f13.net

Struck up a conversation with my brother today, about how we'd design a hypothetical Shadowrun MMO.  Thought I'd post bits of it here so you cynical pricks can tear it apart.  In no particular order...

*  Having the best equipment does not make you a god.  Think of the old UO dynamic where Vanquishing weapons were rare and uber, but plain GM gear was common and reasonably capable.

*  Equipment falls into two categories, namely legal and illegal.  The former is relatively inexpensive and easy to get, newb to mid-range stuff, that you pretty much keep no matter what.  The latter is mid-range to leet, take a bit of effort to obtain, can cause Lone Star officers to arrest you if they notice it, AND CAN BE CONFISCATED AND LOST FOREVER IF YOU DIE and don't get rescued/rezzed by someone.  People should be encouraged to keep backup gear, and should be able to limp along with some effectiveness using just legal stuff.

*  Endgame raids?  Okay, but they top out at a dozen people and take maybe an hour (two, tops) to complete.  Instead of killing Rognachock the Slognord, you're busting into the HQ of a Megacorp.  Instead of getting the Sword of Foozelfuck, you're stealing some sort of leet prototype hardware.  And there will be enough loot for a majority of people to get something good.  After all, you'll be replacing gear on a regular basis.

*  Missions both static and random for cash/karma/items.

*  Crafting?  Nah, not really.  Guns and computer components come from a factory, not an individual craftsman.  Tell you what, someone with the appropriate skills can write matrix apps or assemble a cyberdeck from components.  But that's about it.  You'll be able to spend karma gained from other things improving these crafty skills.  Fuck making a billion things nobody wants just to gain skill or whatever.

*  High-end matrix ICE can potentially delete apps or damage components.

*  PVP is consent-only and based around player guilds/clans/gangs/whatever fighting turf-wars in the barrens.  Guilds can seize "control" of NPC establisments and gain benefits for holding them.  Protection money, discounts, items, various things.  Toss in a few unique items that can only be had this way, and/or quicker access to items that would take longer to get in the PVE game.  I want the PVE players coming into an NPC casino to gamble, and the PVP players fighting over who gets a cut of the profits.

*  Gang hideouts while we're at it.  Instanced or not, depending on how much room we have.

*  Be prepared to suspend the potential item-loss death penalty when it comes to PVP kills if neccessary, but nerf the rewards a bit if such is the case.

*  Players gain a criminal records as they go, increasing their chances of aggroing Lone Star.  Player deckers can be hired to erase records, with difficulty depending upon how severe the crimes are.  Wiping the file of Joe Newb should be easy, but wiping the criminal record of a guy who just shot up a megacorp HQ should be a serious endgame quest for a maxxed out decker.

*  Put out an expansion that lets you work for a corporation if you like.  Let people play corporate deckers and have matrix PVP against those damn dirty shadowrunner deckers.  Maybe hand out "possible PVP" runs where you make more money, but face the chance of encountering a player corporate decker if one is on and seeking such a mission.

There's more, but it's late and I'm tired.  Bash away.  It's not DING GRATZ LOL WoW 2.0, but could it be fun and at least make respectable money?

Your ideas suck.

Cynical pricks rule! or whatever the fuck that leet equivalent is... :)

What about UO2 with enhanced bread baking functionality?

Wasn't SR also where they tried to be AUTHENTIC concerning the astral and ethereal.  Something like mages plugging themselves up to IVs for days at a time while their spirit roamed the other planes.  That's gonna play well with an instant gratification audience.  Oh yeah!

Well, you've basically described WoW light, Cyberpunk Version! with a few UO elements thrown in. It might work, but its not going to get me excited. Give me a design that moves away from annoying terms like "end game" and then I might get interested.

Why the fuck does there have to be an End Game to a Persistent Game?

Actually, your spirit can stay away from your body for about 6 hours before you die forever. Unless you're on a vision quest, then you can take as long as you need. In neither case do you need to be hooked to an IV drip.

--GF

I've always hated MMOs that have an 'end game'. If the freaking 'regular game' isn't fun enough to keep playing, then something is wrong! Why the frick would I want to grind through your craptastic entry barrier to the 'real' game? And what happens when the end game sucks ass? We quit!

Maybe everyone should focus on making a game that's fun to play, now and forever. Amen.

That's one of the reasons I like EVE - the end game *is* the regular game.

Your illegal/legal weapon idea sounds like one of the things the devs tossed around on the SWG boards before they gave up on smugglers entirely.

