I just had an idea, or more of a question. I was wondering why, in most of the MMOs out there, the player is more or less their own army. What they do has little effect on the rest of the game world, and nothing can make any big changes. This brought me to my idea. A MMO that's a FPS.
Here's the basic idea. It's basicaly a WWII sim at it's core. When you start, you pick a side, and that's it. No class, no charater, just part of one of the 5(?) armies. Each side has benifits and downsides, but that comes into importance later on. Now, here's the intresting part, at least to my eyes. When you start, you "Spawn" at a drop point as a basic grunt. As you progress, you level up, get better weapons and whatnot, same as always. But the kicker is this. If you die? You're dead. End of story, all that XP is gone, that great sniper rifle, someone else has it now, and you start over. Or, Almost over. And here is where the depth comes in. When you're not playing, you have the option to have a program running in the background, lets call it "Home Front" or whatever. The point is, that program is what gives you a leg back up from when you look around that corner too soon. It runs and generates points at a constant speed. Lets say you bite it, and you want to get back in the game, but you also want a better gun and better accuracy. You spend X points, and you spawn as a level 4 instead of a level 1. Of course, the points generate slowly, so it's not wise to go running in guns blazing, cause you'll soon be back to low end grunt.
This same idea goes for the missions and whatnot. The program also generates points for the whole war effort, not just you. So you can build an extra battleship for that big push, or make a weapon factory to reduce the cost of better guns and so on. However, these need to be defended. If you funnel all your money into more factories, the enemy can just waltz over and bomb the heck out of it. And that brings me to, what I think, is the coolest part. In real warfare, you don't have a little map with a glowing star that says "Bomb Here" you have to find the place, signal where it is, and so on.
Idealy there would be no missions. Just things you have to do. If you're getting clobbered by the new rocket launcher, better find where it's being made and destroy the factory. How you may ask? First, you need to find out where it is, maybe by accident, or by actually looking for info. Then you have to bomb it with a air strike. And that's when all the peices start to come together. You don't HAVE to mark the building with colored smoke, but it'd help a lot, so you have to get to the factory, set off the smoke, and get out before the bombs hit. And in the sky, you'll be looking for the smoke while dodgeing AA, enemy fighters and whatnot.
So anywho, that's my rough game idea. What do ya think?
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As with most "ideas" there's huge potential!
Sadly, it's potential for success OR failure! =)
I'm not going to pick apart the idea as a whole but the first thing to look at when you have an idea that seems great is this: why hasn't someone done this before?
Take your "no missions" structure. If the user doesn't have a mission, how do they have a clue where they're meant to be going? How do they know that to stop getting killed by the rockets they should take out the factory? How do they know they have air-strikes available? How do they know they have to user coloured smoke to set that as a bombing target?
More importantly, a soldier with no set mission? Does he not have a commanding officer? What are his orders?
Why do people not make more games with no set objective but instead let the users make them up? Why do soldiers get orders handed down to them, rather than just being told "Hey, go out and kill some Nazis!"?
Now, I'm not going to answer these questions. They're just things you need to consider. You also need to consider putting a lot more work into your idea at a base level. There's no indication of whether it's all users and no AI. How many people do you expect to play this game to populate it with the necessary grunts, officers, snipers, special forces, navy, air-force, etc, etc, etc? How big do you think the maps need to be? If you can develop new rocket launchers, is there some kind of manufacturing game going on in the middle of all this? Is there a winner or does the battle go on forever? What happens when I log-out and there's no-one there to defend my base?
What do I think? It's vague. To vague to be considered an actual idea. It's more of a brainstorming of "wouldn't it be cool if..." statements.
Keep thinking and keep dreaming but remember, even ideas take work.
Hehe, very true, it is a bit (very) vague. And I can see your points with the no missions, but what I ment was no concrete missions. If you start playing, you won't go through the same steps of missions, the missions are always changeing depending on what's going on. Maybe the head general is a AI, or something that says what's going on, and then leaves you to it.
As for the size of the maps, that'd probaly be the big killer in this type of game. In my wonderful dream world, they'd be huge, totaly massive. but that's probaly not possible, as it were.
The manufactering thing, that's the "meta" game. You have that program or whatever running, and generateing points which your army can use to build things. Haven't really thought it all the way through, heh, was just a intresting idea.
ive had the same idea (not wwII, but otherwise) but youve certainly put a lot more thought into it. I suspect it would be hard to implement well, but it would be awesome. I also really like that idea of permanent death, but rewarding what you achieved in that life.
It's a decent idea, but the basic premise of it sounds a lot like PlanetSide other than the permadeath and WW2 thing.
