Hi, I''ve never posted here before but I''ve been a gamer for around 10 years now, I''m currently 19 (well soonish) anyway... I have a couple ideas on games, how they could be made more fun, how you could entice more people to play MMORPGs (thus more money, more servers, better pings ect..). I''ve got an absolute load of ideas but i dont know how to get them to the right people? Anyway I dont want to look like a hog or a crap artist so let me share some of these ideas. MMORPG Games: MMORPG are constantly faces problems with cost issues, lack of players, bad pings. But one of the things that strikes me is that you cant sign up and play these games just with cash, how could you do that? well the target market for gamers generally ranges from 13 to 25 and MMORPGs have problems with the younger bracket there and more than often its because of the whole "pay by credit-card idea", but what if you didn''t have to pay via credit card? Lets take the example of mobile phones, a lot of young people get pre-paid mobiles, where they pay say $30 and get 10hours talk time. I KNOW I would have played more MMORPGs if I could go down to the store buy 40 hours of play time or a month of gaming for a game I wanted to get, not only that but these games are a whole life for the players and they are very addictive, gamers would say "yeh damn that game I spend $300 this year just playing it". You download the game for free (or get a copy when you buy "game credit"), you sign up, make an account and register your "credit-key" or whatever you''d like to call it that entitles you to X ammount of playtime. This of course gets rid of the problem of people "forgetting to cancel an account" or whatever. MMORPG economy: More than often i hear game designers saying "ohh but you dont want to loose that or this in a game, that would be to harsh" infact i think they say this to much, you gotta gain, you gotta loose. Personally I think MMORPG games need a sort of "AIbot" making sure the economy doesn''t go crazy, along with a floating dollar to make sure that the money doesn''t become useless. (eg every MMORPG game made). If a weapon becomes to popular, make it harder to use or automaticly "dull-down" its damage, make armour more resistant to it, if a class becomes to popular automaticly make that class a little weaker, you have to maintain that all classes and all types of units are fairly equal. Do all this in a fairly simple manner based on the game and player statistics, not every one in the "upper-levels" of the game should be using the same weapon and class. All things should have a form of wear and tear. This would seem fairly obvious but all MMORPG games have problems with this. MMORPG Pings: Most MMORPG games, well all, have a problem with pings even though they usually have multiple servers working on it, my solution is to create an almost real world. I live in australia and my pings to asia are alot better than my pings to europe, so use this in a game, if your in Australia make it so areas where that the european servers deal with are further away than those in nearby asia, If your in America you''d probably want to be closest to the areas dealt by servers in canada. Additionally if i''m out in the battlezone fighting I dont want to be slowed down by 16 people who are trading back in town, so for towns you might not want to have them on the same servers. Of course I have a game which i have been designing for a while now though i dont have the resources to create which allows all these things to come into play well, compared to say a everquest or ultima online type MMORPG. I might also draw your attention back to the game Diablo 2 where if you wanted to trade you created a server and went from there, it meant all the people advertising didnt stand around hogging ping time, in town you might want to have your own little corner of the earth where the trader acts a "sub-server" dealing with all the non-critical information for that trade, after discussing terms and cost on the battle.net chat. That was great. Your little trade area could be your own In-game appartment or something similar for player-to-player trade. There are of course issues where item duping could be a problem, but assuming its in a "trade only" area there is no reason for an item to be created, destroyed, changed or anything and no player would be killed, so aslong as the server makes sure the items the players entered with are equal to the ones the players left with it doesn''t need to worry about player location or wether they where ducking or jumping at the time. (non MMORPG)Multi-player FPS Games: Imagine your playing you favorite game (lets say UT), and you run in put a democharge next to the enemy base wall and boom you''ve blown in an entrance into the enemy base where you can then get to thier base to destroy their power core to win. On the other hand you might destroy an elevator to try to make it a little harder for the enemy to get to the battle field quickly. Or you destroy a tunnel, a bridge ect. Now why i feel such things are so important is because new games namely UT2K4 are making it so gamers are going to expect vehicles in all future FPS online games, destroying the easiest path for your enemies tanks might mean victory. -=-=- I have many more ideas including -Games that never end, thus never get old or repetitive (one of my golden ideas) -Games that are both MMORPG and normal Multi-player FPS (eg, if there was a "counter-stike" mmorpg, it would probably have 1000s of devoted players) -Simple alternatives to the "class based system". -Ideas on ways around a new poly-model for every gun More on MMORPG economy More on gameplay and many more but I would like to discuss some of these ideas with a game dev company, how would i get to them? If you are or you know someone who might like to hear more contact daryl@petty.com.au