Would you shut up already? That fuckin' game can hear it's name being called -- it slithers towards those who dare speak it, dragging a trail of slime and suckitude with it. It's been safely locked away in it's own thread to protect everyone else.

The game which can not be named???  :-o

The endgame model is just the "endgame" because the rewards remain viable even for maxxed-out characters.  In function, it's not that different from the regular game.  There's gang-PVP, high-end "raid" quests designed NOT to be an all-night buttfuck, and top-level "records deletion" runs for deckers.  Should probably think of class-specific pursuits for for samurai and mages, too...

Oh, also, nothing is "soulbound".  Nothing.  If you don't like the megacorp "raids" then make money doing whatever you DO like and just buy the uberleet stuff from other players.

Random thought:  What if, when you're sufficiently leet, you can go into business as a Johnson?  You'll get quests from some corporate weenie, directing you to hire someone to do X.  You can't do X yourself.  You complete the quest by assigning it to someone else and letting them do it.  When he finishes, you both get paid.  Perhaps you have limited input into the parameters of the quest and how much the runner gets paid, so that there's a difference between generous and cheapskate player quest-givers.  I dunno.  Roleplayers would love it, but I don't know as it would matter much to the general populace.

And there needs to be "housing" in the form of apartments.  I hate having to instance it, but in an urban setting that's probably the only sane choice.  Just have one building that functions as the instance entrance to all the dingy-ass newb apartments, another for mid-range, and a third for expensive upscale places.  Let people decorate and move furniture around, or just buy furnished apartments if they don't give a damn about that sort of fluff.  People like that sort of shit, and anyway it's a money-sink and a place to store your backup gear.  Throw some rare/expensive artwork and vases in there that people can put in their house, and THAT will be an "endgame" for a certain segment of players.

Not unlike the grammar snake.

I'd consider PvP to be a fairly integral part of Shadowrun (but then, I would have considered it to be a fairly integral part of Warcraft, too).  Maybe some kind of EVE-ish setup, replacing CONCORD with Lonestar?  You try to whack people in the city centre, Lonestar guys jump out of the shadows and aerate you before you can do much damage, but out in the slums, you can walk around with your big illegal gattling gun and mow down whoever you want because the cops never go there?

Goddamn grammar nazis is why I'm hiring a friend of mine to edit my thesis. It's her day job -- editing papers and publications for a university several states away -- but she'll cut me a nice rate on it, and given it's her job, it'll be professional quality. Of course, I'm only getting a Masters because my company is paying for it and also giving me a large amount of money when I finish it, even if the focus is utterly unrelated to work. Ah, genetic programming ftw.

You left out DocWagon and its various subscription rates, which could effectively let players choose their own insurance comfort level.

Interesting input from some folks.  My brother favors a wider-open PVP setup, whereas I just want to make it a sub-game with it's own rewards and skip all the Kosteresque social engineering.  Just do the "Lone Star replaces CONCORD" thing on separate PVP servers and let people choose how they want to play, maybe.

I don't know how well a Shadowrun MMORPG would work with instancing since half of what made Shadowrun cool was the fucking massive public destruction your runs could cause. How would you have the nice highway shootouts with riggers and cybered-out-the-ass street sammies collapsing the highway and causing 20 car pileups? Or that corp HQ shootout resulting in the complete demolition of the building?

That, and ARR-PEE. What could you do to make charisma matter other than making NPCs charge more for stuff or runs give out less cash? Ditto for intelligence. How would you balance out someone playing a human adept/street sammie vs. a mentally still-born troll sammie, since there's no GM to enforce the fact that the troll sammie would need a sticky note on all his guns saying which end goes towards the enemy?

It's at this point, that for the 50th time, I mention the only license I think could really work properly as a modern MMOG.

Planescape: Torment.

Carry on.

Ironically, that was always the appeal of Mage -- all this subtle cloak-and-dagger magic in public, culiminating the entire obliteration of someone's house, mansion, or castle. Of course, we tended to stretch the magic spheres as far as they could possibly go, using the "If you can rationalize it to the GM, you can do it" school of thought. He, of course, was fond of the "Suiting Punishment for Inviting Paradox" school of thought, which lead to one of our Time Mages really regretting several personal choices.

I always tended to go heavy entropy. It was amazing what you could do with very subtle manipulations -- I was screwed when it was just us Awakened having it out in private, though.

