Zombies/Survival Horror is just screaming to be made into an MMO.
There's so many factors of the genre that would fit perfectly into an MMO world I'm surprised no one's done it yet.
MMO makers don't want to go anywhere near ANYTHING that would require permadeath as part of it's game play.
A zombie MMO would hardly be in it's SURVIVAL/HORROR niche if you took out the 'game over' screen that can't exist in a MMORPG.
There are ways to have meaningful character death in an mmo without it being traditional "permadeath".
If a zombie/survival mmo was "team" based (in other words, you lead a "team" of survivors, not just one character), you can lose members of the team in a meaningful way WITHOUT forcing someone to start over completely.
There's also the "zombie" mechanism, where you lose you continue to play as a zombie.
And so on. Yeah, true, "old school" permadeath probably won't fly in an mmo anymore, but variations on it could be made to work in the right setting.
Actually, there's a lot of small MMORPGs on this already out. Heard that a few of them are definitely worth a play.
Hell, I'm at the end of the daydreaming stage of making one myself, teaching myself to program in order to try my hand at game developing. There will be some form of permadeath, but the zombie mechanism is being considered. I've been thinking about whether or not to do the team of characters already, it's a probably not, but if it turns out that the rest of the game would work better that way, then maybe.
I hope developers read this thread because there are several good ideas. Two areas I think could be really developed would be a historical setting in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars and the alien world developed by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his "John Carter of Mars " series.
The first idea would let you lead a Rifles platoon similar to Sharpe's Rifles in Napoleonic Spain. It has three distinct sides, the Portuguese-British, the Spanish, and the French. I find the challenge to keep your men fed, equipped, and able to win small clashes featuring muskets, cavalry, and horse artillery to be intrigueing.
The John Carter of Mars theme offers a alien world, humans known as Red Martians, the huge four armed Green Martians like Tars Tarkas, and a bevy of weird Martian creatures to interact with.
Unless Torchlight the MMO is going to be a completely different setting then Torchlight the dungeon crawler, I don't consider the game to be a steampunk setting at all.
Although its unknown how much of it will be shown, pretty much everything that has to do with "magic" in Torchlight mixes steampunk into it.
Not to mention that the "outside" world outside of torchlight mine town(the world which will be featured in torchlight II) seems like industrial revolution times of our world (a huge continent with only railways connecting the towns, people spending their lives building new railways, ).
Everything points to torchlight universe being that of Steam and Sorcery.
# A GRIM, ODD, ARCANE SKY # ANY GOD, I MARK SACRED # A MASKED CRY ADORING # A DREAMY, SICK DRAGON
Me and some friends drew up plans for an mmo we dubbed cops and robbers, the idea was crossing coh/cov with grand theft auto and the godfather. your two factions would be the law, or the criminals. I have a huge backstory written up with it in an alternate world, we even drew up classes and some base ideas for the abilites they have. Maybe we could see something like that in the future. Personally I think a cool game would be based off the coldfire trilogy, but I could see where that would be hard to do. Maybe a dark towers spinoff would be a good one as well. might be interesting anyway. just my 2 cents for what little they are worth.
Hey, how about a combo Old West/Sci-Fi MMO? Something where you could fly around in a rickety spaceship you could barely keep together with spare parts, and had to use old-style guns n'stuff because they were just cheaper than fancy ray-guns?
And you could set it in a future where most people lived in massive "civilized" cities because they were really slaves brainwashed all through school, and you were a former member of a rebellion against them that lost, and that's how you ended up as you are?
So you'd spend your game time cutting deals to haul cargo or do other dirty jobs to get the money to hire on NPC or even PC crewmembers, or upgrade your ship (or buy a better one), and you'd gain reputation with some towns and clans and lose it with others as you did so. Sounds like fun to me!
O wait, they already tried that with the Firefly MMO, and just like the show, it got buried because @sshats got to be in charge of it.
While I do like Shadowrun a lot (still have a 1st ed rulebook lying around) I do not think it would work well as an MMO. Reason for that, besides the huge expectations it would create, is the amount of parallel realities in the system. Good luck integrating the Matrix and the Astral Planes as well as a proper Rigger-system (which is the smallest of the problems) in a meaningful way so it works properly with other classes. A lot of the content would be for a limited number of characters only.
