For a while, I've been tired of being rejected from groups simply due to the fact I'm of a different class. It happens a lot and being denied the play experience I pay monthly for isn't so fun. So I've devised an idea to end all that. Basically, there aren't any classes. Experience is a commodity. And everybody can craft. Now I know what you're thinking. Sounds like you're going to talk out your ass the rest of this post. Well, I always do that, check the rest of my posts. Character developement centres around one thing, experience. But instead of levelling up and instead of running around to different trainers to get advancement, you can do it anywhere. There are 3 types of experience. Character experience: This is your general exp. every action gets you some of this, you use it to buy some items, use it to buy make overs and advance your racial abilities and such. Combat experience: You use it to buy new skills, combat styles and upgrade certain stats. This is linked directly to weaponry. Accumulated experience: This is exeperience you get when you reach certain points in character and combat developement. You put something in, you get something back. You can use it on whatever you like. Of course, there is currency, but that's for trading more than anything. I use this system simply because it rewards your playstyle specifically. There aren't levels or anything. Now, usually, when you get a weapon, you measure it's stats to your current one and judge whether it's any good. But in the game, the weapons you spend more time with are better than ones you just pick up. The weapons you start with, if upgraded correctly, can you last you until the end of the game if it suits you. Combat experience is built up inside the weapon and you unlock powers as you progress with your weapon. Crafting weapons is also different, but i'll get to that later. Weapons have quality ratings, which governs how a weapon peforms by how you look after it. If you look after it, it kills better, if you neglect it, it doesn't. Trading weapons causes this to revert to zero. Also, they have rankings. When a weapons overall ability increases, the rank increases. There are six rankings, in typical style: C > B > A > S > SS > SSS. Each rank increased unlocks new skills and abilities. Damage for all weapons isn't measured by numbers, as all weapons have the same base attack until they're upgraded. Rather, each upgrade changes and upgrades the original weapons skill tree, so the damage inflicted by weapons is increased by percentages from skills. Combat itself is also a button mashing affair, having certain button codes to unleash certain skills. Abilities are passive and activate when the weapon wants them to. Higher quality means more proc. Makes it more interesting that way. Now here's how this all relates to crafting. Souls (on top of various materials). Souls can be mixed and changed using a special machine (which when I make the story thread in the story forum, will be explained beyond two words). There are 3 souls, red blue and yellow. They go along colours. So there are 3 primary souls, 3 secondary souls (purple green and orange) and 3 final souls (black, white and gold). The quality and amount determine the resultant weapon, but using too many or using a quality to high can cause the weapon to break, because it can't handle the power. Crafting is also an intricate moral affair. With recipes for creating new, more powerful weapons hidden from players until they find them. Then they can choose whether to reveal them or keep them hidden. Each recipe you find is logged in your own, personal recipe book, so there's no need to worry about breaking your unique creations as you can do it again later. It will be fairly straightforward, materials that don't make an item won't be consumed, as not to make the process of trial and error too erroneous. Armour is also crafted, but doesn't require souls to create. As well as various consumables. The game is story based and based around instancing and grouping, due to how unbalanced PvP and PvE may be. But you can still have fun doing both of them regardless of your actual skill level. These aren't the only ideas in my head for the game, but they sound difficult enough to implement as it is. If anybody actually wants to join me in developing the game I don't want the workload to be insurmountable, haha.

World of Warcraft also gives you weapon-class skill which seems more reasonable than per-weapon skill. Basically if you use swords a long time, your skill with any sword increases. Whereas you are proposing that you skill with only the sword you are using will increase.

Based on this, why would a player want to pick up a new shiny weapon late in the game (unless it has a very high ranking)? Since all the weapons have the same base damage, it will take the player quite sometime to level-up the weapon. One could imagine that a high-level character will level-up a weapon much faster though. I think you need to strike a balance between weapon-class and per-weapon bonuses.

Simply put, the weapons later in the game (and upgraded weapons) have more optimised skills and better damage outputs.

All weapons have the same base damage just so hunting for new weapons isn't a mandatory affair.
It IS a story based game, running around for shiny weapons and armour is more of a side quest than anything. Just trying to make the game fun for people who have started.

That and all weapons aren't amazing from the start.

Combat experience is required (and quite alot of it) to max out a weapon, when you upgrade a weapon the experience stays but the quality level might change.
Depending on the parts you used and the quality of the souls.

Also, I forgot to mention this (as I usually do), the ranking of the weapon determines the base damage, but each rank's standard, non-skilled output is the same.
So when you duel someone you can turn off the skills and stuff and just fight with your actual skill and not just your weapons. Stops the need for any unbalanced PvP triangles.

Per weapon skill seems unreasonable, but there still has to be a draw for people to stick to a certain weapon. I want people to feel attached to their gear and not just treat it as loot.
Same thing for characters.

Also I'm not sure I mentioned this either (because the scope of the combat in my head is pretty hard to type out in words, seeing as I see everything photographically, also curse you run on sentence brackets) that fighting styles change your weapons characteristics.
So, if you use a two handed sword, you can learn different stances.

Like, side guard or front guard. So one offers you quicker parrying and the other more damage absorption from attacks. The standard combo attacks change as well.
It also offers people who prefer range weaponry the chance to defend themself with melee attacks. Because I'm sure most people are tired of having to swap weapons mid-fight because someone died and pulled too many mobs.
I thought this might make ranged weapons overpowered but pure melee weapons have skills that deal damage in percentage based increments where as ranged weapon melee attacks only deal their base damage.

I don't know, maybe I'm just making it too complicated.
All I want to do is create a combat system with more depth than click and press 1 through 9.

