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The MMO I would make

T

TIG

I like GOOOOOLLLLD!
I was thinking today about GW2 and WoW and Wildstar and I wondered: If I could take the best parts of any game and make a perfect one what would it look like.

Lets assume that we can hire a team that can program and do the art style how we want it. We only have to come up with the direction, mechanics, and style/setting. Technical stuff would be done by the crew we hire by our wildly successful kickstarter program.

OK...Go!

My thinking goes like this.
Main areas to decide: Reputation, Questing, Combat, Crafting, Story/Pacing/Direction, Looting, Interaction/Open World Grouping/Open World PvP, Structured PvP, .

Reptutation:
  • The game revolves around reputation
  • The factions in this game are Chaos/Neutral/Order. Any class/race can be any faction depending on your choices and rep gain.
  • Sliding scale of -100 to +100 on rep points. -100 to -16 is Chaos, -15 to +15 is neutral, +16 to +100 is Order
  • Your class, armor/weapon colors, armor/weapon attributes, personal/race/zone rep, and situational rep affect reputation.
  • You have personal, race, zone, and situational reputation values.
  • Personal is how npcs see your class, armor/weapon attributes. Its like what people "know" about you by what they see, I.E. sterotypes. Thiefs will have a lower rep, heros a higher one, (in a normal town. In a shady town or slaver type town the oppisite is true.)
  • Armor/weapon color effect personal rep.
  • Zone reputation is specific to each zone. the more you earn one way or the other is how people in the zone think of you in that specific area. you can have +100 in one town and -100 in the next town if you steal from the next town and bring the goods to your home town to sell.
  • Race reputation is like zone reputation but it is how each race sees the other races. If you do good for a race that hates you they will hear of your deeds and like you more. If you do that in the zone, that race likes you more for both reps. Moving up in one race rep usually means you move down in another since races like and dislike each other in varying amounts.
  • Race and zone reputation is earned and is added to personal to change how people see you. Think of it as this person knows you more now and either confirms the stereotype or dismmisses it for you as an individual.
  • Situational reputation changes dictated by the actions you take around them. if they think you are a good guy and you steal from them then they automatically drop rep for you and hate you or attack you if its a big enough deal. If they see you steal from their neighbor they like or friend then they drop rep, but not as much. If you hurt an enemy of theirs they like you more.
  • Personal, zone, race, and situational all add up to a rep number. The rep number is what the npcs base their interaction on you on. NPC's have rep numbers too and the closer your number is to theirs the more they like you. If yours is too far away from theirs they may not interact with you and they may even attack
  • Most situational actions that cause rep loos or gain will be forgoten in a certian amount of time depending on how bad/good it was. Lets say neutral rep is 0, absolute good is 100 and absolute bad is -100. if you are at 0 and kill their sister in front of them you go to -100 and it may take years of ingame time for them to forget/forgive. if you just steal from them it may only take a week.
  • Open world pvp will effect the situational reputation of the npcs around you depending on if the see you attack someone they like or hate.
  • There is a separate Dungeon reputation that you can earn for each dungeon. Sliding scale from -100 to +100 you always start at 0. Killing things in the dungeon reduces the number so you can ignore it for a normal type dungeon run. The rep never resets. You can do quests and stuff to raise the number and if you make it to certain "tiers" of +numbers you can go in the dungeon without being attacked and even have a separate dungeon experience where you help the inhabitants.
  • Dungeon inhabitants will attack/ignore/help you depending on your group average rep. Ideally you want all people in your group to be on the same side of the rep scale. Theoretically you can get a group stacked with one type and one person with the other type to leech run with you to change his rep.
  • Dungeons are scaled in difficulty for number of people up to 5 (or whatever) and event driven.
  • While not the largest determining factor for agro, your personal dungeon rep will help the monster decide agro. The more you have the more likely it will attack you. Remember if you are killing the dungeon inhabitants you will be maxing your negative rep.
  • Raid dungeons will probably not have dungeon rep attached to them.
  • World bosses will probably be associated with a dungeon and that dungeon's rep. This way you can attack or help with world encounters, and if you are gettin ganked run to the friendly world boss and they will stomp your ganker.

