Designing an MMO

I'm far from a game designer by training but I'd really like to do it. I'm sure every computer gaming nerd feels the same way. We've all sat around the table and said, "Wouldn't it be cool if..." or "I could build a better game." I've been playing a lot of Eve lately but I cut my teeth on EQ, WoW and some of the other more "traditional" fantasy genre games. I'd like to see a fantasy MMO that has the following design principals.

1) Single Shard: Ideally, this is truly single shard but should the game reach a certain critical mass of players, you could see a need to break it apart for language reasons if nothing else. Still, the single shard concept is an amazing one and one that I hope finds its home in the next generation of games.

2) Player content and economics are king: One of my earliest "MMO" experiences was playing a MUD called "Shadowdale". It was free to play and generally had around 50-150 people on at any given time (and, judging by the people that talked, a user base that couldn't have exceeded 1000). There was no "crafting" economy but I learned very early on that area knowledge was important. This was 1996 so there weren't massive internet resources at the time. Even now, a game that size wouldn't have had an encyclopedic index of locations. Exploring in that game was dangerous as there were death traps in certain places and you had to read the scrolling text for context clues. I discovered a quick way to a zone that I'm not sure anyone knew was a zone in the game. People would portal to specific MOBs that they knew had good loot but they'd portal between places that, in some cases, were two rooms away from where they just came from. So I made a tidy little living running through that zone once every hour killing everything there and selling it all for ~500,000 gold per run. It didn't make me rich, but it let me buy anything I really needed. I say all that because I think the player run economy and player created content is critical for a game to have lasting success. I'd love to see a game where EVERYTHING was player crafted. To have this be compelling, however, you have to create a world where the drops for the crafting are "vaguely predictable" but also "rare". I have an idea for this so read below.

3) Dynamically created environments: I'm having a big love affair with procedural content generation. I think it's the wave of the future in gaming. We're quickly hitting a point where content creation is the limiting factor. The game company/genre/inventor that figures out a way to create reasonably compelling procedurally generated environments / content will make a tidy profit.

4) Death matters: In EQ, if you died, you had to recover your corpse (and you lost xp). Now if you were grouped with friends, this was reasonably easy (although it often involved a naked run back to the group that was scary). In WoW, there are 5 classes that can instantly rez you. Your items are bound to you and not your corpse and the repair costs are often, literally, a few minutes worth of work in gold. So dying is a delayed inconvenience of a few minutes and if you have a semi-successful night logged in then it doesn't matter. Death in PVP is even less costly because it doesn't really cost you anything. I'd like to see a game with something in between (I have some ideas here too).

5) HUGE world: This ties into the single shard. But it's more than that. Does anyone remember playing EQ1 and doing the Dwarven Warhammer quest? It involved going from the Dwarven city to West Qeynos and back. That's a trip that spanned nearly the entirety of the game world at that time. It was a trip that probably took you a couple hours and took you through zones that you were not equipped to handle (including a chasm full of minotaurs). Because death mattered, you couldn't just sprint through it all. It was hair raising. It was intimidating. And it was representative of an absolutely MASSIVE world. I'd like to recapture that scope. There should be ways to fast travel between areas but they should be limited and expensive. Limited travel also creates a better economy. So double win.

6) PVP: I think the beauty of EVE is that PVP is always an undercurrent to the game. We can argue about the balance. Maybe hi-sec is too dangerous. Maybe hi-sec should be smaller. Should all the major hubs be connected by hi-sec routes? Etc. But the fact that you're never COMPLETELY safe creates interesting tension in everything.

7) Players should be able to build epic things: Did anyone play Shadowbane? That was a game that was soooooooo close to being epic and failed so miserably. It suffered from a few key, critical, design elements but in many ways it's the game I'd like to recreate. You could build CITIES in the wilderness. Whole castles with shops and everything. I imagine that the folks at CCP must have played it because it feels very similar to EVE. A game should be seeded with basic infrastructure and then let the players go nuts. That infrastructure should be destroyable too... More for the players to fight over.

So what would this hypothetical game look like. I actually have a design document that I've worked on over the years. It's more of an intellectual exercise at this point. Unless I win the lotto or someone invents a game designer AI that works off of natural language, it'll never see creation. Nevertheless, I enjoy tinkering with it. I'll post more in the next post.