[gameprogrammer] Re: MMO Idea



There are many reasons why games are the way the are. One is that people
*want* to be self reliant individuals with personal accomplishments. The
other is that people with enough scope of imagination to create a new
fantasy concept only come along a few times in a generation.

Bob Pendleton

Bob has a point. There already exist online games which do have a type of corporate structure. Ultima Online was first with the "the only NPC's will be storekeepers!" bit and the much hyped "virtual economy." So you had people sit around mining all day, or dying clothes, or making armor. Boring. The corporate structure in UO was the Guild.

The game you should try immediately is EVE-online, as I see this matching your aspirations fairly closely. EVE gives you built-in player controlled corporations. You can buy blueprints and with enough minerals, build your own ships and gear, to use or to sell. It has a real time, player controlled market where prices are set by player's puts and calls. To top it off you can get into huge fleet battles between corporations. Sounds cool huh. Yeah I think so too, and EVE could have been a great game, but for one fatal flaw: you only control one ship. So everything you do in the game, you have to sit around and wait. Wait to fly from sector a to sector b 16 hops away. Wait to get to an asteroid belt, then wait a LONG time (30 mins to 2 hours, depending) to mine minerals, then wait to get it back to a base to sell to get money. I played it for a while, then realized that the mining was boring. The combat was boring, and the entire game was generally boring. Serious players would compensate by buying multiple accounts and playing them simultaneously. Add to that the fact that a new player could never catch up, both because of the "old money" that players had, and the fact that there was a time based skill learning system. As a new player to the game, with no hope of catching up or even becoming a player that could effect the world in some way, it was daunting and effectively put me off the game.

Moving on to the cross genre stuff, its something that I call a "vertically integrated game universe". This has been done to some extent with tactical "RTS" tools on top of 3d action games (Tribes, Allegiance, Uberspace?). There's Derek Smart's "Universal Combat", that I'll mention without comment. *cough* There's some amount of group strategy in games like EVE and Planetside on top of the trading and war games. Or you have Grand Theft Auto et al that are driving games but also 3rd person shooters. Or RPG-FPS fusions. But most of these are just genre fusions rather than completely vertically integrated game universes. I think it is an ambitious idea, but I also think it can be made to work, but developers will go about it in the wrong way. I wouldn't expect it to work. At best you'd get something like Universal Combat. Ambitious idea, that kind of does what it claims, but since it tries to encompass everything, everything is just so thin.

To be completely frank, you sound like every one of us probably did when we embarked on this path: huge ambitions, stratospheric dreams, and convinced that they have the best game idea ever and somewhat resentful of the skepticism of others.

I'm convinced that there's wisdom had by those who say start small, find a good game idea that's fun and add to it. Find a diamond, and add whatever cruft you want to it. That way at least you'll have a cruft encrusted diamond. If you just take cruft and put it together without having that nugget of fun, you'll just get a ball of cruft.

Even working on a non-game project right now, the amount of work it takes to get from demo to full product is astounding. And its mostly tedious, dull, non-fun work. If you're serious about the not-for-profit and learning stuff, just open source your project. Much better chances for contributors, and success.






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