Hi all. If you do some reading around, you'll find out my team and I are developing an MMO framework library, and a showcase fantasy RPG. I've been thinking about projects to follow on. What I'm looking for are ideas that haven't really been developed in the MMO genre that can be added to the library code to help these sorts of games start to vary. One idea that's sticking in my mind at the moment is a survival-horror MMORPG. These sorts of games are best suited to single-player RPG/FPS with heavily scripted sequences (the zombies in half-life). But let me know what you think of it, anyway. There's no working title, this is just a concept, no particular background story, since it would have to be adapted to available assets in our pack stock, meaning it's most likely going to be near-future sci-fi, the next major art style planned - currently we're working on fantasy / medieval. Firstly, major changes to play style over normal MMORPG, this is basically turning what might be a quite good fun multiplayer 'short' rpg into a linked collection of them. The player takes the part of a human survivor of a zombie apocalypse, and begins play in an enclave of survivors. A player will have a non-progressive character (no skills or levels), other than a high-score. Perhaps a badge system (has killed 25 zombies without dying) or some other reward system. An enclave is a securable area within a single city that forms the game world. An enclave has a maximum population cap and includes sleeping areas, stores, food prep and eating areas, and in the larger enclaves perhaps medical facilities. There are many enclaves at any time within a city. These are generated randomly, at small size, with an NPC population of 5, who will attempt to defend it using whatever is in the stores (guns, baseball bats, chainsaws). NPCs will not forage. Score Points are gained for players bringing stuff back to their enclave stores, finding and occupying a location to increase the size of the enclave, bringing people back to their enclave (increasing its size) and killing zombies. All points are reset (other than the high score) when the player dies. Item looting, player killing (and inter-enclave conflict) is allowed and encouraged. Points can be expended to take stuff FROM the stores in order to equip yourself for a foraging expedition. Inventory and weight allowances will be strictly enforced. Vehicles may exist, but finding fuel for them would be a dangerous task (siphoning fuel tanks), and they'd be hotly contested between the enclaves. Enclaves may be expanded (for example a shopping mall is a good place for a large enclave) or moved (if your enclave is in a small house, you might want to move it). The size of an enclave is determined by its population (you can choose to join another enclave). The attractiveness of the enclave's location to zombies and other NPCs is also determined by its population. The objective of the game is to keep your enclave from being overrun for as long as possible. An enclave is overrun when there is nobody but zombies in it. If a player's enclave is lost, and they are killed, they may choose a new enclave to spawn at. Their corpse becomes another zombie (unless eaten). The zombies are intended to be the slow Romero type. Zombies that eat a corpse become 'tough' zombies for a while, being much harder to kill, and moving faster, with keener senses. A zombie will only eat a corpse if there are no further living humans around. One zombie will eat one corpse. 'Tough' zombies won't get any stronger. After a few hours, a tough zombie will revert to a normal zombie. Just ideas, any opinions? Edit: Particular opinions I'd like are on whether this sounds 'fun', and how it might be possible to leverage subscriptions on it to support the server and maintenance costs. (It's a microcluster environment so isn't massively expensive)

I was thinking about something like this for a while.
I think it's a good idea and very different.nice.

Instead of the whole enclave thing i thought it'd be better where you have a character and they go through the city where the game is set and meet other people(actual players).There would be a time system so people could travel less in fear in the day time and find places to hide at night.
I think there should be a level system though because otherwise there would be nothing to aim for since if it is MMO then you couldnt end the game.

when building a character you should have
1.Civillian(Male)
Civillian (Female)
2.Police
Police(SWAT/SO19)
3.Medical

i can't think of any other character classes at the moment but they'll come to me lol.

You should look up Urban Dead, a browser based MMORPG.

A key difference is that in UD both the world, *and your character* are persistent - you can't just leave the game. That means you need to barracade the entrances to buildings you are in to protect yourself (i.e. if you want to sleep [both in the game and in real life]).

To critique the design I'd have a few points:

In this type of game you want to encourage player interaction (I assume zombies are all NPCs) to make it more then just a single player single session game you need to connect to the internet for (you are trying to advertise it as a MMORPG engine). I'd limit friendly NPCs mostly to the beginning - make it so that there are some "newbie" safehouses run by NPCs - the NPCs are effective at holding off zombies (the system essentially cheats for them by giving them unlimited ammunition and making them never starve or need sleep) but will only allow new players to hide out in their safe houses.

To make it interesting, you'd want player interaction to work both ways - a player on his own may be good for sneaking past zombies, and it may be to his advantage to attack another player to steal his supplies, but he's in over his head if he's trying to barracade a whole building on his own. Basically players are forced to compete with each other for supplies, but need to work together if they want to have a chance at defending themselves from a zombie mob.

As another point, players have come to expect that a MMORPG will have some element of "leveling" - not only should players be able to diversify themselves from other players, but also be able to slowly change the way the game is played. My suggestion would be this: When a player dies, the amount of time they stayed alive is transformed into XP on a exponential scale (you get 100XP for the first day, 200XP for the second day, 400XP for the third day).