I actually rather like most of that.  I'd play it.  Of course, I'd then bitch about it non-stop on your forums, but that's what MMO's are for during working hours.

Endie

Funny way of designing a game.  Just check off a list of features and ta-da! a game is born.

Seriously though, what do players do in this game?  What is the setting, and how does that create gameplay that's not some rehashed gameplay from previous games?  Because, you know, that's pretty much what every MMO beta post on these forums says.

QFT.  There doesn't.

Any game idea you propose that has me playing through an experience I'm not too fond of to get to one that I *am* fond of... I'm gone.

More or less, unless someone wants to pay my zero-experience idiot ass to do the nitty-gritty of designing a game.


Well, like every other MMO, mostly you kill stuff.  Either in the pursuit of fixed quests, or semi-randomized missions.  When fighting there should always be a concrete goal to accomplish for you to go back and get your karma/money/shiny.  Random grinding shouldn't be a big factor, and even "I did random mission #367" should provide a better sense of accomplishment.  Put in competing NPC factions and let players choose which one to work for, with different rewards possible from each.

But really, the core of the matter is one that's been brought up in another thread:  How do you do gun-based RPG-style combat that's fun?  Reading the Hellgate: London thread, it seems they have a better take on it than most.

Do it semi-twitch, with copious auto-aim and collision detection so that running behind a wall is a viable tactic.  You lock onto a guy, then blast away with hit-probability determined by character skills, while you toss in spells/grenades/specials/whatever.  Make it so that standing still ups your chances of hitting your target, but makes you easier to hit as well.  Let the choice of whether to present a moving target take the place of the usual "defensive/offensive stance" crap.  It won't be full-twitch, but you'll have people running around while they shoot, ducking behind cover, etc.  Maybe really heavy weapons can't be fired on the run, forcing the user to make himself target #1 on the battlefield.

Feh.  Windup's Shadowrun Online will bury Schild's Faggy Japanish RPG With Magic-Cards Online!

Eh? I said *I* want to play a game like that. I didn't say it would be a commercial success. See, when I hand out insane ideas, I don't expect other people to give a shit. You, however, started a thread asking for validation on them. I'm pretty sure, even with my 12,000 posts here and about 10,000 posts across other gaming boards, have never done that even once. Sometimes I post vague outlines of some of the things I've worked out and people have asked me to post more (like my thoughts on gardening simulators) and I SAY I'm going to post more about them, but I never do. Because no one really cares. So, go ahead, bury my faggy japanish MMOG. Whatever.

No, nobody really cares about any of this shit.  But since I'm the type of nerd who'll sit around having conversations about hypothetical MMO design, and since this forum is reasonably knowledgable on the topic, I figured I'd post and see if there was anything really terrible about my ideas.  Please wash the sand from your vagina.

You sit around talking about hypothetical MMO design?

Learn something new improbable every day I suppose.

Are you the same WindUpAtheist who was here 6 months ago?

Let's talk about Star Wars instead. Have you seen the new Darth Maul double-ended lightsabers? Planning to buy one?

That's also an opening for all kinds of NSFW links.

Thank god WUA doesn't have an actual designer position working on a title. If his title ever gets released it will collapse space-time continuum on itself and form a suck singularity that will kill all fun anywhere in the universe.

Lineage 2? Hello?

That's what I was just thinking.  You've really fallen off dude.  I BELIEVED IN YOU!

No wonder it sucked so badly and no wonder all games seem a lot less fun as of late. It already happening. Our only hope is to jetteson WUA into space and hope for the better.

Ahem, sorry to have forgotten my traditional duties...  ZOMG UO FOREVAR!!1!  ALSO REVENGE OF THE SITH PWNS CITIZEN KANE!!!1

Now, with that out of the way...  Yes, of course I talk about what I'd like to see in an MMO.  It's a natural outgrowth of bitching about how much they suck ass.  That doesn't mean I'm composing terabytes of design documents in my basement.  I also sometimes bounce around ideas for movies that I'd like to see made, but I'm not flying off to California to work as a busboy while I whore some shitty script around either.

As for validation, guess what?  I don't know if anyone realizes this or not, but I am at least marginally aware that this place is just a wee little bit cynical.  A bunch of thumbs down, flames, and the occasional productive comment are the best anyone should expect in a forum like this.  The thing is, the thumbs down are probably deserved in regards to an amateur's off-the-cuff ideas, the flames don't bother me, and the productive comments are worth wading through the rest for.

