Original post by Shadownami92 I agree quite a bit with everything Telastyn said. Also I suggest that you play any games you consider cliche. I wouldn't call myself a serious gamer if I never even tried out the games. It's not a good idea to call something cliche without playing them, how else will you know what you are playing isn't cliche?
As for your ideas I wouldn't call them revolutionary as they are smaller ideas built on the pre-existing ideas of game developers to made the other MMOs. Also I find that it would be hard to implement everything you have listed for a few reasons. The main problem I think is the lack of technology that could handle your idea. As of now you would need tons of servers just to hold all the data, not to mention having these ideas would cause the computer specs to have to be really high to play the game and would cut anybody without these computers out from being able to play. If it got popular you would need even more servers and I don't even know how sending the data back and forth could even be handled with so much information needing to be taken into account.
What I'm trying to get at is that this isn't really impossibly for you. It would just be very very expensive. You would need the best programmers to somehow come up with completely new and efficient ways to send data and store it, a more efficient game engine that can handle next-gen graphics, character and level designers who would have to create thousands of monsters, npcs, buildings, etc... and somehow not have most of the money spent making it affect the price of the game to the point people couldn't pay for it.
I suggest taking things one step at a time. Here is an example.
Step one: Make a game (I suggest something simple, see how long it takes and see if you still want to keep going.) Step two: Make another game thats a little better (maybe something more fancy, something 3d possibly.) Step three: Try to make one of your games so it has basic multiplayer, then if you can try to add online multiplayer (keep it limited)
Keep building up and possibly making improvement on your game engine until you can make something closer to your specs. Then try making it into an MMO and try implementing smaller things you want in it. A gradual plan with shorter term goals will be less discouraging in the long run and each goal can still build on eachother.
Also saying you want to make MMORPGs only seems a little selfish. Nobody starts by making a full blown MMORPG. They are just too much to handle. It's best to try something you can handle yourself.
You seem artsy so it's probably better for you to improve your art skills and work on other peoples ideas while doing the smaller steps. Make contacts that may be interesting and more likely to help you on your goal.
I also can really judge how prepared you are art-wise by only suggesting you are a Photoshop pro rather than just an art pro. Of course I'm not the judge of that. But a link to some artwork would be nice.
I also suggest looking at a lot of this generation artwork done by professionals, and the games programmed by professionals of all genres and game types. It can be very humbling in your search for the revolutionary game you wish to build. It's much better being able to see where your going then walking in a sandstorm with the chance that you might walk off the edge of a cliff.
Good luck though. I can't wait to see what progress you output.
Well, no one would understand my definition of "cliche" without knowing me. I have this thing where I don't like games everyone else does, such as WoW, Diablo, Ragnarok, and this could even include Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts. There could be reasons why they get so big, but I don't like games everyone's ranting and raving about. It's just a pet peve of mine, and I can't explain it. I have a -serious- problem with being remotely the same as others, which is why I don't play the games. Many will stick up for the games I've mentioned, and perhaps they're awesome. I will only play them when they start to become un-popular, however.
And a comment to my ideas: I pretty much said what every gamer has said, but not out loud. "Why isn't this obvious feature in? Why can't this game be fair?" To be honest, I'd be fine if I could just change level limitations, or cash shop limitations. That's my big thing, you know? It wouldn't even have to be features.
I am also aware that this costs big money. Obviously none of this stuff is in any way easy, either. NC Soft is a huge game development company, which is why they have the budget to create such wonderful, graphically-stunning games. Other games have done flying, and character customization features. So if they can, I believe eventually I can.
And for anyone who is really not understanding me: Obviously you see that I've played Grand Chase and Maple Story: 2D games. I loved the gameplay regardless of the "2D" aspect. And if you truly want to know what I'm talking about:
Google: "Aion - Tower of Eternity" "Blade & Soul; NC soft" "Perfect World International; cubizone" "Celestial destroyer; cubizone"
All of those games are my inspirations. So if they can do it, as I said, why can't I? no matter how many years it takes to develop--I have all of the patience in the world. I handle stress well and can get around just about anything money-wise. <_<' I'd rather a good-quality game to take ten years than a bad game to take only 3-5. I would've said that DoMo has good features, but I hate that game so much now that I can't even compliment them.
I saw your post and wanted to comment. My name's Jeromy Walsh. I'm a professional game programmer and I'm currently writing a book called Programming an MMORPG in C# with XNA.
As the MMO being implemented for the book is just an exercise for me I'm leaving the actual design of the game up to the community. As well, I'll have a developer journal so people can follow along with what I'm doing. Once it's done, I'll be releasing the source code, the assets, and the tools to the community to expand the world or implement their own.
