set by the leaders (players) of those zones), you have competition you want wiped out, you call me, I arrive at your office, you tell me in secret you will pay me an amount of money to kill a certain business man (player). So I go out, I travel over seas, I try my best to kill this other player, I succeed, and in doing so, people hear about it and his reptutation drops, and your business goes up. In fear, you hire bodyguards (which could be other players or NPC's) to protect yourself from assassin's as well. And this is just one kind of scenario, that is fun and effects many players at once. In most MMO's, this sort of thing never happens, everything is feature-based (Each player is individually effected by the pre-set features), the game I am proposing is player-based (Players are effected by the actions of the other players, and the world of the MMO changes depending on what the players do).

[Asher]

I mean we all play Civilization right, which is based on real-life, why did we all play it? To take on the role of a leader?

Civilization is not about role playing. How can you miss the obvious so often?

[FrostyBoy]

You're like an Australian fly.