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Original post by daz-01
-Games that never end, thus never get old or repetitive (one of my golden ideas)

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A game doesn't get repetitive because it ends. Otherwise, all games would be great the first time through.

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Original post by daz-01
-Games that are both MMORPG and normal Multi-player FPS (eg, if there was a "counter-stike" mmorpg, it would probably have 1000s of devoted players)

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Isn't planetside (and a couple others) like that? As for Counter Strike, popular games don't necessarily mean good games. I am playing through Half Life right now (which has more design flaws than any well-received FPS I have ever played) and CS is based on many of the same design principles. They're terribly overrated. From a game design-standpoint, they're abysmal.

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Original post by daz-01
-Simple alternatives to the "class based system".

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Like what?

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Original post by daz-01
-Ideas on ways around a new poly-model for every gun

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Like what?

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Original post by daz-01
and many more but I would like to discuss some of these ideas with a game dev company, how would i get to them?

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Game developing companies (for many reasons) will not accept ideas from people outside of the company. For one, they can be sued. There is an article somewhere around here that discusses some of the reasons that companies will not accept outside ideas. For one - ideas and a dime a dozen. An idea is useless without a design document

[edited by - dgaf on April 24, 2004 5:44:25 PM]

As for the CS MMORPG deal, it would suck.

PlanetSide is kinda of like that, but it''s over a whole planet and there are vehicles.

So, you''d have a CS map size increased by 1000% and turned into an MMOG? It would suck very badly.

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Original post by dgaf
I am playing through Half Life right now (which has more design flaws than any well-received FPS I have ever played) and CS is based on many of the same design principles. They''re terribly overrated. From a game design-standpoint, they''re abysmal.

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Sorry, but saying this and not backing it up with examples makes you sound naive (or arrogant). That said I assume that you are playing Half-Life for the ''first time'' now, about 6 years after it came out. So the graphics etc aren''t as cutting edge, nor will it run at the right speed (probably) which lets you off the hook, slightly.

No, I have played it before. I just...figured I would give it another go before the next one came out. Graphically, I am not holding Half Life to today's standards. In 6 years from today, Halo and Metroid Prime will look like old news.

One of the worst design flaws a developer can put in the game is instant and unpredictable death . There are a ridiculous amount of those found in the game. The only reason it isn't as significant in this game as it would be in others, is that there are quick-spawns. Because life is less valuable due to these quick re-spawns, the player doesn't get as frustrated as they normally would. However, death still equates to punishment in the mind of the player - whether or not they saw something coming. It is the responsibility of the designer to make as many of these deaths appear to be from player error.

I was killed once when I used a crowbar to destroy a few boxes and wooden boards in front of a door. As soon as I broke the last one, the door (with absolutely no warning) swung open, outwards and crushed me between the door and the wall. There was not so much as a warning that the door would open by itself, that it would open outward, or that it would weigh a metric ton - capable of crushing me between the otherwise insubstantially all-too-familiar concrete.

I was killed a few times activating a giant fan and then running through before it went too fast. The problem? Because of the speed at which it started/increased speed beyond passability, it was impossible to time the blades. I had to "hit the switch, turn, and run" and hope that I made it. If I didn't, I waited just a split second longer the next time after hitting the switch. It was entirely trial-and-error, but not one that worked the first time around. The game has many such similar cases.

