I want to make this MMO

Occasionally I ask myself what kind of MMO I would make if given the opportunity to lead a team and design something I want to play. In the past I’ve created long-winded paragraph heavy posts about the MMO I want to see made, but I realized all of that can be distilled into simple ideas. I started making a list in a document on my desktop when I realized… heck, why not share this with you guys?

Fantasy setting

Graphics are stylized realism

Sandbox with guidelines

No PvP at launch. Just PvE.

Magic is powerful and somewhat difficult, expensive, and/or rare to use

The world is dangerous, unforgiving, and not something to be adventured out into lightly

The world is massive and players form communities out of necessity for survival as well as human companionship

Cities are a place people come back to at the end of the day to relax and stock up for tomorrow’s adventure, not a place to “hang out” all day

No “quick” travel of any kind

NPC merchants sell useful items, but players can make much better versions

Items are tools, not character progression

Monsters drop appropriate loot

There are no “raids”

There are no instances or phases

Dungeons are open-world

Quests exist as massive undertakings and aren’t for the weak or faint-hearted

Resources aren’t random. Mining in caves and mountains yields ores and precious metals. Farming yields plants and crops. Trees yield wood.

Resources have quality scores that randomly rotate every few days or a week at random intervals meaning you can’t mine the same quality of resource twice in one place

Players can specialize in crafting and harvesting to the point where that’s all they do when they play

Housing is open-world

Night time changes the world significantly in both appearance and threat. Do not travel at night.

Monster camps are a thing

Downtime must be managed or given thought

Classes are clearly defined into roles with little to no overlap

Death = experience loss and going back to your bind point (oh yeah, bind points)

No Bind on Equip unless special bonuses are crafted into the gear at which point there becomes user-affinity and the item works only for the original owner

That’s my short list. I’ll expand on each feature eventually and most likely grow this into a formal design document.  I’m just about done waiting for the people making and designing the games in this industry to get their acts together.  If I win the lottery, I’m making this MMO.

Feel free to comment with your own lists or critique mine.

  • I agree with almost everything it except for 2 things:

    – death = experience loss and back to bind point, except you can never de-level (assuming there are levels)

    – no bind on equip at all; great items have a base set of good stats that make the item desirable/remarkable, then user-affinity adds additional benefits the longer the same character continues to use the item. If it goes into that characters pack or bank, the affinity stops “growing” but will continue if re-used by the same character. As soon as it is traded to another character or equipped by an alt, though, it’s back to base stats and affinity resets to zero.

    I’ll add a couple of my own:
    – Everyone plays on one massive world – servers aren’t separate instantiations of the same world but merely separate provinces / geographic areas of the same, massive world.

    – Each server/province has it’s own cultural art-style for architecture and arms and armor. Some are better at various crafts than others. Each server/province has a small team of GMs/guides to play important NPCs of that region and set up/play out mini crisis events from time to time that are unique to that region.

    – Characters aren’t “the chosen one” but just ordinary heroes / adventurers. Travel time is non-trivial, so if you want to leave the snowy barbarian wastes, you need to spend some time doing so. Most people may not want to do so and will adventure in their own areas (servers) and become well-known there; explorers will be able to go to exotic locales far away and bring various goods and merchandise that don’t exist natively to difference areas.

    I think all these things would add to a more emergent style of MMO that would be more like the old early EQ days where you hear about other people doing crazy things on different servers, and they take on this kind of mythical aura. I may be in a small minority, but I think it would be cool to hear from a traveling bard the tales of some group in a far-away land that battled a dragon ravaging a particular town and know it was a unique thing that specific people accomplished rather than a pre-scripted “quest” that anyone playing the game can go and do in half an hour.

  • I’d play that. It wouldn’t be *my* ideal MMO but it wouldn’t be all that far off.

    I don’t buy the “No quick travel of any kind” rule. Everquest had quick travel from the get-go, it was just limited to certain classes. Imagine original EQ with no druid or wizard portals and no Gate spell. Does that really sound like an improvement? The version I liked best was the Luclin Era with the Spires that gave limited quick transport on a fixed schedule.

