Concept: Multiple Gameplay Modes

[Daerim]

Ever wish that city managament played like Sim City? Been commanding a defensive bane and wished you could group and control your guards like an RTS? Always wondered why you couldn't break into someone's house and rob them blind Thief-style?

That's the kind of thing I'm suggesting here, multiple different gameplay modes that function at the same time, in the same world and can have an impact on each other. While you're playing Thief on someone's life savings, the person playing Sim City for the town is getting crimewave reports, ect.

I've basically identified a few core systems that can make certain aspects of the game more interesting and fun. The two big ones are Sim City and Real Time Strategy games. Others like Thief, profession related mini-games, dating simulators, Duck Hunt and everything and anything else concievable would add to the things to do in game without structuring quests or requiring tedious mob slaughtering. More people in game doing things means more people to kill or otherwise interact with, keeping the PvPers happy while entertaining the less bloodthirsty types.

Sim City
Perhaps not micromanagement of individual assets, but things like city planning, service management, resource gathering, trade, infastructure maintenance and disaster management can all fall under this catagory. Actions carried out at this level would be represented in game by NPCs going about their tasks. Trade would be represented by NPC trade caravans traveling from city to city (giving players something to attack and defend) while the same happens when gathering resources from a mine. Service management puts guards on the streets and firefighters at your house when the meteor hits as a random disaster. Constructing buildings is done by NPCs but can be prolonged or sped up by player intervention. It could even introduce an entire skill set or character class, the spy, who could sneak into an enemy city and keep tabs on their city management actions. This would also be an excellent way to introduce quest-like systems such as natural disasters, hostile NPC encampments and other such scripted events.

Real Time Strategy
Ok, so you've got guards at a siege... so what? Group them up, march them out in formation and engage the offensive army's military units for the fate of your city! Getting a bird's eye view of the surrounding battlefield with simplified characters and the ability to control friendly NPCs gives a siege commander a whole new level of involvement and play. Setting waypoints that the entire guild can see ties them into the player efforts and maneuvering the NPC assets to assist and compliment players adds another layer to sieges that doesn't exist currently. Random events where small armies of mobs invade guild territory can give it a mini-game feel as well. Supply depots and trains, marching orders (have to get the army to your enemy's city), useful NPC commanders and morale management can give non-commander players targets and impact points for useful non-combat skills such as propaganda and assassination. Perhaps even include a tactical level and let players take command of small units, adding to their character model and gaining bonuses and restrictions from a simplified "unit as equipment/buff" mechanic. Keeping the commander character model in the standard game and only sluggishly controllable from the RTS user interface makes assassination a key and effective occupation.



Now, of course this is only a very rough concept and is obviously constrained by system and engine capabilities, but I think it would be a giant leap forward in MMO design if it incorporated more than just the basic and classic user interface game model.

[Daerim]

Another concept that grew out of the same discussions as the above:

Mob Control
Mobs are dumb and boring to slaughter over and over again, but they wouldn't be if they were controlled by other players. Have a zone set aside where some of the mobs can be co-opted by players and then played with their own power set. This makes farming and other PvE activities much more interesting because the mobs you're killing have the most powerful AI currently available. A lower general power than a player character and useful tactical advantages (such as sharing LoS or minimap info with other mobs) would make the option something other than overwhelming while at the same time making it interesting and fun for the mob players.

As an outgrowth of that basic concept, including instanced 'instant action' teamplay adventures where one team plays their usual characters while the other plays the mobs of a map would be interesting. Play as mobs could unlock more advanced powers both in the mob and normal game modes as well as both sides recieving what amounts to a ladder rank. This would prevent exploitation by giving diminishing returns for farming your alts. Also, giving more points to players in random match-ups would both offer more legitimate ranking values but also encourage conflict.

[Awakened]

I hate mobs. How much time is spent on developing and programming mobs? How much server resources do they drain? In the absence of mobs you could spend more time creating tools for player created content, as well as a world that could substain a much larger population.

The multi-game mode idea is good, but not really new, it's alreay beeen attempted a few times. I think it's something that we'll see in the not-to-distant future.

[cornholio]

I hate mobs. How much time is spent on developing and programming mobs?

lol I hope not that much! twould be a sad day indeed to learn that any significant time was spent on the development of sb's mob AI. Unless all the people who did that work are now long gone from the industry....

[Wrathh]

What a glorious idea Daerim. Props.

This game would sell a trillion copies simply because it would span so many genre's. It would provide the most challenging and adaptive ai in each one of those genres, other people.

I would pay a thousand dollars for a copy of a game like you just described, that worked with little or no bugs. I would spend this because the replay value would take me to my death.

[Daerim]

In addition, this opens up a whole new world of possibilities for character abilities in the meta arena.

Magic users are no longer restricted to nuking, healing and buffing, they can now perform weather magic to assist or harm farming and trade, divine blessings to bolster morale and suppress crime, even the standard magical abilities to heal, nuke or cast status effects available at the unit scale. Imagine a spell called Earthquake that not only causes some damage to RTS-scale units and individual players, but also causes widespread damage to a city as well.

Rogues unlock underworld-specific Sim City variants, the ability to spy and access city management records, even the ability to give a city manager false reports about what's going on in the city.

Warriors could unlock advanced RTS options such as formations and unit training, in-field RTS interface use, even social abilities that let them influence both their own and enemy commander's npc troops... even allowing them to convince the npcs to switch sides.

[CorrEL]

I totally agree with you in these great ideas and hope that SBG takes real consideration of them.

