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Comment by hooby | Hacker News Reader

A true "MMORPG".

Back in the day when the genre was new, people were fascinated by the potential of virtual worlds and virtual societies. Social scientists did online studies on player behavior and the interactions people had online, on spontaneous self-governance coming into existence, on how communities formed and developed, and many other similar topics. That potential was never fulfilled.

Today - some twenty years later - the MMORPG has become a genre of checking off boxes and making numbers go up, along a linear way as laid out by the developers for you. Apart from PvP and maybe some forced grouping, most games would play absolutely identical mechanically, if you were playing all alone on your own private server. You'd do the same quests, fight the same enemies, get the same loot. All the other players you get to meet online - they don't actually influence the game mechanics at all.

You play next to each other. Not actually with each other.

I'd like to see a game, where the sum of players (and their interactions) are greater than just the sum of it's parts. A game with a virtual economy, a virtual society, etc. - that advance and evolve in a player-driven fashion. A simulated game world that dynamically adapts. Some glimpses of this sort of thing can be seen in games like EvE. Old games (pre-WoW) like UO and SWG had some of that magic as well - but were marred by limitations of the technology of the day. This kind of stuff has evolved very, very little since then.

I would assume that with today's technology we should be able to get a lot closer to fulfilling that potential.

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The problem is, games like that aren’t fun. It’s been tried.

Imagine coming home from work and hopping online to go do your second job. A virtual economy implies work. And unless there’s something to hook people in, no one wants to do that work.

Hence you end up with the quest grind and the dopamine trail.

If you can find a way out, I imagine it would be very lucrative. But it’s not really a technology problem.

I would argue that this is the exact problem of current modern games. The parent is suggesting something alternative, fun with other people.

Almost every current MMORPG is oriented on getting that virtual cash or other currency up in virtual economy, to make some linear progression for pre-defined ending.

I haven’t been into MMOs in a long time, but years ago, I remember desperately trying to find a good one, but I found that not only do a lot of them have some grindy linear progression, but even worse was it was always so limited. I got sick of games that looked amazing but had basically no content.

Puzzle Pirates was the best game ever for a number of years.

An MMO without experience points or levels. Everything powered by puzzle games. Ships operate by people playing the sailing game, the bilging game, the carpentry game, the gunning game and the navigation game. On a tiny ship a good player can do it on their own by switching rapidly, but almost always, you need a crew of people working together, up to 100+ people on very large ships.

Your skill in the game decides how much you contribute to the ship's performance. To improve, you must actually improve.

Ships can fight other ships (in two minigames, one before boarding and one after), a whole fleet can fight another fleet for control over an island, with 1000+ people involved, in another game.

And the in game economy was really elaborate, and worked well. Again, based on people doing games in jobs.

Of course, people got immensely rich and could buy things you could not. Namely, some colors for clothes and ship paint were much rarer and more expensive than other colors; black came from kraken blood and was most expensive. So you could see who was rich, but it didn't affect gameplay. Of course being able to supply a fleet of ships and thousands of cannon balls to threaten an island did, but only if you could also get hundreds of people working those ships for you.

Wow, thank you for this blast from the past. I remember getting rich enough to own one of the bigger ships and losing it in in a fierce PVP battle. Good times!

Love Ironman mode in RuneScape for this reason. Taking the economy out entirely improves the modern game experience.

Similar to D3 removing the auction house years back

The one way I can see for true MMORPGs, as outlined by the GP, to work, as I can see, is basically having an AGI director to handle arbitrary actions, along with a BCI to actually take those actions.

That’s actually a fascinating idea.

And basically stolen from a certain type of manwa. (Overgeared in this case)

addendum: also infinite dendrogram

I've also been thinking about using small containers in the cloud to basically run NPC lives inside a MMORPG. I thought this would be what New World would bring to the table honestly.

> A virtual economy implies work.

a game called foxhole has attempted this by making Logistics a real portion of the game (as many wars are). Players semi cooperate to collect salvage, build armaments/supplies/bases, and supply the front line. Clans/Guilds self organize to produce pushes into key fronts, provide roving security (people can sneak behind lines and attack logi) .

It's actually mostly fun. Until you see a newb drive a tank that took you hours to procure wildly into the enemy and you rethink how you're living your whole life.

Well it's fun until logistics goes on strike and demands changes: https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/foxhole-players-launch-...

>> It's actually mostly fun. Until you see a newb drive a tank that took you hours to procure wildly into the enemy and you rethink how you're living your whole life.

Wow, this is depressing ... they actually managed to recreate one of things that I hate most about work in real life (that a lot of our hard work goes to waste because of stupidity of others).

The difference between stupidity and genius: stupidity has no limits. — someone

Savage also mixed in RTS so you could have one player play StarCraft while the others were units

I played Tera about 10 years ago, when it was good.

Free market economy, free looting (anyone can get anything) with random distribution, and people could pass on them so the one who needs an item can get it. Everyone could exchange anything person-to-person. It's what made the "mmo" part for me.

There were tons of mechanics that allowed a medium geared person to outdo people with the best gear available - if you invested in crafting, for example, you could craft things that were otherwise unavailable (unless you bought them from someone) and if you used them properly you could smash anyone in PVP and single handedly do 5-7 person dungeons. One mistake and you were dead, though.

I loved the interactions with people. Some of the first moments were one guy who asked to resurrect him, he was just killed by a monster and was like "bro, pls, I don't want to walk all the way here again". So I ressed him, he added me to the friend list, we later went on a lot of hunts and dungeons.

