The game I am envisioning would be an alternate universe, where the Roman Empire has just gave its last dying gasp. In this world the technology, the weapons, and the fighting tactics would be similar to those used in that era. The Dark Ages have just fallen upon the world, and it is during this time that the game begins - allowing the player to reshape history. However, unlike a conventional MMOG you would not control a single character. Instead, you would control an entire family, starting with a husband and a wife and two children. You would have the ability to jump around between your family members at any time, who will be more or less like Sims. You will have the ability to direct their actions, shape their personalities - from childhood to the grave. It is through this family that you interact with the game world. The objective is rather open ended, but the main focus would be on controlling resources, building cities, nations, diplomacy, and warfare - while managing the daily lives of your family. You would, for example, be able to place your male son in the military, allowing him to receive military training, eventually having him work his way up the ranks to become a general. Then taking that army and using it to install himself as a king of a nation, while solidifying alliances with other families (players). Like in Shadowbane, you would be able to focus on building and running the day-to-day activities of a city or cities... or kingdom. Combat and battles would be similar to in Rome: Total War. Controlling your family would be similar to playing the Sims. There really would not be an overall goal, aside to keep your family alive by ensuring that they marry, can afford to feed themselves and have children. Family members will eventually grow old and die, and there would be a form of perma-death if your entire family died. The primary focus of the game, aside from managing your family, would be your relationships with other players. Advancing very far would directly depend on your relationship with other "families". It would be virtually impossible for you to control everything at once, and therefore you would rely on other players to help you. For example, you may work out an agreement with a player who owns a lot of farms to supply your city with food in exchange for military protection from hostile military forces who would try and take the farms from him. A particular person, who was bad at city management, may have had his city fall in a revolt by the people. In exchange for another families aid on putting down the revolt, they will hand the deeds of a gold mine to the family. So forth and so on. The game could be as complex or as simple as you'd want it. The player himself should always find himself in a managerial role, and never forced to do boring tasks. Also, it should be noted that the family will eventually evolve "traits" based on the players actions. When the player isn't controlling that family member (such as when they are controlling another family member or when they are logged off) the computer AI will take over and manipulate that character based on the personality traits that formed. I think it is an interesting, and yet untested approach - one that I believe could certainly be fun, although I am not sure how much appeal it would have to other people. It certainly departs heavily from the current formulas in MMORPG's, which I am sure to some is a good thing.

Very interesting... I think this is the first family based system I could see working positively. However I've got to assume that this is VERY blue sky thinking, there are so many different features here, that would require massive development work and vast processing capability by the server. The variety of features you suggest would be, close to impossible to balance and the actual situation of every player having a village/town/city and army is beyond consideration!

Do you have thoughts on how you would balance the outrageous power of older families versus new families? What would stop one family from dominating the entire map? How would resources and economy be balanced, the resources must be infinite if the game is persistent, so what stops the world from becoming a concrete metropolis?

Honestly, i'd love to see this game in action, but I don't think it would function with the design you currently have.

I've been toying with a similar idea myself. I envisioned that families would get unmanagable when they reach certain size, and thus you would need to appoint liutenants, which happen to be other players. In a couple of generations, you'd end up with three or four large families (think Dune houses) with complex hierarchy. Basicaly, it would make clans more meaningful. There are some major issues that would need to be worked out, such as how advancement within the hierarchy will work.

Yeah, it's a rather pie in the sky game idea, just something I thought would be interesting to play, that has yet to be created, and something that I felt deviated greatly from the current standard. It is several game genres all rolled into one. I suppose you could call it a MMOSSG (Massive Multiplayer Online Simulationist Strategy Game).

However, I don't think I was completely clear on what I was proposing, as you seem to have misunderstood some of it. The way to view the concept I have created is through the lens of an individual character. The entire game would be based around a task system, where a player takes control of individual family members and either plays a Sims like game with them, or uses his/her family to increase his/her status and power in the game world.

The game could be simple to play or extraordinarily complex, involving you managing many different people, as well as your relationship with other players all at once. Diplomacy and the relationships you build with other players would be the backbone of the game.

Each individual family member, when not directly controlled by the player, is controlled by the game AI. The game AI bases the actions the family member should take on the actions the player took using a trait system as well as an attribute system. Of course, the player can just allow the game to control some of his family members without him ever directly controlling them - in fact; this would become necessary if your family grew to be extremely large.

Traits could be negative, positive or both. For example, a member of the family might develop an alcoholic trait where, when not in direct control by the player, he will often ignore what needs to be done in favor of boozing it up either with his friends or by himself. Alternatively, he might develop a work-a-holic trait, where he is extraordinarily focused on individual tasks and refuses to stop doing something until it is complete. That type of trait could be positive and negative, positive because he'll always complete the tasks you set before him and negative because he'll do so at the expense of his own health - likely shortening his expected lifespan.

Attributes would determine some of the traits possible to obtain for a character. The attributes would be Body, Mind, Soul and Personality. A character with a high personality and a high soul, for example, would make a charismatic leader - someone who could inspire and influence others.

The attributes themselves would be pre-determined, with a few limited ways to increase them. They would be pre-determined by an individuals parents, essentially they are the "genes" passed down to the next generation. Therefore, if two individuals meet - one with high personality, the other with high body, both low in mind, and average in soul - their child would reflect their combined attributes with an element of randomness. Therefore, their child might be above average in body, average in mind, average in soul, and high in personality.