Melee combat looks well planned out. Basically you have the choice of specializing in any weapon class/weapon and in order to do so you must practice a lot with it :) The more you use your weapon and upgrade it properly, the more menacing it becomes.

Any thoughts for spells/magic elements to game?

Primary and secondary weapons.

It allows you to mix combat styles by being able to use more than one weapon.
I guess to even things out you can only have two stances learned at any time, so that you can't just jump into your inventory and equip a weapon.

I haven't given elemental damage and environmental damage at this point, but the combat system is fairly complex as it is.

Quote:

Original post by Cpt Mothballs Combat itself is also a button mashing affair, having certain button codes to unleash certain skills.

Quote:

Original post by Cpt Mothballs All I want to do is create a combat system with more depth than click and press 1 through 9.

The feasibility of this depends on your network. Yeah it would be great to have twitch-based or fighting-game style combat systems in MMORPGs, but when the lag kicks in (which will always happen), the real-time combo input system you have here could definitely frustrate players. It's probably why MMORPGs of now and before have always had their combat centering around simple target-and-wait systems, meanwhile allowing you to select hotkey skills/spells from your skillbar to speed this waiting process up.

If you make each of your battles as separated zones/instances (like for example every time you encounter an enemy or enter into a PvP duel the game launches you into a battle room, like in the earlier Final Fantasy games; Myth War Online appears to do this) that would definitely help it a bit, but by how much you'd have to actually build the game and playtest.

I know combat in Age of Conan tried to offer something different by splitting your basic attack into three directions to which are just basically treated as skills/spells that you can then select from your skillbar. If you want more variation in MMORPG-style combat, I would think you'd have to find similar solutions or angles, at most working within the restraints of current MMORPG networking tech, or even better, within your own network's specs if you have one already / can build one.

(I was also interested in the feasibility of real-time combat in MMORPGs, which had me come across this thread: Real-time MMORPG Combat)

[Edited by - Tangireon on November 1, 2008 10:36:16 AM]

I thought that too, but there are a lot more than just Age of Conan.

I just feel that the advent of the hotbar has removed all required skill from gaming and it makes me sad to think that there are people half the age I am playing these games proficiently.

I just thought that with a more instance based game, the lag wouldn't be a problem because you're co-operating with other players against NPCs.

Maybe it's time to think it through...

Also, just to clarify things, developement hasn't started yet.

I'm still trying to type this thing out.
I don't have much time in the day to do it so I'm just troubleshooting here to see if I've missed something important.
I always do, haha.

*I'm not sureif double posting is allowed but since it's not so much a continuation of the last post but rather an entirely new train of thought while I ponder the implications of implementing real-time combat.

The Character creation system:

It's not so much the system itself that I'm worried about, I know that the way I want it done will fit in well with the rest of the game and the story, but I have some ideas that might make it easier and more fun.

What I was thinking is that each of the seperate features have their own unique number.

These numbers are then seperated by commas or spaces for each part of the body, this way, during character creation, this 'serial number' is attributed to their appearance. Then people can save that number when they right click and can use that to replace their current serial number or save it in a preset slot.

Seeing as you can change your character's appearance at any time after death or when in town. New parts you haven't used cost Character Experience, better parts and cooler parts cost more and some you have to unlock through story missions.

Basically, there aren't set races (except for the templates for people who like the way they look).
Instead of races there are subsections for different parts.

For example:

Humanoid contains all parts associated with bipedal creatures.
So, there's not just two eyed pointy eared elves and orcs. You can create a cyclops with buck teeth and a beard.

Then there's the Animal category, this has stuff like antlers and cat ears, fangs, lizard eyes and tails.

You can have humanoid as your main race, then put animal as your sub-race and get access to both parts, human parts and resemblance being more dominant (in the sense that instead of fur, you have skin and animal print hair or something.

This is to coincide with the story and the universe and stuff. Which, once I finish summarising (it is massively hugemungous) I will post.

So, uniqueness isn't really all that far away. Neither is strangeness and all of it is changeable.

Races also change your racial abilities.

If you have a humanoid character, then you can get access to things that animals wouldn't.
Multi-racial characters get a 50% penalty to racials due to their volatile DNA.

Choosing only a sub-race allows you to create children characters which inherently gain the Innocent Spirit ability which negates all death penalties.

Oh and I don't care about your ethics.
As far as I'm concerned, you can do the same things to Gnomes in WoW if you just substitute the word Gnome with Child.

Choosing no races allows you to become an Observer which is really, a spirit being, semi-transparent and glowy light blue, they can't pick up, equip weapons or deal damage, but are the ultimate support character (you see, seeing as some people might not want to waste a slot for a support weapon and instead opting to bashy smashy things, I still leave the support role open for people that like to) all of the body parts are open for Observers, as they are freelance spirits who reject the physical form and opt to manipulate the realm itself from their dimension instead.
Observers can only negate other Observers, non-Observer characters can't.
All experience gained stays when switching back to physical form.
This sounds confusing, I know it does, but I like the idea of being able to change the tide of battle by swapping to an observer and buffing your friends.

I will elaborate when it becomes relevant.

The original issue as you explained it was that in some games, some classes are not considered valuable by people forming groups - right? If your advancement structure allows specialization, then you potentially end up right back in the same boat, although players may have more wiggle room to identify their speciality. If players can't specialize (everyone can be good at everything), then you end up with players on this informal linear scale from best to worst. Maybe that's good, maybe not.

Well, even though I can tell you haven't read one of my previous posts, I don't mind reiterating.

There are primary and secondary weapons and two slots for stances so you can have your character fit your playstyle better.
It's a skill based game based around player advancement more than gear ability.

Oh well. I should've just said that in the first place.