Hello everyone, so this is a MMORPG idea, so of course, this is completely theoretical, although I do plan to make it one day. I’ve had this idea for a very long time and I think it would make for a great game. It is called Conquer all Time. The idea is that you start out in the future. You are training as an archaeologist and on one of your expeditions you find markings showing strange magicians with 11 glowing orbs. You continue to walk along and find a strange outcrop that seems to be in a circular shape. You had collected orb fragments from around the island (based off Sumatra) that your friend had map out. You go to all the places that an orb fragment might be. Sometimes you find one, others you don’t. You decide to lay down for the night. Suddenly your bag starts shaking and all your fragments fall out and form together above the circle. A portal appears and you decide to step through. At first, it seems like nothing happened, just some of the trees and vegetation changed. Also, the circle is no longer covered in grass, it is clearly a stone circle with engravings.

You continue along and find a group of people and go up to ask them how they got here (The island hadn’t been inhabited for a hundred years). They tell you they’ve been here all their lives, and they look like they’re from another time period. You continue to walk and it begins to look like a Renaissance festival. You quickly run back to the engraved circle and find symbols that look magical and having to do with time travel. You get taken aback and realized that you have traveled back in time to the medieval time period.



That is just the tutorial for the game. It orb fragment that you have to find will teach you a little bit about the game. Once you get back, you tell your friend about your revelation hoping he will keep it a secret, but of course he wont. He spills the beans and some more people find out about it (the other players playing the game). So this is how you can have other players in all the ages as well. It gets much more intense and amazing later on. Basically you have to get back to the future by finding more orb fragments and then you figure out how to travel where you wish in time. We don’t want the players to get confused, because of course, time travel is confusing. The time travel theory we are using is that whatever you do in a previous time already happened. If you try to stop a momentous event, you just can’t because it already happened. Again, we do not want the players to get confused, so this will not be mentioned. You also will only be able to time travel in great strides, not in little steps, so you can only travel to Ancient, Medieval, Industrial, Modern, and Future. You cannot take items back in time or forward (imaging a laser battle in the Ancient times). Your skills do carry over though.

Things I Think are Worth Mentioning

About what is different about our game

and about MMOs in general

(feedback wanted!!!!)

Skills: Some MMOs are coming out now saying that it is all about experience with the game and that armor and weapons do absolutely nothing to help your character and there are no skills and the like. To make it more about your “skill” playing the game. I think this can work OK, but I really don’t think it is a good idea. Yes, your skill as a player should matter, but just to an extent. I really like the idea in games of leveling up and getting to do more stuff at certain levels. Also I really like the idea of certain weapons and armor being better than others, I think it makes the game more interesting. Making it all about grinding and having combat that only has to do with your skill levels is bad as well, though. In our game, it will be a mix of both, just like as in other games, but it will still make it better. There will be skills, and you will get to level them up, which may require grinding sometimes, but hey, grinding can be fun (once again, to an extent).But also the player must know which things are good to use in which situations, and which things are just not very smart to do. There will be an extensive bunch of options that you can choose from to attack with depending on your current level. Please give your feedback on this subject.



Bosses: Of course, every single game has to have bosses, but what will be special about ours is that the bosses will fit in with the (or a) storyline, so by the time you face them, you will have two reasons to kill them (loot and the storyline). And you will be able to kill them as many times as you want like in traditional MMOs. Also (like in other MMOs) the bosses will drop special items pertaining to who that boss is, to make it more special. There will also be a cinematic before you face it so you can get familiar with it (only the first time you face it though).



Questing: questing in this game will NOT be anything similar to, “go get me 10,000 eggs”. I personally find those kind of quests completely pointless unless the items fetched are a low quantity and for a purpose of teaching the player how to do something. Most of the quests in our game will follow the main storyline, with a few sidequests (OK, maybe a lot), but at least the quests will follow a bigger storyline. They will have you solve riddles and kill monsters after a glorious search for a potion or weapon. And best of all, the player will actually understand why they are doing the quest (not just to get XP). The story will be engaging, getting the player into the game like in some RPGs, but the player will also be able to take a break and skill or PK while they are bored with questing.


Player Interaction: of course in every MMO, player interaction will be important. I beleive very strongly in a player-run economy, I think it makes the game more interesting. The players will use their skills to attain products and trade with other players like in normal MMOs. Another form of player interaction will be the boss fights, some of them you will just not be able to kill alone, so you will need to pit together a clan to fight it. We are also planning on an extensive clan system, so you can easily create and organize clans and fight against other ones.

WILL MOST DEFINETALY ADD MORE LATER

Please give feedback on what you like, dislike, or suggestions.

The thing that confuses me the most is that I don't really see the point of this being an MMO. Nothing in this description describes how players will interact with each other, which is the most important thing in an MMO. If player interaction isn't important, it might as well just be a regular RPG.

Story isn't as important as gameplay. This concept just tells me a bunch of plot elements and nothing about actual gameplay mechanics. You need to come up with those before you start on story, especially if your response to this is, it plays like X Game, because why wouldn't I just play X instead?


On a slightly less important note, I also don't like the idea of weapons not being able to travel with you. A big thing in MMOs is getting the rare items, an not being able to utilize them in all time periods would be incredibly frustrating. One way to get by this is to have the weapons transform according to the different time periods, but still having the same stats.

I do actually have a lot of the gameplay designed and player interaction designed. I just haven't posted it, I will get to that tomorrow. We actually just started working on the story not too long ago after we had much of the gameplay designed. I do like your idea of weapon transformation, I will pass it on to the team. My only problem with it is that if I do that, then I might have to do that with every item, which would be a little absurd. I also though that the one thing you could bring back would be money, we will see how that works out. And once again, I will post more about the gameplay tomorrow

Agreed with MashesButtons, it sounds like a pretty decent concept... as a single-player game. What does multi-player -- and in particularly, being massively multi-player -- add to the game?


Your questing system sounds like you will need to hand-craft a lot of content which each player will only really play once, as they will learn how to solve the puzzles and not be challenged the second time. Content is difficult, expensive and time-consuming to produce but will be very quickly experienced by the majority of players.

Sounds like Diablo 2.

To avoid more confusion on the MMO aspect of it, I will edit the beginning of the post a bit to have it make more sense =) And yes, you could compare it to Diabolo 2 in that it is made with multiplayer gaming in mind. We will have to handcraft a bit of it, but we have time and we plan on reusing some of the things.

I do like your idea of weapon transformation, I will pass it on to the team. My only problem with it is that if I do that, then I might have to do that with every item, which would be a little absurd. I also though that the one thing you could bring back would be money, we will see how that works out.

Yes, it's definitely absurd and ridiculous, but so is not being able to use that level 80 sword I spend three days raiding for wherever I want to. MMO has a ton of content in it, and if you think that it's way too much for your team to handle, perhaps you may want to rethink the weapon system a little bit.