As a matter of fact, why don't I name some of the design flaws in Ernest Adam's Designer Notebook articles called "Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie" that apply to Half Life:

Puzzles Permitting No Lateral Thinking At All

You come to a locked door. The obvious solution is to find the key, but it’s also the most boring, so maybe the game provides some other way to get it open. But like as not, there’s only one solution, whatever it is.

In text-adventure terms, this was known as the “find the right verb” problem – you were dead in the water until you figured out exactly what verb the game was waiting for you to say. Break? Hit? Smash? Demolish? Pound? Incinerate? And a lot of games today have the same problem: an obstacle which can only be overcome in one way. The game doesn’t encourage the player to think; it demands that the player read the designer’s mind.

In the real world, think of all the things you can do with a locked door:

• Find the key
  
• Pick the lock
  
• Force or persuade the person who has the key to open it
  
• Trick someone on the other side into opening it (maybe just by knocking!)
  
• Break the door down, burn it, cut it, dissolve it with acid, etc.
  
• Circumvent it – go through a window instead, or cut a hole in the wall.
  

The list is limited only by your imagination.

OK, I know this is a tall order. As a developer, it’s difficult and expensive to think of all the ways that someone could try to get through a door and to implement them all. Still, now that we have the have the power to create “deformable environments” – that is, your gunshots and explosions actually affect everything in the real world and not just your enemies – it’s time to add a little variety to our worlds, to reward players who do some lateral thinking.

Because HL is old, I will give them a little leeway with this issue.

A Switch in One Room Opens a Door In Another Room A Mile Away

Nor does it have to be a door – I mean any item which affects a game obstacle a long way off. Doom was guilty of this a lot, but the worst example ever was in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an Infocom text adventure. In that game, if you didn’t pick up the junk mail at the very beginning of the game, it was unwinnable at the very end. This misfeature is profoundly and pointlessly irritating. With the exception of refineries and nuclear power plants, in most places in the world the knob for a door is – wonder of wonders – in the door. It’s another example of lazy puzzle design, making the problem difficult not by cleverness but artificially extending the time it takes to solve it.

Half Life is exremely quilty of this. However, the devs usually put a sign above (or near) it, hinting as to what its effect would be. From a game standpoint, it's "acceptable, but not encouraged". From an architectural standpoint, it doesn't make any sense. It's not conducive to the feeling of disbelief, even if I am surrounded by aliens and mysteriously-appearing bugs.

[part of an unrelated design issue] ....Replaying an entire level because you made a mistake right near the end is frustrating and boring. As a designer, is that really your goal?

Half Life does this very frequently. In fact, there are enough "instant kill" monsters/bosses or areas in the game that most likely frustrated even the designers who knew they were coming and from where.

Bad pathfinding.

Pathfinding is the process of figuring out how to get a ground-based unit from here to there, avoiding obstacles on the way. Pathfinding can go wrong in a lot of ways, but the most frustrating is when a unit gets stuck behind something and can't figure out how to get around it. The original Age of Empires was notorious for its bad pathfinding until they released a patch for it. You'd tell a group of people to go somewhere, and they'd get stuck and wander haplessly around until you either gave them new orders or removed some trivial obstruction that a two-year-old could figure out how to get past. In addition to being frustrating, it destroys the player's suspension of disbelief and respect for the game.

Pathfinding is not a simple problem by any means - I used to program silicon layout and circuit routing tools for a living, so I know something about it. Game pathfinding is easier in some respects because soldiers don't create a short circuit if they cross another soldier's path on the battlefield. However, unlike routing chip traces, it can't be left to run overnight, either. When the player tells a soldier to go somewhere, that soldier needs to leave immediately, without visibly stopping to think about how he's going to get there.

Granted, Half Life is fairly old. However, when a scientist or security guard is helping me and they cannot get through a door (double doors for that matter), it not only destroys the sense of disbelief, it's just downright frustrating. I'm not keeping these people alive and fighting off "aliens" with them simply to lose them to a "magical door". People who can take on a squad of monsters should be able to handle a door: it doesn't move, it doesn't shoot, and it doesn't run.



