Lol, I never said anything about locomotives, and of course we can stretch the truth. As far as keeping everything geographically correct and time frame correct don't think it will happen. The game would be too big if we made it the same size. I was thinking we could have main cities from that time, some of the major markers(temples, pyramids, etc.). At the same time keep it small enough to keep people from having to walk on foot for 2 hours real time to get acros the desert, like star wars galaxies. Horse, Camal, elephant, boats, etc would be the main transports. I think the boat riding experiance should be interactive, i'll get more into tradeskills but building boats should be included. If you dont have a boat gotta buy a ticket, maybe even include smuggling yourself on and taking a chance of being left in the middle of the pacific. Also lost cities, isles will be included, maybe you guys can find out the "real mystery" of the Bermuda triangle etc.

Jook

Well at this point in the game there will be no big battle to end the war, it will be on-going( I don't expect people to fight in that same area forever) and when the devs see it necessary to move the story on, there will be a "event" the big battle that will not be rigged, the players will be able to alter the history.

Jook

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Telastyn need to chill out, you haven't even heard any of the technical information

Indeed, that's why I made my first post. I am curious as to how you mean to impliment all this. I haven't seen any actual gameplay description yet either. Just some storyline basis and content description.

A great idea is worthless if it cannot be implimented, or needs mangled in the process of making it work. Much of computer game design is balancing the technical and artistic sides.

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Original post by Jook Lol, I never said anything about locomotives

That was in response to yapposai's mention of trains.

So you're saying the world is going to be tiny? I think walling players into specific regions would provide a more realistic experience than marching across an arabian desert in less than 10 minutes. This is probably the single reason that most full-world RPG's choose alternate planets. Modeling the earth as a tiny round ball of dirt takes a lot from the imagination of the player. It will most likely make the game feel very cheap/corny.

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Original post by Jook Well at this point in the game there will be no big battle to end the war, it will be on-going( I don't expect people to fight in that same area forever) and when the devs see it necessary to move the story on, there will be a "event" the big battle that will not be rigged, the players will be able to alter the history.

Well, as I said, that's against the whole idea, isn't it? You said you wanted to present elements and facts from a whole period of time, but if the players can change history it's out of your hands. To make things more simple, I will give an example from the 20th century. You would want to present WWII(maybe each country fighting with its mythical monsters) and the Cold War. But if the player can decide the outcome of WWII, there might not be a Cold War, but a Nazi empire. You can define the starting point, but that's it.

The only way I could see it work is for the great history elements you want to add to go on only in the background. The player can't change them(so there's no point in participate directly in a great war), but he/she can act in the "surroundings" of those facts and form your own little stories which would be affected by the main History, but not be able to change it.

That's all in theory though, the whole idea implies that the devs would have to do constant changes in the game content which would be huge to start with. It would be interesting, but I just can't see a big company investing insane amounts of money on that, and the small studios can't spend even if they wanted to :)

How about dropping the idea of adding many great elements, and instead just design the world based on some key elements? For instance, as you said, in Asia the players could find dragons and karate teachers. In Greece, mathematicians
and hydras. From there on, just let the players decide how they will use those elements to play their game.

so well have pirates in the caribean, ninjas in asia, im sure you can fit in zombies somewhere too, but hows about the robots? the whole thing will go flat on its face without it. you cant just say: 'weve got to draw a line somewhere and stop adding unrelated but supposedly cool stuff together', you have to go the whole way or else you might aswell not do it.

You guys are asking good questions, Let me see if I can answer/reply to all your comments.

~ haven't seen any actual gameplay description yet either. Just some storyline basis and content description~

exactly, the technical details wil be explained later, I'm talking about the basis as I said in my first post.

Jiia- the world would start of a decent size for people to explore, the "walled off areas" will only save the user from spending 2 hours traveling to where he/she wants to go. It will also give more options for expanding later on.

~That's all in theory though, the whole idea implies that the devs would have to do constant changes in the game content which would be huge to start with~

the changes won't hapen right when the game is released. It will come later on in the game when people are running out of things to do. Take EQ for example, anyone remember when that nice little hobbit starting area(kithcor forest(sp??)) turned into a pretty nasty zone after a pretty fun event. This is just an exapmle, thats not exactly what will happen. But the dev team can get the changes ready for whatever outcome it may be.

Anonymous Poster your not understanding whats going on here, noone from newyork starts as a shaman, thats why they have to travel across the sea and through a desert to meet someone that can show them the ways of the shaman. There will be no limits on what you can learn but limiting what you can use and how you use it will be a factor. Plus if you want to learn every skill in the game than it would take a very long time. noone will be the same because you have to take into mind all the differences in cultures. You should be able to customize your character through all the skills around the world.