    Oh, and NPCs don’t just need to sell useful items, they need to re-sell items that have been sold to them.

    As for magic, I’d go with “Magic is *weak* and somewhat difficult, expensive, and/or rare to use”. I like low-magic settings where even summoning a light globe or conjuring a small flame are Gosh-Wow feats.

    “Do not travel at night” is problematic in that night will presumably represent one-third to one-half of a player’s time in the game. “Be wary traveling at night” would work better for me.

    This is all nit-picking though. Obviously we’d appreciate a similar approach even though the details would vary. Have you thought about getting a License for one of the various off-the shelf MMO-making packages that are out there? I was looking at one yesterday that started at $70 and only ran to a couple of thousand even at the top end.

  • @Bhagpuss: The reason I say no “quick” travel is because I want to find a way to make classes with travel abilities but not have them be too “quick”. The goal is to still keep that sense of a massive world despite being able to move around in it. I think EQ, in a way, wasn’t always “quick” travel. Strategically placed portal locations could still lead to 20-30 minute travel.

    I’ve looked at a couple. I haven’t found any great ones, though. It’s also a matter of hiring the people I’d want to make the game great.

    @Khoram: I like your ideas. They capture a lot of the philosophy and ideas I have about creating a world for people to live in.

    @Table: Yeah, pretty close! Very inspired by EQ, FFXI, and SWG.

  • Awesome MMO… this is exactly what would make me to play again for months/years instead of just take a tour and leave…just one problem:

    “Housing is open-world”

    To achieve this you either need to have a really huge huge world, or the server capacity will be very low and you will have many servers or the Housing will be a “luxury” and only something that very few top players could experience.

  • @John: The world would be huge, housing would be expensive, and there would be multiple servers. That’s something I didn’t add: There would be none of this “mega server” nonsense. That’s just marketing b.s. for “massive instancing and phasing.”

  • I agree with the mega-server nonsense..if anything, we need “small” servers with a solid community. I used to know all players on my server back then, before the all the x-realm features and mega-servers..

  • Sign me up!! ArcheAge is pretty close.. but still got the whole quicktravel and no death penalty part.

  • I would play this.
    It was a fun and interesting read, but I can not play a dream.

    If I could I was to busy playing my own to even reply here. ^^

  • I like these ideas.

    Not sure about no quick travel or no pvp. I think that would have to be looked at.

    I would add mob layout. Just clump upon clump of throwy and bashy mobs is not fun.

  • I like quick travel so long as it makes sense and isn’t an instant thing. I thought the flight paths in vanilla WoW were pretty decent and the Nexus Spires in EQ were pretty good. Mounts are good too so long as they are implemented in a way that makes sense and doesn’t nullify huge parts of the game like flying mounts did in WoW. I remember playing Might and Magic nearly two decades ago I think and that had flying monsters such that flying wasn’t always a free pass.

    An interesting travel thing I saw in some asian FP2 MMO I tried years ago was an auto pilot run mode. You could at any time command your character to run on auto pilot to some city that you had already visited. Most of the time this was pretty safe but some areas had monsters that pathed onto the roads so you could come back to find your party dead if you weren’t careful with it.

    I would definitely like to see a game world that was truly enormous but with relatively limited resources. Trees that grow back over the course of real time months not minutes. And metals that are quickly mined out so far as nuggets goes but have huge reserves of actual ore. But that ore would need to be very work intensive to mine and refine.

    Make food and rest an important part of the game, such that a character can’t actually be played usefully for 24 hours a day. I would love to see an MMO where even without PvP the struggle to survive the first few days of the servers start would be a real challenge.

  • You forgot to say no in-game maps. Nothing like navigating by sight and enjoying looking at the world instead of pressing M every 5 seconds. Also, it makes ability to navigate a useful role for people to play.