Another time I was sneaking through pvp territory collecting some shit from enemy bases and I got killed by two randoms. They were surprised at my shit gear and said "yo, come back, we'll give you this stuff, we kinda feel bad :D". Went there thinking I'd get killed, but no, they helped and we also became friends.

At some point I was rich and bored and was just running PVP tournaments with my own virtual wealth. People fight, the winner gets 5,000 gold (decent sum) or some gear I had in storage.

Helped a lot of new people gear up, and they helped me.

Dungeons were fun when anyone could enter and re-enter. If someone died, we'd have to be very careful and kite/heal until they come back, and it was a thrill, we liked it. People were thankful for not being called dumb and being kicked. We even gave materials that they needed because they needed it more.

But people have changed these days. The playerbases seem to hate the above mentioned free trade. "oooh, what about real money trading?" "why does he get free gear from his guildmates?" "he gets help, I don't".

You needed to be friendly and work together, and the newcomers just didn't want that. They wanted a single player game with other players in it.

Not to "log in at 7pm EST so we can do X and Y". It wasn't even mandatory in most groups, just log in if you can, apologize if you can't.

But no, people wanted to just log in whenever and work on their own whatever.

Which is exactly what modern MMOs have become. Single player, heavily developer controlled games with a chat.

Not even MMO. I play Apex Legends, a character based BR. There is a ranked mode where each rank have an entry cost and you get points by placement and kills. While it’s a team game, the entry cost was so low that you could play aggressively - killing a few people and dying soon after - or survive by hiding - ratting - and get to a high rank easily. It quickly became a solo game, where people abandon their team to push fights they can’t win, hoping for a few kill, or leaving their teammates in fight they could have win otherwise.

They’ve just changed to a new system where you have to get both high placement and kills in order to rank up. That means relying heavily on your team to win the fights or strategizing rotation around the map. And some people are still complaining about being forced to play as a team in a team based game.

Your experience with TERA is akin to mine. Not only the game was innovative, skill based and overall fun to play, the interaction with other players was like none I had ever experienced.

BTW, did you ever made it to exarch[1] in the alliance? I only made it as far as commander during my time.

[1] https://tera.fandom.com/wiki/Alliance#Exarch

Ha, I tried, but no dice. Too much competition (and people cheating with multiple accounts). Best I got was Assault Commander, but I kinda liked to stay Defense Commander, the buffs could make a good party unkillable :D.

Probably could've when the game started dying, but I lost interest by then. The mass PVP was really fun with hundreds of people, though often laggy.

The combat system (still haven't seen anything like it, the initial devs were brilliant), the scenery (Seeliewoods was fantastic), the decently balanced, prolonged PVP at the time, all the crafting stuff and absolutely free market, plus the early playerbase made the game great even if it did have a repetitive endgame. Oh and there was no region lock so people from all over the world could play, like Guild Wars.

Spent most money on that MMO, ever. But I guess milking people is overall more profitable.

I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.

Kinda why I hate MMOs nowadays, I'd rather have it all on my computer even if I won't play it :D

>The combat system (still haven't seen anything like it, the initial devs were brilliant), the scenery (Seeliewoods was fantastic), the decently balanced, prolonged PVP at the time, all the crafting stuff and absolutely free market, plus the early playerbase made the game great even if it did have a repetitive endgame. Oh and there was no region lock so people from all over the world could play, like Guild Wars.

I couldn't agree more if I wanted to, TERA's combat system and ambiance was unmatchable. You spoke of Seeliewoods; me and my boyfriend at the time got "married" in the Seeliewoods chapel, it was a blast. I have such fond memories of the place, it always saddens me knowing that I can't go back.

>I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.

Same here, at the time of the migration the game already felt like a shadow of its former self. And even though, just like you, I had spent a sizable amount of money on it, I didn't really bother migrating.

I deeply wish to be able to have a similar experience again. I have tried so many MMOs since TERA and none have ever offered what it did.

I don't think it's a problem of fun, but of profit. I too want an mmo that is closer to a social experiment than a slot machine, but one of those is easier to make and has a more reliable business model to justify the expenses to make it.

Second Life was once this grand experiment. I recall you ended up with weird things happening virtual real estate tycoon Anshe Chung being chased by a horde of scripted dildos chasing her avatar around. All the money in the virtual world still can’t save you from trolling.

I don’t really know what Second Life is doing now. It damn near ruined my real life so I don’t care to check in on it.

Isn't there a pretty broad swath of what people find fun? I mean isn't Eve Online called a "spreadsheet simulator" (Long before the recent Microsoft Excel Integration)

The key is to have your characters work while you work. Kind of like EVE Online.

In an MMO that behaves like a true virtual world, characters shouldn’t just disappear just because you log off. They should carry on in virtual lives making progress for you so you can log in during the interesting bits of their lives and do fun stuff.

This is subjective. I played FFXI for over a decade and despite it being more or less a second job, I truly loved coming home and hopping on and see what we were fighting for that evening.

Some people want that experience. You grow close to people when you talk to them every day for over a year. Comradery is formed etc;

You couldn't level up without 6 players to a party. Needed a healer, tank, DD. Everyone had a purpose, everyone had a job. If one person died, we all died. They just don't make MMO's like they used to unfortunately. Everyone gets a trophy is new style of play. It's bad for the integrity/soul of the MMO's but money talks so it is what it is.

