Normally adrift is about rpgs that we
will never run, in this case I'm going with complicated computer RPG
that I will never create.
I don't have a great relation ship with
MMO's, I know lots of people who put a lot of hours in on them,
playing multiple characters to max level. My experiences have been
different, I usually play for a while, get about a quarter of the way
through the level grind, get bored and move on. The only MMO that I
played to max level was Guild Wars 2, and there is probably a good
blog post in what GW2 does right. Despite having never enjoyed an MMO
long term I have had enough good experiences that sometimes I get
that hankering, I hear about a game, or just decide I need to level
something up. The lure of building a character up over time dances
just at the edge of reason and I download some tedius free to play.
But in general I'm looking for a more condensed experience.
Early on when I was telling my friends
about League of Legends I described it as having a character that you
level up and buy gear for over the course of 40 mintues, a hyper
accelerated diablo. But League really isn't that, it is a twitch pvp
game with some rpg elements, but it got me thinking, what if the
super fast rpg did exist? What would it look like? The one hour MMO.
The base idea is that you do all the
things you do in an MMO over the course of a single hour. You get a
fresh character at level 1, and over the course of the next hour you
explore, adventure and level up. At the end of the hour the world
resets and you do it all over again. Speedrunning for MMOs. The fact
that each game you are going from 0 to max level means that you can
play with your friends without worrying about who is what level.
So how do you make a game like that
interesting and not frustrating? I think you make it incredibly
difficult. Kind of like a dark souls situation. The world would be
mostly static with set world bosses, dungeons and locations. There
would be some randomness in creature spawns perhaps, but in general a
person should be able to get better at a particular dungeon or
location over time. I would set some kind of crazy goal to 'win' the
game. The world is destroyed over and over reborn in fire and
monsters, but if all the world bosses are defeated everyone on the
server gets a 'win'. There would be a ton of mini bosses scattered
around a piles of achievements. Even though the game experience is
only an hour, there would be lots of goals that persist on your
account. Who will be the first person to kill one of every mob, or
complete all the dungeons?
There would be tons of highly
specialized classes. As you play and complete goals you unlock more
classes that you can play in future worlds. Maybe some classes would
even be specialized for defeating certain world bosses or whatnot.
There would be specialized gathering and crafting classes. Of course
that means that there is gathering and crafting.
Gathering and crafting would be
different than most MMO's there would be no market or gold economy to
speak of. As you gathered materials they would either go to your
personal inventory for crafting or more likely materials just
instantly go into a global bank of resources anyone can craft out of.
If you are in a guild maybe your materials all go to the guilds bank.
Probably there would be an xp buff for sending your resources to the
global bank. There would be of course be tiers of resources, and
unlocking classes would allow you to gather more epic resources.
Maybe some percentage of the resources you harvest would persist into
your next games bank, so if you were a crafter you don't 100 % have
to depend on other people gathering.
Crafting would be stolen from my friend
Chris's table top version of an MMO, swordsphere. Basically in
addition to basic materials there would be a mat called essences.
Essence drops rarely when you kill a monster, bosses and mini bosses
drop unique essences. There are no set crafting recipes, so you
wouldn't be able to look up the stuff on wiki and know how to build
everything. Maybe there are some basic set recipes, like making a
sword is the same for everyone. But if you throw essences or other
random mats in while crafting you have a chance to create a unique
magic item. You take a sword and throw a swamp essence in, maybe a
hamburger, and if you get a lucky roll you get the Misty sword of
condiments. It has a chance to proc swamp based effects or hamburger
based effects. Most of the time when experimenting you won't get
anything, but when you do you get a unique recipe that belongs only
to you, so as long as the mats are in the bank you can make that
sword all day.
There are no shops and you don't have
to return to town to shop. So if you are out adventuring and you see
someone crafted the burger sword in the trading window you can get
it. Weapons would have level requirements, and there would be a way
for crafters to see what kinds of items are on the most wanted list.
Classes might be extremely specialized,
each one with only one weapon type, or a set of spells, or damage
type. I could see it like an inverted branching pyramid where you
unlock the two classes under a particular class to unlock it.
So I would see the game working
something like this. I log on and get into a pre world lobby. That
lobby lists all the classes that everyone else has picked already. I
see that nobody is gathering wood yet, so I pick woodcutter. None of
my other friends are on, so I'm ok gathering this game. The world
boots up and I wander into the woods and have a chill stardew valley
like experience chopping down trees, fighting wandering beasts and
stacking logs in the bank. Maybe I see someone crafted a unique
chopping axe, so I pick that up. I earn xp toward lumberjack, and
ranger which are both advanced classes that can gather wood. Maybe if
I have played a shaman before I can get unlock points toward druid.
Another night three of my friends are
on, so we all get set to roll with a tank dps healer trio, and make a
run on a minor boss that none of us has killed before. We meet some
people who are going for a world boss raid, go on the raid with them
and get destroyed because we don't have the right kinds of damage etc
for it. Getting a 'win' on a world would require several guilds
working together each going after a different world boss. You would
have to farm the proper mini bosses to feed the crafters the right
essences to build their unique epics. You could have a fun hour doing
whatever random thing you want, but the hardcore crowd also has their
super challenges.
Sorry for the random brain spill on
this one, wasn't sure how to start eating the elephant on this one.
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