fantasy MMO sandbox

I envision a game that is truly epic in feel. I'd like players to have high flexibility in what their characters do (perhaps with a FEW more limits than EVE). I like the "hybrid" classes in WoW (like the Druid/Monk/Paladin) that can be Tank or Healer or DPS. But not all at once. That kind of flexibility is pretty neat. I think it might be best to limit it a little more but not much.

I envision a world built off the traditional D&D cosmology. A material plan that has the seeded NPC towns and hamlets (not many) with plenty of room for the players to expand to and build their own towns. These material plane towns PROBABLY become trade hubs but that's far from guaranteed. The outer planes are home to the gods and other mythological creations. The Inner planes are the elemental planes. Connecting them are the Ethereal (goes from Material to Inner planes), the Astral (connects the Material to the outer planes), and Shadow (connects inner to outer and is VERY dangerous). This reinforces the idea that the material is "in the middle" but it doesn't have to be if the players don't want it to be.

Each of the other realms is procedurally generated by players as they wander. Each player creates a "grid" around them (reminiscent of EVE) that is procedurally generated content. However, their relative positions are tracked and if they wander close to each other (either on purpose or by accident) then they share grid content. The procedurally generated terrain is based off of grid location so it's stable for any given version of the game but as game content gets updated, it will randomize again. In this way, an area may feel fairly stable for a short period of time but will definitely change over time. Player's can create cities almost anywhere. By doing this, the area around the city gets "locked in" for characteristics. This means that the natural resources, terrain, wildlife, etc gets fixed at this point (although the wildlife is fairly dynamic so that's not that big a deal). Cities in the Ethereal, Astral and Shadow are incredibly expensive and difficult to maintain. Particularly because the natural resources in those areas aren't very common. Should a guild wish to create an isolated outpost, they can go to one of the more dangerous outer planes and carry their town charter out as far as they can walk. They're going to have problems getting the building materials there to make it a big town, but if they can tackle that problem, having a hard to find, isolated outpost deep in the wilds of the Obsidian plane would be a really cool thing.

Speaking of wildlife, I envision a very basic life cycle of creatures. Resource spawns (both minerals and plants) are static and local to specific areas. Those resource spawns attract "prey" animals. Gatherers of various sorts (could be gnomes for minerals or cows for plants, etc). Each resource type has a "family" of prey animals that it might attract. Those "prey" animals then attract a further tier of "predator" animals. This way, you may find yourself farming for certain things. For example, you know your city has a copper vein on the east. You know that copper can attract gnomes, goblins or dark dwarves. The gnomes and goblins don't really attract anything useful from a predator stand point. But the dark dwarves can sometimes attract mindflayers and they have a rare drop of a spell gem. So you keep farming the gnomes and goblins as often as possible until you get dark dwarves. Then you start killing the mindflayers that show up. You have to also kill the other predator animals because they'll eat your dark dwarves. And you have to periodically cull the dark dwarves because if they get too numerous, they'll mine out the copper and leave forcing you to start the whole cycle all over again. So your city's economy begins to revolve around this "ecological" interaction and trying to keep the balance. The player driven economy needs to be INCREDIBLY complex so that the above then results in decisions for my craftsmen in town on what to build. Perhaps there's an herb that grows elsewhere near my town that combines with the spell gems and "essence of fire" to create a really powerful potion. So now my town needs to create and maintain a portal to the fire plane so that periodically people can mine for that essence of fire. Or they could start recruiting wizards that can do one shot portals for mining expeditions.