Is FFXI what the poster was describing though? I got the impression that it was a world where the economy was mostly controlled and defined by the community via trading, crafting and agreements.

That runs contrary to the sort of on the rails, guided narrative that modern mmos embrace (like FFXI and WoW but maybe not Eve online).

Or am I misunderstanding FF? I didn’t think PvP was a big factor.

Most MMOs are overly focused on player engagement. MMOs should have built in botting mechanics, so you can just let your player do the tedious stuff while you are asleep/working/living real life.

Let me set my character up to run in circles mining ores or chopping down trees or killing whatever enemies it sees in an area until your character dies. I'll farm easier areas than I could when at my computer, but feel delighted when I log on to a full bag of loot (loot filters please!) and a 1.5 levels of XP.

One of the Final Fantasies (I forget which one, 10 was the last one I personally played, so I only ever saw my sister play it) had a concept of actions you could program into your off-hand characters. You had only a basic number of slots to define command to begin with, but as you progressed in level, more slots opened up and you could program more complex behaviors.

I believe you are talking about ff xii with its gambit system. It's sort of a simplified programming tool to program your AI companions behavior without having to directly micromanage them. For example, a companion can be programmed to heal ally if their HP is less than 50% hp, cast specific spell if there 3 enemies or more, attack nearest enemy in that priority order. I wish more games have this system.

The gambit system was pretty polarizing. Programmer types liked it, but a lot of people perceived it as "the game playing itself" and didn't.

The line between work and play is not are clear cut as people think. Look at farming simulator games, be it the Harvest Moon style ones or the proper farming simulators. Look at trucking simulator games. Some programming games have problems harder than what I face at work. Many jobs can be turned into play by removing certain parts. It won't appeal to everyone, but the idea with an MMORPG would be to have many such possibilities and a player can have fun even if only a few matches with their preferences.

Along these lines, I remember Skyrim once being described as "at heart, the world's greatest hiking sim." Maybe Minecraft shares some of that.

Try limiting players to 60 minutes per day. In the BBS days this worked because you got two TURNS per day. 24/7 access is what kills this sort of thing, IMHO.

This could be interesting. I feel like the problem with MMOs that give you too much freedom is how players with more time will just completely dominate everyone else within days of any new content launching. Also, in my experience bad/unfun behavior in general gets worse the more populated an MMO is (FFXIV being a nice exception), and this solution could help keep traffic down. The only problem is that no dev trying to make money would ever time-limit their players.

Perhaps time limited but only per realm/server/world? That way someone trying to get their fix can play across multiple isolated economies but still allow players to play more if they really want to (lets be real people would multiaccount anyway)

This was usually done by having separate instances with different time limits. That way all the lifers with 12 hours a day to spare could play together and let everyone else enjoy themselves.

Turn based games can work well.

There is a multi-player browser-based version of Mike Singleton's Lords of Midnight that takes everything great about the original and pitted you against real opponents.

I was thinking of something similar recently as I am a big fanatic of PvP games of different kinds. Problem is as I get older I have less time to play to keep up with my enemies and would love to have "adult" servers which are only on at certain times of the day (maybe even with some auto grinding on the off hours). To allow people to be on more even footing. I bet there would be a decent chunk of people who would enjoy this.

My best idea so far for addressing this is to give all players exactly three characters, which they can switch between at any point. The goal would be for most of your "boring" productive output to be determined more by (character) resource allocation rather than participating in the grind yourself all the time.

For example, a group of players might establish a small town with its own laws. The benefits of joining this group would include protection of your self and your stuff from bandits, access to resources, and potentially a place to train in your character's skills. You might in return be required to allocate a certain amount of your characters' combined time to boring scriptable work like tending crops or patrolling the borders of the town.

You would have to design the game so that most players would feel naturally inclined to join some kind of group, whether to avoid being picked off by other players in the wilderness, advance their characters, trade, or just to have something to do.

It might not be made super-obvious to other players which characters are linked to the same player, but I think there would have to be a way to discover it in-game, or too many players would end up as double-agents. Maybe some ritual to discover a player's "soul bonds", and if they don't consent to it when applying to join your township then you would probably treat them as super-suspicious. :)

I've whiteboarded some very similar ideas to this! If multiple people are coming to similar conclusions, there might be something here.

In my thoughts, my hesitation is that I think I might have a bias for unit management, which is a new "thing" typical MMO players would need to start doing and optimizing in order to keep up.

So I wasnt convinced it would stick.

I think the new V Rising game has a well thought out and related mechanic along these lines in that you still have 1 character, but you can get "servants" which you send out on missions to collect / farm materials from areas you've surpassed

If you can passively make more money with more characters what stops someone from having a ton of accounts and just funneling resources?

I'd like to pretend the cost of a license would mitigate this, but yes, it would probably be disastrous in practice.

The capitalist in me says "oh goodie, people will give me more money to get more power in the game", but the part of me that cares about making a game that's actually good thinks that outcome would be pretty gross.

I wonder if there are some other things you could do to mitigate it, like only allowing characters to operate autonomously for a time that is proportional to how long they are controlled for. It's a half-baked idea, but my hope would be that it prevents the "pay-to-win" model from scaling.

> The problem is, games like that aren’t fun. It’s been tried.

Doubt.

I've seen hordes of online players grinding for anything. People spending years and years to get useless achievements on WoW or years and years of Stratholme runs to drop the mount from Baron Geddon.

