Getting back to the MMORPG Cookie Cutter topic, to keep MMORPG’s from getting stale and give developers a fresh perspective on things gamers want, I started thinking about some interesting ways to bone up on features in new and even some current MMORPG titles. Now, these aren’t necessarily a major overhaul on the whole MMORPG experience as suggested in the afore mentioned post, but they are some fresh ideas for some of those stand out features I wrote about.
One thing in any MMORPG that is constant is players have a strong bond with their characters. You might say they have a lot of emotional equity invested in their online persona. This emotional attachment is usually to do with the time it spent leveling your character or items your character has acquired. This is what keeps the majority of players paying their monthly subscriptions for months or years on end. Their are of course other things that keep players in the game instead of moving on but for this topic we’ll focus on the majority – character investment we’ll call it. Character investment comes in more than just your own characters acquisitions and accolades in the game, it’s also summed up by your guilds achievements and possessions.
With character investment in mind, my first innovative feature idea (I hope it’s innovative anyway) is more player or guild owned attractions. In games such as World of Warcraft this idea really has no room to grow as WoW does not let players or guilds own any of the game world itself. But in other games like Star Wars Galaxies or Age of Conan players or guilds can own a piece of the game terrain to build houses, cities or fortresses upon. In this same fashion, I think it would be a fresh idea to give players more options to build than just the city to attract visitors. SWG touched on this briefly with shuttle ports, players were attracted to guild owned cities to make travel that much faster. But if we took it a step further and put actual content in cities or other player owned landmarks that allowed people to visit and revisit just for the sake of coming to the attraction.
Guild or player owned attractions have many possible bonuses that could be applied to owning and visiting them. My first thought was player owned instanced dungeons. As far as I know, this has never been done but I think it would be an interesting attraction and would give your guild something to be proud to own. My first thought on the dungeons was allowing players to design them but that opens the door to so many possible bugs and exploits. The better idea I thought was having a capped number of pre-designed dungeons from the developers that the players could purchase for their city. These dungeons would need to be unique from pre-existing dungeons or possibly even other player owned dungeons to entice players to visit. The guild would benefit first and foremost from increased traffic to their city thus increasing sales from vendors. Another possible benefit to the guild was the possibility of taxing the loot of players who ran the dungeon to help fund city improvements.
Attractions don’t need to be limited to such large or unique content to be useful to players and guilds and add value to their character investment. Other attractions have been done to some degree like cantinas and cloning facilities in Star Wars Galaxies, with cantinas needing the most work to be useful again. This is where mini-games come in to play, but we’ll get more into that later. Suffice to say you could add drinking, dancing or musical mini-games to cantinas or add other player owned structures of value like casinos. These are all well and good for players and guilds both but the real value for character investment is how unique is it? One major feature of any MMORPG should be choices. Players should have vast amounts of choices to make when building houses and cities. Having something that nobody else has may not impress other players much but it sure makes the owner proud.
With so much invested in their character, game addiction is not at all unheard of. Play a lot but don’t think you are necessarily addicted – may want to think about that. Ever missed work to stay home and play a game? That’s definitely a sign of addiction! Well, another feature that won’t necessarily cure addiction – in fact it may help to feed the addiction – a light or mobile game client for your favorite MMORPG. By light I mean java or some other browser based technology that will allow you to go into the game while away and at least do some menial tasks that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to do from work. If you could still get a little bit of a fix on those coffee breaks you may still have your addiction but you won’t be taking a pay cut to do it! With a light game client players would be able to do tasks such as possibly some crafting or other tasks that don’t necessarily require full control over your character maybe just your inventory and in-game email.
Have a wacky idea you thought would be cool in a game? Something you’d like to see implemented in your favorite game to give it some pizzazz? Post up a comment and let the world know about it. Who knows…
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