Jook

I really wouldn't want to be part of your development team [wink]

It takes massive amounts of time to build even small detailed areas or to write even simple bug-free scripted scenarios. You said before that Morrowind won't even touch your game, yet apparently the biggest complaint from Morrowind players was that there wasn't enough detail and the terrain was too empty of content (I personally don't agree, but I'm crazy, so I don't count).

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that you and your team will have to be superhuman to pull it off.

lol, yeah will be hard to make the game but thats fine. Remeber that we arent talking about that though, just stick to whatcha got right now, I got some cool features i'm going to explain soon.

Races and the basis of the storyline is interesting? Not fully explained but it will come together at the end of this thread. Just keep giving me feedback about those 2 simple things for now, I guess my selection of races is good?

Jook

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Original post by Jook lol, yeah will be hard to make the game but thats fine.

There are different degrees of hard. You seem to be thinking of an entirely different degree than most people here. The degree of hard that you're imagining is a doable hard; the degree that other people are imagining is a nearly impossible hard. But if that doesn't concern you, then I suppose I'll at least make this post worthwhile by stating my opinion on the ideas you've presented thus far.

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Races and the basis of the storyline is interesting? Not fully explained but it will come together at the end of this thread. Just keep giving me feedback about those 2 simple things for now, I guess my selection of races is good?

Honestly, I don't find them very compelling. It's barely different from what's already been done, as far as gameplay goes. It's nice that it's not simply getting experience and levelling; you have to go to different places to gain certain skills. But that's pretty common anyway in certain ways. Most RPGs require that you go certain places to get certain types of items, which can have a large impact on your character. Some require that you go to different regions in order to find the person who will teach you this or that skill.

Races in your idea aren't essentially different in any way from races in other RPGs. This race is from this region, excels in these skills, that race is from that other region, and excels in those other skills, etcetera. The only difference is that the races correspond to actual cultures in our world's history, which frankly isn't very compelling to me. Maybe others, but I'm guessing that a large majority of people would be more interested in a fantasy RPG of some sort rather than an historical one. RPGs are more about escaping from our standard world more than they are about mimicking it.

And the storyline sounds rather vague. There isn't any one world to get sucked into. So suspension of disbelief. If I play an RPG, I wanna be engrossed in the world; feel like I'm actually in that world. If all I'm doing is hopping from one historical culture to another, I doubt that I'd find it very easy to get into it as a single unified world, because it isn't really a single unified world. It's a lot of different worlds all haphazardly glued together. It would probably feel very disjoint in my opinion. Also, even if it didn't feel quite so disconnected, it would be very broad, very large. I want a storyline that I can comprehend, can be involved in in some meaningful way. If the story is too large and/or broad, I'm simply going to feel completely insignificant. And it's going to probably be hard to keep the whole story in mind at any one time anyway; there will be too many parts of the story going on simultaneously. I'll stop and wonder, "Wait, why was it I was going here, or saving this person, or killing that monster?" And I'd likely answer, "Hmm, I don't really have the slightest clue anymore. Seems kinda pointless."

In my not highly experienced opinion, making a good game, RPG, and MMORPG specifically is often not about making something new, or providing new content, but is more about balancing all the features in a way that is satisfying to the player, as well as balancing all the features so that the game can actually be developed successfully. There seems to be a certain range of how many features a game should have. Too few, and people will likely find it dull. Too many features and designers will probably have a nightmare of a time balancing it so that all the various features are sufficiently compelling and not just useless baggage, and the developers will probably have a nightmare of a time getting it all implemented.

If Starcraft had 20 different races, and each race had 50 different units and 50 different building types, the game would probably have been impossible to design and implement. But it sounds really cool. But even if they successfully created it, it probably would have been insanely imbalanced. Some races would surely suck in general, certain strategies with only a very few unit types would probably be far better than all the other strategies. In the end you'd wind up with a game where only three races are really any good if you wanna win, only five or so unit types from each race are really needed, and only the buildings necessary for those units manufacturing and upgrades, and a few other utility buildings are needed. But since so much time was taken to create all those other unused races, units, and buildings, these few that end up being the core of the game probably are not nearly as good or cool or balanced as they could have been if that was what the game was designed around from the beginning.

It takes experience, and I've mostly gained my experience thus far by analyzing games I play rather than games I make, so I'm admittedly not expert, but as time goes on, you learn more effectively when to know whether an idea merely sounds like it'd be fun, and when an idea actually has a good chance of being fun. Your ideas as presented thus far sound to me quite definitely like the former, not the latter.

Just my opinion, make of it what you will.