Don't even get me started on more farmy mmos, or games like Stardew Valley and the countless job simulators.

I beg to differ, World of Warcraft is some of the most fun I've ever had in my life. It was destroyed when they changed the game to have multi-server raids etc. that ended the social aspect of "your server is your world." No longer did you have to make friends and have a life on your server that was as addicting as real life. You just had to queue up and let the computer match you up with people. And then the magic was gone.

Have you played any sandbox games more seriously and joined some guilds etc? I would say WoW was more of a "world" in the start (but not on a comparable level to others) and turned less and less so over time. The one thing blizzard always managed really well however is a crazy level of polish. I am sure they could make any kind of game really shine.

Isn't the OG Sim City something like "work"?

I remember that game being really fascinating, and yeah a bit of a chore sometimes. I get how those types of games might not appeal to the masses in the way that the dopamine trail games do, but is there not still a niche for sandbox type games?

Not true, EVE, Albion are like that (and probably a good number of others). Some survival type games with PvP features parts of that as well although they are regularly wiped. While the demand is smaller than mainstream MMOs the following is way more hardcore, there is a reason some of these games are going strong after 15-20 years.

I think you underestimate the number of people who live their lives on these games.

There are probably a number of MineCraft servers that achieve this. Back about 10 years ago there was the /r/CivCraft server. Not sure which ones are active now, but it did feel like a real world with a real economy, since there were even shops you could set up to sell materials for a price. You had to be careful who you piss off also, since people could be "jailed" in the ender world. There was a large element of alliance making / political process in the game since you have strength in numbers.

Minecraft is indeed a great example of a game pushing the envelope on player freedom - and allowing emergent gameplay.

Tip of the hat to you, good sir!

Still, Minecraft is pretty limited mechanically. The game doesn't actually recognize any of the stuff you mention. The games' mechanics - all the technological progression and stuff - work perfectly fine in single-player. Also the number of players per server isn't quite on MMO levels...

But yes, some elements of Minecraft would be great ingredients of the game I'm proposing.

> The game doesn't actually recognize any of the stuff you mention.

With mods, it does.

> The game doesn't actually recognize any of the stuff you mention.

To be fair, neither does real life. Real life shops, jails, etc, are just collections of atoms with certain emergent properties resulting from how players have set them up.

I haven't heard that name in a very long time.

Tell me, what town did you mainly reside in? I was over in Chiapas with the crazy leftists, one of whom erected a wool statue of himself. We were largely untouched by the HCF invasion, except for when their skirmishes with the World Police got close to our borders.

I offer you this classic, and hope you recognize it: https://youtu.be/BAzsolKHJfc

Yep I remember that like it was yesterday! If I remember correctly, in the Civ 1.0 map I hung out a lot in Haven and in Mt Augusta

Mt Augusta was a little before my time. By the time I got into the server, it honestly felt like one of the most difficult places to get settled into. Crowded, property costs too high, chaotic.

Dirty Ancaps everywhere. </s>

I'm pretty sure it was somewhere between late 1.0 and early 2.0, but I ended up in Carson City for a bit when it was coming online. Where they made a hole in the ocean, and turned into a city. A fun place to hang out and talk shit.

Do you have any 2d world maps of that era?

Sorry can't find any 2d world maps from the time, I'm sure there are plenty on the subreddit if you go looking :-)

I remember playing on towny servers years ago and holy crap that was fun. The kingdoms and roles, and wars managed to be more immersive than games based around that concept (cough bannerlord)

The best Minecraft MMORPG I've seen is Monumenta ( https://playmonumenta.com/ ), which is made in the spirit of Complete The Monument (CTM) maps like Ragecraft (which is also a great experience!). A good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEK-djlOkqE

Expanding on your idea, I thought it would be interesting to have an MMORPG with multiple completely different clients. The easiest example might be in a future/sci-fi game, you have a normal game client for people moving around the game, and a Stock market client for people who want to play the stock market in the game. You could have a business simulation client as well maybe for shop keepers. Maybe a news website to try and bridge the gap between them all, but you could play one game (the stock market game) while never logging into the First Person "MMO" client but you're completely integrated. If you could think of a number of these different clients, I think it would be interesting.

I love this idea for so many games, but I'll try to stay on topic.

From elsewhere in thread, heavily snipped:

  games like that aren’t fun. It’s been tried. [...] hopping online to go do your second job [...] implies work [...] no one wants to do that work

I wouldn't want to do data entry in an FPS game, no, but people love "bakery simulator" type resource management games. It would be cool to link my grocery-line-time-waster score into my overworld bank account, enabling me to shop around for gear in stores set up (but not manually run) by other players, to use in the FPS portion of the game where I steal morsels from the full-sized humans (or am I getting my threads confused?).

EVE tried this with Eve Online + Dust 514 which was a PS3 exclusive. There were cool concepts like having your space ships show up to air strike the planet as they were fighting on the surface. It was interesting but ultimately Dust felt extremely low stakes in the world of EVE. I can’t really speak to its other problems I only tried it once or twice.

Yeah, I imagine a challenge would be making a second really fun game in a different genre from the first. The different 'games' would probably have to be relatively lightweight and lean into the fact that it's the interaction that is the fun part. Having a space MMO developer somehow land a super popular AAA FPS would be near impossible. I like how the battlefield games let you fly airplanes, but then it's not really a full blow flight simulator.

