Ok, you have a reasonable budget and a pretty decent team of programmers and artists. Everything is waiting on YOU to work all the design out.
What I want to know, is what you feel is missing from MMORPGs, or what do you think could have been designed much better in current titles. Does fishing for 36 hours straight to get to level 2 fisher really piss you off? How would you do it differently? Think all magic systems are horrible? (fireball1, fireball2, fireball3 gets old after a while doesn’t it?) How would you do things differently?
I’m not looking for story ideas here, I just want to see what everyone thinks is missing or could be done better from a gameplay and mechanics perspective. Any interesting ideas out there?
Sound off…
…and to add something to my ‘hoW’ section, I think one needs to address the issues with complex systems, including how to deal with exploits and nerfing, before thinking about adding more complex systems to deal with things like dynamic PvE scaling, random quests, functional economies, etc. This is why I have focused my comment on changing the players’ perception of “How a system should be used” rather than “What systems to implement”.
I’m casting a vote for creating separate topics on specific issues raised in this thread at a later date. Designing a perfect MMORPG in a single thread with multiple participants covering every game design topic is very hard. ;)
Lachek, thank you for the clarification, I agree with most of your perspectives here.
“I guess my point is, if people think of the MMORPG as “just a game”, they will accept the game mechanics as law however broken they may be, will abuse them whenever possible to maximize profits, and 50% of the population will always complain if and when a particular mechanic changes. If instead they think of the systems as tools that allow them to enjoy the game more, they will work with the devs to ensure the systems work as intended, since that increases their enjoyment of the world.”
Good point.
There IS a difference between designing an MMORPG as a “game” and as a persistent world environment. These are two very different design philosophies.
My goal with the post was to spark a discussion (notice the “Pt.1″ in the header). There is a LOT of good stuff here, and quite a bit of it bears further discussion in another thread or something. Who wants to meet up at E3 over a couple of beers and figure out how to turn the MMO industry on its ear?
I’m not sure if that system of truely dynamic content is reasonable or valid.
It’s a good idea… but think about what would happen if you plugged it into any of the existing games. Take World of Warcraft, or EQ. Any outside housing would kill the feel of the areas (can anyone imagine the Barrens with a huge Tauren town right outside the Sluge Fen or a pile of small shacks around Un’Goro Crater?), and any huge changes in content could destabilize missions/quests.
The only game I’ve played that I think has enough open space and a mission system that could support such a thing is EVE, and as a Massively Multiplayer Spreadsheet, it really wouldn’t benefit much from such a system – players might not even notice it exists compared to just having a guy twiddle around with seldom-used space. Maybe SWG, but I don’t know if the mission system is robust enough there.
I’m sure you could design a game to work that system, but I’m not sure you should. I can’t see it adding enough character to the game to make up for the inevitable :
Yell : “Were r the Orcs in Plains?”
Yell : “Should be some around the far northeast.”
Yell : “cant find ny ther.”
Yell : “er, try the far south? Maybe the old village to the east?”
Unless you plan to give players a reason to level alts, or make such altering enemy spawns autoscale, the average player will only see them once or twice.
Don’t have the time to read all this, but my perfect MMORPG will never exist and neither will yours :)
I’m not the type that gives up easily. I will either find what I think is the perfect MMORPG, prod developers into opening their minds and making one the right way, or I’ll do it myself. /cracks knuckles/
Anyway, back to the topic at hand…what do you guys think about death mechanics? Death penalties and rez sickness? Favorite implementation in an existing title? How would you change things?
Death is all the penalty I need. Even in games with very little (or no) penalty for death, I go out of my way to avoid it. I just plain hate to die.
I’m going to go with much of what A55cl0wn posted. I’ve been trying to quantify what type of player I am and have decided it’s immersive. I WANT the RPG to be in an MMORPG. I want to have an effect on the environment in which I’m spending so much time. I realize the technical challenges of providing true character development in a persisted world. However, that is precisely what a so-called RPG should provide. EQ2 is a little better at making you feel as though you’re creating a character than a game such as WOW does. GW seems to have less linear play-style and choices but is way too instanced. I want a Fable-like game online.