That's one thing that always kinda bugged me about MMO's in general, if you die, at WORST it's a XP hit, or you lose some quality in your armor or something. I think if they had where if you got shot, you're dead, thanks for the effort, it'd really change game play, deffently after you walked for X ammount of time to get to the place. You'd be a hell of a lot more cautious.
I'm going to be kinda damning here. Yeah, I like your idea very much, but ideas are cheap and easy to come by (mums, etc). I've been developing game ideas now for years and I literally can come up with one in about 30 minutes now, including all the gameplay, all the depth, the characters, the worlds and the art, the flawless balence, all that crap. Hell, I can even imagine myself being interviewed about said games.
I don't really tell other people about them because they need years of refinement. You have to criticise every single aspect of your game before it's really got "worth". Otherwise, it's like holding a lump of coal and saying "One day, this could be a very expensive diamond!"
Still, I did like it and maybe you'll be gifted with the money to make it one day. The closest thing I think we've got to that at the moment is either Savage or Giants: Citizen Kabuto, games like that. Seriously, download Savage. It's freaken brilliant.
Huge potential, but games like that dont sell well, so it probably wont be made. Also, play Savage like Phil said, its amazing
Sounds a lot like Planetside with Permadeath. I really would love a next-gen Planetside, but I doubt that's gonna happen. Guess I'll have to stick with Savage and Huxley.
@ UglyPhil:
I don't think this guy is looking to profit financially from his idea. All he wants to do is bounce ideas of people, he simply wants to see if they are interested in his concept.
Now the problem is that the concept itself needs some iteration. As glipe said before, there could be problems in terms of population. What if you have a server that is too dense or too barren when you log on? What are your options at that point? Maybe you could use the points to purchase some Unmaned Vehicles/Mechanized Troopers/Anything? Something to help you defend while you wait for more people to sign on would be nice, because it appears that this is a PVP-focused MMO concept - with no PVE elements.
Another problem is: how many people have been programed to dislike permadeath? I know it adds to the realism, but how many people would stop playing if permadeath as has been stated was implemented? I'm guessing that the number would be pretty high - what with WoW and many other modern MMOs lowering the price of death.
Could you explain points to me again. I may be a little dense today, but I don't really understand when they are being calculated or how you get them. Is is that you get points for each of your actions on the field - or are points building up after you die, and the longer you wait to respawn the more points you get?
Maybe when you die you could also move around the the map like a satellite - examining enemy loadouts, buildings, and other defenses which you could share on the fly with your squad? Maybe that would ruin balance by allowing smaller squads with greater intel capacity to defeat larger squads with lesser intel capacity - or maybe it would provide yet another strategy.
I don't know, I'm kind of running on fumes now...
...I'll just check back later :)
Hehe, well, points work like this, at least in my mind :)There's two sets of points, personal and global. You have a program, or something that's running on your computer when you're not playing the game. You can chose to have it running or not, but while it's running it generates points, lets say 1 per minute or whatever for private, maybe faster, maybe slower for global.
You start as Pvt. Bob, with lowest class everything. You play for a while, and soon you're Sgt. Bob. But then you take a wrong turn and hit a land mine, and goodnight. So you start again, as Pvt. Dick. But you've had the program running for a few days, and you've got some points, so you can upgrade yourself by spending the points. It's basicaly a reward for playing smart and not getting killed and doing stupid things, if you do accidently get killed you can get back on your feet quuckly, but if you're the kind of person who runs into combat trying to take on the whole army by yourself, well, you're gonna be at a low level untill you learn.
Global points work something like this...At the program screen, you have your global points, and lets say graphs or something for what the army's currently working on. YOu get these by voteing, one of the officers (talk about that next paragraph) says "We're gonna build a new stageing point here" You think it's a good idea, and pour all of your points into it. Of course, just you won't be able to do it, lets say you get 1 point a minute, it'd cost something like 100000 points, whish would be a few weeks of just you. However if everyone does it, then it gets done much faster, and the more unified everyone is, the better you'll be for getting important stuff done quickly.
Officers were a problem, as some people mentioned before, but i had an idea for that. You can level up to say, Sgt. (Forgive my lack of knowledge of military ranks) but that's as high as you can get. To get to the upper level of officers, you'd have to be voted in. You'd put your name in the hat, and the other players would vote you in. YOu get their votes by leading them, say a small 4-5 man team, an getting them back alive. So if you're a good commander, then you'll move up, and if you suck, e.g. "Lets take out that tank with out TEETH!" you won't.
Thanks for the responce for this everyone! I'll keep on thinking, and thanks for your suggestions for games i should try :)