Best setting

[Slamz]

For some values of "best"...what's the best setting to use for a new MMORPG?


Two examples --

Elves, dwarfs and magic:
Very popular, very common, very well known. Hard to go wrong with elves, dwarfs and magic.


Sci-fi:
Could be fresh, but sci-fi games seem less popular in general. Even in pencil and paper gaming it seems like it's always the magical-medieval games that are the most popular.



There are plenty to choose from but the first question to ask is "what are the questions to ask"?

* How popular is that setting?
* How much work do you have to do to make that setting? (For example, an authentic modern battlefield setting would require a great deal of research to get all the weapons and effects right. Cue endless debate over the lethality of an M-16 bullet hitting someone in the leg from 500 yards.)
* How much freedom does that setting leave the designer? (Elves and magic: tons of freedom. Authentic 1920s mobsters: very little freedom.)
* ???


We could also talk about licensing (money issues aside). "Elves and Magic: The Beginning" vs "Lord of the Rings". A license brings you a ton of already-interested fans, but restricts what you can do based on "loyalty" to the license.



I was just thinking that a "magic ninja" setting could be interesting. If you watch a lot of cheesy ninja/kung fu movies, they're basically martial arts wizards. Some of them have magical healing powers, some can scream so loud that they send enemies flying, some can breath fire, most can jump 50 feet in the air and exhibit limited flying abilities. Plus it's ninjas. I wouldn't mind a break from the usual "dwarves and elves" setting but magic is too useful from a design standpoint to want to get rid of.

[Diggles]

simulation vs arcade

how often does action occur
how long does it last
how complex is it (ease of controls, forgivingness, etc)

[Slamz]

simulation vs arcade

how often does action occur
how long does it last
how complex is it (ease of controls, forgivingness, etc)

I would consider those to be sub-questions.

For example, you could have an elves-and-dwarves game with fast action, slow action, complex controls or simple controls. Ditto for sci-fi, ninjas, pirates, etc.


First we just have to decide what actual setting would be good to start with, and whether some settings are just inherently better than others.


For example, I've often thought of a "no magic" game, like Mount & Blade, but in the end I'm afraid that would limit the game design too much and make it harder to come up with a long term, fun game.

[grizzle]

In my opinion, I think the two settings that would really take off would be: a) Horror, b) Western

Horror is just such a huge success right now in novels, movies, and shooter games, I'm surprised it hasn't already been created. In terms of fan base, I think it would be an immediate and huge hit - people would flee the overdone fantasy MMOs for something with more chills, thrills, and excitement.

Westerns, with a huge influence in theme, sounds, music, character clothes, etc., from Spaghetti Westerns, could really be a fun and strategic game. Building cities, towns, railroads, fighting over gold and silver mines, throw in factions (northerners, southerners, outlaws, tin stars, Indians). You could have resource gatherers, such as cattle ranchers, but unlike other games where you are either an action player or a resource gatherer, this would include both; you raise your cows, but have to move them around, fight off computer AI attacks, or attacks from actual players. Guilds could create towns, players could run the saloons, poker tables, jails, be sheriffs, etc. Ambush other players out in the wild to steal their gold, and, of course, create a cobat system that allows for OK Corral styled shootouts or high noon showdowns.


Whatever the style, just no more fantasy. Even stereotypical sci-fi is getting old. But fantasy in MMOs is like WWII in FPSes - completely overdone and stale.

[1000xZero]

How about something that blended Fantasy and SciFi.

The Many Colored Land by Julian May

or

Split Inifinity by Piers Anthony

Come to mind.

[Uncle Shags]

I would think Sci-fi would be better than fantasy. Many people are burnt out on it from all the previous and current ones.

And it has these advantages over fantasy:
Variety of weapons
Space combat
Tech gadgets
Realism
Aliens

Also, "magic" could be worked in through nano-tech or some kind of "force" knowledge gained through enlightenment/quantum mechanicish reality manipulation.