The thing about the Matrix and Astral Space and all that is that you're not actually limited from any one cahracter being able to do all three. You CAN, if you want to, have a Datajack/4th ed equivilant as well as being a mage, and they've intergrated riggers and deckers into hackers so you don't need a mechanic waiting in the car, your hacker brings it round the back via the wireless Matrix. And it's really an overlay of the real world anyway. You would hit a button/power - toggle it on - and you'd be in Matrix-verse, so you can use all your Matrix only powers and affect the Matrix only stuff. Same goes for Astral Space. Most "astral" things aren't dual natured. They exist on one plane or the other at any one time. You could work o flushing the Astral Threat onto the physical plane for your gunners to shoot it, or they shoot it to make it go fully back to astral space where the mage dismisses it back to the Meta Planes. It's really a nice break in the gameplay of the current crop of MMOs to give us a multiple-plane combat sytem. Also you could have whole dungeons/runs being purely based on the astral realm for teams consisting of all awakened characters. Or full matrix runs. The way 4th edition opened up the matrix makes it much more suited to an MMO and I think it'd work great. Always been my favourite RPG.
the old D&D franchise, Planescape. it was the setting for that game Torment.
an MMO version could have each of the planes be different servers, and make interserver travel a fundamental part of the mechanics, but only if they were each as diverse as the original setting.
We know that campy franchises can be made cool, like Batman. How about looking at the style of the 1930ties pulp science-fantasy stuff and make that cool. Doesn't have to be a Flash Gordon MMORPG, but something that captures this retro-fiction-fantasy style. With Star Wars so immensly popular, I wonder why nobody dares to go that route.
Other than that, I'd like Steampunk or Weird West as well.
I've always liked the idea of a World in Darkness MMO. There's a lot of lore and content that's been created over the years for it to work well. Implimentation might be an issue, but the concept allows for a sandbox style of play, which there is clearly a huge market for.
The only case for a MMO setting that does not exist yet would be for a Vampire / Werewolf MMO. Particularly I would like to see the Castlevania franchise turned into a MMORPG as it is an already established money making video game franchise. Taking Castlevania to a MMO wouldn't be a huge leap from a players' perspective.
The only case for a MMO setting that does not exist yet would be for a Vampire / Werewolf MMO.
There would be an absolutely huge market for this atm. So many vampire/werewolf movies and tv shows at present that all you would have to do is mention either of these 2 species and suddenly you've got alot of peoples attention.
Personally I don't care what genre/setting a game is. I can just as easily play a space combat mmo or a fantasy sword and shield game, aslong as the game is good I'll play
I always thought that some CCG's should try to be MMO's such as Magic (Course!), Shadowfist, Illuminati, or even Over the Edge.
Alternate Realities (AR's) would be cool, you could have certain realms where some gear doesn't work forcing the players to hone their skills with different gear while traveling there. And have a meeting place (Planescape, Cheyenne Mt. Command via SG1, whatever...) where the players could interact while the various AR's would be instanced areas.
Prehistoric :(AoC is more post Ice-Age prehistoric than Jurassic) not sure I'd go for thos, a case of "cooler on paper" I think, unless it maybe mixed in Sci-Fi to have you as an intrepid time-traveller team that got stuck as your machine busted en-route & was now irreparable, then you have build your little team into a new civilisation struggling for survival against the denizens & maybe even other time travellers.
Wild West: I like this, so many millions of ways to spin this one out within even one game, prospecting, trading, hunting, crafting, town building, defending against Indian incusions, train robbers, train companies etc
Gangland: sort of multi-faction or guild versus guild & I think the intra-gang mechanics would be where the game could truly set itself apart by each member working towards promotions within the organisation by way of bringing in more money, or kudos or legal businesses, landholdings etc would be a natural game to have as a territory control game, building up your gang would be an integral part of the game & players could each have "scams" they run which make them an attractive recruitment.
Punic Wars: The era famed for some of the the Greek, Roman and Persian empires greatest triumphs & failures, there was a Tigon Studios Barca BC game touted as an MMO but it has since been reimagined as a crappy RTS game which I think is a great shame.
