Pirate Sandbox MMO

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to an idea for a MMO setting/world lately.  It’s not the setting of the MMO that I’m designing (on paper), but I think it has enormous potential.  The setting is that of a pirate world mostly taking place out on the ocean and close to land in port towns.  I first started thinking about this setting when anticipating Pirates of the Burning Sea.  I had expectations of this world where players truly lived on their ships and cared for them as an extension of their character and as a home.  The world would operate much in the way of a sandbox world so there would not be rails that the player follows or any other established norms of ‘this is how you should play’.  There would be vast areas of ocean that are open for sailing and adventure, but a great deal of the world would be populated with islands and coastal regions.

The key to the concept is how the players identify themselves as inhabitants of the world.  It is, after all, a pirate-themed MMO.   You can be a pirate and attack others or you can focus on other aspects such as merchanting, socialization, adventure, or whatever you can manage within the sandbox openness of the world.  The size of the world have to be truly enormous.  Players should be capable of setting sail and going on for hours.  Personal space to claim, beyond just your boat, would be available.  Let’s say that Graev and I were to start a pirate guild/association and we wanted to establish ourselves a base like any good pirates do.  We would sail out and find ourselves an island, dock our ships (which would exist in the real world, visible and docked and accesible, and begin building our base.  Building would work like it did in Star Wars Galaxies, mixed with other building mechanics.  You need the deeds and materials and then you can simply place the building/structures.  Once placed they would be customizable to the fullest extent.  The freedom for players to establish real habitations is key.

Crafting, as in any good sandbox, would be important.  It would one of the key focus points for PvP conflict as well as a driving force behind many people choosing to play the game.  Keeping with what I think works, the resources would be constantly moving around in the world.   You may find a metal in one location this week but the next week it may have moved or diminished in quality.  Extractors, similar to SWG, could be designed as work crews and you pay for their upkeep.  Ideally all of this would also be visible in the world.  The trade, moving, and use of resources then fuels the economy.  Everything would be player made — everything.

Now that you have a general idea, I want to give a quick scenario and premise.  Imagine you’ve been exploring islands and hunting other players and npc’s for a few days.  You’re tired and ready to unwind from the constant adrenaline and stress of sailing the seas.  Your cargo hold is full and you want to begin using your resources.  You check your map and decide to sail to an extremely popular bay city.  As you approach from a distance you can already see the island coming into view on the horizon and the lights of activity begin to twinkle.  As you get closer you see players and npcs on the docks and the live hustle and bustle you would expect from a city.  I’m imagining a Tortuga from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie.  You find a place to either pull in and tie off or you drop anchor and sail in via row boat.  When you arrive the city feels alive and a little overwhelming.  You have prior knowledge that there is a particular player who usually does business here, but he only meets clients at the tavern.  When you enter the tavern it’s the stereotypical loud and dangerous setting, but in the corner you see a player sitting at a table surrounded by menacing looking players.

When you approach the player you’re immediately approached by the thugs who are real players paid by the infamous fence/player merchant.  You make it known why you’re there and the boss lets you approach.  You work out a deal to meet on the dock to unload your treasures which are quite valuable (you’ve managed to find extremely rare resources).  You’re told to meet at these coordinates, on a small island that the fence likes to make deals on.  Fast forward to when you arrive.  You come ashore see that this island has been claimed as established as a middle-man island, but something feels wrong.  Turns out you’ve walked into an ambush and you’re going to be killed and robbed…. or are you?  Upon your signal suddenly the torches on seven of your guild’s galleons light up, illuminating the dark waters surrounding the island.  Turns out that it is you who laid the trap all along.

It’s the thrill of the unknown and the ability to create this content all on your own within a setting and world that encourages and facilitates the reality and creativity.  I think a Pirate/Naval MMO like this, coupled with the enormous scope and sandbox elements, could be a fantastic setting.  The crafting, resources, PvP, PvE, and establishing of property and claim to parts of the world enables the player to be attached.  This has been just a quick look at an idea, but there is a lot more to it.  A skill system for advancement, details of the crafting, and the motivation for people to truly play as I narrated in my example above are all easily designed to fit the world.  The setting has -never- been attempted with this scope and there has -never- been a serious attempt at creating a truly open sandbox world like this — it’s a shock really, given how fantasy is becoming overdone and other attempts at branching out have failed.

  • I think, while it is nice to have a true sandbox. There should still be a line you’re unable to cross. When you make things too in-depth they become life. Breathing life into something, and having to make it your life to survive really are two different things.

