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Original post by Ultimaking Essentially, any MMO game you make will be an RPG.

Essentially, any game you make, viewed from an abstract enough vantage, will be an RPG. I mean, you play a role - race car driver, hardened space marine, (aspiring) pirate, glorious commander of the Armies of the North; you have an objective or quest (with mini-/side-questions liberally interspersed) - win the races and own all the cars, survive and kill all the slimy aliens/demons, become a pirate and plunder the sea-faring ships fer booty while avoiding Davy Jones' Locker, crush all would-be empires that oppose your forces; you typically experience enhancements or stat progressions - faster, more powerful cars, bigger and badder guns, better insults, more resources and more effective military units as a consequence; and you have a set number of means of interaction.

But that has nothing to do with what people mean when they say "RPG." There are a host of genre conventions and assumptions implicit in the term, as there are in "MMORPG." Yeah, the terminology is horrendously imprecise: this would be the reason for the Game Design Patterns project and The 400 Project. In the interim, we make do the best we can.

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Original post by GroZZleR Space/Air dogfight - Plausible, I suppose. What would be persistant though?

Been done. I can't remember the name though

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FPS - Same as above.

Planetside

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RTS

Shattered Galaxy

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Horror: The hell would you do? Run away from monsters persistantly?

Funcom is making one, apparently. :)

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Prehistoric: This one could be fun.

Being made :)

And by Gothic and Mythological, I think he mainly just meant something that isn't littered with damn dragons and elves and orcs. That's how they're different from fantasy. [wink]

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Original post by Telastyn Speaking of orginality, why's everything these days have to be massively full of cheaters, bots, powergamers, and griefers? I know I could really go for a good Simply Singleplayer Offline RPG right now.

Hehe yeah, it's surprising how many people suddenly think singleplayer games can't be fun. I've played enough MMO's to know that they can never hope to offer the same things that a singleplayer game can. They do hold a lot of promise, but they can't replace singleplayer games for me.

Yeah I like the idea of massively multiplayer games with less of an RPG element to them. To be honest, the RPG element puts me off to an extent. I like games that I can play without having to take them too seriously, and the stats element of RPGs just puts me off.

I'd love to see a war game that was massively multiplayer, combining elements of different genres. I'm thinking, a game that combines the class-based teamwork of Team Fortress, or Enemy Territory: Quake wars, with the vehicles of games like Halo, with perhaps, elements of real time strategy.

How great would it be to plan a raid on an enemy outpost? With some of your team in helicopters, with tanks and troops on the ground. You could also have leaders ordering air-strikes or laser attacks form satellites, a-la Command and Conquer, which don't require players in vehicles to carry out the action.

I think a lot of fun gameplay could come from the interaction of individual people in a persistent environment, when they're a part of one of two warring factions. You could have spies that infiltrate enemy towns/outposts, befriending the players there, performing a cruicial task in the town, all the while sending information back to their side, and sabotaging the operations of the town, spreading paranoia and mistrust.

You could seperate the world into small towns, or outposts, with elected leaders. Leaders would be in charge of the spending of resources, the creation of new buildings, real time strategy style (although obviously you'd need to have some kind of limit on how many buildings could be built, due to technical limitations). If you had command and conquer style resource managment, then the leader could be the one who decides where automated resource harvesters go to get their resources. You'd also have to protect your leader, as the death of the leader would leave the town at a big disadvantage during an attack. Being a leader would give the player a lot of power, but it would also have the disadvantage of requiring protection from your town-members wherever you go.

This idea might not be feasible though. I don't know how you'd force players to play along with the war-game element of it. What's to stop someone from stealing a plane and deciding to bomb friendly outposts for example? What's forcing players from either side to fight each other, rather than creating guilds and fighting amongst each other? How could you make sure that each town had enough of the right player classes, without forcing people to play a class that they don't enjoy?

