MMORPG Cookie Cutters

I recently read a few posts at various other sites talking about how all the MMORPG’s coming out as of late have been pretty well cookie cutter games.  In other words, the same game repackaged with a few ’stand out’ features.  Like AoC for example, a lot of people are comparing that to WoW in the general feel of the game with Funcom’s choice of stand out features being adult themed content with a real-time combat system.  I have to agree most MMORPG’s are the same basic idea, create a character and kill stuff or grind stuff to level them up in your chosen profession.  Rinse and repeat.

There are some exceptions of course, for example World War II Online is a bit different in that it’s massively multiplayer but more like an FPS.  It’s the same with Planetside, which had some leveling based on performance in game which I thought was a pretty cool idea.  Neither Planetside or WWIIOL are really MMORPG’s though as they are both basically massively multiplayer shooters. 

To break the tedious mold I think we need a hybrid somewhere between the typical MMORPG and games that are more FPS style.  To bring them closer together, you need to take a game like Planetside or something to that effect and add the things that are missing to make it an MMORPG.  For example, there needs to be non-combat roles to play.  In a game like this, there really wouldn’t be any levels per say, more rankings or things you can unlock to use.  So that would essentially get rid of the tedious grind for both combat characters and non-combat characters.  Let me shed some light on my thinking here.

Let’s start with the non-combat roles.  Crafters are probably the most popular non-combar characters in MMORPG history so we’ll start there.  How can crafters get better at their trade if there is no experience?  How can they improve if they can’t level?  Glad you asked!  The crafting system would actually be hands on.  Meaning you don’t just pick your template, add some ingredients and hit a ‘craft this’ button and see what the results are.  No!  Here you would learn the ingredients needs for certain items through crafting quests and manually put them together.  How good the crafted item is depends on two things, first will be your skill level at putting together the peices correctly.  There would have to be some kind of tolerance checks in place, haven’t really figured out the details yet maybe it will depend on how well you can fine tune the smaller components and some kind of challenging mini-game to actually put the components together.  I’m all ears for any suggestions on how the mini-game would work.  I have an image in my mind of assembing different components on a workbench but I haven’t figured out how to make it challenging yet but I’ll figure something out.  Let’s face it, in any MMORPG once you are at the max level all crafters are basically the same, this would take that out of the equation and make all crafters more unique.

Then next phase of the crafting would be a rip-off idea from Star Wars Galaxies which I thought was what made the crafting system in that game so unique, the materials themselves.  Raw materials being mined or gathered in some fashion would have stats like anything else in the game.  SWG pulled this off beautifully pre-NGE and finding the best resources is really what seperated the good crafters from the bad.  Good resources and equally as important, good crafting tools would be a major factor in the final products quality.

Now, for combat roles.  Obviously we’d need a large mix of different inital combat classes for players to choose from.  Don’t want everyone bored with one class and just different weapons and armor to choose from now do we?  To mix it up further, players in one combat class could be different from other players in the same class by a tree system of progression.  Not technically leveling, but players could slowly progress down different class trees unlocking the ability to use different weapons and armor.  For example, if you had a commando class (stealing from SWG again), you could advance down a heavy weapons tree simply by using weapons associated with that tree.  To keep everyone from learning every tree in their chosen class and keep some kind of unique feel to the game, you could be lose abilities in one tree as you advanced up others.

Questing in a game like this would definitely be different from your normal XP grind.  Here quests would have a different meaning.  For this to work and keep quests an intigral part of the game, they would have to truly help shape the world you live in.  Quests would have to be mostly factional based for combat roles, rewarding some coin of course, but also rewarding factional standing and helping your chosen faction advance their goals, depending on the quest.  If your successful in your quest it should show in the world in some small way.  For example, if you have a quest to rescue some stranded faction troops (just an example) then if you are successful, once rescued NPC patrols in the area should increase slightly for a time.  There are an unlimited number of ways this could be implemented to be refreshing and fun.

Starting to feel a bit to much like a first person shooter and a lot less of a role playing game?  Keep in mind, there would need to be many non-combat roles to choose from too.  Miners, politicians, entertainers, explorers and here’s a unique thought, farmers.  A different kind of craft.  And once again to steal ideas from an old favorite of mine, SWG, player cities and player houses.  Everyone should be able to own their own plot of the game world.  Some more wealthy players may rightly so own a bigger plot and a bigger house to put on it, but that just adds to the flavor.  Those rich merchants probably won’t have some of the trophies to display in their mansions that the poorer combat classes have, unless they want to part with some of that coin to get it.

I’d like to take it even further and have permanent cities and towns be controllable be players in the form of guilds.  This is a concept that is coming out soon in some form in Warhammer Online so I haven’t seen it yet, but I always thought in SWG that players should be able to setup shops in the permanent, more traveled cities.  And while we’re on cities and housing, I’d like to see the SWG player housing system taken further.  Instead of five or ten different homes you could build, houses should be more modular.  Depending on how much land you have you should be able to build houses in sections, adding floors and basements, etc.  Making each house a bit more unique.  There would have to be some caps in place to keep houses from getting ridiculous, like a 50 story house on a small plot of land but you get the idea.  That would be fairly easy to manage.

To sum it up, there are a lot of different directions we could go in our next big MMORPG to make it stand out from the crowd.  Not just one or two unique features but a whole different system and a different way of looking at the genre.  MMORPG’s are great games but they could all stand to be a little bit better.

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