I could not possibly agree more with what Ethic says about death penalties in the mainstream of MMORPG design. WoW’s death pently doesn’t feel any less punishing to me than EQ’s [i]vastly[/i] harsher one, simply because I still hate dying.
I contrast these games, however, from something like EVE. EVE’s ‘death penalty’ is an important part of how the game’s economy works. You get your ship blown up, and you need to buy a new ship.
Part of that, I think, is that WoW is very explicitly designed to be a series of semi-disconnected ‘theme park rides’. PvP, raids, soloing, all offer distinctive and different experiences to have with your character. EVE is designed, equally explicitly, to be a ‘world’, where the systems all interact with each other to produce an overall gameplay dynamic. I don’t think one of these approaches is better than the other; I would prefer to live in a world that has games that approach ‘fun’ from both directions.
If I were going to design the MMORPG I would want to develop, release, and play myself, right now (and, of course, I have game ideas aplenty, so this is just the one on the top of my stack ATM), I’ve been working on an idea that combines the crafting systems and personal avatar of SWG with the openess of EVE with the advancing technology of ATITD. Basically, you play a colonist from a crash-landed colony vessel on a habitable but undeveloped planet. You start with the somewhat basic but powerful tools you brought with you (lathes 4tw!) and advance… as far as the game lets you. Chop trees for crossbows to stake your claim to iron deposits to turn into the planet’s first guns! Horses lead eventually to cars. Building roads and railroads to connect settlements and industry! And, of course, the military needs to defend all this infrastructure from the inevitable bandits, pirates, and assorted twits EVE players are long familiar with.
It would hardly be for everyone (just like EVE”s particular PvP-freedom isn’t), but for the people that liked it, it would be really really good.
Personally, I’m a big fan of perma-death, or at the very least, a really NASTY, incredibly painful death penalty (EVE comes to mind).
If you’re a jerk, you deserve to bite it. Mind you, you shouldn’t necessarily perma-die if ten-rats-kill-YOU, but if you happen to piss off the entire town guard and then take a dump on a sleeping hobo, and then PVP some n00b for the fun of it, all the while agro’ing a lvl 991 demi-Canadian Dragon of evil bacon doom, sending it on a mad killing spree through the town, yeah, you die.
In the 10-rat case, I think a “semi-death” or unconcious state should take your character out of the action. The ability to continue to feign death after reviving, to make sure all the baddies have disappeared would be a must. After all, in a truly “perfect” mmorpg, you wouldn’t have to worry about being stuck on a spawning zone (they don’t exist anymore right?) and this method of death would presuppose that the rats are smart enough and motivated enough to chase after the rest of your group, or merely run into the woods because they’re hungry, tired, or running away from the aforementioned dragon. Or, maybe, they’d just fall asleep for a long enough period to get your arse outta there.
Respawning my character COMPLETELY destroys the immersion and believability factor (slight knock against EVE’s podding system – after a legit PK, you should be gonzo, but I guess the “technology” of that day and age makes it possible)
This would also take care of the level caps to a certain degree. At the very least, it would give the devs more time to iron out bugs and throw some more polish on the game engine, rather than constantly being pressured to make more and more high-level content for those crazy overseas kids that don’t need sleep and can get to lvl 64 in WoW in a couple of weeks.
“Strange Brew” – the best Canuck movie ever, no dragons though eh?
Whatever death system is put in place, it has to *make sense within the world setting*. EVE’s death system makes sense. WoW’s death system does not. Horizons tried its best to have their (lack of) a death system make sense by making all player characters Chosen Ones who cannot perma-die. In CoH/V, you’re instantly transported to the hospital … uuuh, I was in the sewers by myself fighting evil robots, and I guess they called the ambulance after they beat me up? The otherwise fantastic NeverWinter Nights persistant world called Avlis has a death system where you are instantly resurrected at your God’s temple – but to be fair, they have a free-for-all looting system, so if you don’t make it back to your corpse, too bad.