  • Sounds great. Now you just have to get people to actually act in character. No not talk all piratey or have story time or whatever passes for RP on MMO servers these days, but actually adopt the role of pirate or whatever. More than likely your scenario would go like this.

    “lol ur a faggot newb” *log out*

    Boom, perfect MMO moment ruined.

    This is why we can’t have nice things.

  • I always wondered how PotBS would have played out if they’d stuck to only 3 factions, England/Spain/France… and then made the Pirates like the Jedi from SWG originally.

    Once you go Pirate, you get all the overpowered skill sets, but it’s a perma death situation. There’d be wanted boards in all the countries with bounties posted by actual players for killing famous pirates, which also doubled as leaderboards showing how many of that particular faction said pirate had killed.

    I think the game would have panned out much better like that.

    Also, the levels in PotBS were totally unecessary. Their only purpose was to gate the ships you could access… which could just as easily have been done via a skill system in tandem with the cost of producing the bigger ships. Just leave it to the “sail what you can afford” mentaility from EvE.

  • What is it with pirates? All possible interest drains out of me even at the sound of the word.

    Leaving the setting aside, the basic problem with the scenario you paint is that you aren’t describing what might happen in an MMO, you’re giving us a scene from a movie or a novel. In paragraph four and five you’re describing the experience from the perspective of the protagonist in a narrative. Try looking at it from the perspective of the “real players paid by the infamous fence/player merchant” who “usually does business here, but he only meets clients at the tavern”.

    What’s the gameplay experience of these paying customers? They sit at their keyboards night after night watching their avatars idling in a virtual bar while the avatar of another player waits for the avatars of yet more players they don’t know to happen by and do some virtual business. Once in a while, possibly once in a very great while, this business may go wrong and they may get some brief action. Then they go back to watching and waiting again.

    Can you really imagine MMO players doing this? Night after night? Month after month? They might do it a handful of times, but for your player-merchant to establish himself, his player-bodyguards have to do it every night, indefinitely. Now it’s entirely possible to get a player to do the merchant part – there are obsessive-compulsive traders in every MMO. But to get the bit-parts filled with real players? Not going to happen.

    That’s why MMOs have NPCs in the first place. It’s why RPGs have NPCs. Almost all imagineered MMOs and RPGs feature a huge amount of background acting. Either it’s going to be done by AI, which it turns out either no-one is able to code, or which costs too much to code, or which is deeply unconvincing when it is coded. Or, like this, it’s going to be done by players, who, it turns out, actually want to play the leading roles not stand around being extras.

    Leaving aside Mahlah’s very valid point above that the people who even want to roleplay in MMOs at all are heavily outnumbered by those with contempt for the very concept, there just isn’t a huge pool of would-be unpaid virtual character actors with near-infinite patience just waiting for the chance to sit jump into an imaginary bar-room brawl once or twice a week when the occasional virtual deal goes sour.

  • I don’t fancy the pirate theme, and as with Bhagpuss I think you’d be hard pressed finding players that will idle in a tavern for hours just waiting for people to come do business. Yes they do exist, but they are rare. That said I think some of the ideas you have are great. When our guild in AoC built the first couple of structures for our guild city in Purple Lotus Swamp I felt an enormous guild pride, we worked for it, we built it and it was OURS! (AoC lacks in other things like player houses etc but thats not the point). So having things playermade is great!

    Now I have been thinking lately why noone has made an attempt on a Wild West MMO (as far as I know at least).
    I picture the Wild West setting as a very good setting for a sandbox MMO. Cowboys vs Indians is a given, the conflict is there already, but you could have conflicts between different indian tribes (guilds or groups of guilds) and between groups of cowboys (again guilds, read on for more ideas).
    The game should be based heavily on crafting and gathering, Indian tribes make their villages, weapons etc using mats they gather, the same goes for Cowboys. Each side could have access to mats/crafts that the other side doesn’t, say the Cowboys can make guns which Indians naturally want because of their efficiency, and Indians could produce hides and/or herbs/pots that the Cowboys want etc. This would lead to a reason for both sides to not only fight eachother, but also try to find some sort of peace with some guild to be able to swap goods. This again leads to possible ambushes and setups etc.

    Guilds on both sides would start to build their cities, gathering mats or trading other guilds when needed and fighting others to steal their resources.

    It could get very complex and I’ve not much but scratched the surface of the idea, but imo it would be a awesome ground for making a sandbox mmo.