This forces the town's leaders to go negotiate with some cities on the plane of fire. The hope is to find one that will not ask for money to create the portal because they'll have some other kind of economic incentive. This also creates HEAVY regionalization of resources. No more will any town or even any region have access to everything. Towns on the plane of fire will have lots of fire gems and other fire related resources (rubies, etc). But they

And oh, by the way, the town is still farming the dark dwarves and mindflayers with the help of player created quests. Players earn the right to create types of quests by collecting papers seeded and dropped in the world. So by killing a few hundred dark dwarves myself, I earned the right to create quests involving dark dwarves. By finishing a small mini-dungeon (randomly generated), I earned the right to create "kill x for y gold" quests. Putting those two together, I can now throw up quests on the town's quest board. I could have found other types of quests that I could have combined differently. Quests that trade killing for items. Quests that involve protecting. Quests that involve finding. Any of these are possibilities and I'll build up a library of quest creation options as I level (they come on papers so if I find a duplicate, I can sell it).

The class system is critical. Mage-tanks have plagued other MMOs and should be fought vigorously against. On the other hand, I like how EVE encourages you to emotionally invest in a single character. My thought is that there are a number of combat roles in game that are critical (tank, heal, single target dps, aoe dps, crowd control, buff/debuff, etc) as well as non-combat roles (trader, many varieties of craftsmen, spy, etc). A system that allowed any given character to access many but not all of these roles would allow for players to have a lot of variety in their game play without having 15 alts. You can further differentiate things by making different classes geared to specific encounter types. So maybe the "Chaos Knight" has a core ability that makes him a better magic tank than anyone while the Monk is a better tank against physical attacks in hand to hand and the Warder is a tank for ranged attacks. Balance is a tricky thing but if people always have multiple roles they can play then no one should ever feel too gimp.

One of the things that I felt was really cool about Shadowbane was that there was a "profession" system overlaid onto the more combat oriented "class" system. The professions were unlocked by runes carried around by special mobs scattered throughout the world. Those mobs were one of the few resources worth fighting over in the game world. So you'd see cities pop up next to the spawn point for a particularly good rune. That KIND of thing is really cool.

The ecosystem itself would be the biggest time sink from a development standpoint. One of the best ways to accomplish the goal is to create creature "frameworks" and then overlay "templates". So maybe you have a wolf base creature with "frost", "fire", "storm" templates that modify it giving it resistances and new damage types and maybe even new abilities. Certain places have a preponderance for certain templates "fire" and "lava" wolves on the "magma" plane for instance. The game would simulate an ebb and flow of these based on the eco-systems cultivated by the various cities. So if I am farming some kind of low level animals in my city, I'll make my city pretty noobie friendly with only slightly higher monsters around it. On the other hand, if I'm farming vampire minotaurs then the surrounding area is likely to be very dangerous.

I picture PVP as being "impactful" without being "ragequit inducing". When you die, you lose 1% of your gold (half of which goes to your killer be it mob or player) and your corpse is lootable for one item of equipment and all inventory while one item of inventory is also destroyed. After a set period of time (or perhaps after casting a special spell), the remaining items come back to you (or you can retrieve them earlier). If you haven't been looted, one item is chosen at random to drop from your corpse when you do that (so unless you recover your own corpse quickly, you're GOING to lose two items). But, I think one item slot would be devoted to modifying game play on these lines. One item slot would be a PVP/PVE/Crafting modifier token. So you could put a "coin purse" in that slot that reduced your gold loss. Or a "red herring" that made that item the only lootable item. Instead, maybe you're geared for PvE so this is a "rabbit's foot" that increases the chance of gold dropping from a mob or a "spell book" that improves your chance of spell discovery when crafting. This token slot you would frequently switch in and out based on what you were doing.

I think it's time for currency arbitrage to make it's way into a game. I picture 13 currencies in the game (that may be too many). One for each "wing" of each plane. So you'd have a fire, water, earth, air, positive, negative, lawful, chaotic, good, evil, primal, abstract currency... plus gold. The ONLY currency faucets in the game would be those created from core towns (the starter hamlets or the small NPC hubs in the planes) and from boss mobs. By allowing noobies and veterans to have access to faucets, you guarantee that the economy doesn't stagnate. For sinks, you have player death as a big one and if that's not sufficient, town charters can easily provide a dynamic one that auto-scales with the faucets.

So player run economy, player run quests, player created content and in many very real ways, player created world. What a game that would be!