What bugs me is that if the death system is not in theme with the game, it becomes *impossible* to roleplay, or even immerse yourself. How am I supposed to justify walking into a tavern in the world of Avlis and announce to everyone that “Shaliim del-Tor has resurrected me fifteen times today! I am the Chosen One!”? In EVE, on the other hand, it is very easy to justify that you’ve lost three clones and four ships in trying to recover some massive drug shipment from a competing corp. The WoW “roleplaying” servers are just a bad joke – how can you roleplay a character in a world you cannot change in any way, with a completely penalty-free death system?
Pah. I’m with A55cl0wn – give me a perma-death system, with a good allowance for death-defying feats like running away, falling unconscious, being rescued by your party members, properly advertising dangerous areas and so on. Force people to play smart, and don’t pander to the lowest-common-denominator because that will lose you some short-term subscriptions.
Deciding a death penalty really depends on your game and who you’re trying to appeal to.
Casual gamers will like lesser death penalties. It makes mistakes less crippling, and encourages players to explore or to attempt trial and error. Hardcore gamers won’t like such a system – they’ll find that it allows players to progress even without the tactics/skill/equipment they found necessary, and that it allows the n00bs to step in their territory.
Personally, I’m a fan of progressing penalties, from initially weak to overly harsh. While accidents happen, and you might die once or twice in a specific quest/mission/grinding session, that’s acceptable. If you’re throwing yourself and zerging enemies, well, not so much.
The first thing to remember is to not make one death cause other deaths to be more common. If X can kill you when you’re not suffering from rez sickness, it’ll kill you when you are, and that basically turns rez sickness into an artificial delay tactic (and something that makes gamers want to go AFK isn’t too good of an idea, either). If X can kill you when your armor’s in good shape, no one will attempt a second fight at 90% armor values.
Also, making characters feel like they’re going ‘backwards’ tends to be extremely casual-unfriendly. This is more true with XP than with currency, and more true if the XP can cause skill or power loss (I’ve seen quite a few rants about how ‘unfair’ that was).
I don’t think perma-death is viable in a large scale and long-term MMO. It’s just not popular enough, and discourages anything but big groups beating on enemies that really aren’t enough of a challenge for them. Yes, it may be hard to explain thematically… but that mainly means you need to come up with better writers or a better mechanic for rezzing. Make the first quest/mission’s reward be divine intervention that makes your character somehow special enough to never die for long. Or look toward future tactics, where a rez machine was pretty the focus of the plot.
There are ways to do it without breaking or even going against immersion, and I think it’s better to do that, than to create an environment that encourages players to not challenge themselves or take risks. Beating up things that aren’t a risk to you isn’t fun, but that’s what players will do if it’s the path of least resistance.
I think the best idea is to have scaling penalties depending on the death, who killed you, and how often you’ve died recently, but scaling it correctly without seeming too harsh (EVE without the insurance) or forgetable (CoH inside missions) seems pretty difficult to come up with.
Two comments here, at the risk of being intellectually overpowered by the great postings so far:
1. On death penalties, I don’t agree with permanent death for your character. This option is always available to the player – you died, delete your character. For me, I’m with ethic. I hate dying. I hate running back from the GY and spending time trying to time my rez around the various Mobs and other players so that I can have some sheltered moments to rebuild my health and mana.
I do believe that a progressive death penalty would be useful though to encourage players not to rush into encounters. Perhaps WoW’s dishonorable kill system provides a model. I’ve seen people go to great lengths to avoid killing civilians and then get in massive flame wars on chat when someone in their party does, because they know that the DK will stick with their character forever and make gaining honor that much harder.
So imagine if we had “Astral Sickness” that slowly incremented. I’m pulling numbers out of my head here, but suppose each character death added 1/50th of a second to your rez time. WoW already has a minimum time that you have to be “dead” before you can rez (really only kicks in if you die very close to a GY). So say you die an average of 50 times with each level; by the time you are Level 60 you have to wait a full minute in the graveyard before you can move to your corpse. That would penalize completely careless players without impeding a player’s ability to take risks and look around the corner, go in the cave, or over a cliff.