In the dessert area (mines, apache choppers, etc.), touching a cactus freezes your position until you shoot it. Have you ever seen a cactus? Do they hold onto you until you hit them?

The same "freezing" issue occurs with some monsters. Whether they are underground at the time or not.

Enemies are stupid. The marines either:

A) Throw a grenade at you with uncanny accuracy
B) Crouch in one spot and shoot until one of you is killed
C) Run away

They have absolutely no combative tactics. Maybe playing Halo has forced me to expect more from a game than I should - but it's not too much to ask that enemies are not morons. If they were able to design intelligent 'nade-throwing marines, they should be able to design them to move and not just crouch-&-shoot.

I have not been writing down any design problems that I have seen as I have played, but if you would like - I will. These are all issues that I have fresh in my mind. I am sure that I have forgotten quite a few that I have encountered. Instant and unavoidable deaths (which is all too common in this game) are one of the worst design flaws that you can implement. Most of the people in this forum will probably agree with that statement. Killing a player without any type of warning only teaches them about the world or the way the world works by punishing them - it's "unfair". Half Life, occasionally, shows an in-game scripted event that teaches players about threats - but more often than not, they just kill you and hope that you learn from it.

When marines are capable of throwing grenades accurately and the grenades are lethal (in most cases), players should not be introduced to those areas by being cornered into a small section in which grenades become nearly unavoidable. That is also very prevalent in Half Life.

I will try to remember to keep a list of things that I do not like about Half Life (although I am trying to enjoy the game), but these are merely some of the flaws that I was shocked to have found in "one of the best games in the industry". The game, to put it simply, is good. It's still one of the highest-rated games in gaming history. However, it's far from perfect and I can't pretend that it is.

Counter Strike, is really an entirely seperate game. It's the "player mechanics" of the game that are the cause for my dislike of the online multiplayer experience. Most notably, the tau-jumping, bunny-hopping, etc. Those are also horrible designs. When people are bunny hopping instead of running, chances are - the level design is poor. If people would not use "bunny hops" as a legitimate militaristic tactic, there's probably a pretty good reason - it's improbale.

This is not to say that I don't like Half Life or that it is a terrible game. It is simply overrated and has managed to get away with far too many design flaws for my taste.

[edited by - dgaf on April 24, 2004 10:48:08 PM]

dgaf, if i explained it to you then you would understand, I was simply giving outlines, I didn''t want to share the idea completely because it may make money one day. On a side note I''m also a good skinner, a better texture creater, a fair level designer and an average modeller.

"As for the CS MMORPG deal, it would suck." (refer to above, i only shared one line and not the concept)

That was a small, brief and probably not completely accurate to what i was starting to say, I would need to put up a full 100page document to showcase what I am showing and how it would come together. My main question was where would I send these ideas, (the full 100 page deal)

I gotta say I''m a bit displeased with the respose, also you should know when i said "(eg, if there was a "counter-stike" mmorpg, it would probably have 1000s of devoted players)" I was mearly suggesting that game because of its sheer size, obviosly an MMORPG version would be different, but assuming the basic "cash-for-guns" and the whole physics and the sort where the same it could be a success. Of course it would need vehicles, structures, an economy, social areas and the sort but I didn''t want to go on to explain that, i just hoped you didn''t think i was a complete dunce.

So my question, where would I send a design brief to?
Comment on one of the ideas that I have actually written a little about, not just the idea head lines.

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Original post by daz-01
MMORPG Games:

MMORPG are constantly faces problems with cost issues, lack of players, bad pings. But one of the things that strikes me is that you cant sign up and play these games just with cash, how could you do that? well the target market for gamers generally ranges from 13 to 25 and MMORPGs have problems with the younger bracket there and more than often its because of the whole "pay by credit-card idea", but what if you didn''t have to pay via credit card? Lets take the example of mobile phones, a lot of young people get pre-paid mobiles, where they pay say $30 and get 10hours talk time. I KNOW I would have played more MMORPGs if I could go down to the store buy 40 hours of play time or a month of gaming for a game I wanted to get, not only that but these games are a whole life for the players and they are very addictive, gamers would say "yeh damn that game I spend $300 this year just playing it". You download the game for free (or get a copy when you buy "game credit"), you sign up, make an account and register your "credit-key" or whatever you''d like to call it that entitles you to X ammount of playtime. This of course gets rid of the problem of people "forgetting to cancel an account" or whatever.

