I've come up with what I think is a cool idea. Any ideas you guys may have for it, just contribute, please. Imagine Tekken character graphics, extremely detailed character models. Now take a World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, or UT2004 like environments with UT2004 like levels. Put Tekken toghther inside UT. This is the basis for my new idea. People start by choosing or customizing a character, much like in an RPG, the player chooses his starting stats and looks, as well as a "class" where the player will get his skill tree. The player then takes his character online and joins a server with around 20 people. The player is put on the team with less people and is injected into the action. The player can pick up multiple objects around the level and use them against other players. The main mode would be a Deathmatch (or Team) where the player must just kill the other players by using his multiple tekken-like fighting combos, skills, and items found around the level. The player can advance his character by completing level objectives or killing other players. Once leveled the player can add stats to his character or learn new skills. To prevent high-levels easily killing newer characters, servers can be set for level restrictions. This is just a few things I've thought of. I'm hoping I can build of this, as I really think it would be fun to have a MULTI-player Tekken. Any further ideas or comments?

Lag makes online fighting games not work. Frame-specific combos and fighting techniques are too hard to work with in a laggy environment.

Sounds kinda like Unreal Championship 2. Check out the hype to see what I mean.

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Original post by EMidget Any further ideas or comments?

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Ishpeck's theorem of Massively Multiplayer Games The quality of a game-play experience is inversly proportional to the amount of adolescent players in it.

For very practical reasons, hand-to-hand fighting is most interesting as one-on-one fighting. Unless one person is vastly more skilled than the others, even two-on-one is a massive imbalance, since each person can only attack one other person at a time, but can be attacked by more than one. So the basic progression would be one person fights another, a third joins in and two of the people beat up the third until it comes back down to one-on-one. Then whoever is most skilled/least hurt wins.

This could be mitigated somewhat by being able to run away, lead groups of enemies into larger groups of your teammates, existance of weapons that could massively tip the balance one way or another, and so on, but then it becomes a tactics game more than a fighting game.

well it wasn't a MMOFG but I remember a Wu-Tang multifighter game that came out on the PS1. 2, 3, or 4 players could fight at once. maybe you might want to look into that for ideas.

Tekken involves long chain combinations of moves, where one player is essentially stuck as long as the other can maintain the combo in question (although there are ways for the victim to break out in most situations). Adding a 3rd player to this situation would break such a combo system, so you'd need to develope along a different angle that didn't rely so heavily on combos, or which contained combos which could somehow be used against multiple opponents.

How are you going to send all the commands for such a game and keep it synced without extreme lag? This, for the most part, is why the 'fighting' systems in current MMORPG games is so simplified.

It could be fun if you could make it work well however.

Iron Pheonix or however you spell it. Regarding UC2, it isn't a good example as who wants to do the same 2 attack animations all the time plus the game wavers too far from the path of UC. UC2 is a "you've got your chocolate in my peanut butter. Hey wait that isn't chocolate, it is carobi!" type game - a untasty immitation of something that could have been better.

Back on track... for an oldie, check out Rune on the PC. It had (has?) quite a dedicated MP hack and slash quality to it. Using unreal script, RPG elements are just a design and coding session or hundred away.

Don't get too locked into your notion of how a fighting game works. I think multiplayer Oni would have worked very well indeed, especially if there had been some sort of lock-on system. Mark of Kri uses a good system for groups of opponents, and I think it would translate well into multiplayer.

For a great example of how multi-fighter combat can be fun and fair, look no farther than Super Smash Brothers. It's entirely possible for one injured player to fight off three opponents at full health if the single guy is fast, skilled, and knows how to take advantage of the little items that bounce around the levels. The simple controls, 2D format and frenetic pace of SSB and its sequel make for some of the best four-player gaming around.

Rune is a good example of why ninjas attack Chuck Norris one at a time. If you're trying to gang up on someone in Rune, you're going to have to be careful not to accidentally decapitate your friend. Generally speaking, in serious play with 2v1 fights, I'll stand back and let my buddy do the fighting, and maybe throw a little axe or something if the opportunity arises. If my pal gets beaten, I'll step up and take his place, but it's foolish to try to go at the same guy at the same time. I've been on both sides of one beating two or three, and it's a good feeling to be the one.

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Original post by GremSilentshadow Lag makes online fighting games not work. Frame-specific combos and fighting techniques are too hard to work with in a laggy environment.

I agree. Maybe it's just World of Warcraft, but latency issues spoil PvP for me. As a Warrior I need to be able to know what's going on around me at all times. Chasing opponents, moving away from area of affect spells, getting out for healing, and using the proper abilities are very timing critical. When twenty people are all together casting spells, firing arrows, running around, and using special abilities the game goes to crap. It's unfortunate too because I was excited about battlegrounds, but I don't think I'll be able to enjoy it.