Then the dev’s could add a quest that would occur late in the game, in WoW terms say, Level 50, that would allow you to reset your penalty. It would have to be difficult enough to make people really want it, but it would allow players who had matured to recover from their earlier mistakes.
2. On a different topic, I would like to see more gradual progression rather than the abrupt Ding of leveling. In WoW I can substantially improve my skills every two levels. That means when I am one point away from leveling I am essentially as skilled as I was nearly two levels ago, just carrying the “permanent buff” I got from the odd-numbered level and any extra items I was eligible to equip at that point.
What if you gained some attributes (intellect, stamina, rage – whatever) throughout your playing and then periodically were able to learn the new spells and abilities. That would add a much deeper dimension to the game – “LF1M Mage, one bar from 40 pref but will take 39″
Any attempt to split the difference between WoW-style light death penalties and EVE-style harsh ones is, IMHO, misguided. No solution will be at the same time light enough not to drive casual players into Blizzard’s welcoming embrace while at the same time keeping ex-Shadowbane players feeling like they’re being a sufficient affliction unto their enemies.
In the larger sense, attempts to thread that needle and present a gameplay experience that will be strongly compelling to all or most of the types of MMO player out there are mostly going to end in tears and recriminations (see: Star Wars Galaxies, Horizons, WoW’s PvP/BG/Honor system).
Uggg, not even gonna pretend I read all those replies but here is what I would like to see:
1) Class/level based MMOs bore me to shit. BAM hit level 60 with mage type now go back and do the same chit with fighter type…oh crap Im level 4 again and bored to shit cause I know whats coming up and oh yeah cant play with my level 45 friends…..
I like EvE’s skill based system, given enough time you can do whatever you desire. Also with EvE the skills are setup such that getting to lvl 3 is not too painfull and the difference between lvl 3 and lvl 5 is usually pretty minimal. So a two year old character can meaningfully interact with a 2 month old charater.
2)Meaningfull content: In CoH we used to joke around about how good the villians lawyers were. In WoW you see the samething, villians never die, nothing changes. EvE is the same with the NPC content…HOWEVER…EvEs NPC content is kind of a “hey its here if you want it” thing. The big thing in EvE is the players and the Devs support this. The Devs actually report on the big player news, they report when an alliance breaks up or when an old corp is revived. Not only that but major changes can be made by layers. When the guiding hand social club took down that corp they took down the victim was honestly affected. They weren’t back the next day with all their chit intact.
I see this as the big move in future MMOs, let the players make the content. Start with a bit of NPCism and slowly fade it out as players take over the role. Seed out the blu print to make item a and then take out the NPC….been too long since item a was around slowly bring back the NPCs.
EvE does one other thing that helps in this area, players are neutral. In classic games there is a subconscious aftertaste of alignment and that affects things. EvE does away with this and allows players to take the role of good and bad as they see fit.
3) dynamic environments: now this is a technology based complaint but in games like WoW and CoH I want to see dynamic weather and other environmental effects. CoH had planned for player actions to affect the environment but soon realized this would be abused as people would just go around destroying stuff (I see their point but I would have realy liked the effects) I want snow in winter and rain in summer, I like that games include day and night (incidently is WoW on a 24 hour timer, CoH was on like a 4 hour timer or something). I would like to see rivers swell and fade and trees change color. At the same time I wanna see mines get stripped and animal populations become endangered.
With a game like EvE it would be nice to see how orbits affect the environment. And who hasnt wanted to land and stretch their legs.
I think for a game like EvE a good solution would be to do a meta verse type deal.
::So here it is, my dream MMO::
First off the “Universe” is actually a metaverse backend. The “space” portion is handled by one company and their client while “worlds” are leased to other companies. The clients are seemless, so when I land at a station and get out of the ship I load into the new client (via loading screen mabey, but in the perfect MMO this is fully transparent.