Plus, who doesn't love Space Marines? I'd give my left nut to try on the suit.

I agree about horror setting, Griz. I've thought about it a lot since I am kind of obsessed with werewolves, and love zombies and vampires. Add Space Marines and you have a winner. I even came up with a back story for the setting, and the mechanics of different playstyles.

I think White Wolf may be making a horror MMO based on their PnP.
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://gaygamer.net/2007/06/white_wolf_gets_serious_about.html">http://gaygamer.net/2007/06/white_wolf_ ... about.html</a><!-- m -->
Kind of old news, but it still may be going on.

LOL, I linked to gaygamer.net! Awesome!

[Thudz]

Orcs in space! Warhammer 40K style.

[Vllad]

The thing about horror is you can still impliment all of the fantasy things (magic, castles etc) with out being limited to the fantasy barriers.

Every PC plays a human but his entire world is surrounded by Zombies, Liches, Vampires, Ghost, Werewolves etc.

Hell aren't all of those things just human anyway?


Vllad

[Kakarat]

The thing about horror is you can still impliment all of the fantasy things (magic, castles etc) with out being limited to the fantasy barriers.

Every PC plays a human but his entire world is surrounded by Zombies, Liches, Vampires, Ghost, Werewolves etc.

Hell aren't all of those things just human anyway?


Vllad

If you look at it, Games that have everything already have the liches, vampires and ghosts implemented. EQ, EQ2, Warhammer.

Are we trying to limit the game to one genre?, or get everything involved?

Do you want to play a Vampire?, Werewolf?
or
Like Thudz said, Orcs in space?
or both
Perhaps you want a game with Lychanthrope in it?
I played EQ on the playstation and it was fun being an alligator Bard.
Basically you can implement anything with Lychanthrope, you could be a bear, rat, alligator, wolf, lion. I am not sure what else they had.

[Dustie]

Here is my opinion of why you avoid "World Mixing" and Orcs in Space
1. It breaks immersion imo
2. Think of alien vs predator -- the two worlds just don't mix and those worlds are pretty close.

World mixing imo, only works when very well done and in very specific conditions. I'm thinking of Stargate and Ancient Egyptian style relics etc.

I vote no world mixing.

[Slamz]

I'm not sure what "Horror" would entail. I would think that a proper horror game would have to be carefully scripted. Otherwise you're just playing an MMORPG where all the enemies are ghouls, vampires, etc, and it's always really dark out.

Although maybe that's not such a bad idea. It's basically an MMORPG in a "fantasy horror setting", where the world has a lot of factions like vampires, werewolves, etc, and you're either working with the forces of good to push back the evil or you're joining the evil because it's fun being a werewolf.

That could be fun when combined with my idea of keeping combat fast paced. So when the werewolf jumps you, it's not going to be a 20 fight where you snare, get some distance, shoot your gun twice, knockdown, backstab, root, get distance again, etc. You're going to kill or be killed in 5 seconds, so you have to really be on your toes, as you would in an FPS.

I could kind of see it like Left 4 Dead, where player-monsters have little control over the sounds they make. When a ghoul goes to jump, he has to spend a couple seconds building it up, and when he's doing that he's growling. So you're walking down the dark road minding your business and you hear that growl, you've got about 2 seconds to get ready to fight a ghoul.

[Slamz]

...pondering that horror idea some more...

As Vllad said, these monsters are all basically "humans", or used to be.

So suppose you use "human" as the starting type.

If you want to join the ghouls, you go talk to the lich king and he turns you into a ghoul and now you're working for his faction.

If you get tired of this, you go seek out a priest, who turns you back into a human (perhaps for a hefty fee or complex ritual). From there you can go get turned into a werewolf, vampire, whatever.

