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Zombie Apocalypse MMO
Xero_Chance
Member Posts: 519
I have plans (I'm still in college for programming x.x) for a zombie apocalypse mmo.
Full 3D FPS-style shooting
Player Faction vs Player Faction vs Zombie scramble for lost resources
Dynamic game world as towns are lost to the zombie hordes through neglect, or reclaimed by players.
Expanding world in relation to server population, possibly extending across continents.
Limited ammo, armor, and health makes Survival a key point (it wont be hard to play, just suspenseful when battles get longer and longer, especially against player factions for a crucial resource or tactical position.
Melee weapons (swords, chainsaws, axes, pipes, shivs)
Crafting system, make armor, ammo, and weapons out of salvage!
The main goals will be to reclaim key points in large cities or reclaiming and walling off small towns, claiming them for your player faction, and shooting zombies. Reclaiming a foundry, for example, increases the ammo available to the player faction or something. While reclaiming a nearby power station and rerouting it's power will help power a city or a few towns owned by that faction. This will help defend from zombies and other players (electric fences anyone?)
There will be lots of gore and exploding heads.
Oh, and moderator controlled zombie hordes that attack random towns for kicks and giggles.
Did I mention zombie shooting?
Comments
Too late bro
The idea is already in the works
Buuuuut they made the game a console only mmo, so you have your chance...
PS: Console only, really? /facepalm
Couldnt resist
"It has potential"
-Second most used phrase on existence
"It sucks"
-Most used phrase on existence
I saw that thing that Undead Labs is attempting to make and I doubt it will have the amount of depth and immersion I'm planning. I'm also making it for PC only (maybe mac too, eventually).
Plus, their zombie shooting looks more oriented towards "mass hamburgering of zombie flesh with 0 regard for ammo, possibly even unlimited ammo". Mine is going to be different, there will be thousands of zombies and players will only have a couple hundred bullets. Survival and suspense will be major themes.
I see
But just beware with one thing, people dont tend to like very much lobby based games, so if you really do a survival zombie apocalypse mmo in a persistent world im with ya in this project hehe.
Make it a thrilling experience where you really have the fell that you are fucked if you encounter 100 zombies in a street, if you want inspiration that serie "the walking dead" is looking very good
"It has potential"
-Second most used phrase on existence
"It sucks"
-Most used phrase on existence
If you make a zombie apocalypse game that works on PC online, then that would be AMAZING!
I just want to kill the damm things and this would make it possible without me having to go onto cod 5.
If you do make a game like this then you will definatly have atleast one subscriber....ME!
Wait .. you are in college and you want to make a MMO?
Do you know anything about raising millions to properly fund you game? Do you know anything about managing a large software team? Do you know anything about game mechanics design? Level design?
Knowing some programming, even an expert programmer, can't make a MMO.
At least they have funding. I have no interested in some amateurish produced, unpolished, buggy game.
I was also thinking of implementing "resource caches" that can be seized by factions, that in case even if everybody wipes, at least they earned some resources for their faction.
You guys have such great ideas, my mind is boggling with more ideas stemming from those.
I'm going to try to avoid instancing as much as possible, this way if some genius leaves a gate open, an entire town, building, or tactical city point can be overrun by surrounding hordes.
There's going to be different types of zones that scale in difficulty from small rural communities to large factories to big segments of major cities. Making new map material, and possibly an automatic random zone builder process to automatically generate most of it from pre-made blocks, is easy. I'm just unsure on how I'm going to enforce player boundaries, invisible walls maybe, or minefields, or maybe beyond a certain point the zombies are just too thick and tough to get through that nothing can see the edge of the map.
The rural communities are going to be for beginner players, as the zombies will be less dense. It gets harder as you go into the city.
I was thinking of implementing a leveling system but only having it effect things like recoil, weapon spread, movement speed, and MAYBE a little bit of durability mod, armor, health, etc.
Maybe even making heavier armor and higher caliber weapons having some sort of Strength requirement to use, or certain SMGs needing a certain amount of dexterity to use effectively. I don't think I'll just restrict the use of them outright, but if you aren't up to the str reqs for a weapon, it's going to recoil like mad and it'll be very hard to hit anything. If you aren't up to reqs on armor, it'll make you slow, or less accurate, or something. There's going to be 2 different kinds of levels, player levels and skill levels. Player levels will give you points to spend on base stats, extra feats, and access to certain dangerous areas. Skill levels such as Shooting, Endurance, etc will accumulate exp the more you exercise them! Of course the more you shoot at something, the more accurate you'll get.
Oh did I mention it's going to be a cover-shooter similar to gears of war or mass effect 2?
That will make a much more tactical approach to pvp as it won't be all about bull-rushing and more about holding tactical positions and making the right decisions. Of course when fighting zombies in pve, you wont need to take cover.
I was thinking of handling the pvp system by a "players per radius" system. This means if there's about an even number of players from opposing factions in a certain radius, everybody in the radius gets flagged for pvp and the zone becomes a hotspot. If there's like 9 of them and only 1 of you though, you won't get flagged and they'll be unable to hurt you. It probably won't flag if there's only 1 or a low number from each side, I'll figure out the particulars later.