Questing:
  • I would do a mix of GW2's dynamic quests and traditional questing.
  • The traditional questing will be more like the original Ultima style where there is no hand holding it just says go get me this, or go talk to this person. You would have to find that person in your travels and remember that you needed to do something.
  • To facilitate this you have a journal that you can click on a conversation and it drops in it. Then you can go back to it whenever you need to remember. The only limit to the journal is how much convo you save. I would have it indexed smartly so that each convo if saved attaches to keywords. That way if you meet a person you check your journal to see if you have a saved message abou that person.
  • In the meantime while in the world or when traveling to a destination dynamic quests pop up and you can join them. That way you can just run around and get xp or you can follow a story line through traditional quests, but more likely both.
  • Co-operative questing like in GW2 for dynamic quests. The only diff is that if its open world pvp and you click to accept a dynamic quest you are pve to others on the quest till you finish or leave the dynamic quest. That leaves ganking and open world pvp open for those who want to, but those people are open to pvp from the whole group who has accepted the quest.
  • Dynamic quest grouping or "soft grouping" makes it so you can work with people from any faction without worrying about harming them.

Combat:
  • Wildstar type combat with telegraph zones. you can still target an enemy to get the health readout, but only a few "elite" skills can auto hit them. Otherwise its all conal (or other shapes) targeting.
  • movement durring every skill, some will get benifits from standing still. like a channel spell will gradually hit harder if you stand still, or will keep hitting for even amounts if you are dodgeing.
  • GW2 invuln dodging is win and in the game.

Crafting:
  • Dynamic crafting that is discovery based but no xp gain. GW2 without the xp.
  • Dyes. Also the color of your armor/weapon will effect your reputation with everyone you meet.
  • Combining of 2 pieces of armor by a crafter to get best of both in one piece. Each piece has x number of atributes, higher level has more. weapon and armor atributes also have rep attached to them so if you get a piece that adds order skills then order npc's like you more and chaos npc's like you less.
  • Armor/weapon rep gains or losses are minimal so you can use whatever you want and still stay in your faction.
  • I would let Tristan design my housing, but make it only available to be made in a town, or very low density in the open world.

Story/Pacing/Direction:
  • I like swords and sorcery type games.
  • Factions are chaos/neutral/order, based on your rep. you can speak with people from other factions, or in faction language.
  • The game is highly based around rep and the way people interact with you and where you can safely go is based on that rep.
  • Character creation is going to be based on personality test questions to give you a chaos or order character. Based on how you answer your questions you also chaos and order points to spend on chaos or order skills. As you level you get neutral points that can be spent on chaos or order skills as you choose. these skills will move your reputation towards chaos or order.
  • Leveling role points will be neutral that you can spend on either side to lean in a direction for character advancement "trees"
  • In structured PvP its chaos vs order, with neutral people being able to choose which side they want to play on. It also opens up the possibility of 3 faction fights
  • Open world killing of your own faction will move your zone reputation away from your top end. killing opposite factions will move it toward the top of your zone faction.

Looting:
  • Looting is instanced like in GW2 even for gathering
  • Looting for quest items has a chance to fail, but the more you loot for that item per quest the better the chance to get the item. This would make it so the more you do the quest the faster the items come pouring in.
  • Looting chaos attributed items as order and vice versa can give the item a "captured" status (usually reserved for top end awesome looking items). Captured items count as having the attribute points in the opposite faction. The "Captured" status goes away as soon as you modify the item with anything other than a dye.
  • Items are either not ever binding or bind on account.

Interaction/Open World Grouping/Open World PvP:
  • Open world PvP, possibly PvE worlds not sure.
  • Anytime you are in a group of any kind you cannot harm those others in the group. Nameplates change color depending on if you are PvP or PvE to them.
  • Hard and soft grouping
  • Red for chaos, yellow for neutral, blue for order, green for in your group. You are able to attack anyone but green nameplates.
  • Hard grouping is traditional 5/10/20 man groups with portraits and health/etc info on your screen.
  • Soft grouping is when you join a dynamic quest, others on the quest will have PvE coloring name tags to you but no info on your screen.
  • People on your friends list/party/guild will get priority in rendering on your screen.
  • Like the journal you have a personal map that you can access that can be zoomed in to 3rd person level or as high up as to see the whole area/lands. This map has a fog of war anywhere you havent explored when zoomed in more than the normal map. You can make notes and checkpoints on the map if you have explored it. And share those with others on your friends list.