Factions could be things like:

Vampire Red Court (evil)
Vampire Black Court (also evil)
Western Werewolves (evil)
Northern Werewolves (evil)
Paladins of the Citadel (good)
Warriors of the East (good)
Zombie Lich King (evil)
Ghoul Lich Queen (evil)
etc

Evil factions may ally with each other or declare war with anyone.
Good factions will tend to be allied with each other but may break off or even go to war under some conditions (especially if they start to become really powerful, in which case the Warriors of the East decide they're sick of the Paladins of the Citadel's bullshit).

[Breand]

I say humans vs zombies is some form or another, in a post apocalyptic setting. Kind of like a cross between Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead. =) That would let you throw in all kinds of different NPCs. Different zombie types, and then your nuclear waste variants, as well as renegade human bands. You could make the PvP conflict humans vs humans, like settlements fighting over various parts of the wasteland. As Romero always does in his flicks, it's always the conflicts that humans have with each other and the zombies are wrench in the cogs.

[Hoofhurr]

Yeah the problem with everything other than fantasy and sci fi is that the worlds have never really been developed in great detail. What do you model your game after? It just becomes like an Alien vs Predator or some such. Maybe I just have never read enough horror or whatever. It seems like those themes are really dependent on the setting. As soon as you get a bunch of kids running around talking about Britney Spears or Sponge Bob you stop getting scared and start getting annoyed.

[Vllad]

If you do the Horror thing I would suggest trying to make it less limited then Fallout.

I would put us in the setting of this is the battle of Armegeddon. Heaven and Hell are fighting over the world in the final battle of good and evil. A 1000 year battle over who will rule over the souls of mankind.

That is why men are allowed to be immortal until the final battle is decided. Heaven and Hell are no longer places you go when you die. You return to earth to continue on the fight. Hence the entire point of respawn.

God and Satan have vowed to stand by and allow free will to decide the fate of the world. This includes the free will of all its creatures. Demon and Angel a like. The end result was a splintering of factions of not only the minions of hell but of heaven as well.


Not only would you have these factions:

Vampire Red Court (evil)
Vampire Black Court (also evil)
Western Werewolves (evil)
Northern Werewolves (evil)
Paladins of the Citadel (good)
Warriors of the East (good)
Zombie Lich King (evil)
Ghoul Lich Queen (evil)


But you could have things such as:

Seraphins
Cherubims
Order of Archangels, i.e., Uriel fighting Remiel, Gabriel fighting Micheal
Order of Fallens Angels, Baal, Abaddon, Uzza etc
Wights
Wraiths
Ghost
Long list of beast from heaven and hell,
Gargoyles
Minotaurs


Forget listing them as what is evil and what is good. This is the battle of thousands of factions all trying to gain their piece of the world.


Vllad

[Hoofhurr]

I agree Vllad but people's emotional commitment to any of those character options was developed in an entirely different context, probably a very specific context. I've never liked the Xmen vs Hall of Justive mashups because it tore at the fabric of those separate universes. They were interesting experiments but much like our 'choose five super heroes' thread we have a hard time trying to formulate the rules that bind the separate universes.

I think this is the critical point of any new theme you develop. How do you combine elements from disparate universes in a way that doesn't unravel a player's emotional attachment to that particular entity? What's the common denominator?

[Uncle Shags]

This is kind of long, but it's a breakdown of the horror/armagedon world I've been thinking up. I tried to break it up to make it easy to read.

50-100 years in the future the world is engaged in a world war. How isn't important, but I like the idea of religious fundamentalism being the spark, with somehow a military industrial complex pushing buttons behind the scene.

Earths population is down to a few hundred million following nukes, biological weapons, famine, etc.

The first entrance of horror (other than nuclear war) is the zombies. I'm thinking one side went too far and created some sort of virus or something that zombifies people. Once the virus breaks out the population takes another hit, dropping a couple hundred million before defenses go up and a stalemate is reached with the zombie hoard.

Following the zombie disaster humans go out on zombie hunts, searching everywhere for pockets of undead to eradicate. So far it's all very similar to the book WWZ or Resident Evil or 28 days later.

