MMORPG Brilliant Game Idea.

I think the soul of the game you are describing exists a little bit in the hearts and minds of nearly every person who's imagined building the ultimate MMO game. Not to say your idea doesn't have some truly original angles on it, I like your take a lot. Look at Ready Player One, for similar constructs, even star-trek's holodeck,etc.. It's a great game concept to write about, but(I think) nearly impossible to actually write, as yet..

That is, unless you were to narrow the list of activities you could perform in the game down to a manageable and/or extendable list that could be implemented in phases and/or could be implemented by the users themselves. In which case the bulk of the programming effort by the creator of the game would be significantly lower.

Sorry to ramble, just some thoughts I had after reading your post. I have an open world MMO project that I'm working on bits and pieces of a little at a time right now, so I think about this stuff a lot.

I had that same question come to me a few minutes ago. Either I make it a town with some restrictions or I call it somehow a Vacation Land type game. Every night a new activity. Karaoke, gambling, drinking, fishing. etc. Again... quests. Then somehow try to fit action into it since that's what people really enjoy. This is all very raw.

Maybe have an option in the game for other players to create different towns/themes and have other live players explore in them.

3 hours ago, Tara Louise said:

Thoughts? Comments?

I think we've all had that same dream.

12 hours ago, Tom Sloper said:

I think we've all had that same dream.

I agree we all had the same dream, and some of us foolishly still have it (and that means me, and perhaps the OP too). Like many players, I like best the MMOs with at least some sandbox elements to them. However I also realize that without something unique my game will likely be just one in a large crowd of wanna-bes. I therefor feel I have to have something that other games don't have or at least very few do.

I came up with this idea playing WoW. I noticed a lot of other players hated gold farmers (usually from China). I really didn't care myself. In fact I was often soloing and would team up with one of them and we would split the goods between us. I couldn't talk to them but we generally came to an understanding.

It struck me that teaming up with someone I couldn't talk to added an element of adventure to the game. Suppose there were whole areas of the world where I had to make an effort even to communicate, and where everything seemed foreign to me.

In order to really pull this off the world would have to be giant and every part off it would have to be different. For instance, there would be a virtual China. It wouldn't be called China but the architecture would be Oriental and players physically starting in real China would start in this area. Perhaps players in Central America would start in a place where everyone spoke Spanish and there was Central American architecture, and so forth.

The second aspect of this idea would be there would be no fast travel. To get from one place to another you or your party might have to travel a week of actual game time.

To support all this the world should be a single shard and as I said before VERY large. Therefore initially I've decided to work on the technology to support all this because it's really not possible without it.

In any case, IMO that's the trick. Find the thing that makes your MMO different and hope it has a fan base. I think nothing is for sure but if you are just copying other's ideas, you'll have to top the top dogs at their own game to really give them competition. If you can make your game a "game changer" you might have a slim chance of giving them a run for their money.

Sounds great. I'm not aware of anyone with a billion dollars or so just lying around who wants to attempt it.

What you describe is far beyond what could be done with an 8-digit budget, and quite likely beyond a 9-digit budget. You describe pieces of games combined where each piece is an 8-digit budget project. Anything that is going to do that much work at an MMO scale would be costly.

Scaling that down to be a simpler online game (not MMO) that has concepts based on those comprehensive games could be far cheaper, but much less of a grand experience.

On the other hand, you could learn VR Programming and make exactly what your describing with a measly 2 decades of programming and using the technology that will be available in 2029

Feel you.

5 hours ago, SIr Pep said:

On the other hand, you could learn VR Programming and make exactly what your describing with a measly 2 decades of programming and using the technology that will be available in 2029

Nah just wait long enough and some AI will develop the game for you, just be careful it doesn't imprison you inside it...

This idea sounds a bit like Second Life (although I don't know much about Second Life other than reading its Wikipedia page)

However, an "everything game" is usually not a brilliant idea, it just seems like it in theory.

21 minutes ago, 1024 said:

However, an "everything game" is usually not a brilliant idea, it just seems like it in theory.

This is because an "everything game" is the complete antithesis of the commonly held best practice "find the fun in the game and incrementally improve it", which by its nature involves identifying one or two fun mechanics in the game. If you're trying to do everything by its very nature incremental advancement is impossible to do properly.

Im sorry but such a vague idea is hardly brilliant. Brilliance is finding something unique and make it work. Often something simple but that stands out or work better than something else that already exists. Your "idea" comes off as just saying "put all game ideas into one super large game. So all players will like the game since all players like SOME kind of game".

