I've been revisiting alot of the old games I used to play so much of on Byond, hoping to recapture the magic of those first few months. What I've found is that things just aren't so much fun anymore, wether by code changes, elitism by the higher level players, decentralized playerbase (no main server, dozens of single-player fly-by-night servers), a lack of new players, or a lack of ANY players.

Going to a new game seems to be just a rehash of the old ideas with very little innovation. It's not just the copies/rips, where many claim to be the first or the original, or have permission or whatever, it's not just that. It's the same ideas that the 'owner' of that game liked, with nothing good to wrap it all up nicely into.

I've been thinking for a very long time about what I like in different games, the things that I keep thinking about that I loved from the past games. I've also seen what keeps new players coming in and keeps them playing months later. I'm not the only one with some ideas. I'd like to jump-start a discussion that will hopefully result in something wonderful for us all. I'm unsure if this should be in this forum, but it certainly doesn't belong in the Classifieds as I'm not trying to form or join a team.



Player Customization. What I think made Seika so much fun was the customization and item crafting available. There was a sense of creating something unique. The same customization is something that made a handful of the zeta rips like Rebirth such great games, if only for a short time. You could tweak your characters to make them unique when compared to other player's characters.

Item Customization. When you look at Diablo or World of Warcraft, you see an endless amount of equipment that you can customize your character with.

Grinding. No one likes grinding for stats/levels just so they can compete with other players. There must be a way to gain experience that does not force the player to grind. Zeta had its punching bags. Heroes United had its grav training for str/def just so you can do ANY damage to an npc. There eventually comes a time when every player is much stronger than any npc in the game. This is true in many different games. At this point, the only thing that the player can do to keep busy is to climb the never-ending staircase to surpass the strength of all the other players.

Economy. If everything is forever, eventually nothing is worth much. Items should degrade over time, but give people the ability to repair these items somehow. Don't force the players to rely on NPCs, but also don't make it possible for a player to completely ignore other players.

Character Abilities. Many games divide characters into classes, with each class restricted in their potential abilities and strengths in certain directions. This limits customization. If you go too far in the other direction and allow any character to use any ability, you get a cookie-cutter effect. Eventually you figure out which abilities are best to use for the character type you want to make, and you maximize those abilities. Give the player too much freedom in customization and everyone becomes a clone of one another, because that's the only type of character that can compete with other characters.

There should be limits to what strength a character can gain, but this limit should only be a realistic limit. If a player pushes hard enough, he should be able to surpass this limit. Truly dedicated players will see no literal wall between themselves and infinity, but with greater strength comes a greater length of time required for further improvement. There should always be a challenge ingame to really test the player's ability to play the game, not just a test of the stats the player's character has.

Character re-rolling. Sometimes you just get bored with your current character, but restarting seems to be a big step backwards, or a waste of time. In Star Wars Galaxies, you could choose a new set of stats. Over time, your character would grow into this new statistical layout.

HUD customization. Not everyone will agree with what should be displayed, how it should be displayed, and where it should be located. You can see in World of Warcraft with all the User Interface modifications available that HUD customization is something that everyone loves. I'd love to someday see a game that feels that customizable. While you can't let the player modify things on their end, you could give them a lot of options ingame. Create a customizable HUD that can display anything the player can think of, in any way that the game currently supports and in any spot on the screen the player chooses. Create a Tab that contains only the information that the player chooses to have in it. If it's the same data that everyone else has access to, why not allow the player to customize how they see that data, within the confines of the game? Beauty is in the eye of the mouse holder.

High-Level immunity. All players, in a pvp encounter, should be theoretically defeatable by anyone. This does not mean that you have a good chance to beat someone 100 times stronger just because you know what you're doing and he doesn't. I'm saying that there should still be a small possibility of scoring a hit, doing some damage, having an effect on a stronger opponent. In D&D this was portrayed as the critical hit and critical miss chance. No matter how skilled you were, there was always the chance that you would screw something up, or that the other character would get lucky and land a hit on you. This chance of you being defeated would increase with more people attacking you, as you would eventually be unable to keep healing the damage that you were taking.

Pretty colors with no substance to back it up. What makes a great game isn't just good icons and an idea. Fancy animations and good looks attract players for a short time, but a game that's good in all aspects will keep those players, who will then tell more people about your game. You'll get the curious people who see it on the hub, and you'll get the friends of already existing players who will simply beg for the chance to play this awesome game they heard about.



I want this to start some discussion about what makes a game a good game.