While playing in the new Thousand Needles zone in World of Warcraft, Graev and I thought of a neat idea for a MMORPG. In 1k Needles, as I mentioned in the adventure log entry below this one, you get command of your own boat that you sail around the zone. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a MMORPG based around your boat? We thought that a great inspiration could be The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and even this implementation of boat usage in WoW. WoW certainly demonstrates that it is possible to pull these off on even the simplest technological level.
Personally, I think the best implementation would be into a sandbox style game. The world would be comprised of innumerable islands and even continents that you can sail your boat through via river inlets. Again, the idea is that your character is centered around your boat. You might disembark to go on adventures (That wouldn’t be instanced, tyvm PotBS) but you end up going back to your boat to continue onward. Your boat could actually dock and be visible or disappear like it does in WoW. It doesn’t ruin my immersion any if the boat disappears and it also makes it technologically feasible. It would be ideal if your boat was still where you left it but phased and only visible to you and your party members.
The great part about it being a sandbox is that you would have that “roaming around” feel that is often lost in themepark games that tend you lead you around linearly. Although less awesome, a themepark implementation could easily work as well. Just takes 1k Needles and expound upon it. Quest-driven island hopping works.
The boat could serve several purposes. 1) Transport. 2) Player Housing. 3) Player Crafting (portable shop anyone?). 4) A source of character progression. 5) PvP/PvE as you’re able to fight with it too if you wish. Guilds could form armadas and take territory. I think about DAOC but with boats here. I’m also thinking EverQuest or WoW but centered around boats. That should help the creative juices and visualization start to flow. Take those games and twist them to revolve around a boat and you get the idea.
Once you get the concept of a big open ocean of a world with archipelagos, small continent, islands, and the like, you can start to visualize guild controlled islands and islands that you said to in order to find rare materials or places to visit where you know certain quests or mobs might be hiding. I think the idea lends itself greatly to all types of players, whether they be explorers, achievers, killers, or socializers (imagine owning a barge turned into a bar).
Someone take the idea and make a MMORPG, please.
Water world MMO?
You’re making me miss my Vanguard boats
sorta like what PotBS could have been then eh? The same idea, but without the loading screens between the overmap and the ports/combat situations.
@Untos: Vanguard did have good boats.
@Gali: It’s what I imagined PotBS being before I played it.
I’d try it.
I wonder if Arche Age will have a decent boat game attached.
Hmmm eve online on boats? 😛
I believe what you’re looking for already exists … Uncharted Waters … http://global.netmarble.com/uwo/
Do more than look at the site .. its a pretty deep and engaging game. Sandbox-ish .. easy to get lost in.
I’ve seen that before Old Tom. It looks decent, but more like Pirates of the Burning Sea.
I guess I’m looking for a more fully realized experience where it’s less like EVE (Where YOU ARE the boat) and more like WoW, EQ, DAOC, etc, where you are still your avatar but participating on the boat as though it were your house. I’m also wanting a more fully developed title with that special sparkle of high budget polish. I know that sounds like I’m asking for a lot, but it’s nothing more than what we already get in common themepark games.
Looked at uncharted waters. All i can say is that i definitely want to play the “Trade-Type” class, because “Investing in villages to rake in the big gucks!” sounds like my dream job.
Sign me up! I’ll help with the art design 🙂
The problem is water gets very boring to look at after awhile. I guess the world enviroment would be easy to do, just one big blue thing.
I think an in depth water portion built into a MMO would be a better idea. Think about a Sandbox MMO where you have people who live inland, and people who live entirely at sea. You could develop entire cities that use trade routes that depend on one another.
It would either be very difficult to explain expansions feasibly or incredibly easy, depending on how much you care about maintaining a suspension of disbelief.
“Hey, this patch of water I sailed over a billion times last week is now a fully-thriving uhh…sea-kobold fortress or…something. I wonder how I missed that?”
Personally, I loved finishing something up in Wind Waker and setting out to sea again with that sweet inspirational daytime sailing music. It got me every time.
If there’s one thing I don’t think MMOs have done very well in a very long time is give players a REAL sense of exploration of the unknown. It seems to me like sea-faring titles would lend themselves well to this, but I don’t know if it’s what a mainstream audience would want. Still, there’s a lot to be said for niche gaming.
I think you are looking for Puzzle Pirates with a couple of small changes. Player owned islands, your own boats, traveling around archipelagos looking for resources, pirate fighting, skellie infested islands, player run economy and puzzling to make it all go. No quests. It is a bit dated now, but was great fun.
Wait.
Sandbox game with boats, naval combat?
Uhm, Darkfall? Darkfall has come a long way with its naval component and they seem to be adding to it with every expansion. Its a much different game than the one that launched.
@Esloan: Don’t bother reading the post at all. Just insert “Darkfall already has that”. *facepalm* The idea is a game based entire around the life on your boat, not shooting magic missiles in the air or swimming against a wall.
@Kotton: See, maybe Puzzle Pirates has some of the qualities but it’s not the type of game I’m talking about. You wouldn’t say “Puzzle Pirates is like WoW” or “Puzzle Pirates is like UO”. I would want this game to actually be like those but centered around your boat.
I did read the post, thanks for your concern Keen!
I simply stated that Darkfall does allow for much of what you want in its current form, albeit with some compromises and with the new meditation system the afk-macro’ing should be a lot less common.
Darkfall has its problems, no doubt, but it is slowly becoming a very good game, at least if you are into that style of game.
keen, I didn’t play wind walker or the new wow expo, but here’s what i’m thinking when i read your ‘boat adventure mmo’.
Remember the high level zones in (vanilla) DAOC? I’m thinking Vanern, Skona, Raumarik, Dartmoor, Lyonesse, etc. Also, the frontiers. These were in my mind “adventure zones”.
You went there faced with a high risk/reward. On one hand you could hunt good mob camps with +xp bonus but you would face the risk of dying and your adventure would pretty much be over for that day, since you would respawn far away.
In your idea, the boat is your home, your respawn, your safe zone (to some extent), and your mount. Sailing to different areas (not just “GENERIC INSTANCE 1”) you would go ashore seeking monsters/treasure/resources/whatever… the longer you had to venture inland, the higher the risks and the higher the rewards.
Imagine a situation where it would take you RL days to get to a camp/node/dungeon… days not just of walking, but of fighting through mobs, solving quests, getting faction. Then you’d do what you came for, hopefully collect your reward and try getting back to your boat with the treasure intact. That would create opportunities for epic adventures with a band of friends.
Re-imagine the standard MMO Raid as an Adventure. You log in to go hard-core raiding 4 times a week playing 4 hour sessions, what if you had the same hard core people having to spend 4 hours 4 days a week, not in an instanced loot pinyata, but in the ACTUAL world?
i think that would be marvelous.
oh and i wanted to add that today, MMOs kinda say “well, if you die, you should be able to go back doing whatever you were before within 5 minutes tops”
Wasn’t Allods Online supposed to be this with your airships? In that high level zone? How’d that ever turn out?
dblade,
probably, but nobody I know stuck around or forked over the cash to find out.
@Pierre: That would be my dream game Pierre. Let’s make it!
@Dblade: The ships were fantastic, to an extent. They weren’t quite as free form as I would want in a new game, and they required you to have an entire crew of real players (which was awesome. I got to play around with them a little in beta. As Gali said, few if any stuck around.
Star Trek online
Ships are spaceships
Islands are planets
though, after 4 months of playing it, I got pretty bored. Hopefully your Sailing MMO can learn what NOT to do from STO
sweet. start a design thread on the forums 🙂
@Lupy
It was probably how it was done, but spaceships seem as though they would always be more interesting than seafaring ships. Space is infinite and the “rules” of believabilty are much looser, so you can create more interesting worlds. If this was say a Waterworld MMO it would get old much faster due to the lack of available design varations.
It would work in space too, if you could actually be inside your ship flying it and could actually fly down to planets and off of them as though they were real in side and interactivity.
While its generally ignored/reviled for its admittedly wretched graphics, Wurm Online has a pretty robust boat building/ship system.
Ships, depending on size, has pretty extensive storage capability. In fact, colonization of the far wilds in Wurm is made much easier by water than overland. Pioneers can bring essential supplies that are more difficult to make in the wild with them to jumpstart a frontier community.
Getting lost in Wurm is also a very key concern .. though the availability of online maps of the continents and the use of compass (pretty easy to make but it still has to be made).
Wurm as it currently exists doesn’t come close to Keen’s vision. But there is talk of allowing people to host and develop custom kingdom’s (kind of like Minecraft servers). Talk about a sandbox.
I would love a game with a system like this but with a themepark system.
Sandbox games aren’t that interesting to me. EVE is the only decent one.
Keen, IMO Allods was the game that had one of the best ship systems and how it integrated seamlessly with more traditional MMO systems.
If an MMO as you suggest could exist it could perfectly reconcile a sandbox feel with some theme park islands. I don’t know why no one managed to make a decent navigation themed MMO with these IPs being proven as profitable by other entertainment industries (Pirates of the Caribbean movies, One Piece manga, etc…).