    Thrown together at a break from work, so bare with my incoherence 😛

    Cheers.

  • I’ve got to agree with Jezebeau, this really sounds a ton like EVE. Except w/o the starbases, massive titans and doomsday rays, and the corporate espionage. And fewer laser.

  • I’m sorry no offense intended but I totally agree with Bhagpuss and Mahlah. Your doing what really, really, really bad game developers like Tasos and David Allen do. Your fantasizing what players are going to act like. I thought you played UO. You should know that NO ONE is going to give up HOURS of their life to act as some person’s body guard in a damn pup.

    That is actually one of the things I first mocked Darkfall players about in beta. Several of them were saying that they were going to be crafters and get around pvp by “hiring player bodyguards you can do that in a game like Darkfall” Yea and how did that work out? WEll most people took their money and stood around for five minuets then left OR just ganked them at the first oppertunity.

    Bhag had it right your not designing a game your writing a script for a book/movie. THat would NEVER, EVER, EVER play out naturally in an mmo. MAYBE if you lined the whole thing up as an RP event but even then a few random morons will likely try and ruin it for you.

  • @Bhagpuss

    What is the game play experience of the players who raid the same dungeon night after night, month after month, wiping on the same AI driven boss who doesn’t do anything new or random each time you face it so players could establish themselves as the cool kids on the server with the awesome loots only to replace the gear they wasted so much of their time and life on to get a few months down the road. Perhaps even a month or week after they finish the content.

    So even though i disagree with keens pirate mmo sandbox concept you will always find people doing random things in these kinds of games who dont have anything else to do with their time. It might be a hard concept to wrap you’re mind around but people do these kinds of things all the time.

  • @Holgranth- while it doesn’t appear Darkfall is your type of game, a lot of people really like it and i think Tasos shocked a lot of people by how that game actually turned out after so many people figured it was vaporware, and then once it was getting close to release figured it was another Dark and Light. If you like FFA PvP in a sandbox fantasy world it really is a very good game – ableit the FFA PvP sandbox is a fairly small audience to target. They are doing pretty good with the updates too and appear to have some big plans in 2010.

    At any rate, i think he and his team did a pretty good job developing the game they wanted to develop, even if it wasn’t a game you wanted to play. So to call him a really bad game developer (and i missed a few “really’s”) i think is innacurate – maybe he’s just really bad at developing games you like to play?

  • This is very very much like the game I’ve always dreamed of. I think all the concerns by other commenters should be addressed, and can be.

    I think alt characters can give potential for the idle job of a hired guard or merchants. Log out of that character, but he remains as an NPC for a time period, and you can play as one of your other characters.

    Maintaining role-play in a server requires rules and strict enforcement. In my experience with the Neverwinter Nights server, Arelith, the DM’s are constantly monitoring every message sent by players. It might be possible to have heavily monitored RP servers and more open Non-RP servers. If you’re banned from the RP server, you must play in the Non-RP server.

    I always thought an open game like this should be more open than just pirates, also. I would give it more of a Wild Frontier theme. People can be pirates, or simply traders or imperials. Factions should be created by the players themselves, as corporations are in Eve.

    I love the idea of being able to control ships and build homes, this is a feature I’ve always wanted to see, too. So who are you going to hire to develop this, Keen? 😉

  • @ Jordan he’s a really, really, really bad game dev not because what he eventually accomplished with Darkfall but rather because when the game was getting designed he had delusional fantasys about how players were going to play DF rather than actually designing the game properly.

    Tasos and the game have both come a long way but if you want to see why I call him an idiot read all the drivel he posted on IGN some day.

    See the alignment system for a good example. It was supposed to be “advanced” and “all race clans would be possible but an extreme rarity”.

    As it is Darkfall’s alignment is incedibly simple, incredibly broken and clans that ARN’T all race are an EXTREME rarity.

    Darkfall right now is in DESPERATE need of content. No not warcraft ect dungeon and quest content but SANDBOX content. More stuff for people to do, fight over, and so on.

  • There has been enough MMOs you can always compare features to another. Don’t let that bug you. The big difference I see with eve is walking on land. Which is actually a huge difference.

    In a sandbox game, Eve did a lot right so it would be a mistake to try to deviate from it too much. I see this more as a Eve, SWG combo and a lot of what Vanguard promised but never delivered on.

    A 4 faction system would be great here. England, Spain, France, Pirate. English cant attack English, same with Spain and France. Pirates attack anyone and everyone.

