dot hack... something similar perhaps?

Rejor

  Yes, I'm sure a lot of people are going to be like, "WTF?!" lol. But hear me out.

  Now, I love .hack//sign and the games as well. The anime was great, and as for the games, they were awesome.

  Thing is, I'm kind of surprised that nobody made an MMORPG that uses a similar system that .hack does.

  For the basics... Each town has the Chaos Gate, and through that Gate, players enter in keywords to go to an area. These areas are generated by the combinations of key words. It seems that in the .hack game at least, there are near-limitless combinations. Of course, these areas become fairly same ol-same ol, but some such areas are more specially made.

  If you've ever played the .hack games, you can argue that the combat system could be pretty easily implemented. Players control when they attack, and what attack skills they use, etc. It's still got numbers rolled in the background to determine hits and misses, but most of the time you hit for so and so damage. And the combat's pretty fast paced too.

  Now of course, the harder part would be the interactions between characters, which I found to be really cool about the .hack//Sign series, as well as the game. Of course a lot of the things that happen in the anime wouldn't be easily possible in a real MMORPG, but a lot of it can still be implemented. Same with the single player game.

  This, in my opinion, would make a pretty damn good MMO. If it had great interaction between characters, with tons of visual emotes, gestures and what not. Combat that's easy to learn, fast, and fun. Several towns that can be the hubs of activity for players, and they go to different areas via the chaos gates, or whatever they want to call it. And interactivity between players and the game world itself.

  And I think one big thing would be voice communication between players. Perhaps using a seperate server for voice communication. Log in, and you find yourself in a town with the distant conversations buzzing around you. And I doubt that would be hard to do... Team Fortress 2 was developing such a way of communication, with voices dropping in volume due to distance from your character.

  From what I've seen in current MMOs, this can be very possible. The biggest problem I see sprouting up is the Chaos Gate and the keywords themselves, making different areas to go to. But even then, with instancing for dungeons and areas in current MMOs, even that can be done. Oh yeah, and the money required to make such a game as well.

  Now what does this mean, for the game's story and all? Well, perhaps there wouldn't be any grand story. Just a game where people can play, interact with others, roleplay, and basiclly, just have plain, good ol fun. And plenty of DM controlled events and such. Constant additions via patches and such as well.

  Anyway.. that's my spiel.

Sparks243

There is a .hack game being made

.hack//fragment

Rejor

lol well it doesn't look like it'd actually be an online game.

I'm hoping people understand that if someone made an MMO that is similar, it could actually be something fun. That's what I was trying to get across.

theanimedude

the funny thing about a .hack MMO would be... well there would be almost no relation to the show or game (other than portals) because frankly, all the characters were very random. It would basically be something like Dofus... only 3D. I was a huge fan of the series, not so much the game. I agree, a .hack MMO would be neat, but as you said, the world scale you would need is huge. Think about having to make an algorithm that takes text entered by the user, and somehow parses that into certain sets of numbers, teleporting them to 'x' world. What im getting at is... wow that would be a lot of worlds.

Of course, if you can come up with an algorithm that makes there be many possibilities of worlds, but not infinte, im sure I could start something up. Just get me some artists

Jimmy_Scythe

Actually, the fictitious game in .Hack was based very largely on Phantasy Star Online and Diablo. The closest thing to it on the PC is Guild Wars and most of the people on these boards don't consider that a real MMO.

I still think that something like "The World" could work, but the concept would require a little more depth than just rushing to the bottom of the dungeon for a rare drop. I'm thinking It would need some kind of crafting or elements from Animal Crossing or The Sims to keep people comming back. And then there's the whole PvP thing to think about.....

Zhanghia

while .hack// would certainly be a cool idea, upon further investigation goes that if it 'were' a MMORPG, it'd be very boring. You don't have the compelling storyline of the series, it'd be everyone trying to be a hero in the limited quests so it'd just not work. Even though it may be being made, I have no faith in said project.