I thought it was and came up with a few ideas last night that made it sound really feasible, albeit a hefty task. But before I posted those ideas I just wanted to hear what the genearl crowd had to say about it on a grand scale. Do you think its possible? And why or why not?

Warcraft III

Quote: Original post by xor
Warcraft III

is not at all an MMORTS

You'd have to define an MMORTS before this question can really be answered.

What if you could create a world where players came together to align themselves with a certain faction/race/etc. and try to achieve goals (whatever they may be) in a granderiose fashion? Im being kind of vague here, cuse I just want to see what people really think of the idea in general. And this is very general.

An MMORTS is a largely infeasible concept, because it requires that every player online (say, a modest 2 million subscriber base) play as a grunt. Now, we'd theorize that each of these subscribers could at least play as a lieutenant of the smallest possible unit, with every position above becoming accessible through promotions (leveling up), but let's do the math. Even assuming a ridiculous 1:2 commander:commanded ratio, with five levels in the command hierarchy above lieutenent, you still end up with 1 million lieutenants - 1 million grunt-level units being commanded by beginner players! And that's with a 2 million member subscriber base.

So drop the "massively" part, for starters.

Once you've pared it down to simply a multiplayer online RTS, the RPG aspect is perfectly feasible. The first requirement is that you personalize your avatar, and by that I mean having a literal, physical avatar that is represented on the battlefield, in opposition to the traditionally disembodied representation favored in RTSes. The next is that you imbue the characters in his command with personality, which means that units are not simply disposable resources. They are well-trained, disciplined soldiers. They have histories and families, and they talk about them. They have hopes, fears, dreams, aspirations, and they share them.

And they die. And when they die, it has impact, not just emotionally, but stregically. You lose their experience, their battle-readiness, their cool-headedness, their reliability and the ability to delegate tasks to them.

So, yes, a multiplayer online RTS - not MMORTS - with a strong RPG component (and I don't just mean stat progression) is possible.

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi
An MMORTS is a largely infeasible concept, because it requires that every player online (say, a modest 2 million subscriber base) play as a grunt. Now, we'd theorize that each of these subscribers could at least play as a lieutenant of the smallest possible unit, with every position above becoming accessible through promotions (leveling up), but let's do the math. Even assuming a ridiculous 1:2 commander:commanded ratio, with five levels in the command hierarchy above lieutenent, you still end up with 1 million lieutenants - 1 million grunt-level units being commanded by beginner players! And that's with a 2 million member subscriber base.

So drop the "massively" part, for starters.

Once you've pared it down to simply a multiplayer online RTS, the RPG aspect is perfectly feasible. The first requirement is that you personalize your avatar, and by that I mean having a literal, physical avatar that is represented on the battlefield, in opposition to the traditionally disembodied representation favored in RTSes. The next is that you imbue the characters in his command with personality, which means that units are not simply disposable resources. They are well-trained, disciplined soldiers. They have histories and families, and they talk about them. They have hopes, fears, dreams, aspirations, and they share them.

And they die. And when they die, it has impact, not just emotionally, but stregically. You lose their experience, their battle-readiness, their cool-headedness, their reliability and the ability to delegate tasks to them.

So, yes, a multiplayer online RTS - not MMORTS - with a strong RPG component (and I don't just mean stat progression) is possible.

How will you find time to read about someone's family during a game?

Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
How will you find time to read about someone's family during a game?

Who said anything about reading?

(No, I won't explain. Use your imagination, or, alternatively, accept that you have none.)

Your not going to have 2 million people playing on one server.

The really difficult thing will be teamplay. There are alot of people that just want to shoot people with guns or something. Play a game of TFC, usually only a few members of the team have any concern for getting the flag. The rest are deathmatchers, goof-offs, or HPB snipers.

If you can't get people to work together toward a goal, you will just have a MMODM.

Actually, there already is an MMO RTS with RPG elements. I first found it about a year and a half ago, but after about 4 months of off-and-on playing I grew impatient with the game's poor translation into English, a couple of rather annoying bugs that it had, and more-or-less complete lack of documentation of the stats which governed your units' capabilities. I don't remember the name of the game, unfortunately, else I'd give you a link (and the game did allow players to play for free--- paying got you more goodies, better weapons, etc, etc).

Here's the basics of the game:

You are a resident of a faction which you fight for in a futuristic science-fiction setting. You control an army of up to 36 units, but may only send waves of up to 12 into battle at any given time.

You're supposed to go out and capture territory for your faction, and you do so by entering an enemy-controlled territory and sitting on the 1 to 5 control points in the territory until they are all turned to your side. If your side does not have at least one unit on the control point and the control point does not already belong to you then it resets to the defender's control. You have a finite time in which to capture all of the control points, too.

Players from any factions may show up and join the battle for the territory, up to a maximum number of total players for each faction involved.

At the end of the battle, experience is dolled out to your units, and with enough experience they level up: They become more powerful, more accurate, etc. You also get money from the battle, more if you win, less or none if you lose.

Money can be spent at your faction's capital to outfit your units with better gear, making them more efficient machinations of death, chaos, destruction, and general-purpose harassment.

Further, the units can "evolve" into more advanced (and specialized) unit types once they reach a sufficient level.

The game was actually not too bad and, except for a few instances, was relatively lagless, which impressed me for an MMO that would have to deal with so many units in a single battle at a time.

And I'd say it was pretty MMO... it was online, there could be a dozen territories being fought over on any given cont at any given time and there could be a good couple dozen of players fighting over any given territory. That definitely rivals the size of some other established MMO games, like Planetside. It was definitely RTS, and I'd say that units with levels, experience, and stats qualifies as RPG elements. Oh yeah, you seem to have some kind of personal avatar with their own non-combat-related stats, which go up as you win more battles.

EDIT: As I recall, getting your units killed and losing the overall battle for the territory were both rather bad things. It was cheap and easy to repair the units, but they could actually lose experience if they got beaten too quickly or if the overall battle was lost.

Check out Spellforce. It's not MMO, but it blends RTS with RPG. Actually, if you mix Warcraft with Diablo, you get Spellforce. That pretty much sums up the entire game. Shadowbane also blended elements of RPG and RTS. It was ultimately an RPG, but territory was a factor of gameplay. On the whole, I tend to agree with Oluseyi, in that, as a practical matter, an MMORTS is probably not feasible. Granted, anything is possible if you have the mind for it --- this includes imagination and perseverance --- but balance is a very serious issue in RTS's, and I don't see how you'd balance an MMORTS, particularly when you complicate it with RPG elements.

So, take off one of those M's, and you've got a good shot.