As they gain XP they level up and can obtain new skills - the leveling up and gaining of new skills happens only when they are "revived" as a new person. So in their last life they where a medic, but because they lived for so long, in their next life they are now a survivor who "used to be" a doctor before the zombie apocalypse, with all of those skills. In addition to this you could obviously have a leaderboard and personal stats for survival.

The fact that you literally die and then start out again (as a slightly better character, i.e. the first time you play you play the role of a skilless fast food employee) means that inventory has a new meaning - your game doesn't need to load the player up with stuff or worry about money to save up. Of course players will likely start doing interesting things - hiding away some supplies (like a weapon) to be recovered if they die, perhaps later even evolving into guild banking systems (guild members guard common equipment that they can then give out to members who died). All of this should be encouraged, as it creates very interesting and often true to live gameplay.

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Original post by Michalson A key difference is that in UD both the world, *and your character* are persistent - you can't just leave the game. That means you need to barracade the entrances to buildings you are in to protect yourself (i.e. if you want to sleep [both in the game and in real life]).

I have often considered this from two persepectives. I like idea of persistance, however are people really wanting this? or are they upset when things happen to their character when they are not there to react???

Also, sleeping in MMORPGS. I thought it might be interesting to have a "Sims" style game where characters needed to eat, sleep, stay warm, etc... but do people really want to be bothered with this level of realism? or does it just get in the way of gameplay. What does the player do while their character is sleeping?

To the idea of a skill-free, level-free game, again *I* like the idea. However, I have the feeling most people need some form of advancement. What's more, I think people like numbers and scores for this. While you could say the goal of a MMO was to make friends, it seems most players wouldn't take it seriously unless they had a # of friends stat they could watch go up, and brag about :)

I'll just point to Zombie Nation, an idea I had (and developed a little with the help of some people here) for a relatively fast-paced MMO zombie game. The big twist is that you play as the zombies (at least to begin with).

If you use it, let me know, I'd love to play it [grin]

Where's that link to Survival Crisis Z?

Found it, and made a clicky. Play that game. Then make me an awesome MMO version of it. For free, please.

Also take a look at the PnP RPG All Flesh Must Be Eaten. Some neat fundamentals there.

I like the idea of player characters not levelling, but I'd like to see a little bit of change in them. If your guy isn't changed by a zombie apocalypse, he's less interesting. You could even have them slowly go crazy, or develop specific resistances or vulnerabilities in the course of the game. Not necessarily a linear improvement.

Say your guy has a shotgun that he really likes. He's used that scattergun since he took it from a dead trucker on the first night of the apocalypse, and he's good with it. It's his comfort zone. So he gets some kind of damage bonus when he uses that particular pellet pusher, and that sets him apart from the other cookie-cutter "Bartender" characters out there. But if he runs out of shells or loses the boomstick, he'll be rattled, and suffer a penalty. He'll suck with other weapons, which could lead to a player taking a stupid risk to retrieve "Roscoe" from the sewers.

Other "Survival" factors could be worked in as well. You don't want players to just be hoarding ammo and food. Have weather affect you. Out in the snow with no gloves? Your dexterity decays as your fingers freeze, but you can stick them in your pockets for a few minutes to "recharge". Wearing body armor in the California Summer? Say goodbye to your stamina. Carrying 4000 rounds of 7.62 NATO for that PSG-1? Zombies will out-shamble you.

And play some EVE. Slow-paced, directionless universes are not a death-knell for gameplay. You can be all alone in the void, or you can be part of a mining crew, or you can be an electronics specialist in a hit & run pirate squadron. That kind of experience would really shine in a survival horror game.

I think more emphasis on player interactions would be good. I could see the game being somewhat like Runescape, with a "safe" zone, and an area outside where there are no safe area's other than those provided by other players. To give incentive to go out of the safe zone you could make it so the player can't stockpile gear (since you can't make your own enclave), or that the best or non-basic gear is found outside the safe/barricaded area. Though it might be somewhat frustrating to not only deal with the zombies, but everyone else outside the safezones (IE: new players == freshmeat for experienced players).

I think this could also make equipment a key point in the game. Since players will need bullets, weapons and armor to survive and fend off the zombie hordes, equipment could be a key defining attribute for the players character, rather than stats. Groups of players could define themselves and their enclaves with the stockpiles of equipment, weapons and ammunition they have, if a player dies he would loose all his equiped gear, and if the enclave were lost all the equipment would be gone, setting the players back but allowing them to make up for it.

You could also give an overall goal, such as escaping the city or surrounding area, which would involve going into heavily infested enemy area's and collecting gear/keys/whatever. The benefits of escape being unique equipment, armor or weapons.

It would be nice to give players a real sense of progress as they go through the game again and again. Once they have that one really good play-through, all their other characters will be a disappointment. Perhaps, instead of levelling the individual characters, you could level the player himself.