What would stop individual outposts from breaking away from their faction, and fighting their own side for resources? I think you'd need some kind of big incentive for people to stay within their faction. If a town collectively decides to break away from the faction, it should be a calculated move with risks and rewards, rather than something they do just because they can.

I realise this really isn't feasible, but I think it'd make a great game.

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Original post by robert4818 GTA style MMO.

There's a company in my town that's actually working on a game called APB that's apparently going to be like GTA online. I'd give my left arm to work there.. Then again, maybe not, as programming would be rather difficult with one hand :)

The head of the company is actually the same guy that founded DMA design, the company that made the original Grand Theft Auto.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/apb/

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Original post by Oluseyi Quote: Original post by Ultimaking Essentially, any MMO game you make will be an RPG. Essentially, any game you make, viewed from an abstract enough vantage, will be an RPG. I mean, you play a role - race car driver, hardened space marine, (aspiring) pirate, glorious commander of the Armies of the North; you have an objective or quest (with mini-/side-questions liberally interspersed) - win the races and own all the cars, survive and kill all the slimy aliens/demons, become a pirate and plunder the sea-faring ships fer booty while avoiding Davy Jones' Locker, crush all would-be empires that oppose your forces; you typically experience enhancements or stat progressions - faster, more powerful cars, bigger and badder guns, better insults, more resources and more effective military units as a consequence; and you have a set number of means of interaction. But that has nothing to do with what people mean when they say "RPG." There are a host of genre conventions and assumptions implicit in the term, as there are in "MMORPG." Yeah, the terminology is horrendously imprecise: this would be the reason for the Game Design Patterns project and The 400 Project. In the interim, we make do the best we can.

I would be inclined to agree with you, except that I am NOT using the word "RPG" in the broadest sense possible. RPG in the broadest sense possible would be the player playing a role. Nothing more.

I am referring to the fact that the most common genre conventions of RPG's and MMORPG's, such as gaining experience, getting new items and cash, competing with other players in "PvP", an open ended enviroment in which players can interact with other players etcetera, etcetera, will apply to practically any MMO you make.
I don't know about you, but these are the things I think of when I hear RPG.

Perhaps these games need to take the planetside approach...

Create a "simpler" or not as high quality a game. (Poorer graphics/sounds, less flair) Keep the gameplay great, and then toss it out as part of a package deal.

Planetside has bugged me because they haven't addressed the issues with base uniqueness yet. Its only been a complaint since about the second week of playing....and its been two years now.

the problem with MMO's and some of the ideas detailed here are technical. theres about 3 or 4 people on the planet that can code a network engine tight enough to have great collision detection and physics on a massive scale.(im not one of them but one of them does post on gamedev.)


most of the MMO's are designed so that you can "fudge" the collision detection or physics, or at least avert the "one object collides with 2 objects similtaneously" conundrum that breaks server based collision detection.

Planetside uses a rock paper scissors method that averages down the importance of a single shot. the popular mmorpgs use simple sphere based physics and RNG's to determine hit and damage.

When Counter-strike or Tribes scale up to 1000 players then you'll begin to see some real innovation in MMO's. until then its going to be more of the same. you may perhaps see a "new fudge", that allows minor innovations. but the entire genre is waiting on high quality network coders to break the ceiling.

Or perhaps the networks and transports need to get better?

A lot of the advances in gaming, and the ability of game developers to focus on creating and leveraging those advantages, is due to improvements in hardware and operating systems, abstracting certain problems away. Even on consoles.

PlanetSide had so much potential, but it was butchered post-release and took way too long to get it together. I've always thought that a massive online FPS, or simulated FPS like PlanetSide, would do amazingly well if it was constructed with just enough character advancement to keep it interesting.

Deus Ex Online, using the same character and world mechanics that the original did, could easily become the most popular MMOG of all time. A mix of conspiracy-based missions, lots of weapons, factional PvP combat, and a 'City of Heroes'-like enemy AI... oh well, I can dream.

*whistles with a sly smile*