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[Brentai]

I'm surprised more MMOs haven't taken after D&D's approach. Perhaps gamers prefer the simple gamesiness of "score ten goals" to a more engaging cinematic narrative? Does the focus on grinding for drops, levelling, monster respawns and raiding take away from the more storytelling approach you see in maybe JRPGs?

Consider RP servers.

Just... consider them.  You'll find your own answer quickly enough.

[Detonator]

The 4E Dungeon Master's Guide specifically advises that a quest never just consist of "kill 10 ogres". That might be what you need to do to fulfil a quest, but never the point of the quest. You're adventurers, not fetch-questers.

I'm surprised more MMOs haven't taken after D&D's approach. Perhaps gamers prefer the simple gamesiness of "score ten goals" to a more engaging cinematic narrative? Does the focus on grinding for drops, levelling, monster respawns and raiding take away from the more storytelling approach you see in maybe JRPGs?

It's mostly technical limitations and laziness.  Possibly because no one would care about the story anyway and just want to kill things to get to the endgame where all the actual interesting quests are.

[Mongrel]

Story is dead! Long live story!

[Bongo Bill]

The 4E Dungeon Master's Guide specifically advises that a quest never just consist of "kill 10 ogres". That might be what you need to do to fulfil a quest, but never the point of the quest. You're adventurers, not fetch-questers.

Well, the quests in MMOs often do provide a context that explains why you're hunting for twenty boar tongues. It's just that nobody pays attention to them after a while. The only information about the quest that changes what they need to actually do are the values of X and Y, which is why those are the only things that players pay attention to after they've done about fifty or sixty of the things.

You can't stop them from ignoring the story; for a designer to insist on the player seeing it, in fact, can often just be rude and intrusive. The trick is to make sure that the quests require different strategies, the way bosses often do in single-player RPGs, be they J or W.

[James Edward Smith]

I was thinking that taking the Dwarf Fortress model of having a population of labourers under your influence and then setting up jobs that they then do when/if they can and in the order they feel like it due to fairly complex decision making algorithms and applying it to other situations would make for some damn good games. This is especially true if said ripoffs where a little more accessable to a wider audience UI-wise.

The Orion Belt

My first idea in this vein was to make a game about a group of Marsian colonists who have to colonize an asteroid belt. Colonists who aren't wearing spacesuits equiped with oxygen can't travel outside and must stay inside of habitation pods or the mines that reach into the asteroids below them. This brings a new danger to miners. Dwarfs can flood a mine with water or lava, but only Marsians can accidently breach and depressurize one, sucking its contents into the cold reaches of outer space. Transport pods are necessary to traverse between asteroids unless costly interasteroid bridges or ziplines are made. Inside your colonies you can farm food, produce oxygen and building materials or gizmos, etc. On the outer surfaces you can hunt wild bugaloo, etc.


Zombie Fortress

This one I like even better, where your underlings are human suvivors of a zombiepocalypse. You can start your Zombie Fortress in the middle of a destroyed urban area, in the country, in a mall, wherever. You must forage for food and resources and use tools to modify the surrounding area into a defensable fortress. You can destroy stairways, build barricades, board up windows, while all the while sending out scavaging parties to find food, weapons, tools and other needed materials and resources.

Appart from zombies and other terrors, migrants will flock to your secured location too. Is one of them a doctor or nurse? Set up an infirmary so you lose less survivors to zombie inflicted injuries and other sicknesses. Do you have land for a farm? Start one. Set up a firing range and barracks for your militia so you'll have the security force you need when ever an Overlord let zombie attack or crazy biker raid occurs. Also, watch out for tremor worms.

If your fortess becomes comprimised, run for it. Set up a way point for fleeing refugees and start an other fortress.

[James Edward Smith]

I think if I made the latter case described above in a 3d engine rather than with sprites (maybe you could still do this with sprites though if you were clever about how stuff was placed) I would make it such that equipable equipment like weapons, tools, tool belts, gasmasks, etc, would all be worn over a person's clothes. Their clothes would just count as clothes regardless of what they were so like, if you found clothes and then someone wore them as their old ones wore out, they would just look like whatever that person's clothes were. This would be determined by their highest ranked profession. It would be just like how in Dwarf Fortress they use colours to denote this with green dwarves being jobs relating to animals (hunters, trainers, disectors), yellow dwarves being woodworkers, purple dwarves being administrators and money handlers, and so on. In Zombie Fortress* though, there would be room for variation based on simple and easily indentifiable themes. For instance:

• Foragers/Scouts - Hoodie sweaters with fingerless gloves and bandanas worn around the face
• Scientists/Medical - Dress shirts or blouses often with ties and slacks or skirts all suitably messily worn
• Construction/Cultivation - Overalls or blue jeans with flannel shirts, perhaps hard hats
• Mechanical/production - Coveralls with gloves in back pocket or worn
• Militia/Leaders - Military style jackets or sweaters with toques and webbing(Think of the resistance in HL2)
• Skilless - Tshirt, baseball cap

*which I would probably actually call something like The Last Tribe, The Final Sancuary, or Ark of the Damned

[Disposable Ninja]

I was thinking of a way to do MMO's differently.

Instead of a massive, sprawling world filled with oceans and continents, it should be merely one massive, sprawling city broken by a strict caste system and by a self-destructive, splintered religion.

And at the very core of this city (both physically and metaphorically) is a Babylonian-proportioned tower, and it's within the tower that most of the game's content exists. Many of the Tower's floors are instanced randomized dungeons; many aren't. You'd be able to warp to any floor up to the highest one you explored, and the people who've climbed to the highest possible floor would get some sort of special recognition.

There'd be all sorts of content outside the tower, of course. Missions would most all revolve around political intrigue, and few if any would require exploring the tower -- though the spoils from exploring the tower would make accomplishing your missions much easier.

Beneath the tower and the city you'd find most of your PvP and newb torturing content. Don't go in unless you've got a big sword and the ability to murder everything that moves.

[Kazz]

yeah, i think so too.

[Kazz]

I'd like an MMO that doesn't put a premium on advancement.  Like, make the level cap something like One Million, and then make it so that you can easily gain like ten levels a day.

Also, a "Rested" bar like in WoW, but with an XP multiplier that starts out at like x10 and then quickly drops off as you level, to discourage people from grinding for 20 hours a day.  Put other shit in the game that's interesting to do that doesn't involve pumping your numbers up (maybe some kind of gold-getting whatever or just talk to goddamn women or something) and while you're doing that interesting shit you count as "resting".  Variety for suck's fake.

By the way, let's say your first 100,000 levels are relatively quick, then at 10 levels a day you would take 90,000 days (or about 246 years) to reach level 1,000,000 but you'd still fucking feel like you were getting anywhere when you logged on for the day.

[Norondor]

if you want a game where you can level up forever, FFXI is it

[Brentai]

Asheron's Call had a pretty good system of letting you spend your XP like cash on stat or skill increases etc.

You had something called a level but it was really just a bullshit number you had for when someone cons you.

Even on a bad day you could usually get, like, a point in strength or something.

[Norondor]

Or cooking or thrown weapons

YES MY CHARACTER WAS TERRIBLE

[Detonator]

I don't see the advantage of having a game pretend you're advancing more per play session than you actually are.  If individual levels become meaningless, then players will focus on something else to base their progress on, even if it means every 100 or 1000 levels.  Either that, or players will be so underwhelmed by the meaningless levels that they will feel that they have nothing to work toward.

[Brentai]

If you can get just slightly better at killing boars every time you do it instead of marginally better every 100 times you do it then it it will stave off a lot of the frustration inherit in killing boars.

[Detonator]

If you can get just slightly better at killing boars every time you do it instead of marginally better every 100 times you do it then it it will stave off a lot of the frustration inherit in killing boars.

I would rather fix the problem of games expecting you to kill 100 boars than the problem of your relative power every time you do so.

[Brentai]

UPDATE TABLE games SET genre = 'fps' WHERE genre = 'rpg'

Awesome, I'm taking the rest of the weekend off, that'll be $1000.

[Kazz]

here's what i want

when you're level 100 you're killing boars with a sword

when you're level 1,000 you're killing ten boars at a time with a sword

when you're level 100,000 you are launching a thousand boars a mile into the air with waves of force created by your cock.  all the time.

playing the game should be viscerally exciting and constantly self-reinforcing.  you should get a big "DING DING DING" and point indicators and get to watch the boars slam into the mountainside in slow-mo and your screams shatter the heavens.

and you can get to level ONE MILLION.

[Brentai]

Basically you're asking for a Korean game, but not made by Koreans.

[Kazz]

and the game should lie to you and tell you that everybody else is worse, but could catch up soon!

[Bongo Bill]

Combine it with the idea where you're not killing boars, but getting in actually interesting encounters.