I think it would be a great opportunity for you to express your design ideas, by helping to build out the world, etc... Right now it's a blank slate, as I've focused on implementation of the network and server code, and none on design.
So at this point there are no defined races, classes, etc...
Come visit the website and forums, register, say hello, and start some discussions on the design forums. Who knows, maybe you'll find you fit well with the team and if your ideas are integrated into the game, you'll be given full credit in the book and on the website. That's a great opportunity for someone with your interests.
You want "blue skies, waterfalls, and lots of green all around" in the majority of the maps. While that might be "beautiful," it's also tedious. They cease to be striking. People generally like variety.
Character Customization
You originally stated that character "should be totally customizable with no limits." You later revised this with limits. I don't see any obvious problems with a high degree of character customization. For me personally, the variety of appearances in commercial MMOs today is completely adequate because I don't really look at other characters that much.
However, you later say that you want your characters to be "adorable" and "cool-looking" - having a high degree of player customization and having good-looking characters are two goals that are at ends with each other.
Class/Skill Systems
Coming up with new classes is a good idea. Going classless and going skill-based would work too, which would be one way to achieve your magic-wielding swordsmen. The danger here is balance - if your classes and/or skills are not carefully balanced by YOU, the designer, then most players will choose the one or two most powerful/efficient skill combinations or classes. Players that don't choose the best will be severely gimped compared to those that do and will probably not have fun. Essentially, if you're not going to properly balance your skills and/or classes, there's no reason to make more than one - almost no one will use the others, and those that do will dislike your game. These things don't "balance [themselves] out."
Making all skills "look cool" is a good idea.
Summons with good AIs would be really neat, but challenging to balance with other class abilities.
You want "every class [to] have an AOE section in their[sic] menu." That's fine, but it cuts down one way to differentiate classes. Right now, class differences are usually something like 'class A is good at melee, class B is good at range, class C is good at crowd control, class D is good at healing, ...' If you start giving all of the classes similar powers, then there is less to make each class unique and the class distinctions start to become meaningless. Most players want more than cosmetic differences between classes. Are you going for a game where the differences between characters are chiefly superficial?
Races
Game designers generally give different class options to different races for the same reason that they give different abilities to different classes - distinction. If all of the races are almost exactly the same, except that they have minor bonuses that stop being noticeable by mid-game, then you're going to appeal primarily to more cosmetic players. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but you should be aware of the sort of audience that you're attracting. From what you've described so far, your game would be pretty, but tediously pretty, and after the novelty of all of the prettiness wore off, no one would stick around.
You also say that "it'll be more work" to not "make classes race or gender specific" - why do you think it'd be harder to make something this way?
Starting Locations
Having well-connected start locations seems like a pretty good idea.
Stats
You already hit half of the reason why players generally aren't given control over their specific stats. I don't want to have to alt-tab out and read some guides to produce a character that isn't broken. Also, unless if you lay out the specific equations driving the game, I won't have a good idea of what sort of effect my choices will have. Choosing how to allocate those points stops being a meaningful choices if I don't have a really good idea of what outcome it will produce.
The other half of the problem is introduced by min/maxers. If there is a "best" or "optimal" configuration, players will find it, and you run into the same problem I describe with classes. The PCs that are set up the best will be the most successful and the PCs that aren't will feel gimped.
Unless if you keep it down to 2-4 core stats, I don't think your team would be able to do a good job of achieving balance.
Player-Run Shops
I don't see how allowing players to set prices as high as they want is "unfair." I also don't know how you would determine what a "fair" price is. Free markets are generally good at determining what the proper price for an object is. If a player sets an object's price at a level that most people consider to be too high, then it won't get bought and that player will have to reduce the price.
With the way that you describe drops later on, it sounds like inflation is going to be a major problem - are you going to change the price caps regularly as the game goes on?
Pets
If you have a large variety of pets, again, it is going to be very hard to make them so that they're actually functionally different and not just cosmetically different. Also, again, whenever you have a large number of different things, balance becomes nearly impossible.
Mounts
Flying mounts for everyone sounds like a fine idea.
Armor
You say that "a lot of games have big level gaps in their armor" - I have never noticed this problem before. Then again, I've been playing mostly commercial MMOs that actually have budgets for design teams, so that may be why.
Weapons
If all weapons look epic, then how are more powerful items going to look different? The same applies to spell effects.
Gathering/Crafting
"Sit[ting] [my] character there for hours and mine/chop/pull[ing]" does not sound fun to me. You say that these gathered objects will be "sell-able" - if they're easy to attain, then they're going to sell for crap to other players. If you can sell to NPCs for a decent price, then this is another road to intense inflation.