Dust 514 was a really, really cool idea that was dead on arrival because CCP (the company behind Eve) released it on a platform that was nearing the end of its lifecycle, and refused to release it on any other platform. It also had to introduce the Dust players to a fair number of the Eve mechanics, particularly around loadouts (fittings) and the economy.

The fact that the spaceship game was intertwined with the team-based FPS was really cool. FPS players (on planets) could be in the same clan/guild/corp as the spaceship pilots, and could call in airstrikes. In the spaceship game, your corpmates could maneuver into position and rain down lasers. This interaction had an effect on the local economy, which was an incentive for the spaceships to show up for airstrikes.

I agree, I've always thought it'd be cool to develop a game that, for instance, you could meaningfully play from a full fledged console or a mobile phone. They might be different components or aspects of the game, but both would contribute to your world/quest/whatever. And just like real life, some people might specialize, and only ever play one aspect of the game, while others focus on other parts.

I'm a huge fan of API-first design and would love to see MMOs embrace this. Anything you do in game could be doable via APIs and those could be open to 3rd-party clients. That would allow people to develop those kinds of specialized clients.

WoW had its auction house in the mobile client for some time. I don't know why they removed it. I suspect that people just automated it.

I agree. The beef I would add with those games is that they feel like theme parks. There's no real frontier. Elite Dangerous came close, it was a thrill to be the first one in a system. Genuinely don't know how you'd solve that, though.

One obstacle you have to overcome is that there has to be an investment that is risked by the players. There's not much of a cost to gank someone usually, or it's simply not allowed at all except in a controlled way. One thing that forces people into social cooperation is to protect against the potential for loss. As I understand it, confrontations with other players in EVE Online are dangerous because of that investment of time and/or money. That's part of what makes roguelikes and battle royales so compelling. That said, you have to balance it against being appealing enough to more casual players--how do you encourage investment without making it a boring grind or too expensive?

There are other ways next to protection against loss.

SWG for example had all items being player-made in addition to slowly loosing durability and breaking eventually. That means, instead of finding loot you can then use indefinitely, you were dependent on economy supply chains. SWG also made you dependent on player services - like doctors, entertainers and such.

I think there could easily be many casual friendly playstyles, like farming, harvesting, herding, entertaining, being mayor in a player city, etc. - in addition to more combat oriented play. Players should be able to choose one style or the other, or mix and match to their liking. And every such playstyle should both need and provide "stuff" from/to other playstyles on a regular basis.

Elite Dangerous is one of the most fulfilling grungy space sims I've ever played. I'm not much of one for the dog fighting side of things, but I do keep coming back to Elite to just do cargo runs or swap over to an Adder and push myself into the dark - scooping fuel off suns and try to avoid space hazards while just ogling the beautiful scenery.

It is a very strange "game" though, so I understand why it's not for everyone.

I have a MUD open right now in another window. I still play it because despite the lack of graphics, the freedoms of player interaction are interesting and far beyond whats available in modern open world games.

Attack a same side player? Sure! You might get warranted by the local militia (which may or may not have real players in it), but you can do it.

Pickpocket players? Sure. Change sides mid fight? Yep. Be a spy or mole for the enemy? Chase people down in 'safe zones'? Completely ignore PvP? All up to you.

Another thing i really like is looting. If you die, anyone can grab gear from your corpse. If the enemy get it, you're gear is gone. Theres no perma death in this particular Mud, but losing gear adds stakes to PvP. It also means gear is a real in game commodity, but also people dont get too precious about it. Die in the fight? Reequip asap and get back out there.

MUDs are a class of game that is terribly underrated. I've played on a few different one (mostly toward the RP focused end of things) but I think the whole family of games shows just how effective imagination can be when coupled solely with text descriptions.

I have extremely strong memories from Shadows of Isildur[1] and met my spouse there!

1. http://www.middle-earth.us/

All of your points also exist in Renaissance era Ultima Online. There are a number of custom shards with playerbases that want this exact experience.

Yup! Ultima is another great game from when they were still 'figuring out' open world games, before they became stale.

In terms of mmorpgs, I'd love to see a game with actual human GMs behind the scenes enabling players to have far more latitude in their actions. I'm envisioning something like a cross of EVE and tabletop rpgs.

The old Ultima Online had GMs pop in and create quests and random events. Non-scalable, but - oh - so much fun

"Non-scalable" is a rather medium excuse though. There's quite a few ways around this:

1. Raise prices enough to employ enough humans. I imagine there's quite a few people out there who'd be happy to spend a pint's price on a quality gaming experience.

2. Give the GM better tools. Higher level half-scripted events + better sentiment monitoring. I imagine a single competent GM can run in parallel a bunch of events keeping quite a few players engaged.

3. Recruit experienced players to do this job for you. I imagine there's quite a few people who'd do this job for in-game goods, as long as an hour of GM-ing gives a couple hours worth of grind of goods.

Gemstone IV does this.

You should check out MUDs - MUDs (being entirely text based) are easy for any old person to modify and create within... no texture or graphics work - just writing. As a result a lot of MUDs have extremely dynamic worlds that have large ongoing plots being managed by the GMs.

Currently building this. We're launching in August.

Give us some kind of link / mailing list so I dont have to remember 'til august. Spoiler: I wont remember.

Seconding maerF0x0, what's the game called?

I'm currently building a game like this and it's pretty close to finish.

The game is a Space Survival MMORPG that takes place far into the future, where human civilization is stranded in an O'Neill Cylinder in space. No one in the cylinder knows anymore how they got there and why they are there in the first place since so much time has passed. Technology has also been lost due to the very long time periods, so life and survival is tough in the cylinder.

