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One big catacombs under the entire world
rungard
Member Posts: 1,035
one thing i think mmos are missing is a giant underground maze that encompasses the entire land mass and has openings all around the world. The content would be completely randomized with logical themes ( orc patrol, goblin hunters, undead king and guards etc) and it would have that "you never know what youll find" aspect to it.
Comments
Agreed!
Mezzoberranzan, Drizzt Do'Urdens home.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
too much on servers to handle. Rift is having issues alone with rendering water under the landmass. now imagine how much a game would struggle rendering a complete world under the land mass.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Zoning and/or instances, the word "randomized" should have nailed that one home.
While it would be cool to have it seamless and all, I don't really see it happenning anytime soon - but I have run with the idea in multiple GDDs over the years. It's always interesting to consider the difficulty of content equated to it's depth relative to the surface... and vica versa, if the game is based underground and works it's way up.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
its a concept i have loved since i got a taste of it in console with Lufia.
if they gave you the option of random dungeon/tunnels with the possiblity of 3 seperate directions (not exactly where it might come out) it could give you more realistic generalized locations.
"I hit the maze last week, we were walking and dragging Andy's dead body around for 3 days before we found our way out."
I'm holding out hope that a Minecraft-Nethack cross will come along.
I always thought you could have it completely canonical within the game world itself if the idea was you were inside a giant AI run structure of some sort.
My basic idea was that everybody was inside a giant spaceship that freely rearranged areas, and the whole game itself was sort of the spaceship (Played by a combination of the rules of the games and occasionally GMs) running an IQ/survival test on all the players to see who's worthy of rising up to command ranks within the spaceship itself.
That way it could totally make sense that you get in a transport and end up someplace completely random each time.
Well, the basic idea was that there were diferent kinds of areas... home areas where no PvP was allowed where you could set up your base structures and that didn't change (But could expand infinitely to accomodate new people... and areas could collapse right out from the middle at the computer's whim, when they decayed from not being maintained or whatever... the advantages of not having a solid landmass).... set giant open world style areas that didn't change and would have various public challenges and contents, and instanced areas that were basically randomized areas of all imaginable sorts. There could even be a crafting class that involved being able to program certain types of requests (I would like an area extremely high in mineral density, and relatively low in things trying to kill me) for the computer to make randomized maps based off of.
(Alternatively, you could do this with highly magical areas or whatever, demons or wild magic or whatever doing the randomization. Or characters who hop alternate dimensions. Or cyberspace. Whatever the excuse is, I think the better you can explain the randomness within game rules, the better the system works, rather than just 'Well, this time you go in the door and it's different. Deal with it!' Feature rather than hand-waving!)
It's a really neat idea. I don't think it should be a problem for the servers to handle. Just make the dungeon entrances and a while into it be part of the overland zone. Then after a certain depth you enter the dungeon zone for that area. So it wouldn't be different than a regular zone transition between two overland areas.
I've always felt that this is something that mmos should try