Assign "badges" or "trophies", like the ones in Battlefield 2, for certain achievements. If, for example, you have killed 20, 50, or 100 zombies in a single "life", then you get a "Zombieslayer" designation on your account, and can choose the "Soldier" character type, who is highly skilled and well equipped for combat, but virtually useless and woefully underequipped for other tasks, so that experienced players can specialize and form teams with the friends they've made.

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Original post by Gyrthok You could also give an overall goal, such as escaping the city or surrounding area, which would involve going into heavily infested enemy area's and collecting gear/keys/whatever. The benefits of escape being unique equipment, armor or weapons.

I think this is important. As it stands, dying is the only way to end a game. There's no real "winning" end-game scenario. Giving players a chance to survive and escape would be a good way to deepen the game. It should be very difficult, even for the most experienced and skilled players. Perhaps a layer of super-high difficulty, randomly generated terrain as a final boundary, so that making an escape attempt would require you to get a fairly large group of very strong players together, and even then you'd only have about an even chance of making it. That would stay fun for a long time. I don't know what the reward would be, though.

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage Quote: Original post by Gyrthok You could also give an overall goal, such as escaping the city or surrounding area, which would involve going into heavily infested enemy area's and collecting gear/keys/whatever. The benefits of escape being unique equipment, armor or weapons. I think this is important. As it stands, dying is the only way to end a game. There's no real "winning" end-game scenario. Giving players a chance to survive and escape would be a good way to deepen the game. It should be very difficult, even for the most experienced and skilled players. Perhaps a layer of super-high difficulty, randomly generated terrain as a final boundary, so that making an escape attempt would require you to get a fairly large group of very strong players together, and even then you'd only have about an even chance of making it. That would stay fun for a long time. I don't know what the reward would be, though.

Um, no. It's a really bad design idea to put an end-game scenario into a persistent-game environment. Consider the Jedi in Starwars Galaxies, or what would happen if one of our players were to escape the city? What's there? - only more content to be developed, and balanced. Once they're at a point where they (and their group) can escape, there's little left to challenge them. One idea I had was to have an escape from the city 'racing' objective (all living members of your enclave must gather at the exit) with a time limit (the nuking of the city), with enclave size being determined by position in the 'race'. Larger enclaves would have a more difficult job (more people) but better starting facilities. Problems with this lie in the setting of a reasonable time frame, and the newbies that aren't capable of escaping the city at all, never mind with their entire enclave. It's probable that any form of escape is a bad idea, design wise.

I like the idea of very difficult areas- places like hospitals (medical supplies! loads of zombies!) or a military base on the outskirts of the city (guns and ammo! no food!) that provide excellent enclave facilities to groups capable of taking (and holding) them. I also like the idea of comparitively safe rural areas around the outskirts of the city - farms, small outlying villages etc. as places for smaller enclaves to start.

It seems most people are talking about skill based levelling, so I might as well use the skill system from Bloodspear, it works and the code can be reused. Skills in this system are improved through use (every action using a skill has a difficulty value, which determines xp awarded to the skill). The mechanic to keep these for the next incarnation of a character can simply be paying a certain amount of points (perhaps on a sliding scale) to 'save' your skill levels.

I think dying to 'level' is a bad idea - you'll end up with a suicide culture of players going out of their way to get killed because they can acquire a good skill by doing so. It'd become suicide-horror, not survival-horror. Better to make sure the player wants to stay alive.

Implementing the skill system suggests a few mechanics that might be fun:

Zombified players retain all stats at 75%, and skills at 25% or so as 'embedded memories' - this allows zombies to shoot guns, use melee weapons or hand-to-hand weapons better (than a normal zombie), and just make a zombie'd player a more difficult opponent than your standard 'tough' zombie

The usual run of lock-pick skills.

Weapon maintenance - fixing/cleaning a gun, sharpening a weapon give points.

First Aid - heal humans for points! Amputate infected limbs to prevent zombification! (Bloodspear has a full 'dismemberment' system using stat losses to represent crippling wounds and so on.)

I like the idea of badges to unlock classes - but I'm not going to bother writing a class system for this - I'm aiming to reuse as much existing code as possible. So how about this:

Getting the 'zombie killer' badge (say 150 zombies in 1 life) unlocks a quest to meet an NPC (the 150th zombie drops a CB radio or some other very contrived link ;-) ). That NPC can teach a new 'specialism' skill (like 'assault rifle' as opposed to 'rifle') and the item to use it. Each CB can only be used once.

Other skill quests can be added - medics might get a badge for healing 100 players, or amputating 50 limbs... lockpickers for picking 50 different locks.

Now, all this fun aside, this is approaching a 'standard' MMO design again - progression (check), skill list and trigger items/targets (check), grinding for points/xp (check). This isn't where I wanted to take the concept, but it seems to be the way it's leaning.