Steampunk: Has been touched upon by several games often mixed in with fantasy games, but a truly Victorian Era styled kind of Steampunk might still be appealing, how would it be different enough to standard fantasy MMO's is difficult to say but if made in an alternate universe sandbox kind of way it might allow for some interesting play from the corporate angle.
CyberPunk: I think the Matrix Online already tried that angle & it was a great concept spoiled by half assed realisation, something based around Caprica might have some promise & a more relevant framework.
My theme would be one that's already been explored but only 50% a "superhero" mmo, but one concentrating on slightly more mundane superpowers than the dc marvel or champions worlds & where your "alter ego" was just as important in order to do the research & groundwork & resource collection to launch your do-gooder (or do-badder) schemes, where co-operation with other "supers" was needed in both hero mode & in alter ego mode, and where you had to be careful who you associated with because unlike in most superhero games where there are clearly defined "sides" in my title there could be more at stake than good or evil, there could be corporate affiliations to take into account & it would be feasible to infiltrate and take down organisations from the inside, by both might & skill or money, influence or "who you know".
Many of the things you mentioned "original article-er" seem to point to the fact that you want to see an in-depth sandboxy MMO. Thus I am inspired to write a short post on the inherent failing of the sandbox.
Though i to love the idea of the sandbox. The inherent failing is thus.
RL
What do I mean by this. Sandbox's take a ton of time. RL is the same as a sandbox, and infinitely more indepth. Creating a city in an MMO =~= to getting a degree. Most people say, hey I should do something more constructive with my time, then making a city in "*******", however cool that may be....
The rest stay and make the city... they are perhaps 0.000000000001% of the population.
The 0.0001% of people that play WoW %5 of which don't leave their grandmother's basement, only want a hamster wheel with cookies that pop out of the ceiling, on a relatively predictable basis
The sandbox of life is pretty cool though, it even has virtual sex!!!
Whoops, forgot one. Renegade Legion. A pen 'n paper RPG with a sci-fi setting in the year 3000 AD in which Rome never truly crumbled, instead came back from the grave, grew to encompass the stars, and brought a lot of evils with it. There are other races allied against them, including renegade humans fighting to overthrow the oppression. The Renegade Legion is their fighting arm, and the combat is both ground and space fighting. Since it's a pen n'paper RPG already, it would serve as a good foundation for an MMO.
Another along the same lines would be the Mechwarrior franchise, but they'd have to do the whole universe thing so you could start out with your own people, raise up until you could do combat missions, then make your own destiny as an awesome soldier or a mercenary, or a warlord taking over some vulnerable planet, etc. Or all of the above
Comments
.......WHAT?
Actually, there's a lot of small MMORPGs on this already out. Heard that a few of them are definitely worth a play.
Hell, I'm at the end of the daydreaming stage of making one myself, teaching myself to program in order to try my hand at game developing. There will be some form of permadeath, but the zombie mechanism is being considered. I've been thinking about whether or not to do the team of characters already, it's a probably not, but if it turns out that the rest of the game would work better that way, then maybe.
I hope developers read this thread because there are several good ideas. Two areas I think could be really developed would be a historical setting in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars and the alien world developed by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his "John Carter of Mars " series.
The first idea would let you lead a Rifles platoon similar to Sharpe's Rifles in Napoleonic Spain. It has three distinct sides, the Portuguese-British, the Spanish, and the French. I find the challenge to keep your men fed, equipped, and able to win small clashes featuring muskets, cavalry, and horse artillery to be intrigueing.
The John Carter of Mars theme offers a alien world, humans known as Red Martians, the huge four armed Green Martians like Tars Tarkas, and a bevy of weird Martian creatures to interact with.
Although its unknown how much of it will be shown, pretty much everything that has to do with "magic" in Torchlight mixes steampunk into it.
Not to mention that the "outside" world outside of torchlight mine town(the world which will be featured in torchlight II) seems like industrial revolution times of our world (a huge continent with only railways connecting the towns, people spending their lives building new railways, ).
Everything points to torchlight universe being that of Steam and Sorcery.