It's going to be first person but you'll be able to look down and see the rest of your body and your feet, and your gun won't be floating in front of you the entire time, only if you raise it to ironsights or shoot from the hip, otherwise it stays low and pointed away from stuff. You can always look down and see your hands holding your weapon. Its little details like this that bug me the most. Turning will make your feet move like you would normally, and you won't be able to resist animating a step if you tap forward. No sliding around unnaturally.
Oh and I need to implement built-in voice chat, it's hard to communicate in an FPS without it.
If I make this game and run my own studio, I'll require the development staff to browse the forums and participate in the community, knocking down the cold wall of customer service reps. Well, there will still be moderators for immediate player issues and stuff, but big technical issues or gameplay faults won't go ignored or be deemed "impossible" to fix. Also, frequent small bugfixes are a good way to keep your community's trust that you're working to try to improve the game. As a person, business owner, and a representative of my own studio, I won't be afraid to admit when something was a bad idea to implement and will quickly apologize and reverse bad updates instead of stubbornly holding onto it as my playerbase fizzles away in rage.
Some of these studios don't even act like businesses and more akin to Country Clubs.
It all has to be THEIR way or the HIGHWAY. I believe the players run the game since they pay the bills.
Ideas are always welcome and will be shamelessly ripped off and stolen by me with no credit given.
btw it's going to be P2P, with free content expansions, I'm not going to change this.
EDIT:
I almost forgot, Death in this game is going to be a big deal and will involve things like:
- Respawn Timers
- Exp debt
- Loss of gear and items, full looting upon death (not really that big of a deal, most things will be pretty easy to replace, possibly even free. and your friends could always save your stuff. Maybe even implementing a "designated battle buddy" system where you can join an agreement with another player(s) that, in case one dies, the other can loot their stuff, but if the other player is within a certain range of them, nobody else can loot.)
- Zombification (merges with respawn timers? maybe 5mins or so of forced zombie play?)
Player Factions are going to be created out of collectives of Player Clans (same as guilds). They will have resources and NPC quartermasters that sell things to their faction with prices based on the amount of resources they have available. Obviously if there's not much ammo, it'll be expensive. They might even run out of items completely, but this is unlikely because all those items will be craftable and if sold to the NPC, is available to be sold by the NPC to a player. This doesn't mean that I'll be cutting out normal player/player transactions. All money going in and coming out of an NPC will directly effect the owning faction's funds, each one having to upkeep a constant supply of resources and funds or face economic collapse.
This sounds really good. I hope you have rich parents or a sugar mommy/daddy.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
I wish you luck in your endeavor because that sounds like a lot to pull off by yourself.
Good luck making it solo without funding.
Maybe you should get a team together first.
Can I play a zombie?
Faction vs Faction PvP baby
PbvP
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I love the idea... I've been wanting to see a Zombie MMO for quite some time.
Ignorance may be Bliss, but Knowledge is Power
Good luck. Sounds interesting.
I believe you may need to rethink your respawn timer concept. Plenty of other ways to penalize a player from being able to get immediately back into the fray without cutting down on their actualy play time through xp debt, item loss, set respawn locales, significant debuffs, etc.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
I aplaud and welcome anyone who is bold enough to step in to the most difficult genre of games in creating them.
I just have to wonder apart from OP still learning programming skills how much work on games has he done, any experiance in making just smaller type of games, just say a simple 3d game?
There plenty of good/great/awesome idea's from people not even into game making, but often it will not develop beyond idea's.
And from what I read what OP is trying to deliver it takes allot of skill aswell experiance with games in this genre. This doesn't mean it can't be done, but over the years I have read so many people who told they are going to make this or that type of game but never had to show something for it. Instead of saying you want to make some awesome MMORPG keep your lips tight and speak out when you actually have something more then just words, just some advice, take it how you will.......
Regardless of what I said I wish you best of luck, but hopefully next time you might want to bring something more then words to forums.
Oh and of course there are some games in development already with the Zombie theme aswell games already released and/or playeble with zombie's:
http://www.deadfrontier.com/
http://www.zombiepandemic.com/
http://www.urbandead.com/
http://ww2.zombieinitiative.org/node/1016
go go go go! We can only hope for such a risky endeavor to make it. I wish youall the best
Even if you manage to eventually start working on this game, you made one major mistake...
You told everyone, all your plans.
I remember keeping a close eye on a 3D zombie mmo. They had some cool concept art, and some info on classes, but they were very scarce on info, since they were afraid that someone would end up stealing it...
You are wrong, they have said that most of their content will be based on survival (gathering resources like ammo, which means ammo is limited). Their game concept is rather sandboxy actually.
If a counsole game brings back the Sandbox MMORPG, then I will laugh.
--When you resubscribe to SWG, an 18 yearold Stripper finds Jesus, gives up stripping, and moves with a rolex reverend to Hawaii.
--In MMORPG's l007 is the opiate of the masses.
--The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence!
--CCP could cut off an Eve player's fun bits, and that player would say that it was good CCP did that.