[Kalico]

E
Real Time Strategy
Ok, so you've got guards at a siege... so what? Group them up, march them out in formation and engage the offensive army's military units for the fate of your city! Getting a bird's eye view of the surrounding battlefield with simplified characters and the ability to control friendly NPCs gives a siege commander a whole new level of involvement and play. Setting waypoints that the entire guild can see ties them into the player efforts and maneuvering the NPC assets to assist and compliment players adds another layer to sieges that doesn't exist currently. Random events where small armies of mobs invade guild territory can give it a mini-game feel as well. Supply depots and trains, marching orders (have to get the army to your enemy's city), useful NPC commanders and morale management can give non-commander players targets and impact points for useful non-combat skills such as propaganda and assassination. Perhaps even include a tactical level and let players take command of small units, adding to their character model and gaining bonuses and restrictions from a simplified "unit as equipment/buff" mechanic. Keeping the commander character model in the standard game and only sluggishly controllable from the RTS user interface makes assassination a key and effective occupation.





The way-points for guild members is an exceptional concept. The RTS aspect with the guards would have the GL focus on NPCs rather than one's guild members. In which case if the implementation of said Originally Posted by FluxRoC
and then finally i like the guild voting system where a bad leader can literally be overthrown. this one needs to be in all guild based games. would be put to good use. Obviously a little exagerated, however I think that if a leader was able to assign someone the ability to do that, then thats fine.

If I were a guild member I wouldn't want my leader to be pre-occupied with NPC's rather than giving commands. Eh whatever.

[Daerim]

It wouldn't have to be the guild leader, of course. It could be an assigned capacity like you just suggested, it could require certain abilities or even something as simple as ownership of the Guard Captain NPC.

In the original concept work most of this was taken from, there were four base classes (Fighter, Magic User, Social, Rogue) and three tiers of powers (Basic, Advanced, Meta) available to each class. Basic was available to most everyone (but more expensive outside your own) but you had to choose between your class' Meta line or the ability to multiclass into another's Advanced line (so you could have Basic+Advanced+Meta or Basic+Advanced1+Advanced2). Meta abilities included RTS-style powers for Fighters, large scale magical effects (weather magic, strategic-level combat magic, nation-wide blessings, ect) for Magic Users, Sim City type controls over player cities and the inter-nation trade system for the Social types and then spymaster and underworld Sim City control for the Rogue meta line.

So using that as a rough model, it wouldn't be at all unreasonable to require a high level Warrior or other fighter/leader type to command the troops. Perhaps some relatively generally available powers or a Discipline-like requirement. Using Shadowbane as an example, maybe you would have to be a Fighter baseclass character with the Commander Discipline and you could only group Guards into groups of no more than your Leadership/10 units. Or maybe it would be a granted position like Tax Collector is right now, it could be called Warmaster, Master of Guards or Garrison Commander. Maybe its available to anyone that owns a Barracks and the controls could be integrated into the mini-map and/or an actual RTS interface.

Also, all things considered, it might not be a terrible idea to have your over-all battle commander looking at things from an RTS point of view, especially if he can utilize NPC line of sight to see enemies coming. This could also serve as the core of the Defender's Advantage or be extended to the attackers, letting them drag units of troops with them from their city. That gives scouts more to do and mimicing the marches from the rolling treb days, which might encourage defenders to be more aggressive.

[KayleeM]

I hate mobs. How much time is spent on developing and programming mobs? How much server resources do they drain? In the absence of mobs you could spend more time creating tools for player created content, as well as a world that could substain a much larger population.


The issue with removing NPCs / minimizing NPC development is the whole phenomenon of "Hrm, server pop is low right now and there is no PvP.... what to do?" Remove the NPCs and you run a serious risk of there being absolutely NOTHING to do if not a lot of people are logged on.

I also hate mobs... as they are stereotypically introduced in MMO's nowadays. However, did anyone ever play Return to Castle Wolfenstien? The AI that is behind the enemies in that game is, to put it mildly, sick. The enemy learns your patterns, calls for help, doubles around back behind you if it sees you and you don't see it, hides just around the corner (up against the wall) and tosses a grenade at just the right moment...etc. If MORE effort was put into the AI behind NPC's, they could easily become something that is actually fun to interact with. NPC raids on your city, NPCs that hunt YOU, NPCs that gain levels and powers as time goes on, NPCs that loot your body and use your gear when you get killed by them...etc.

[Daerim]

I'm pretty sure that the Final Fantasy MMO has mobs loot gear just lying on the ground. If that's possible then it can't be much of a step to start having them loot corpses, either player or other mob.

Perhaps add some kind of aggro meta-tag to the mobs? So Reekor could be meta-tagged to Player:KayleeM, which activates the 'Wolfenstein' AI scheme while MobCamp:Grobolds could be meta-tagged to City:KayleeMTown, causing them to activate the 'CityRaid' AI scheme? Perhaps limit the special aggro tags to certain camps or mobs (so Grobold B doesn't hunt you and the camp with three r0 Frost Spiders doesn't invade your city)? That way traditional farming and leveling would still be possible, it would just get really interesting if you were to catch meta-aggro without realizing it. Higher level zones could have whole camps of meta-aggro capable mobs. It might even serve as a cloak for player-controlled mobs if that were to also be put in, so that mobs 'acting strangely' didn't immediately single themselves out as player controlled.

Of course, I have no idea the coding feasability of any of this, I'm just throwing out ideas I've either come up with on my own or through were neat in other games.

[Chadwick]

It would be cool, but I suspect it's hard enough developing one game, let alone several simultaneously.

[Heindelkin]

I could see them bringing aspects from each type of game into it but it won't be as in depth has players would hope.