Items
Cool-downs exist largely for the sake of balance. Eliminating cooldowns is not a bad idea, provided you can use other means to balance items.
Refinement Systems
I have no idea what you're talking about here. I don't think I've ever seen this feature in a commercial game.
Maps
Map-trace sounds fine. Let people just sit and enjoy your beautiful maps while their characters path to the destination.
Detailed maps are a great idea.
Quests
Your quest ideas sound fine. One issue that comes to mind is that your quests may be so easy that they're no longer fun. If all of the specific steps of the tasks are laid out for you, I don't think any players will read the accompanying flavor/story text. Unless if you can think of a really huge variety of activities, your quests (like quests in many MMOs) are going to be very monotonous.
Monsters
Large groups of fast-spawning monsters sounds like a death trap. Are they going to be "easy to mob" or "an awesome challenge"? You can't have it both ways.
If you're going to have a variety of monsters to choose from at every level and you're going to have a lot of levels but you don't want variations of the same monster type, then it's going to be very hard to stick with one consistent theme.
You also say that you plan on making monsters easy - "even another level or two [higher] won't severely damage you." You add that potions will be very common. What you're doing here is making level information meaningless. If I'm level 10, level 10 monsters should be appropriate opponents for me - why else would you call them level 10? Your approach seems confusing. You then add that you don't want it to "take you forever to level up, but doesn't spoon-feed you, either" - it sounds like you're doing the latter, by making monsters too easy.
In-Game Events
Capital idea. Do it. The only reason these don't happen more is because they take a lot of time to develop.
NPCs
I think most problems with grammar &c are fundamentally budget issues. If you don't have people on payroll to proof everything, it won't get done. Self-explanatory names sound good.
Town/Building Design
If you put all of the NPCs together, you may have some serious lag issues, because all of the players will also congregate in the same place.
The other potential issue with putting everything together for convenience sake is that no one will have any reason to see any part of the city other than the walk from the portal to the trainer. Designing more city would be a waste of time. On the other hand, if every city is a little circle of trainers, portals, and vendors, then your cities will not have much to distinguish them.
Hell, why even make a city? Why not just pop up a menu for the player to select what they want to do? That'd be much more convenient.
Portals
Free portals sounds dandy.
Marriage
Go for it. Marriage should not require anything lengthy or hard. It should not have any meaning or significance, it should be easy and trivial to get into.
Flying Feature
If players have wings, they don't really need flying mounts anymore, do they?
Summary
It sounds like you want to get rid of all of those annoying time-consuming tasks in MMOs and produce something that is easy and pretty. The reason most MMOs have time sinks is because they can only create content so quickly. If there are no time sinks, then players will consume all of the game content in a short period of time, see that there's nothing else to do, and quit.
You also want really tremendous variety in the designs of everything, and you want a lot of choices. This is going to be very hard to do while still maintaining some kind of stylistic consistency.
It also sounds like you want to make your game free ["Things that should've been in the game already had to be -bought- with real money, first. It was really frustrating." - implying that you aren't already spending real money]. If your game is free, then you're not going to have money to pay a team. If you're not paying a team, who is going to produce all of this content? The game, as you describe it, would literally never get made. The big commercial games that are out there now have tremendous budgets and are continuously producing new content and they are still generally repetitive.
Finally, you seem to have no grasp of MMORPG economies. If your monsters are dropping "a lot of gold" and you're eliminating a lot of the money sinks ("[pets] won't be cash shop items," "...I will charge a very MINIMAL amount for portals, or nothing at all", etc.), then you're going to experience severe inflation. Established PCs will have ridiculous amounts of money, to the point that money really has no value to them anymore. Player-sold item prices will skyrocket because game money will be virtually worthless. It also sounds like you want everyone to have awesome, epic equipment. If everyone has it, what's special about it? Now you can fight monsters 10 levels over you instead of just 5? If everyone can do it, it doesn't mean anything.
On the whole, it sounds like you're targeting a game toward people primarily interested in how your game looks and not how it functions, and, again, once the novelty of that wears off, you will have no one playing. The decades upon decades that you spend generating all of this content will not be experienced.
Original post by Ikatsu I have this thing where I don't like games everyone else does, such as WoW, Diablo, Ragnarok, and this could even include Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts. There could be reasons why they get so big, but I don't like games everyone's ranting and raving about. It's just a pet peve of mine, and I can't explain it. I have a -serious- problem with being remotely the same as others, which is why I don't play the games. Many will stick up for the games I've mentioned, and perhaps they're awesome. I will only play them when they start to become un-popular, however.