During these search and destroy missions they find small communes out in the middle of nowhere that are extremely resistant to a search of their communities. But the zombie menace is a big deal, so they force their way in to make sure it's clear.

That's when the search parties start disappearing. Cut to the chase? Werewolf and Vampire holdouts, who had been waiting out the war in hiding, living off animals and human farms (captured humans, breed and used as food, how sinister!).

Humanity puts its differences aside in the face of a new enemy, and it's all out war again. Werewolves vs Vamps vs zombies vs humans! Rawr!

I haven't gotten too far with the mechanics, but here's what I got so far. It's all very basic, and I'm not married to it.

Humans:
Decades of war has produced advanced weaponry. Enter the Space Marines! Well, they are more like Terra Marines, but same thing. They can have ranged weapons, melee weapons or some combo of both. They are well armored and can go toe to toe with a Vamp or Wolf, maybe with a slight disadvantage due to the ranged capabilities.

I'm also thinking you could play as a non-armored soldier and control a small squad of npc pets. Maybe 4 or 5? You could set up complicated commands to get them to do different flanking manuevers and such, ala Republic Commando. Arm them with different weapons and abilities.

Werewolves:
I'm thinking melee berserker. Super strong, regenerative powers, very fast and can jump all over the place.

Vampires:
I don't know. I'm thinking stealthy? One way I was thinking of doing it was giving them some kind of "shadow hide" ability, where they are close to invisible in the dark, and have to navigate from shadow to shadow to stay hidden. Their combat mechanism could be that they triangulate their attack from a shadow, in the light to attack, then back into the same or other shadow. Defense would be to use lights to illuminate shadows.

Zombies:
This one is kind of different. Playing as a zombie would be like controlling the spread and evolution of the virus. You would start with one zombie and try to build your numbers and evolve different strains of the virus. Then you would control things from above, kind of like a RTS, sending your hoard out to attack in whatever maneuvers you want.

There are lot's of holes that need to be worked out, for instance the "it's always dark" point Slamz made, and I'm sure tons of others, but nothing that would be a deal breaker, I don't think.

[Vllad]

I agree Vllad but people's emotional commitment to any of those character options was developed in an entirely different context, probably a very specific context. I've never liked the Xmen vs Hall of Justive mashups because it tore at the fabric of those separate universes. They were interesting experiments but much like our 'choose five super heroes' thread we have a hard time trying to formulate the rules that bind the separate universes.

I think this is the critical point of any new theme you develop. How do you combine elements from disparate universes in a way that doesn't unravel a player's emotional attachment to that particular entity? What's the common denominator?

Well in this type of setting Horror all stems from the same enviorment, Heaven and Hell. All things listed above are the mythology of those two entities and removes all limits. Vampires, Werewolves, Liches, Zombies Angels and Demons are part of the same mythology.

We aren't combining different universes we are just completely opening up christian dogma.

The common denominator is Heaven and Hell.


Vllad

[Hoofhurr]

Valid points. There's potential there and I don't think there has ever been an MMO that used Christianity/associated mythos as the theme. This opens up some interesting possibilities for an entirely new nomenclature for abilities, spells, classes. I like it actually. With three highly developed texts Koran, Hebrew Bible and New Testament as resource material you could develop a world that much of the gaming world might drop cash into.

[Slamz]

Heh.

We should market it as two separate games:
"Heaven"
"Hell"

If you buy "Heaven", you can only play heavenly creatures and fight for those factions. We market this to Christians, who will pay large amounts of money for anything that's actually marketed towards them and doesn't completely suck, as most things marketed towards them do.

If you buy "Hell", you can play unrestricted.

It's basically parental control in box form.



But anyway, I agree with Vllad, that we're really talking about a whole big Christian mythos, which has basically incorporated all sorts of western myths and folklore. Anytime there's a movie about vampires, werewolves, demons, ghouls, etc, there's a pretty good chance that some priest or hunter is involved and he holds things back with a cross. (At least true of any movie of this type made before, say, 1990.)