# A GRIM, ODD, ARCANE SKY
# ANY GOD, I MARK SACRED
# A MASKED CRY ADORING
# A DREAMY, SICK DRAGON
Me and some friends drew up plans for an mmo we dubbed cops and robbers, the idea was crossing coh/cov with grand theft auto and the godfather. your two factions would be the law, or the criminals. I have a huge backstory written up with it in an alternate world, we even drew up classes and some base ideas for the abilites they have. Maybe we could see something like that in the future. Personally I think a cool game would be based off the coldfire trilogy, but I could see where that would be hard to do. Maybe a dark towers spinoff would be a good one as well. might be interesting anyway. just my 2 cents for what little they are worth.
Hey, how about a combo Old West/Sci-Fi MMO? Something where you could fly around in a rickety spaceship you could barely keep together with spare parts, and had to use old-style guns n'stuff because they were just cheaper than fancy ray-guns?
And you could set it in a future where most people lived in massive "civilized" cities because they were really slaves brainwashed all through school, and you were a former member of a rebellion against them that lost, and that's how you ended up as you are?
So you'd spend your game time cutting deals to haul cargo or do other dirty jobs to get the money to hire on NPC or even PC crewmembers, or upgrade your ship (or buy a better one), and you'd gain reputation with some towns and clans and lose it with others as you did so. Sounds like fun to me!
O wait, they already tried that with the Firefly MMO, and just like the show, it got buried because @sshats got to be in charge of it.
The thing about the Matrix and Astral Space and all that is that you're not actually limited from any one cahracter being able to do all three. You CAN, if you want to, have a Datajack/4th ed equivilant as well as being a mage, and they've intergrated riggers and deckers into hackers so you don't need a mechanic waiting in the car, your hacker brings it round the back via the wireless Matrix. And it's really an overlay of the real world anyway. You would hit a button/power - toggle it on - and you'd be in Matrix-verse, so you can use all your Matrix only powers and affect the Matrix only stuff. Same goes for Astral Space. Most "astral" things aren't dual natured. They exist on one plane or the other at any one time. You could work o flushing the Astral Threat onto the physical plane for your gunners to shoot it, or they shoot it to make it go fully back to astral space where the mage dismisses it back to the Meta Planes. It's really a nice break in the gameplay of the current crop of MMOs to give us a multiple-plane combat sytem. Also you could have whole dungeons/runs being purely based on the astral realm for teams consisting of all awakened characters. Or full matrix runs. The way 4th edition opened up the matrix makes it much more suited to an MMO and I think it'd work great. Always been my favourite RPG.
I know that its no GangLand, but Mafia II is coming out soon right? The trailers to that are really promising. ^^
Well, one of the great stories that helped spawn the steampunk genre is Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea"
That would make one great MMO.
the old D&D franchise, Planescape. it was the setting for that game Torment.
an MMO version could have each of the planes be different servers, and make interserver travel a fundamental part of the mechanics, but only if they were each as diverse as the original setting.
Great ideas! I always thought the Arcanum setting, a mix of fantasy magic and steamwork tech would make a great setting!
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
We know that campy franchises can be made cool, like Batman. How about looking at the style of the 1930ties pulp science-fantasy stuff and make that cool. Doesn't have to be a Flash Gordon MMORPG, but something that captures this retro-fiction-fantasy style. With Star Wars so immensly popular, I wonder why nobody dares to go that route.
Other than that, I'd like Steampunk or Weird West as well.
I would absolutely love to see a Cowboy Bebop MMORPG. Smugglers vs Bounty Hunters, ground and space combat.
I've always liked the idea of a World in Darkness MMO. There's a lot of lore and content that's been created over the years for it to work well. Implimentation might be an issue, but the concept allows for a sandbox style of play, which there is clearly a huge market for.
The only case for a MMO setting that does not exist yet would be for a Vampire / Werewolf MMO. Particularly I would like to see the Castlevania franchise turned into a MMORPG as it is an already established money making video game franchise. Taking Castlevania to a MMO wouldn't be a huge leap from a players' perspective.
There would be an absolutely huge market for this atm. So many vampire/werewolf movies and tv shows at present that all you would have to do is mention either of these 2 species and suddenly you've got alot of peoples attention.
Personally I don't care what genre/setting a game is. I can just as easily play a space combat mmo or a fantasy sword and shield game, aslong as the game is good I'll play
I'd really like a vampire / werewolf / zombie / horror MMO. A well done Wild West MMO could be really interesting too.
I always thought that some CCG's should try to be MMO's such as Magic (Course!), Shadowfist, Illuminati, or even Over the Edge.