So let's assume you make this dream game of yours, and it truely is as awesome as you imagine. That means everybody is going to start playing it! What'll you do then? Quit because your own game has suddenly become popular?
MMO games, by definition, need a "massive" number of people to be playing them. I don't see how you can say you are only interested in MMORPGs in one sentence, and then say you don't like games that everybody else plays in the next.
Okay, everyone. I can't possibly try to respond to everyone, so let me type a general message.
These are -my- views. Not yours. These are -my- opinions, and I honestly think that we need to start getting away from all of the same games. Otherwise it just gets repetitive and everyone has seen it before.
I asked for perhaps whether you liked my ideas or not, but some of you are being just plain rude and blunt.
I -know- that this'll probably take time, money, patience, what have you. But whether they come true or not, these are my ideas. I need no reality check; I already -know- the reality. I don't deserve to be judged or called shallow because I have dreams and views on certain things.
I don't need to defend myself upon assumptions, either. So let's make with the nice comments, because I said nothing in this post to offend anyone, because they are my.opinions. However any of these visions are done: it doesn't matter to me. I'm not thinking too in-depth with that right now. I don't want to start fights over game ideas. That's absolutely absurd. I happen to think that these ideas would revolutionize MMORPGs as we know it, so I won't change or modify anything for anyone else.
Then what was the purpose of posting the ideas? You just want someone to go 'oh wow that'd be awesome!'?
Having a healthy discussion of the relative merits of ideas is far more beneficial to your ideas than ego stroking.
Oh, and I've said it before; innovation is overrated. Give me a tried and true roguelike, rpg, 4x game... and I'll buy 'em in bulk. The chances of making a wildly popular (read: good) game is a whole lot more likely if you don't avoid doing what made other games wildly popular.
Welcome to the forums, Ikatsu. Sorry your first brush with Game Design has been rough, but the main value of this forum is in sanity checking otherwise nebulous and hard to quantify ideas. You lose a lot of what this forum has to offer if you take the responses so far as being insulting. If you have logic holes in your ideas, wouldn't you want to iron them out?
Know also that there are LEGIONS who have posted extensively about building the next great WoW-killing MMORPG. For whatever reason, it seems a horrible temptation of aspiring designers to try to top the best of whatever genre is currently popular (years ago it was Quake killers).
I think you shoot yourself in the foot in terms of improving your ideas, your communication skills, your ability to rebound from criticism and your game design analysis ability by ignoring what people have said. Usually a wall of text is dismissed out of hand.
Also, know that if you make strong, opinionated statements and speak authoritatively about something a great many are both knowledgeable and passionate about, you're probably not going to get a lovey-dovey response. People will argue with you, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they're being rude. You should be prepared to back up what you think and believe.
--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...
As the others have said: Given your last post, then, can I ask what you're trying to accomplish with this thread?
If you are happy with all of the ideas you've posted, and aren't wanting to change or refine any of them, what feedback are you looking for from the community?
I have to say that while certainly many of the responses so far have been quite blunt, I dont think any of them have actually been rude. For the most part, I think threads in this section of the forum take one of two forms: 1) A post presenting a problem, asking for discussion of possible ways to fix that problem. Or 2) A post presenting a solution, and asking for discussion of whether that solution is suitable, fun, etc. Since the first post was not regarding a problem, you are getting replies targeted at number two - "Is the proposed solution going to be suitable and fun?" If that isn't the sort of feedback you're after, then you're going to need to steer the discussion by giving us a more detailed explanation of your intent for posting and what you want to achieve with this thread.
For the thread so far, my comment would be: What you've got so far looks promising. You've obviously got ideas about a wide variety of different facets of the game, and what you do and dont like in other games, which shows you've been paying attention and analysing as you play which is already a head start over some aspiring designers. What I would like to see is a more abstract list of concepts as well, to go with you specific ideas for features - that is, think about each feature you want to implement and why it appeals to you. For example, a lot of your ideas show an interest in customization, and a detailed description of exactly what about the customization interests you would be both interesting to read for us and probably useful for yourself (for example, is the customization intended to maximise the player's personal investment and connection to their avatar? Is it intended to be a reward mechanism to give the player a sense of accomplishment in designing a good looking character? etc).
A list of your goals for the game in that sense, as well as thought into the relative priorities of those goals, would be an interesting read. (ie, if you have a situation where customisation might mean lower quality graphics, what would your choice be? Is customisation more valuable to you than graphics, or vice versa?)
Its also good to see people starting young, and people from less commonly represented viewpoints (From the reference to having a boyfriend I assume you're female, but you could be a gay male. Either one is a relatively fresh viewpoint for a game designer)
But Id have a much more directed and specific response if I knew what sort of responses you're looking for.