  • @Holgranth- i kind of see your point, but on the other hand if you held every game dev to everything they said during development about how awesome their game would be and how it would be played…what your saying is just about every dev out there with a couple rare exceptions are really, really, really bad. That’s all part of hyping the game to sell boxes (or digital distributions as the case may be) imo.

    I think you really need to judge devs on the end product, and not against all the holodeck-type predictions they spew forth during development because they all do it and even the good games never live up to the hype.

    In the case of Darkfall, after hearing how awful the game was going to be, if it was ever released, i was honestly shocked how it turned out (in a good way). For an indie company with no prior experience to pull that off is pretty impressive, especially considering the gigantic failures we’ve seen from more extablished companies with many more millions of dollars to pour into development.

  • and to get back on topic…

    while i support the overall idea of Keen’s game, that of a huge sandbox world you can actually “live in” instead of just play…agree that there are so many small technicalities that would make developing such a game next to impossible. While i would love a game like that, the masses have shown what they want, and what they want is a game like WoW. A game like Keen describes would have huge development costs which means only the giant companies could afford to build something like that…and none of them would ever spend a lot of dollars to build a huge game for a relatively small audience – at least in comparison to the number of people who want to play games like WoW.

  • The idea is wonderful and it would be great if the players could pull it off. I remember a player police force in Ultima Online years ago that patrolled the forests outside towns and punished criminals.

    Sadly, even the merchant would probably rage-quit as four or five anti-RPers would be jumping up and down in front of his table yelling “RPing NUB! Get a life loser!”

    We can hope.

  • EVE is a good game to look at from a design perspective. It was able to start small and over the past few years has grown in to a very complex and robust game. UO, SWG and PotBS are all other examples of successful (and some failures) of sandbox design.

    A few notes from my perspective. Gamers rarely want to log on to a game to do “nothing.” Sure being a hired bodyguard is a great idea, but I don’t want to spend the majority of my active play time to sit and wait for another player to attempt something for me to stop. Also you can not have the players enforce security everywhere all the time.

    Something that I liked about UO (and EVE and SWG) was that there wasn’t any mechanics to prevent you from attacking anyone anywhere. However, if you did it in a major NPC town, the guards would show up and beat down the aggressor. For player controlled cities (and even shops) your PC guards should be able to run missions to allow NPC guards to patrol/secure an area for some time. The more PCs running patrol/secure missions, the better and longer the NPC protection will remain.

    Even shop owners could get extra NPC security by having other players run missions for their shops. Traders can hire NPC escorts or a guild that has run enough player escort missions can have those NPC escorts for free. The idea is that as a guild, those that want to provide security for the rest of the guild do not have to be on at the same time as those that need the security.

  • @Jordan its not so much the hype that gets to me with Tasos and David Allen but the sheer LUNACY of some of the stuff they expect to happen.

    David Allen for example thought that “families”, aka a collection of unmoderated chat channels that all players get thrust into depending on what symbol they click on during character creation, would lead to a powerful united community.

    Now I don’t know about you but I’ve been in Barrens chat, trade chat, the OLD SCHOOL lfg channel when it was basically just a global channel and in a few guilds that just invited anyone and everyone of any level.

    Beielive me throwing random players into unmoderated chat channels is NOT a good way to build community.

    Tasos had similar delusions about how players would “organize anti-pking forces and patrol the newbie areas” among many other things (I don’t have the time to dig them up right now) that showed EXACTLY how little he understood about how players actually PLAY an mmo with no developer rulesets.

  • Yeah, sounds very similar to EVE. I’d prefer your game over EVE though because pirates would have an actual setting. EVE’s idea of setting is to change the names on the stellar anomalies once in a while and change the color of stargates.

    EVE shows some of the problems you’ll face though. Players will not harvest in PvP areas unless security is more or less guaranteed. EVE has a concept called “not blue shoot immediately” which means if new people aren’t blue-aren’t offcial allies-you shoot to kill. Even merchants, which makes real trade impossible. So the “merchants” actually are alts of the pirates, and the ones that aren’t stay the hell away from any PvP areas they can.

    They have the whole trap scenario like you listed too. Problem with that is soon everyone looks at any single ship as a trap and people get gun-shy unless they have overwhelming force.

    Players will always act to minimize risk. That’s the lesson of EVE, and expecting them to put themselves at risk just wont happen often enough.

  • OK Keen. I love you brah. but this is dreams. I applaud your bravery, and i’d love to see a sailing sim/mmo, but it just won’t work.

    You say that the world is supposed to be massive and “real”. It seems like you want a world where day and night come and go as in reality, not like in POBTS where time-of-day isn’t real (it takes just as long to sail between two ports as it takes to walk from the inn to the auction house).

    First of all, how long does it take you to sail from your island pirate fortress to this popular port city in time played? 1 hour? 2 hours? 6 hours? Do you think people are willing to sit on a ship for 30 minutes doing absolutely nothing – let alone hours? Basically: what’s the amount of “dead time” you see the player having between “fun time” periods?

    your story is nice, but you’re telling it out of the perspective of the “winner”. How many times will the “loser” walk into deals like that before he stops playing, or simply gets a zerg together and takes your sh!t? Then, how many times will you attempt to forge a deal if you know that 9/10 times you’ll get ganked and looted dry?

    When people play MMOs they want to be “the hero”. Every single player wants to be “the fence” or you in that story, few if any would be content to ride shotgun to help you or “the fence” to be heroes.

    By the way, and this is not an insult, but look into Puzzle Pirates. they have an interesting way of giving players different roles on a pirate ship and keeping it interesting. (along the lines of allods)

  • Clearly it’s a dream design. Concessions would have to be made to the overall idea and scope for it to even work in modern day tech if what’s already released is any benchmark.

    Yes, players do not always act in such ways that they fulfill the dreamed up scenarios of developers. Yet at the same time are they ever given games that facilitate that anymore? No, they’re not. Don’t even pretend for a moment that the games released today come close — and don’t mention puzzle pirates.

    My fantasy world is much more fleshed out and achievable, but this world would present far more challenges and end in something vastly different from what is currently available.

    And let’s face it guys. I’m brainstorming on a blog where I write about stuff I like. DUH it’s unrealistic and dreamy.

  • @Keen

    Glad you told them 😉

    I like the scenario and concept your came up with. It’s my dream to play a fleshed-out pirate MMORPG where the seas is your home and ports are your war-grounds. It would be nice to finally see a game where RP’ing isn’t forced, but you find yourself doing it anyway because you feel that connected to a game.

    I don’t know about the rest, but the reason I haven’t been able to RP since SWG is because I never felt connected to the character I was playing in the sense that when I was typing my line, I was actually saying it instead of typing it.

  • This shouldn’t be a question of whether it would work or not but how to make it work. As hobby designers, it always seem like we are looking for the perfect idea that we can turn into a great game. The truth is, great designers will take any idea and turn it into a great game thereby maximizing fun.
    Obviously, there will be elements in his design that will be unachievable, lame, or a waste of time…let’s take those and turn it into something fun instead!

  • I figured you’d be insulted by the mention of puzzle pirates…

    What you fail to realize is that you cannot design player behavior into an MMO. If they could, they would. You have to start with the assumption that 90% of the population is soon going to reach a point where they “see the matrix” they play the game to win it.

    I have the same phenomenon happen to me, take a game like chess. In the beginning you play it with childlike enthusiasm, you gallop around with the knights, send forth your pawns, let your majestic queen be protected by her bishops. You’re playing around with the pieces. Later when you learn the game you stop seeing the beautiful art of the game, you just see Kn R P Q B A4 B1 C4 etc… You know the openings, you know the counters and you’re playing to win.

    That’s what happens to video games. In Starcraft at first i’ll play the single player and immerse myself as a space marine commander exploring an alien planet. But soon i’ll “see the matrix” and focus on the optimal build order and unit microing instead of making up names and backstories for my marines.

    Another example: Travian. In the beginning you pretend to be a mighty chieftain in barbarian europe, building an awesome force of 50 clubmen you ravage the tracts around your village, and you develop your farms from the spoils of your fallen enemies…. Until the day you are hit by an enemy on an account that has four sitters around the world to get full 24/7 coverage, and send a constant stream of soldiers to your village, preventing any army building.

    Please go forward with your planning, Keen. But realize that most people will metagame your mmo to gain edge against others ESPECIALLY if it’s a pvp game. If you start with that premise, and you can design something that allows that but still lets people be immersed, then you’ll be on to something.

  • To the people saying you couldn’t get people to do this, have you ever played DarkFall? Some guy convinced a load of others that he was their king! Guilds would pay tax to the ‘Hyperion Kingdom’ in turn for his protection. He had people on horses literally just patrolling the borders of hia land. Like Keen says, if you give the people tools to do something, they might just well do it.

  • I want One Piece in MMO form. I was hoping that Allods would be it but that game got ruined.