However, the longer someone survives, the stronger and the more rare their character becomes. We expect only a few percent of players to survive for longer than a couple of weeks and only 1% for longer than a month. However, those that have survived for longer than a month are very strong characters that can usually lead and provide protection to a village of 50 to several hundred people.

The biggest danger to the player are other players, since the entire game is PvP. This means, you need to quickly band up with others to protect against other players. There are no guns in the game, since there is no technology in the cylinder, so it takes several minutes of beating someone up to to actually get their health to zero. There is also voice chat, so it's quite brutal.

Here is our teaser trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg4GHUIXB8U and here is some pre-alpha gameplay footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFHzg0R8sUo. We'll likely be able to go into early access in June on Steam, it would be great to get your feedback on it!

Gives me rendevous with rama vibes!

That's the one! :)

Can I piggyback on yours?

A true FPSMMORPG. Closest thing we have to this with a good community is Destiny. I wish for fully open worlds, good storylines and everything you said. I believe that was the original idea with the project that became Overwatch but sad it didn’t pan out.

I understand that level building and all is much harder when the expectation of detail is higher in FPS but hopefully that gets easier with better tools. I would think that it’s still Bungie’s ultimate goal. Hopefully Destiny can evolve into that. Whatever game does it right, has the potential to be one of the biggest games ever.

I don't particularly care whether it's first person or some other perspective. Whether it's a shooter (or some other form of combat) isn't really relevant to my point either.

Open world yes - that's totally an ingredient that goes in there.

Storylines rather not. The thing is that storylines are pre-written, canned content that's just identical for every player that consumes it. In order to fit my bill, the "plot" of the game would actually have to be defined by what players are doing (and the game simulation reacting to that) - it would have to emerge dynamically. Saga of Ryzom originally tried to go a little bit along those lines, but due to the technological constraints of the day, the game world would have to evolve through updates/patches mostly.

The issue with SoR was not really technological constraints. More budgetary and time constraints, and the people who had the creative vision left shortly after release.

The commercial game is now run by a finance guy and a web developer, pretty much. Neither of which seem to be interested in pursuing the original more daring vision.

The tech is definitely capable of being expanded into a real dynamic world.

What you see in the game right now is effectively auto generated placeholder content that got rushed in to have a deliverable by release.

Imagine if the tribes and mobs actually moved their locations dynamically, instead of being in the same spots eternally. Players could help out tribes, supply routes for trading goods between tribes would need to be maintained, mob populations would be affected by player activity, etc.

Destiny was amazing but good god the grind...

Wonderful screwing around game. An extroverted friend of mine during the pandemic made it his primary social network. Made a lot of friends.

While Destiny fits the RPG portion better - Planetside 2 gets much closer to the MMO side and I really, really want to see someone else make a similar game without the terrible components. PS2 if the monetization was toned down and the global player interactions were ramped up would be an amazing experience.

You'll get snippets of how awesome the game could be if you play in an active outfit and try and coordinate in platoons... but oh gosh does that game have its warts as well.

You might enjoy Eco. It's not quite an MMO, but it is a multiplayer game that can have large server populations where everyone must work together to advance through a collective "tech tree". It starts very similarly to a Minecraft playthrough, but has a much deeper cooperative progression of advancing different trades and resource gathering methods until the server can construct a laser cannon to destroy the meteor en route to impact the planet. There are also pollution and environmental mechanics, and diplomacy and collective governance. So you may have a player who produces lots of ore, but poisons the oceans to do so, and other players can collectively lobby to restrict that through the government. But at the same time, everyone must rely on the production of ore to further advance the tech tree.

It can be a lot of fun with the right group of people. There's also a lot of flexibility for adjusting the game's parameters, so you can make it work with 2 people or 20 so that everyone needs to work together but the tasks don't seem insurmountable. It's one of the most novel and interesting multiplayer game concepts I've played in recent memory.

It's never gonna be a AAA game. The broader market just doesn't want this, and you'll need the broader market if its a AAA game.

New World hit on some of these points at one point, but they backed down pretty fast.

Ashes of Creation may or may not hit some of these points. But that game is... overly ambitious, to say the least. They're trying to go full tilt on everything and I'm skeptical as to whether it's gonna work out well in the end.

Ever heard of A Tale In The Desert?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_in_the_Desert

Yes! It's amazing that it is still going.

Oh man, I loved this game almost 20 years ago.

My friend and I started building on the side of a pond far away from everyone. We would get home from school and tie our house phone to our heads with our dad's tube socks so we could stay in constant communication while we collected resources and build up our enterprise.

Most popular MMOs do have healthy economies and virtual cultures. You do need to participate though. If party play is enforced then party members certainly do affect game mechanics.

Maybe you want a pvp focused MMO? Maybe something like PlanetSide with more of an economy? Either that or maybe you want some big story points influenced by players?

Honestly I think you'd probably be disappointed unless you are personally part of the group that made the influential change. That takes a lot of investment as the mechanic would either be pvp or feel like its on rails.

Maybe you just want an RP wow server and a guild that is into grinding for Glam/RP loot according to their own stories?

I don't see how it's a technical problem at all. It sounds like your major issues are with story telling. Can you explain what technology you think is missing?

Some persistent world NWN servers might fit the bill. Some are heavy on roleplaying, and are more of chat servers with optional combat rather than a traditional MMO setting.