PS:  Sinij, quit swinging off my sack already.  I mean I may be guilty of refighting six-year old battles over a game nobody cares about anymore, but at least I also occasionally post other things.  I've never seen a post from you that wasn't either "Trammel sucked!" or "WUA sucks because he liked Trammel!"  If I decide I need a forum-bitch, it won't be you, so quit sniffing around.

I think the problem is you can't just half-ass these things, sure that sounds like a decent feature-list but it doesn't really say much.

You covered equipment but not skills/levels/experience or death penalties in pve or pvp.

Hell you haven't even explained what kind of mobs we should expect, or how they will interact with the players and the gameworld.

You only barely touch upon how the matrix aspect of the game is going to work, a second gameworld?  Integrated how?  Accessible to all or only certain characters with certain abilities?

Those answers will open up more questions followed by more questions until you are at the point where you need to actually put forth actual design for your karma system, territorial control, game economy and so on.  Making games is hard and stuff.

I laughed twice.

I happen to like potential equipment-loss as a death penalty.  It keeps the market from reaching a point where everyone has the best gear and will never lose it, forcing you to either accept stagnation or mudflate to keep people going for new items.  It's critical, though, to make sure this penality isn't too crushing by making decent items accessible and the difference between decent and uber not too huge.  And I may well support a WoW-like total lack of PVP death penalty, except for maybe a brief "no PVP" timer if zerging is a concern.


Primarily intelligent humanoids with spells/firearms, as dictated by the IP.  Fuck that SWG shit of shoehorning animal-bashing into the game for no good reason.  I wouldn't mind working in a factional system to where X group of NPCs isn't neccessarily hostile to every player, but then that adds PVP concerns of "I see them shooting MY NPCs and can't attack them!"  I really don't want a UO/SWG system of PVP flagging.  My initial inclination is to say play on a PVP server if you want to stick up for faction NPCs.


Second gameworld, but smaller and simplified, since it will only be accessible by a portion of the playerbase.  (Namely deckers.)  Accesible from the usual plug in the wall.  Solo missions will be accessible from any jack, so that the player can be in a safe location while jacked in.  Group missions may require the player to be jacked in from a specific location, with other players defending him as he works.


Which is why this is a meandering messageboard thread, and not a concrete design document.  I never claimed my ideas were perfect, or so clearly laid-out that one could literally make a game from them.  This is idle forum bullshitting.  It's something to do besides post in the SWG thread again.  /shrug

I have to admit that the very thought of a Shadowrun MMORPG makes me pretty excited and in general I thought that most of your ideas worked pretty well at conveying how some of the concepts from Shadowrun would translate online. 

Your point about equipment makes a lot of sense, in fact, if it was otherwise it just wouldn't fee like Shadowrun.  An Ares Predator was always an Ares Predator, it didn't magically do more damage as you became more powerful.  Their was no gold-plated purple Predator of godliness.  Weapons should be disposable, it's far more organic and in touch with reality.  I like the idea of having illegaly modified weapons though.  I think utmost care would have to be taken to ensure that it was impossible to utilize such weapons indefinitly.

I definitly don't see how you could do end game raids though, I mean, it's Shadowrun, I just can't picture even 12 people going on a mission and it still being a "shadowrun."  Missions though I think your right on the money, you could easily have static missions that are more scripted, conspiracy oriented whatever, and then have a good number of Johnsons available for generic shadowruns kind of like in the Genesis game.

I definitly agree there isn't a need for crafting, what are you going to do, harvest resources in the middle of the city?  Hop on over to your machine shop real quick in between runs?  There is no good reason for even including any crafting routines, you suggest having deckers make their own apps and yeah that works, but it should be included with the base "decking" skill (I don't remember what it's called, havn't played since 2nd edition.)

I liked the rest except for the idea of putting any guild emphasis territory war whatever, I think it would be better to have players aligned with a corp/lonestar/the stupid elves/whatever and have that be the basis of conflict (and make them choose one side) than have guilds be a basis.  I think that would work well with your PvP concept, since supporting a megacorp shoudl have tangible benefits and PvP control could work well for those.

Would you keep the stat/karma system pretty much the same?  That has a bigger effect on some archetypes than others I think.  A low karma Street Samurai could I think (not sure on this) be more effective at the outset than a low karma Decker.

It's hard to believe that a Shadowrun mmo hasn't been made, it's a shame really.