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Many Sony games already have a system like that. You use a code on special cards to get 3 months free.

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MMORPG economy:

If a weapon becomes to popular, make it harder to use or automaticly "dull-down" its damage, make armour more resistant to it,

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Why nerf a weapon just because people like it? Eventually, all weapons will be useless.

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if a class becomes to popular automaticly make that class a little weaker, you have to maintain that all classes and all types of units are fairly equal.

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Just because everybody uses the class doesn''t mean its incredible. Perhaps is just easier to fool around with.

Also, Like the weapons, you will eventually have to nerf all classes until a rat could kill a level 20 warrior. (Okay, I''m exaggerating, but how far does the nerfing go?)

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(non MMORPG)Multi-player FPS Games:

Imagine your playing you favorite game (lets say UT), and you run in put a democharge next to the enemy base wall and boom you''ve blown in an entrance into the enemy base where you can then get to thier base to destroy their power core to win. On the other hand you might destroy an elevator to try to make it a little harder for the enemy to get to the battle field quickly. Or you destroy a tunnel, a bridge ect.

Now why i feel such things are so important is because new games namely UT2K4 are making it so gamers are going to expect vehicles in all future FPS online games, destroying the easiest path for your enemies tanks might mean victory.

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This was done in Red Faction. Also, If you had vehicles in a fully destructible terrain, whats stopping you from simply ramming your way through all of the obstacles?

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-Games that never end, thus never get old or repetitive (one of my golden ideas)

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If a game never ends, it WILL get old and repetetive. Also, if a game never gets old, a handful of comanies would bid for the right to napalm your house, as a game like that would destroy the gaming industry.

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-Games that are both MMORPG and normal Multi-player FPS (eg, if there was a "counter-stike" mmorpg, it would probably have 1000s of devoted players)

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Planetside.

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-Simple alternatives to the "class based system".

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Stab in the dark, but do you mean things like "Use guns a lot and learn how to triple shoot?" That may be interesting...

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-Ideas on ways around a new poly-model for every gun

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If there were not new polygons for each gun, all of them would look the same.

Actually, you could probably simply have a handful of parts and build the gun by pasting them together, but that would be the same gun with the polygons in different areas.

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More on gameplay

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I''m right behind you on that one...

I don''t want to sound like I''m bashing your ideas. Simply put, ideas are a nickel a pound.

If you want to see your ideas, I''d suggest working as a game designer.

Just my 2 cents,
~Dakar

If our responses are disappointing, it''s only because we don''t have enough information about your ideas to formulate a solid understanding

And that there is a topic like this started every week, saying they have the next Quake waiting to be sold for a million bucks... Really the best way to be taken seriously in the industry is gather together a small group and use one of your ideas to create a freeware (or shareware if you really want) game. The game becomes insanly popular and you are are able to put that on your resume...

I'm not the most knowledgable in this area, just using my common sense to help you out here. If you were a multi-million dollar company and had people harrass you everyday with the 'lastest and greatest' game, while having no solid evidence to support this and wanting you to risk millions would you open your arms everytime?

To add to this, if you think you have an original idea think again. Not trying to put you down but search the forums for your idea, chances are its been brought up a few times before. I started out guarding my ideas with my life, letting off only the smallest details to get some attention or help, until I realized one day that nothing is truely new, just rehashed.

But not to leave you on a sour point, Good Luck and if you are serious and stick by it you will make it

[edited by - tagged on April 27, 2004 1:10:33 AM]

lol u got an idea, then go make it!, you can talk alot, show us some implementation