NWN is a great example as well. It's imho quite underrated/overlooked how ground-breaking that game was, considering it's editor- and GM-tools.

It's a bit too static though, to fit the bill of what I'm longing for. Needs less pre-made modules, more dynamic simulation - so that the game world actually evolves in response to what players are doing. ;)

The Mount & Blade Warband Persistent World mod servers are like this. All equipment and resources have to be mined, crafted, and used by players, and the only gameplay was player interactions - trade, banditry, war. Amazingly good fun when you're on the right servers with the right people. No idea if its still active or not.

I’m not sure how WoW isn’t/wasn’t just ticking off boxes? That’s all MMORPG’s ever basically. “Go here, kill boars, bring me 5 of their tusks. By the way it’s a 25% drop rate so really you’re killing ~20. Oh and they’re often by themselves across a large area. Oh and other players need the same amount too so you’re competing for the kills. Oh and there are baby boars harassing you that don’t count. Oh and there’s no quest marker until you’re mini map can see it so it’s going to take you 10min of wandering around a featureless field before you know you’re in their spawn area.

As obnoxious as I’m being, the thrust of basically any MMORPG is grinding hours of boring tasks to get minutes of awesome time with the fruits of your labor. That’s how they make you stick around - roadblock after roadblock after roadblock. You remove the grind (d3 auction house) and you remove your players.

FFXIV doesn’t really have mandatory grind. They instead make the main story actually good (better than most other FF games) and so people will buy the expansion packs even if they don’t stick around every other month.

I agree but there’s a reason I didn’t say “literally every MMORPG does this.” FFXIV definitely stands out as a notable exception. SE is also big enough that they don’t need FFXIV to generate insane revenue to justify its existence, and good on them for making good use of that. It’s a profitable title that has also built them a lot of good will as a company, good will that’s been sorely needed lately.

My point is, most MMORPGs depend on giving you relatively simple tasks but finding ways to make them take three hours.

> a genre of checking off boxes and making numbers go up, along a linear way as laid out by the developers for you

Feels like a FAANG job

So the largest public server (white tiger) for the game eco https://play.eco/ might scratch that itch.

I would be in your views on it's economy and settlments gameplay in SWG. In some ways, Star Citizen may shape out to be a good replacement for SWG, if settlements, economy and manufacturing come out well there would be scenarios that aren't possible without an organisation or cooperation and real benefits to being part of a settlement. Think manufacturing pipelines and trading routes that can't be handled by one person. There are also ships you couldn't possibly fly and afford on your own, capital ships and the like.

The caveat to a game like that, is it lives and dies by it's player count. You really want to be on the bandwagon when it kicks off.

For me, this is a role that MUDs used to fill. Text-based online games with player driven governments, economies, and theologies. You, as a person, could work your way up a ladder to be a renown combatant, or diplomat, or merchant; but, none of that had any value if not for the other people playing the game. You got dropped off in a virtual world and truly had agency to play a role.

Ultimately as I got older they became too much of a time sink and I just can’t play them anymore, but back in my high school days they were an absolute blast.

Check out Foxhole. There's one server with thousands of people fighting on one map in a massive war. All weapons, ammunition, structures, etc are built by players from mined resources. The "High Command" Discords for each faction have their own internal tools used for gathering intel with computer vision and stuff. There's also a live map of the war: https://foxholestats.com/

I've heard of some success with this where people using mods on minecraft to implement economies on private servers.

But yes, sandbox MMO's were a different beast than the themepark MMO's we have today, I had high hopes for Everquest Next when it was announced (like ten years ago now) but it ended up vaporware I guess, and that was the last I've heard of anyone actually trying. I guess metaverse might count but I've mostly ignored anything that facebook tries to do.

"Id like to see a game, where the sum of players (and their interactions) are greater than just the sum of it's parts. A game with a virtual economy, a virtual society, etc. - that advance and evolve in a player-driven fashion. A simulated game world that dynamically adapts."

This describe Soulforged perfectly: https://play.soulforged.net/

It's funny but if you drop by the Discord, we've been having lengthy conversations yesterday on why this might not be fun.

The short of it is that it hurts solo players and individualism. Communes are extremely powerful and necessary for progress. There are also certain professions that are popular (like mining) but gated because of the rarity of mining picks. So a lot of people give up on their mining dreams for the greater good. The mining problem was patched just this morning, but solo gameplay is still a problem - you need to be part of some group to get anywhere.

The other major problem with a sandbox is many have no idea where to continue. They chop wood poles and then chop higher level wood and making housing from that. And then don't really have much to aspire for other than hoarding wealth. So the dev is adding quest-like features: one classic MMO quest system and a player based system, where people can pay for say, ore, or a rare material found from certain beasts.

But the world is based a lot on the players, from settlements to the name of materials.

If you guys plan on joining, civilization is past the river. Head south outside the tutorial cave, then keep moving NE past the bridge. The roads are also player built but nobody got around to making roads for the newbies.

On a bit of a tangent, there was a prequel. A plague hit - it was very annoying but lethality was low.

Half the player base decided to quarantine. There was a route west, which involved a dangerous swamp and a climb up a mountain that most newbies couldn't make if they didn't have the right buffs. New citizens would be escorted to the mountain, quarantined for 4 days, then buffed so they could cross it.

The other group was the "gains" group. They figured out that sparring increased stats rapidly and they could buff stats to the point where the disease was no longer a problem.