Structured PvP:
  • Separate game from PvE
  • Can have 2 or 3 faction battlegrounds
  • I suck at PvP so need a PvP person to figure this section out.

What do you think?

ADMIN EDIT: Listified for readability.
 
Ooooh. I'm SO all over this... but my feedback may have to wait because I have dinner plans very soon.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear your initial thoughts on (all or any of the following!) professions, crafting, classes/spec systems, item stats/tiering, and base game economies, too.[DOUBLEPOST=1362888667,1362888611][/DOUBLEPOST]Oh, and what's your stance on mounts? :angrybirds3:
 
If I actually had a chance to make this thing I would probably want to be creative director instead of like ceo of the company or something because I feel I am way better suited to keeping the project going in the right direction instead of running how it gets done on the highest level or the worker bee level.

All the areas you mention are not as strongly fixed in what I think would work best so I would be more open to collaboration for those. Not that anything I mentioned would be set in stone if it was a real project. Other than the rep system cause that feels to me like the core of the game.

As for the areas you mention...

Professions/Classes:
I like calling them classes because professions sounds like crafting and I would use that name for crafting. I would actually like to have the trinity setup. I think more people gravitate toward it. Chaos and Order would both have very similar forms of Mele, Ranged, Mages, Healers, etc. There would be slight differences in each sides abilities like Chaos mage lightning bolt is a DD and Order mage lightning orb is a dot. Both for the same total damage. Also flavor differences like color of lightning.

What I would want to do different (than most mmos) is have classes be "specialists". I would have each class have a base of 5 skills that are part of the class (this makes them the specialist in that field) and then the other 5 skills can be chosen like what GW2 has. All 5 extras will be free form choice instead of 3 plus healing plus elite. These "free form" will be mostly appropriate to your class, but will have overlap with other classes. A mele class that can use ranged can dip into certain ranged class skills. A healer can get magic dps spells. All classes can get some mele. All classes have access to healing, but the healer base class will be the specialist. Basically lots of choices on how to spec.
Those 5 extra slots would initially be chosen by the extra chaos/order skill points you are awarded from how you answer the personality test questions at character creation. As you level you would get more points to buy more skills that you could swap in to the slots when out of combat.
These later skills would be able to be chosen from order or chaos to help tweak your rep balance. Because of this the opposite faction skill must be similar or the same, and can be chosen by either side. This also allows someone who is order to move his rep to neutral and then chaos without having skills that are no use anymore.

Crafting:
I love the crafting system in GW2. I would probably copy that pretty close without the xp gain from crafting. The only thing I would change is put in more recipe only items that you can't discover, you have to obtain the recipe and learn it. This would give crafters ways to find more niches and let us introduce specialty items to crafting easier.

Item stats/tiering:
I haven't found any system that is super amazing good, or super amazing bad. I would probably have the group research what is most effective and easy to implement and go with a hybrid of those.
As for tiers, I would like to see the tiers work in 2 different ways. At higher tiers you can get items with more stat "slots" and lower stat numbers or items with less stat slots and higher numbers.
I want each item to be able to transmute with the same type (i.e. sword to sword) where you combine two same items and pick and chose the look and stats you want per slot from the two. This will be done through the appropriate crafter to help the economy with a money sink built in. Level item differences must be limited or huge gold investment must be made to move down levels to help combat twinking and low level ganking.

Economies:
I would probably try to do a global economy like D3 and GW2, and hire a full time economist. I would also do many things on a regular basis to introduce fluctuations and uncertainty into the economy so there would be areas where there is stable trading and areas where there is volatile trading.

As for business model economy I would do whatever system works best, which looks to my uneducated eye to be f2p with micro-transactions. Whatever I do, all the items you can buy with cash would be obtainable with in game gold.

Mounts:
I love mounts and would definitely have them. I would probably have some waypoints too especially for city to city travel if you don't want to take the scenic route and get dynamic quests on the way.

Flying mounts would probably be a no go because it makes it too easy to just skip everything. I could see short hop gliding type flight mounts that let you take big leap type flights instead of real flight.

With the combat system being so free form and not target based I can even see mounted combat being a thing. I would give mounts a leveling system and make you have to level them to be able to fight higher level anything with them. Crafting armor and weapons for them could be a thing too. This means your mount could die just like you could if you take it to an area that is too high for it. I would probably have some system so you can have a mount that is a non combat mount so you can use it only for travel and not worry about it getting killed. Then the damage would go on you and dismount your or something.