Compare to:
Many players like call of duty
Many players like fifa18

Now make a game that includes the machanics of both in the same game. You will double your player base!
In theory that could work. In reality that is a VERY bad idea. Games needs to be polished and work well. Add to much different stuff and you'll just end up with lots of boring or half-completed pieces of the puzzle.

We dream in theory. We make games in reality (sadly!)

On 1/18/2019 at 10:38 AM, 1024 said:

This idea sounds a bit like Second Life

For many this idea is actual life. Quests like fishing and bowling etc... That's regular stuff that I can do in the most realistic sim of all... Reality.

1 hour ago, Greedy Goblin said:

For many this idea is actual life. Quests like fishing and bowling etc... That's regular stuff that I can do in the most realistic sim of all... Reality.

Yeah i play this game too. I'm quite addicted as i've been playing it for 38 years. It started off OK with lots of fun quests, but now they have introduced lots of grindy quests such as that repeatable one called 'career'...

32 minutes ago, Brain said:

lots of grindy quests such as that repeatable one called 'career'...

Oh god yeah, that one is a real drag. Totally ruins the balance of the game IMO. Replayability rating of zero from me! ?

That's what Second Life is - a general purpose big virtual world. There's no plot. You can build things, buy and sell land, hang out, and play games. It's a huge shared world - not sharded. All users are in the same world. State is persistent. Very persistent. Some objects and running programs are 15 years old.

Because Second Life tries to do everything, it doesn't do anything as well as specialized games. You can build an FPS within Second Life, and people do, but it's not as good as a specialized FPS. There are dungeon crawls, but they're not great dungeon crawls. There are driving games in the big world, but The Crew and GTA do that better. There's great game art and asset design, and there's terrible art and assets. All this is created by users. Linden Labs acts like a municipality. They build terrain, roads, parks, and some public buildings. They sell land, collect property taxes and a fee from premium members, and that pays for the system.

The effect on new users is unusual for gamers. The big new user question is "what do I do now?" The usual answer is "what do you want to do?" It's like moving to a new city, not logging into a game. Second Life tends to attract people who like building things and aren't scared of a really open world.

Second Life would be in about 7th place on Steam, about even with GTA V there. About 30,000 to 50,000 concurrent users, depending on time of day. It was about 50% bigger at peak, around 2011, and now it's holding steady at those user numbers.

Second Life's technology is about 15 years old, although it's been modernized along the way. The graphics system is somewhat dated. The back end servers are basically single thread for each region (256 x 256 meters), which is a drag on performance. More than about 20 players in one region, and it slows down visibly. More than 30, and it will choke. The network protocol is a bit flaky. The level of detail system is not very good."Technical debt" within the C++ code is a big problem. I've made some fixes to the client, which is open source. This is Not Fun. The server is closed source, although there's a clone of it, OpenSimulator, in C# for people who want to run their own worlds. The system needs a major tech refresh. But it would have to retain the users and the user-created content, or the successor would be a flop.

So far, there's no successor to Second Life. Sansar, Linden Lab's other product, is not a big-world system; it's more like a game level loader which allows users to create and upload their own maps. when you load an "experience", you wait a few minutes while a few gigabytes download. The same is true of High Fidelity and Sinespace. All of those have user counts in 2 digits. They all thought that VR with headgear was the Next Big Thing. Oops.

Improbable, with Spatial OS, is making big-world noises. So far the only big general purpose world to come out is Sominium Space, used by nobody.

It bothers some people that Second Life allows sex. That, too, was developed entirely by users. Linden Labs neither encourages nor discourages it. It's available to those who want it, and not too visible to those who don't. Just like real life.

Second Life was originally envisioned as the successor to the World Wide Web - at last, a 3D world, like the Metaverse in Snow Crash or the Oasis of Ready Player One. That's why it's overbuilt and so general purpose. It turned out that wasn't what the mainstream wanted. They wanted Facebook.

So that's the real "everything game". It can be done, it has been done, it could be done better, but it's a big job and a tough sell.

i'd totally play that, the only thing that it's kinda impossible to make (or you need to be a gaming giant like blizzard or w/e to make such an open world)

On 1/21/2019 at 1:10 PM, suliman said:

Many players like call of duty
Many players like fifa18

Now make a game that includes the machanics of both in the same game.

Sounds like an awesome game idea to me.

Sooo minecraft...ish???

Too late bro, the game was already made, here is the trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXgZGZMaUks