Zyviel wrote:To use an analogy, the veteran player would be the power equivalent of Batman while the new player would be power equivalent of Robin. The veteran would be more powerful but the new player would be strong enough to jump in and contribute as well.
Contrary! Robin turned into the most violent form of the Joker! He almost owned Batman! Haha i'm just kidding (even though it did happen).
Now that we have all these great ideas going... You want to start making a game with this? LOL
Achilles wrote:Contrary! Robin turned into the most violent form of the Joker! He almost owned Batman! Haha i'm just kidding (even though it did happen).
Now that we have all these great ideas going... You want to start making a game with this? LOL
LoL! I didn't know that about Robin. As far as making a game I think alot of people here are making an attempt at that including me. I am currently working on a browser based strategy game that will try to incorporate these principles.
hallsofvalhalla with the tutorials and website has provided inspiration and guidance on how to approach this so hopefully, I can create something that will be fun and encourages team work and community.
The game will be a fantasy based sword and sorcery strategy game. When a new player starts he will be given a small personal map with a starting city. This personal map will be where the player learns the game without fear of being attacked. Once the player has learned his way around on his tutorial player map he can send armies and settlers to the contested map. Anything on the contested map will be open to attack and destruction.
You can move armies around on the map and these armies are made up of units. Units are the basic military units and could be a unit of pikemen, archers, calvary, mages, etc.. The units will have health points and if all health points are lost the unit will die. The units can be healed and will receive exp from winning battles. There will also be heroes, and if they are in an army they take up one unit slot. There will be a gold, food and in some cases a mana upkeep charge for each unit in your employ.
Units and heroes and can be outfitted with swords, shields, armor and rings. I plan to let players craft these items and choose from a multitude of magical bonuses to put on them. There will be resources to use to make cities, troops and equipment. The resources you can accumulate will be gold, metals, wood, stone, food, and mana.
If a unit or hero dies the equipment will be lost. The winning side may be able to salvage some of the resources from the equipment of lost units and heroes. If better equipment is given to the units or heroes then what they were wearing can only be salvaged and can not be moved to another unit. I also plan to create a trading post/auction house for people to buy and sell items and resources.
There will be guilds and alliances so people can band together. Resources and items can be transferred from player to player. Players will also be able to reinforce each others cities. The cities will have a population and that population will grow over time. The more people in a city the more production that city will have. The production can be divided between housing (for population growth), farming, making trade goods, building and upgrading structures in the city, and producing military units.
There will be non player cities with roaming armies and also roaming monsters that will be controlled by the computer and will be hostile to all players. There will be resources spread out on the map that players can control and harvest. The player will have to leave units to guard those resources. A player can build a mine or a castle on a map square but not both.
Although it was mentioned a few posts back, I would like to chime in on my feelings towards voice chat in MMORPGs. I actually like voice chat to not be included in game. For events where you really do need it, such as challenging raids and organized PvP events, Ventrilo is easy enough to set up and use. But when it is built into the game, players will want to use it more, and for me, that just breaks the fiction of the setting. In text chat, you can actually experiment and be a bit more than you really are in real life. You can experiment with different personalities, and it all feels more abstract as well, helping people who are typically more shy or self-conscious to interact. Voice chat in social situations just breaks all of that down and leaves people to do nothing but fall neatly into the same social roles they fill in the real world. The obnoxious laugher is the obnoxious laugher. The shy person who says "ummm" all the times is going to be the same as well. I play MMOs to live in another world, and voice chat just brings in screaming back to reality for me.
I agree with your preference for text chat. I remember using the voice chat programs when I played WoW and DAoC and it really felt like I was listening to a radio station. A radio station whose format was focused on the game I was playing but still felt like a radio station. Voice chat fits right in with a FPS dealing with modern or futuristic settings, but for me it doesn't fit with the sword and sorcery setting.
Very interesting system, however it is also very complicated. There are so many different variables associated with the game. Different units, heroes, armies, cities, skills, items, looting, money system... and many of those branching off to other sub components. That is a lot of work needed to be done - hope you're not working on that alone lol
Haha Jackolantern is right. Having reality scream back at you on your 'escape' is quite annoying sometimes.