[Dharus]

I think the elf, dwarf, magic theme has been played to deathsince RPGs started. Vampires seems to be the new trend to change into different variants but looking back on my life I think sci-fi has dominated my preference.

Robotech, Star Wars, Star Trek and even a fair about of comic books went with sci-fi themes.

You can created whatever you want with a sci-fi setting. Think back to original Star Trek. You could even have worlds were elves, dwarves, and magic is "real".

SWG really started well but imploded. I'd personally think a SWG 2 could do well if they went the multiple skill trees/do whatever you want theme, added a ton a races, 2 sided faction warfare with maybe an underworld twist, and put the time and effort into it. I really enjoyed to original freeplay style games.

[grizzle]

The thing about horror is you can still impliment all of the fantasy things (magic, castles etc) with out being limited to the fantasy barriers.

Every PC plays a human but his entire world is surrounded by Zombies, Liches, Vampires, Ghost, Werewolves etc.

Hell aren't all of those things just human anyway?


Vllad

If you look at it, Games that have everything already have the liches, vampires and ghosts implemented. EQ, EQ2, Warhammer.

I love the horror chat that's been building up in this thread, and I'll delve into it in more detail later (heading out for a bit now), but wanted to just quickly address this one.

In EQ, for example, while all the zones were "neat" for one reason or another, there were only two zones that scared me - actually scared me. One was Kith Forest - holy crap, for the first year I played that game, and was low level, I would literally sit at the zone line until daylight, then run my ass off and hope that I didn't get lost (this was back when there were no in-game maps, and EQ Atlas didn't yet exist, so if you didn't know where you were going, you got lost).

For me, Horror isn't just about monsters, it's about the mood, the setting, how you implement the monsters, etc. For example, a zone like Kith Forest, with fog, always dark, and make the path dynamic, changing as you walk, so the forest feels alive and feels like it is trying to get you lost. Spooky sounds, small harmless animals that jump out and scaring you, so that you recover only to then have a real monster come at you, etc. Your flashlight battery dies, etc., etc.

A horror themed game isn't just about mobs - it is a Horror World. And just image if every zone was like this enhanced Kith Forest. The players' heartrate wouldn't be below 140 until they make it back to their Safe Zone (tavern, chirch, whatever).

Imagine if you take your toon to a new zone, you enter a building, and Wham! You black out. You wake up a moment later with a quest having been forced upon you, a quest something out of a Saw movie, where you are trapped and have to find/figure/cut your way out, otherwise your toon dies and you suffer death penalties.

Man, oh man, all the possibilities of a horror MMO!

[Vanraw]

How about a game that pits good against evil, against Agnostics.

Angels, Demons and Atheist Scientist. The angels and demons would be magic based, while the scientist would be technology based.

Without going to far into the mechanics, base the races on completely different power sources. Angles could be high lightning based magics. Demons, Fire, and the Atheist would a mix if bags, but mostly technology based, like guns and bombs and stuff.

[Diggles]

U mean AnGELs

[Zouji]

If you want horror your going to have to do the Cthulhu mythos. You also don't have to worry about end game stuff.As your characters become more powerful they also become more insane and suffer the wraith of the elder gods. Eventually Cthulhu or some other big nasty eats there soul! So there you have it no end game content!

On a slightly more serious note if you want to do horror then do Zombies vs Aliens vs Whatever else. So you got 3 main races/factions whatever. That way you don't have to worry about one side becoming to powerful. You got zombies. Everybody either loves or hates zombies.

Then you got aliens who have decided to take over this planet but then they realize not only do they have to deal with the indigenous people, but they have to deal with Zombies too!

Then you have the indigenous people. It might be modern day, fantasy, or a horror group of survivors. It might even be ninjas!

Plus to top it all off you can have a story that can laugh at itself while still somehow giving you some good pvp.