I've been thinking of a game that would be about a war set in space in a massively multiplayer world. There could be ships that serve as carriers for fighters on which players could walk around. There would be a complicated mission system for the high command to use to direct different ships that could contain 30-60 players. There would be an engineering component to the game and the fighter combat would be deeper than other similar games like Tie Fighter. I would want the game to have both strategic and tactical depth, meaning that players would have to think about what to do and how to train. Moving the ship from place to place would happen in semi-real-time turns that last 1 or 2 days, and ships would have the option of having some players to participate in repairing the ship and getting the most out of its systems. One thing that I take as my inspiration is the game world war II online. I used to play it, but it is plagued by many problems. A lot of it has to do with things that were left out of the game that make for nonexistent or bad gameplay. A good deal of the problems come from the designers only designing a world and the weapons to fight with. Little attention was played to the game mechanics or how the players in the massively multiplayer world would interact with each other. Some would look at wwiionline and say a virtual mmo war game (including strategy and tactics) can't work, or that there is no market or audience for it. In wwiionline people would just spawn in and go off to kill things like in quake, so many would argue that there is no audience that wants to be part of a virtual ship headed by a captain (elected?) that moves once every 1-2 days and attacks at about that same rate. Some would say that there is the shooter audience on one hand, the flight sim audience on the other, the puzzle gamers on another hand, and the strategy/war gamers on another. And that they wouldn't all come together to play a game that includes different coexisting elements. The shooter gamers would want to go out and kill things all the time and would get bored with the waiting required to make for a good strategy component, the puzzle gamers wouldn't like downtime that exists when there are no system problems, flight simmers would be at odds with the shooter fans who don't want a complicated game, and rpg gamers would clash with gamers who only want to fly, strategize, and engineer. One of the reasons for my post is to ask about whether or not their is an audience for a game like this. WWiionline's dev team spent almost zero effort on making for good gameplay and almost ignored how players would interact. More or less, they spent most of the time making realistic weapons without a thought for realistic or deep gameplay. It would take a lot of effort to create such a game in which players are able to have a deep and enjoyable experience (from a game mechanics perspective), but I think it is possible. On the other hand, it may be the case that all people really want to do is spawn in and kill things and it has little to do with a lack of good game mechanics. What do people think about a game like this? Is there just not a market for a deep game that covers multiple aspects of an ongoing massively multiplayer virtual war. -- Scipio3

If you want more player interaction and less egocentric cometition, my advice is to focus more on the community than on the gaming.

Look around these very boards. People log on here, interact with one another, help where they can, and log off again. I don't feel disappointed if there aren't any threads that I can contribute to, and I'm not filled with envy when somebody else has a higher rating than I have. I have no real expectations or demands, other than that the community behave in a decent, polite manner and like-minded individuals respond properly to properly presented questions.

So, if your carrier-class community ships work a little like that, you'll have a fanbase that won't mind not being able to exploit every facet of the system at all times. For instance, I might log on at an unusual time and see that only a handful of my shipmates are online. I could chat with one of them for a while, maybe work on my ship, retrofitting my rocket pods to track torpedoes for defensive use. Then I might take a PvE sortie with one or two other guys, some milk run babysitting a freighter or maybe a light reconnaissance job to test out my new scanning gear.

Once a month or so, I'll get an e-mail letting me know about a planned action. If I'm needed for it, I'll sign on at the appropriate time and take part, but I can refuse if I have a hot date or something that day.

If I'm a squad leader or other administrative type person, I might have to participate in periodic "big picture" meetings where we set policy or ID weaknesses in our armada's PvP capabilities. No biggie.

Keep it casual, and let players define their own roles within the world.

Oh Scipio, you make OT cry.

Anyway, not sure if you are the same Scipio I am thinking about, but if there was one thing you should have learned from playing WWIIOL is that making a game is difficult.

I'm, glad to see you on these forums. Hopefully you will try and make a game. After which you would probably never put down the efforts of the RATs again.


To answer you question. There is probably an audience for any game you can think of. The real question is what size of an audience?

And then the real problem is do you actual know your audience, and does your audience really know what they want.

There are lots of reasons why the game industry focuses on genres, sequals, and rehashing the same game over and over. But one of the main reason is that the audience is identified and so are thier expectations. Making a successful game (from a design aspect) isn't too tough once those are nailed down.

If you are not making a rehash game that fits directly into a defined genre then you are going into risky terrority where no one realy has the answer to your question. Of course with risk hopefully comes the potential for reward.

Back to WWIIOL. WWIIOL is unbelievably successful. (Small team making a game that doesn't fit into a standard genre). It is a game that defines a genre and is also the king of the hill of that genre (there is only one persistent MMO FPS Alternate History Military Simulation Game).

The game you describe sounds like it would best fit into thier genre (minus the simulation and Alternate History). SO to get an answer to your question you would probably want to look at thier audience.

Play EVE

As has already been said there is always a market. The issue is how big is the market. Strategy games and FPS games are totally different and I can't see FPS players being will to sit around for a day waiting for the captain of a ship to have his fun getting them to location X before they can do any fighting (and then presumably wait another day to get to the next fight). FPS players bitch about waiting five minutes for the next round. They aren't going to wait one day. There are always problems when your game play depends on one other person - what if the ships captain is on a different time zone. He may pilot the ship to arrive at a time that I won't be online and I miss most/all the fun.

sounds to me as though you just want to create another "Ogame".



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