  • In short, you’re looking for a virtual world more than a gaming environment. 😉

    Building such a world will require a lot of ressources, probably be rather expensive too. It brings me back to the same question everytime : how does the benefits/costs look like ? The more expensive your game is, the more players you need (or a very small very focused group willing to pay over a long period of time). What’s the market out there for this kind of game ? Is it big enough to justify a high level of expenses or are you better off being an ass on cost control ? I believe this type of game would target a group of very dedicated gamers. How big is that group ? Not easy questions for developers and publishers. It’s also depends on their willingness to gamble, putting out a game that’s geared more for the average-not-so-dedicated-gamer seems to be a sure way to go these days.

  • @Maljjin: Yep, I am indeed.

    Building a virtual world doesn’t necessarily have to take a lot of resources. I think a lot of MMO spending is like “pork barrel” spending. For example, voice acting? Not necessary. Gratuitously developing unnecessary systems in order to win over certain demographics isn’t necessary if you target the niche group you feel can support your project. A large world doesn’t have to require a large team either.

  • So EQ but with a few, very few, other good ideas that came out of the past decade of mmo’s lol. I too have had the same idea if I ever somehow won the lotto lol. I guess I would have to actually buy a ticket to win though eh lol! Anyways I’d add dynamic npc spawning based upon logic to your list. Like a lava goblin may spawn in a lava area with an emphasis on “may”. Also appropriate loot based on what the npc has on them visually. I always liked how EQ had some of that. A rare npc would spawn and would be attacking with that special dagger that proc’s magic and it would use it against you so you knew it would drop the item.

  • @Sikk: Lots of SWG influence in my ideas. I didn’t speak at all about the skill system. Plenty of DAoC in there as well. I have ideas about a Darkness Falls type dungeon. Imagine how that’d work without PvP. I should blog about that idea.

  • This definitely deserves a sticky it’s such a good topic. This list could translate into such an awesome game. The world would definitely make the game. I’ve always wanted giant sprawling mines that people go to for mining ore. One such cave system would be so large with many different entrances that several guilds could lay claim to different areas. As you you go deeper the ores get rarer and higher in quality but you might run into ancient horrors.

    Crafting could be real fun if you make it more like combat. If problems and opportunities actually appeared on the item you are working on while it’s sitting on the table and you could use abilities on them it would be great. Then you could take on group projects like this since group members could band together to react to problems like fighting mobs. Think EQ2 crafting x 10, instead of the system being contained in the UI it spills out into the world.

  • @Gringar: Yes! You’re thinking exactly what I’m thinking about mining. I should write a post about that mining idea. I like your ideas about crafting too.

  • Interesting what you say about resource cost. I find it frustrating these days that all the effort and ££ of so called ‘AAA’ titles is blown on expensive assets such as voice acting, CGI, even scripted events and plots which are very developer costly.

    Some of the most fun games are based around a single, super fun mechanic. Look at the classics: Tetris, Elite (original), even Chess. These are games where that basic mechanic, plus the players’ imaginations are what generate the fun and variety. You don’t need thousands of man hours of effort to generate the content, and the content cannot be ‘consumed’ and therefore used up so the game lasts so much longer.

    At the moment it seems like there’s a big split between fun, original indie games and expensive, boring but visually impressive games. It would be nice to see a game which takes a great core mechanic (or mechanics) like those above and throws even a small portion of the budget of the AAA studios at it to give it the base visuals, polish and detail of a modern game.

  • Keen, Archeage is being released in a few months, finally.It has many items on your list.

  • @Joy-Energiser: It has a few of the ideas. I’ve played the alpha/beta until level 25ish. ArcheAge is still very much a themepark quest-grind though.

  • It varies… I know there are (good?) open source tools out there but without a need to look farther than that I have no idea specifically what they are or what they are capable of. The biggest hurdle is going to be gathering the talent required any paying them. Programmers, designers, art guys, sound/music guys, idea guys (something lacking in the industry!!)

    And then server resources required of an MMO don’t exactly come cheap either. Still, I get the feeling that the game community itself has the talent scattered within it to make a truly great game.