NPC only fill roles that are needed but that the player base lacks. The entire system is dynamic, farm all the warthogs on one planet and boom they are gone…..unless some traveler brings some new ones. There are no “shards” we are all together and the world is fully persistant (since we are dreaming updates are done real time and transparently without need to down the server). Death would be meaningfull, if your world/area has sufficently high technology clone vats may be available, but otherwise when you die, you die.
Tis a dream
Death penalties are always an interesting subject. I suppose no one remembers original, release EQ, before they halved it (late beta 4 or jsut after release, I forget now when exactly it was)? Or remember the utter horror or undinging after a hell level?
I do think that WoW’s death penalty is frivolous. It’s meaningless, but actually I like it right now since I have very little play time and I know that at most a death will set me back ~5 min, while logging on my EQ raid character will take me ~15 to get set up before I fight, and a death, if it happens, will be half an hour to rez, rebuff, get back, etc. AO had those reclaim booths, and unless you were reckless, you stood to lose nothing at all (some people even would use them to teleport around). CoH’s experience debt system worked for me as well, although again it was a bit heavy at some points, but has been lessened since. I don’t recall DAoC’s (teleported to a town and damage on equipment maybe?), and no idea what EQ2 does. It’s the one mmorpg I’ve avoided.
There is no perfect system isn’t there, as everyone wants something different. Wow even has the two tiered rez system with taking damage and a few minutes of lessened stats rather than fetching your corpse. No loss of items/corpse = win for me.
A harsher death penalty does increase immersiveness though. You have a stake in that character. You know you have something to lose. However, that should be balanced with monsters/game creatures that you can beat. You shouldn’t have to fight something that has a 70% chance of beating you just for minor progress. Progress is good, and builds that character stake, and retains people.
Lot of talk about immersion and what helps increase it lately. Sounds like a good branch off topic!
Allow players to customize their melee/magic/range/ etc. attacks. This would be more fun. :) I don’t think it would be too hard, players would just have to manipulate a few factors like speed, strength, accuracy and such which would increase as your base level increases. Plus allow players to choose the elemental/god/attribute/ etc. for each attack.
I’m back from LA, sorry for falling off the map for a while. Blame it on United Airlines and EconoLodge. Anyway, I started a new post about MMORPG death. Check it out. Also, I’m working on a fat survey to do a little research on MMORPGs. Coming soon!
my question is in the homm disces #1 and #2 why can,t they have some dragons of some color,phoenixes of some color to do the fighting or allow the player to be able to win a game now and then
“I like that games include day and night (incidently is WoW on a 24 hour timer, CoH was on like a 4 hour timer or something).”
Oh so that’s the problem with WoW, they want you to play 8-hours a day! ;)
Well my perfect MMORPG game should have more focus on the RP than many other MMORPG’s games have. Possibility to buy houses, shops, running your own company if you want to and earn money that way, but better take care of the place. I would say the graphic should be as in Lotro and give the possiblitiy to completely change the appeareance of your own char then you will get the possibility to make your own UNIQUE character by changing the size of the nose, eyes, chin, ears all that, even height, and maybe even age, but not all the way down to 14 years. The game should be some kind of Sci-ficition, where you also can own your own spaceshit/cruiser and even start online spacewars with others, seens as usual strategy games aswell, but when it ends back to the graphic and movement as in Lotro/Guild Wars (minds me pretty much of each other) the combat system with the char should be skill based and not the same, click first and win and level system, but rather make alot of items, weapons, to buy and then instead of level there should be skills for different weapons and you should be able to learn differrent things, like melee fighting and magics over some long time, rather than go out grinding xp for level, then maybe go to lectures, find yourself a fully skilled player who can teach you, someting like that. There should be a possibility for travelling from planet to planet, of course with the risc to get into some PvE/PvP fights on the way, but only a low risc, and there should be some specialmade places only made for PvP aswell and all other for PvE and as in WoW there shall be some kind of instances where you can go and gather new items, gold, treasures, quests (not for xp but items and gold). That would be my perfect MMORPG some kind of Sci-fi Starwars game just focused alot on the RP since it is a MMORPG game, but of course gives the best to the PvP and PvE parts in the game aswell, it might cost alot, but I also think it will give alot to sell