In effect, you want your family members to "breed" with the right people. You would want your families offspring to be high in all attributes, and then you would want to manage their life to give them good and beneficial traits.

You also have to keep in mind that each individual family member would have a life expectancy of roughly 48 years. (I would say this is about right for the time period.) That could either be increased or decreased based on the life the individual is leading. If one game day passed every thirty minutes of real time, then a single year would pass roughly every 7.6 real life days. This means that a family member with a life expectancy of 48 years (game time) would live roughly 365 real life days (1 real life year).

Things would also happen in real time - based on the game time. If, say, a castle would take 3 years to build - that means it would take nearly 23 real life days to build. Reproduction and such would also happen on the same time scale, with it taking nearly 6 days from conception to birth, and roughly 53 days (7 years of age) for the child to fall under the control of the player.

At that point, the player would have to decide what he wants that family member to become. If he has enough currency, he could send that character to get some type of education. (Once that happens the character would fall out of direct control of the player for the duration of his/her education.) Alternatively, the player might decide to use the child to aid another family member, picking up some type of craft as he goes - such as becoming an apprentice blacksmith, aiding his father as a farmer, etc. Then as the child gets older (around the age of 12) he might have the child begin military training or something of that sort.

By the time the child is age 20 he is roughly 152 real life days old.

Obviously, this is not the type of game you would play for hours and hours on end, unless you wanted to macro manage everything. It would be primarily social in nature, with the ability to be both competitive and strategic – it would have the ability to cater to a wide range of gaming preferences.

However, for aspects of city management, you would be just that – a manager. You would still be forced to work with other players who have family living within the city, as well as any NPC's who live there. You would manage taxes as well as trying to encourage other people to have members of their family move to the city... as well as managing unemployment, militias, etc. This would involve politics and diplomacy between players.

In addition, a city would most likely not develop quickly, and would most likely start out as a small village or town, building its way up slowly. And there would of course be natural cities near high resource areas and key trade routes, just like in real life. On the larger scale, managing kingdoms would require a player to work with perhaps hundreds of other players, who would control various aspects of the military, as well as the resources and the cities. No single character would be able to stand-alone.

I think this is what makes the game a unique concept, a simulationist strategy game. A fast paced, dramatized virtual representation of real life, almost. Maybe we'll see a game similar to this in the next 10 to 15 years.

i have been thinking about this type of game for a while now. I own an old DOS game called "Sword of the Samurai". It is similar to the game you have described, but it is not multiplayer. The game is based in Japan where you are a Samurai. The aim of the game is to become Shogun of Japan.

In this game you can have a RTS like combat, Diablo style adventures, Street Fighter like sword fighting and you have to manage the relationships between you and your neibours and your superiors (if any). You can marry and have children and eventually take over them as your character ages (or retiers, or commits sepuku for dishonerable acts).

The idea I have been working on is to tranlate this stye of game to a European setting and add in the ability for multiplayer.

The interesting thing about it though is that it was written many years ago and computers were now where near as powerful as they are today. This means that you should be able to do a multiplayer version of the game today (I know it doesn't exactly work like that, but if you limited the number of players to around 1,000 then it should still be able to be done - though 10,000 might be pushing it).

I think that the player should only have direct control over 1 character at a time. The other members of the family might be able to be assigned tasks (like learning a trade, etc) and have their own strengths and weaknesses (skills and abilities). So you might have a Son that has a high personality and Sol ability and has been trained in diplomacy. You might be able to send this Son off on a diplomatic mission to improve relationships with another kingdom. Another idea (appropreate to the time) is to send family members off to be married so that you can get a dowery, which would increase your holdings.

You culd limit the number of family members that you need to control (directly or indirectly) by haveing a designated "Head of the Household". This would be the primary character and onyl directly related characters would fall under the player's control (Spouse, Sones and Daughters). The others the playr could marry off for a dowery (or sell on ebay :D), or have some other in game use (maybe new players can select from this pool of cast off characters - and they would have a claim on the holdings that the original owner had if they suffer a permadeath/loose all of their characters).

Family members that get sent off to war might be able to bring back spoils of war or even rewards from the rulers (other players) that might advance the player's standing. However there is always the risk of being captured in a war and the prisoners ususaly got ransomed back to their families. Lowly peasants might not be worth much, but if one of the prisoners were the child of a richer family they might be ransomed off for larger sums of money.

Well these are just some ideas off the top of my head (I am not sure where I have my notes on this but if I find them I'll post them up here). I hope they give you some ideas.

I agree with most of the other comments here. One thing you might want to try is emphasize the educational, historical aspect of the game. I don't know if any educational companies (if such things even exist) would want to fund it, but I think that kind of game would be a great way to teach history. I really like the politics and social dynamics of trying to get your family into power. It is not something commonly explored in games.

To me this doesn't sound like it would work as an MMOG.

You have to keep in mind that if it is truly Massively multiplayer then hundreds of thousands of people are playing with each other, and if you make too many goals that only one person can achieve, then you're screwing over the majority of your players.

On the other hand, if you let multiple people be in charge of multiple empires it would not be feasible and would lack realism. I can't even comprehend how 100,000 empires are meant to fit on earth, and I can't even comprehend how any game engine would handle 100's of thousands of empires.

In my opinion this sounds like it would work better as a single player game.