So then there was a PvE war with the orcs, which hit an uneasy peace, where the player base decided to just give tribute of weapons and armor to them. A third faction spawned, the orc sympathisers, who snuck more steel weapons to the copper age orcs. A smith player unlocked the orc race this way and black market emerged trading iron to the orcs.

The gains faction were uneasy with this and broke the peace treaty. The rest of the game, unhappy with breaking a treaty, moved west.

The gains faction conquered the orcs. The orc god was impressed and there was a party involving player-crafted beer, and a brawl with a god that increased someone's dodge skills to superhuman levels. The orcs were assimilated and they created a warrior-murderhobo faction in the north. They took on small territory, near a rich mine and some rare leathers used in armour. By the end of the game, everyone up north including chicken farmers had the highest tier swords.

The isolationist faction had a larger block of land and established trading relations with the dwarves. They got access to many of the remaining dungeons and artifact zones.

Sadly the game died shortly after, because of tech debt, server costs, and a burnt out player base. After a year, it was rebuilt into what became Soulforged today.

> Old games (pre-WoW) like UO and SWG had some of that magic as well - but were marred by limitations of the technology of the day.

Tibia too. It used to be an extremely social game. Everything was hard so people had to play together. It's been modernized and made much easier, nowadays it feels like the magic is gone. The changes began with restrictions on player killing and spiralled from there.

I think it’d be cool if all the players in a server are part of a country in a constantly changing state of warfare and alliance with other countries in a huge world. Where your goal is not to level up, but to participate in actions that expand your homeland or fend off invaders or expand your economy.

The larger and wealthier your country becomes, the more you become a threat to other powerful nations who will want to stamp you out. Or maybe there would be revolutions, alien invaders, etc. if you become too powerful.

Alternatively, if the players of the realm fail to defend their lands or make peace with their enemies, they might be conquered and forced to live under another empire, fighting their wars and paying high taxes, until one day they can scheme to win their independence again.

Of course, this does essentially mean your world can become irreparably messed up, but that’s life. Maybe people would give up on a server and move on to a new world with new ambitions about how they can do better next time.

God I miss the glory days of Ultima Online.

This is happening right now, but in small MMOs, usually with 128 or 256 maximum players online. Most common in heavily modded Minecraft servers, but also in many other games. There are also some roleplaying focused servers in games like GTA5 or Rust, which generally reset much more quickly.

Also see this game, ECO: https://store.steampowered.com/app/382310/Eco/

listen to first 10 minutes of this podcast: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/brad-will-made-a-tech-pod/79-...

I have high hopes for the upcoming MMORPG from Riot Games (maker of League of Legends/Valorant/Legends of Runeterra/Wild Rift). So far all of their new games have been very solid entrants in their respective genres. They have consistently had strong storytelling and art/design throughout their games, and they've mentioned there will be a focus on co-op content in the RPG. It's probably still several years away, though.

That said, I think part of the problem is that we've all gotten older, and no one has time to spend 5+ hours a day in a game world anymore. The younger generation may be able to experience it, but for those of us who have memories of old MMOs, it's unlikely we'll ever truly relive those nostalgia-filled moments.

These aren't quite true MMOs but will scale up to 40+ people online at once, with totally emergent social structures:

+ Rust

+ Ark

+ Conan Exiles

I think the recently-released V Rising could be added to that list as well.

Seems a great game.

Can confirm. Is excellent.

Look for the Ryzom Core Discord or IRC chat. There's a couple of us in the open source community hoping to build such a thing, based on an existing MMO codebase and assets.

The key point is that all missions should be impactful on the world, and not merely reward oriented.

We have the tech for an MMORPG. We've been working on simplifying the onboarding curve for new contributors first. In a few months we can start exploring game mission mechanics. :)

Lots of games have dedicated "role-play" servers. When I read your comment i instantly thought of this: https://www.polygon.com/22512951/gta-online-new-day-role-pla...

Conan Exiles is another game that has RP servers of a different variety.

Some of the browser based games like Travian, Inselkampf and OGame had similar meta games like Eve Online where the diplomacy, alliance management and game tool building took up far more time than the actual game.

They were for all intents social constructs with the game as the centre point. I'm looking to build a new version with different scenarios but it is the social aspect that makes them so compelling.

This is basically what people mean by The Metaverse. Digital cash + social interaction + player created environment and content. Getting all three of those right will be a big winner since it will literally mean the creation of a second world that people can inhabit. I don't think it's possible without any of those three elements.

What about an MMORPG with Chronotrigger-like features where two or three players together can do a special move.

I have been trying to make one like this for a decade, kind of a next-gen UO. Right now it's big ideas and the beginnings of a world. I'm not promoting it but feel free to take a look! I have a discord for discussing these games as well, though it's not active.

I think the constraint here is that you need people to create novel objects with novel functionality in the virtual world and then sell them to have an economy. That might be tricky but if you could solve it well then, your imagination is the limit.

If people love the world they'll be happy to make things without financial recompense. Lots of folks used to run RP guilds in WoW and other games with entire worlds constructed out of whole cloth - if you build a flexible system and supply the players then DMs will emerge and create gameplay within the world - just like D&D DMs get into it for the fun alone.

I can see a couple of obstacles:

Complex simulation based mechanics are much harder to implement than more basic fighting mechanics.

Puzzles require more work and hand crafting than creating new monsters to kill.

The whole project is probably more work, harder to scale, and has an unproven audience.

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