This would let there be all kinds of mounts to choose from like in Archage.
 
sure. It's kind of a rant. I just thought how would I steal the best ideas from all I have seen so far and put them together.

I think the only original section I put in was the reputation part. everything else was derived from something else.
 
ThatOneGuy said:
sure. It's kind of a rant. I just thought how would I steal the best ideas from all I have seen so far and put them together.

I think the only original section I put in was the reputation part. everything else was derived from something else.
Click to expand...

Booo took all the fun out of it for me.
 
yep.

I would actually like to see this get made. I realize there is some unrealistic things in there to be all in the same game but it would be cool.
 
OK, I keep checking back to see if you posted feedback. I am real interested in what you have to say Katie since you work in the field or related field.

I've also had ideas for phone/tablet apps that I think would be cool. Or at least concept thoughts. I have thought for a few years it might be cool to have a side job of making apps. Not sure if that's unrealistic or not though. If you ever want to hear some I'll see if I can get them down and out of my head.
 
I haven't forgotten this, Mike! Dealing with some insanity at the office, and will get around to responding as soon as I have the time. :)
 
NOOOOOO!!! How dare you have commitments outside of this site!

J.K. take your time. Just thinking about how much stuff you do makes me want to lay down and take a nap.


Oh and I thought of a crafting system I would love to see. Its stolen from a minecraft addon called thaumcraft 3. Explination video here if you care

The relevant part to what I would like to do starts at 7:24 and it talks about aspects. Aspects are like the different building blocks that make up an item. So say a sword would have aspects of iron, weapon, cutting, and maybe wood or leather. A piece of gathered wood would have wood, earth, life, etc. To make items you would break down items and use those aspects to combine into new ones. Add the whole discovery system and you could make a robust crafting system that could branch off easily and have new items and aspects added to the game at any time. The hard part from the programers side is that every item in the game must have aspects attached to them for breaking down. although I guess disenchanting does this already. (splash page of video shows aspects in a cauldron from broke down stuff)

Thaumcraft 3 has some negative effects built in where as you break down an item the aspects either go into the air and pollute it to the point where bad things happen, or the aspects go to the worktable where you are trying to build something, or both. Usually both because its almost impossible to find the right ingredients to make a new item perfectly without any spill over of extra aspects.
 
Your original standing on crafting disappoints me. I want harder to level than traditional crafting measures. I want mini-game style crafting with chances of criticals and failures based on performance, and to effect the gear/items created, similar to a +1/+5 style, but even more enhanced. I would love a system that requires not only a high density of mats, but rare mats, obtainable by only the elites. No more of this casual crap. GW2 crafting is shit because of the casualness/ease of leveling and the lack of benefits for actually doing it. Think a mix of dropped recipes + quest chain + specific activities + discovery + holidays + other means.

Crafting should be incredibly rewarding while being incredibly difficult and time consuming. I miss being part of the awesome club of elitists.[DOUBLEPOST=1363089785,1363089206][/DOUBLEPOST]And PvP usually requires two things. Variety, and Balance. Variety is usually obtainable by including maps and game modes. Balance is impossible. Or, at least impossible right out of the gate. It's one of the most complicated and delicate things to ever achieve in a game, especially ones as complicated as an MMO.

Multiple game modes (TDM, CTF, Arena, Objectives, etc)
Map Variety, potential to re-use maps for different games modes or having dedicated maps for specific game modes
Size Variety (1v1, 5v5, 10v10, 15v15, 20v20, 1,000v,1,000)
Class Balance, Impossible with indepth classes, think of a 100 deck house of cards. Everything has to be perfect, or it crumbles.

And, over course, rewards. Does one follow WoW, in their efforts to give a gear treadmill? An imbalance of power, formed by dedication, time, gear, and lastly skill? Or follow GW2, with immediate stat allocations, "balance", and only reward being cosmetic? There needs to be a mix of the two. Giving rewards that are meaningful and progress you through some form of progression, as well as having availability and customization. As you see, cosmetics only bring you to the field so long. Ranking systems are nice, but need to be earned through accomplishments, not time. Skill > Gear, but gear should help in an imbalance of skill, but not too drastically.


PvP is a fickle bitch. Remember that.
 
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