This idea came to me in a dream. It's a choose your own adventure game. 2D and VR optional. Basically, you are set up in a big town with other live players. You are free to do what you'd prefer. For example, in the game you could stay at home and do any mundane activity that you choose. Or, explore and find quests. These quests are no dragons and knights. This setting is taken place in a regular town in a modern day time frame. You could find a quest from a programmed avatar who would need help trying to capture a criminal, etc. You could be like Grand Theft Auto and be the one people try to capture. You could get a job. You could meet people (being a live game) and go to a restaurant, smoke, drink, play darts/pool, get a hotel room with someone etc. The game is what you want to make of it. Either it's a simple story line (for someone like me) who likes to explore different places, do extreme sports and play mini games with other live players. Or. You can make it something completely different and fierce with a whole lot of action. It's your choice.

All people would love this game because they are almost designing it as it goes. What will be the adventure today? Or what will the regular day bring?

Thoughts? Comments? An e-mail is fine, too. Taraloumccarthy@gmail.com. 

So far this is an idea. And the post is would you play it? Are there interests in coming up with a game plan on this.

I think the soul of the game you are describing exists a little bit in the hearts and minds of nearly every person who's imagined building the ultimate MMO game.  Not to say your idea doesn't have some truly original angles on it, I like your take a lot.  Look at Ready Player One, for similar constructs, even star-trek's holodeck,etc..  It's a great game concept to write about, but(I think) nearly impossible to actually write, as yet..  

That is, unless you were to narrow the list of activities you could perform in the game down to a manageable and/or extendable list that could be implemented in phases and/or could be implemented by the users themselves.  In which case the bulk of the programming effort by the creator of the game would be significantly lower.

Sorry to ramble, just some thoughts I had after reading your post.  I have an open world MMO project that I'm working on bits and pieces of a little at a time right now, so I think about this stuff a lot.

I had that same question come to me a few minutes ago. Either I make it a town with some restrictions or I call it somehow a Vacation Land type game. Every night a new activity. Karaoke, gambling, drinking, fishing. etc. Again... quests. Then somehow try to fit action into it since that's what people really enjoy. This is all very raw.

Maybe have an option in the game for other players to create different towns/themes and have other live players explore in them.

3 hours ago, Tara Louise said:

Thoughts? Comments?

I think we've all had that same dream. 

12 hours ago, Tom Sloper said:

I think we've all had that same dream. 

 

I agree we all had the same dream, and some of us foolishly still have it (and that means me, and perhaps the OP too).  Like many players, I like best the MMOs with at least some sandbox elements to them. However I also realize that without something unique my game will likely be just one in a large crowd of wanna-bes.    I therefor feel I have to have something that other games don't have or at least very few do. 

I came up  with this idea playing WoW. I noticed a lot of other players hated gold farmers (usually from China). I really didn't care myself. In fact I was often soloing and would team up with one of them and we would split the goods between us.  I couldn't talk to them but we generally came to an understanding.

It struck me that teaming up with someone I couldn't talk to added an element of adventure to the game.   Suppose there were whole areas of the world where I had to make an effort even to communicate, and where everything seemed foreign to me. 

In order to really pull this off the world would have to be giant and every part off it would have to be different. For instance,  there would be a virtual China. It wouldn't be called China but the architecture would be Oriental and players physically starting in real China would start in this area.  Perhaps players in Central America would start in a place where everyone spoke Spanish and there was Central American architecture, and so forth.

The second aspect of this idea would be there would be no fast travel. To get from one place to another you or your party might have to travel a week of actual game time.

To support all this the world should be a single shard and as I said before VERY large. Therefore initially I've decided to work on the technology to support all this because it's really not possible without it. 

In any case, IMO that's the trick. Find the thing that makes your MMO different and hope it has a fan base. I think nothing is for sure but if you are just copying other's ideas, you'll have to top the top dogs at their own game to really give them competition. If you can make your game a "game changer" you might have a slim chance of giving them a run for their money.

Sounds great.  I'm not aware of anyone with a billion dollars or so just lying around who wants to attempt it.

What you describe is far beyond what could be done with an 8-digit budget, and quite likely beyond a 9-digit budget. You describe pieces of games combined where each piece is an 8-digit budget project. Anything that is going to do that much work at an MMO scale would be costly.

Scaling that down to be a simpler online game (not MMO) that has concepts based on those comprehensive games could be far cheaper, but much less of a grand experience.

On the other hand, you could learn VR Programming and make exactly what your describing with a measly 2 decades of programming and using the technology that will be available in 2029

Feel you.

5 hours ago, SIr Pep said:

On the other hand, you could learn VR Programming and make exactly what your describing with a measly 2 decades of programming and using the technology that will be available in 2029

Nah just wait long enough and some AI will develop the game for you, just be careful it doesn't imprison you inside it...