Hey all I was contemplating working on a new M(M)ORPG based somewhat off of Heaven and Hearth if anyone has heard of it. I tried going back to play that but the lag is horrible and makes it almost unplayable. I have yet to find another game even somewhat similar to it besides Topia online(and that looks like it could tank).
This game would be a permadeath survival world. You literally have to try to survive and this includes eating and foraging for food. Eventually you can work your way up to claiming land and building on it. You would generally start out with a small hovel type building and put a bed in it to restore stamina while your offline. The player essentially would try to work up to joining other players to form a town and later on a nation possibly.
The main focus as said is just trying to stay alive and the "generic" monsters most games have would be non-existent. Things like wolves, foxes, bears, etc would be the only violent creatures in the game which all provide food as well. Players would be allowed to PvP as well but combat would generally be avoided because of the permanent death penalty. Crafting and surviving would be the major focus of the game.
The permanent death would result in the player returning to either a menu or a starting room to remake their character. The only things that might be saved would be some % of LP(learning points) if a character decided to use the previous character that died as an ancestor.
Does this sound like an interesting idea to anyone? Of course I would try to take some things a lot deeper than this with a complex combat system, and belief type system, etc eventually.
The reason that works in Haven and Hearth so well is because you need to farm up A LOT of learning points to learn murder.
| |
I was thinking about the griefing aspect and there are ways around it. As Lugia said I could make it to where it takes quite a bit of farming LP to actually learn a "murder" skill for PvP. I could also just take PvP out of the game, but that would eliminate a major factor for the end-game. If you live in a town with some other people and have a farm setup with crafters, hunters, etc though there would be no danger at the end game and players would become bored.
I think if I kept it to where it takes a certain amount of time before you can participate in PvP(noobie protection to some extent) and the fact of possible permadeath via retaliation(player ran clan that kills griefers, etc) there would not be to much of a major problem. | |
In EVE Online alliances are able to capture areas by building special structure. It has defenses and someone usually defends it, so it takes 10s or 100s of players to destroy one, making it hard to grief.
Meanwhile even in "safe" areas you can attack other players, but if you do so illegally "police" shows up to kill you. Legal reasons to attack are: he stole your loot, he killed you in the past, your alliances are in war. | |
If you're going to go for Survival RPG, go ahead and shell out a Zombie Survival Game. They're always fun.
| |
Well you could make it so that killing other players doesn't give you a huge reward. Perhaps they would drop all their stuff which could be valuable, but if that is the only reward and if it's dangerous to attack even a completely fresh player, people won't just go around slaughtering noobs.
| |
Yea that's basically the only reward that would be gained is the players loot. I was also thinking after death the players loot cannot be grabbed by anyone but the returning character for fifteen minutes or so(unless the murderer has a steal skill). This was also combated in Haven and Hearth by something called a "scent." When a player committed a "crime(grief)" the player would leave a scent and anyone else with the tracking skill can find this person for so long no matter where they go.
Also why would I make a Zombie survival game those are everywhere :P. | |
Well, I'm not talking about the Resident Evil clones all over the hub right now. I'm talking about something along the lines similar to the Arma II Mod, DayZ. Something where it's actual survival in an open landscape and not standing in a base and shooting zombies that come through the gates.
| |
Solomn Architect wrote:
Well, I'm not talking about the Resident Evil clones all over the hub right now. I'm talking about something along the lines similar to the Arma II Mod, DayZ. Something where it's actual survival in an open landscape and not standing in a base and shooting zombies that come through the gates. I just looked up DayZ and it looks very intriguing. I bought Arma 2 a while back on Steam but it lagged pretty badly on my PC(on high settings) so I uninstalled it. I will have to give this a shot though and try playing on low or medium. I am sure a game like that would be more well received on BYOND than my current plan. I will do some research and thinking on whether I should do something like that instead. Thanks for the tip :). Do you know if anyone else is working on a similar project? | |
Not that I know of. Good zombie survival games take a lot of finesse to finagle properly. Make a few unbalanced calculations and it could spell disaster for your project. Your open world needs to be diverse and dissimilar from every other area. That means no long expanses of nothing but grass with no landmarks. Points of interest for players need to be scattered all over the map, not just horded in one area, leaving a wilderness to never be explored by anything other than your zombie AI's. If the important places (like abandoned grocery stores, shelters, water sources, ect.) are spread out, players will be forced to move around in order to survive. That means slugging through or around zombies, keeping the pace of the game alive.
You'll find that player cooperation becomes very organic and doesn't really require any other drawbacks than the lack of another teammate. Players begin sheltering together and delegate authority such as sending a group to get water, another group to find food or supplies, and the rest to find or fortify an existing shelter. | |
Thanks I checked it out and the game does actually run pretty good on my PC. It is a very good idea, but lacking a few things I would love to see as well. I think I may startup a design plan for a similar game :). Thanks again for the great idea! My main drawback will be getting enough graphics in the project to use on a large open map, and so will need a sprite person to probably help out. Once I get a plan going and a basic engine started for it I will start looking.
| |
In my opinion, there's not enough open-world survival RPGs (sure enough, there are a few already), but they're pretty hard to make in a way that keeps people from doing bad things while still giving them a lot of freedom.