Alternate Realities (AR's) would be cool, you could have certain realms where some gear doesn't work forcing the players to hone their skills with different gear while traveling there. And have a meeting place (Planescape, Cheyenne Mt. Command via SG1, whatever...) where the players could interact while the various AR's would be instanced areas.
Gangland could be the best. All it really needs to be is something like EVE but with the obvious changes.
A mob/GTA style MMO would be great. A lot of people were expecting this from APB, and I'm sure that resulted in a majority of their meager sales.
Some great ideas already.
Prehistoric :(AoC is more post Ice-Age prehistoric than Jurassic) not sure I'd go for thos, a case of "cooler on paper" I think, unless it maybe mixed in Sci-Fi to have you as an intrepid time-traveller team that got stuck as your machine busted en-route & was now irreparable, then you have build your little team into a new civilisation struggling for survival against the denizens & maybe even other time travellers.
Wild West: I like this, so many millions of ways to spin this one out within even one game, prospecting, trading, hunting, crafting, town building, defending against Indian incusions, train robbers, train companies etc
Gangland: sort of multi-faction or guild versus guild & I think the intra-gang mechanics would be where the game could truly set itself apart by each member working towards promotions within the organisation by way of bringing in more money, or kudos or legal businesses, landholdings etc would be a natural game to have as a territory control game, building up your gang would be an integral part of the game & players could each have "scams" they run which make them an attractive recruitment.
Punic Wars: The era famed for some of the the Greek, Roman and Persian empires greatest triumphs & failures, there was a Tigon Studios Barca BC game touted as an MMO but it has since been reimagined as a crappy RTS game which I think is a great shame.
Steampunk: Has been touched upon by several games often mixed in with fantasy games, but a truly Victorian Era styled kind of Steampunk might still be appealing, how would it be different enough to standard fantasy MMO's is difficult to say but if made in an alternate universe sandbox kind of way it might allow for some interesting play from the corporate angle.
CyberPunk: I think the Matrix Online already tried that angle & it was a great concept spoiled by half assed realisation, something based around Caprica might have some promise & a more relevant framework.
My theme would be one that's already been explored but only 50% a "superhero" mmo, but one concentrating on slightly more mundane superpowers than the dc marvel or champions worlds & where your "alter ego" was just as important in order to do the research & groundwork & resource collection to launch your do-gooder (or do-badder) schemes, where co-operation with other "supers" was needed in both hero mode & in alter ego mode, and where you had to be careful who you associated with because unlike in most superhero games where there are clearly defined "sides" in my title there could be more at stake than good or evil, there could be corporate affiliations to take into account & it would be feasible to infiltrate and take down organisations from the inside, by both might & skill or money, influence or "who you know".
Many of the things you mentioned "original article-er" seem to point to the fact that you want to see an in-depth sandboxy MMO. Thus I am inspired to write a short post on the inherent failing of the sandbox.
Though i to love the idea of the sandbox. The inherent failing is thus.
RL
What do I mean by this. Sandbox's take a ton of time. RL is the same as a sandbox, and infinitely more indepth. Creating a city in an MMO =~= to getting a degree. Most people say, hey I should do something more constructive with my time, then making a city in "*******", however cool that may be....
The rest stay and make the city... they are perhaps 0.000000000001% of the population.
The 0.0001% of people that play WoW %5 of which don't leave their grandmother's basement, only want a hamster wheel with cookies that pop out of the ceiling, on a relatively predictable basis
The sandbox of life is pretty cool though, it even has virtual sex!!!
Whoops, forgot one. Renegade Legion. A pen 'n paper RPG with a sci-fi setting in the year 3000 AD in which Rome never truly crumbled, instead came back from the grave, grew to encompass the stars, and brought a lot of evils with it. There are other races allied against them, including renegade humans fighting to overthrow the oppression. The Renegade Legion is their fighting arm, and the combat is both ground and space fighting. Since it's a pen n'paper RPG already, it would serve as a good foundation for an MMO.
Another along the same lines would be the Mechwarrior franchise, but they'd have to do the whole universe thing so you could start out with your own people, raise up until you could do combat missions, then make your own destiny as an awesome soldier or a mercenary, or a warlord taking over some vulnerable planet, etc. Or all of the above