My friend was writing up his thoughts on the ever popular and addicting game of World of Warcraft and I was asked to submit my ideas for a Massivly Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, or the rather unwieldy abreviation of MMORPG.
These ideas are not completely mine, a friend helped develop a few points. They are mostly my own.
I have been a RPG fan for a long time. They always got me very excited. But conventional MMORPGs made me very frustrated too. They are too static, the story doesn’t really exist and it soon feels like being a visitor in a theme park.
Motivation
After spending over a month (not continuous) leveling up a character on a friend’s World of Warcraft account, I began to think of what World of Warcraft could have been.
Blizzard begins the player’s World of Warcraft experience with an intro alluding to an ongoing epic war between the many factions left behind after the last installment to the series. The player is then placed in control of a single character and told to bring glory to his race as help turn the tides of battle
What battle? Did I miss something? World of Warcraft has the largest online population of any Massively Multiplayer Online game out there, and the most intense fighting in the virtual world are relegated to ‘raids’ – nothing more than harmless skirmishes with no lasting effect on the game world.
Influences
If you do not already know, I am an RTS gamer – that is a PC gamer who loves Real Time Strategy games. A small, but old company known as Stardock is currently working on a neat little idea. While it is not knew, it may just be the first time something like this has been done right. They are working on a MMORTS titled Society. In this game, players control a faction and battle their neighbors for control of discrete territory. The catch is that the map does not reset when the battle is over. Instead, players will control a faction which occupies one or more distinct maps, and every time a battle is declared, your map and the opponents map are joined to form one battleground. The winner takes the territory and adds it to his society. Eventually a game winner is declared and the game world resets.
The key idea of the above is that, like [i]World of Warcraft[/i], there is this concept of an ongoing epic war. But in Society the war actually affects the game world.
The idea
In its simplest form, my idea was allow territories, such as those found in World of Warcraft, to truly be contested. In other words, allow races to conquer territories and add them to their side. From here, a friend and I expanded the idea into our own ideal game.
First off, at its base level all MMORPG’s will have the player control a character and, through some means, progress that character’s abilities. This is typically done through experience points and leveling up, but can also be done just as easily through purchasing and acquiring better items – such as in Eve Online. All of this comprises the RPG part. The Massively Multiplayer Online means all this happens in a persistent virtual world shared by other players.
Let us keep all of this in place, and level up our character via questing and defeating opponents in battle.
The game should include a variety of unique and interesting sides, each with their own advantages, disadvantages, and play styles. However, their allegiances are not static, but subject to take shape over time through the virtual game world. Many races will quickly become conquered pawns of more powerful races while others will join in alliances to increase their power. Yet others will specialize in manufacturing weaponry or cross-trading between factions.
The game world will be divided into territories, each roughly the size of those appearing in World of Warcraft. Some territories will begin with villages, which will form the beginning zones for each of the races. Villages may be established on the remaining territories once a faction has conquered it and acquires the proper resources and funding.
Almost everything in this world will be dynamic in nature; even the cities. At some point each side will want to elect a leader, who will be in charge of managing the combined resources of the faction and also have a hand at determining the strategies their side will want to take and any political haggling between factions. A mayor will also be selected to head each territory under a faction’s control and can spend wealth on developing the city and territory to give players more lucrative options for items to buy and quests to embark on. The leader should be in charge of establishing prices for items. Sell items for cheap to equip vast armies of soldiers quickly – but risk losing funding for further development of controlled territories. Items can be brought to cities by purchasing them from other players or cities, or building them with resources collected from quests.
Because territories can be won or lost in battles, the quests themselves become a resource of each faction. If a faction does not control enough territories, they will not be able to provide enough quests to properly level up their soldiers.
This is only a rough outline, and obviously requires more thought. For example, how should leader and mayor positions be handled? And how long should they last? How much control should a mayor have over city development and item acquisitions? As for quests, I think each territory should have pre-programmed quests much like in [i]World of Warcraft[/i], but the quests must first be unlocked by the mayor for a fee. Generic quests should also exist for all territories, such as item and resource collection.
An MMORPG such as this one would truly occupy a dynamic game world, which is fully shaped by the players inside it. While I have not played other games such as [i]Eve Online[/i], I know this level of dynamic play is not new, although I believe my idea takes it even further with the territories themselves subject to player-directed development.
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