Well while I was typing this you replied to Hoax, and I think that equipment loss as a death penalty makes sense based on the general equipment premise.  On the other hand, Shadowrun had Doc Wagon accounts and what not didn't it?  Those could be fun to incorporate somehow.

Wouldn't riggers be the kinda fighting craftsmen?  I mean they jack into the vehicle and fly/drive/shoot/bum smokes, and have to tinker on how to make it better.  It wouldn't be the find an node of iron ore and whip out your pickaxe and dig it, but more in the lines of those that can buy, build or jerry-rig gear onto the vehicle.  Plus riggers would or could be combat engineers, setting up fixed platforms of weapons and sensors, or enabling cloaking devices or allowing them to by-pass security.

I'm not exactly sure how a rigger would work within the constraints of a MMOG myself, since half their point was that they fly/drive much much better (or less worse) than non-riggers. It's that instancing thing again...will there be actual driving (and will it require player skill)? Will the highways be clogged with jackrabbits and the skies dark with helicopters going to pull their teams out?

Shadowrun has a lot of metagame stuff that would all have to be done WELL for the game not to end up sucking.

Why not design all equipment as easy to lose easy to replace? This way crafting can be very involved and there would be a lot less need for mudflation. Instead of awarding players with ready to use items give them components for items and let them craft customized items. To discourage twinking base all bonuses on percentage boost of base ability instead of flat bonus.

Lets say you raid dungeon not to get a shot at 1% of drop of dragon-tooth sword that you get to keep forever but rather to kill dragon, get few dragon teeth so you can get few of these swords made. You still get to do this dungeon few times to make sure you always have ready supply of dragon-tooth swords but you never going to leave empty-handed.

Last year, in the thread that heralded WoW hitting one million in North America, people were pelting Raph with thoughts on where MMO design should go from there.  Here's a section from what I posted.


So yeah, I pretty much agree with Sinij in theory.  I don't mind someone assembling a deck out of components like they were building a PC, and if that is the case, making the best components a "raid" drop makes more sense than dropping complete decks.  There are probably plenty of magic-related talismans and fetishes that could be "crafted" as well.  What do we do about guns and armor, though?  Maybe just let them modify weapons?  It's not really any different from crafting.  Old gun + mod component = leet gun.

As for riggers, I'm open to suggestions.  But yes, I'm all for vehicles.  Every player should be able to drive a basic vehicle for personal conveyance, at the very least, because walking blows.  Make them diverse enough in appearance, and put enough NPC traffic (rusty cars, ugly trucks, etc.) in the street/sky, that it doesn't just look like a world full of 8000 shiny runner-mobiles. 

Where should MMOs go from here?  Remove crafting entirely, for starters.  Remove the idea of an uninflated economy entirely.  No item decay, either, except for maybe set 'non-essential' products, but certainly not for weapons/armor.

Crafters are a huge cockblock on moving MMOs in interesting directions.  Let them stick with the games that are out there right now, no need to drag them and their preconceived expectations into games moving in new directions.

But then again, what WUA is proposing isn't really 'moving in a new direction' - it's basically a few minor tweaks on what we've all seen thus far.  As a result, this thread is scattershot, because we're all debating pretty much every major MMOG mechanic thus known to man.

Combat players are the real problem to moving MMOs in interesting directions.  Trying to invent system after system to bop the foozle.  Every game has to be combat this or combat that.  If we could only get away from combat games could really take off with innovations!

A stupid argument?  No more so than saying that crafting is at fault since all we get is uninspired DIKU-clone after DIKU-clone.  There really is not much supporting your stance.

In Shadowrun there is not much call for crafting, although there were systems for building certain things, but let's avoid painting such broad generalizations as the root of MMOs' design problems.

True story. Enough with killing foozles, its time to go after the bigger game - other players.

Honestly, if stuff sin't getting beaten up, then what are we to do, sit around in a bar and socialize?

If I want to do that, I can do it without paying $15/month.

At this point I'd rather just see Bioware do a Knights of the Old Republic style Shadowrun RPG rather than see anyone attempt an MMO.

I like the legal/illegal concept, but I would prefer something more like everyone can have one special artifact per character, but all artifacts have a timer. Artifacts can be found anywhere and everywhere but you can only ever have one. Pick one up and you are stuck with it until the timer runs out or you trade it to another player for a different artifact. Artifacts can be combat, crafting or RP in nature. All other gear is basically fungible.

Fuck, what bar do you go to?

Cheapest keggers are not that cheap.