It's going to be a online action RPG set in a fantasy world. There will only be player vs player combat and I want the gameplay to be fast, almost on the level of a FPS. It will be based around nations fighting each other to take control of various points of interest (towns, towers, etc.), each of which will be in its own seperate instance. Guilds within a nation can claim locations their nation owns which will provide them with bonuses and a steady supply of resources with which they can craft equipment. Players will join instances through a battle.net style interface where a list of game lobbies will be displayed showing all contested locations a player can join. Characters will progress through a skill system based on PvP participation/results and a simplistic crafting system.
Because there are no monsters to grind or long roads to travel before you can do anything interesting, I'm hoping people will find this game a lot more accessible than the average online RPG. Resources will be gained through winning battles and owning locations over time rather than clicking on trees, and combined with the simplistic crafting system will make getting decent equipment not too time-consuming. Locations will be locked to a certain range of levels so players won't be playing against people far lower/higher levels than themselves. In this way everyone can contribute to their nation as lower levels will fight for outposts and towers while higher level players fight for castles and keeps which provide a greater benefit to their nation. Once a nation takes a certain portion of all locations (~90%?) the entire game will reset, ensuring no player or nation can become unstoppably overpowered. I'm hoping the game will cause players to feel loyalty to their nation rather than their character, eliminating any drama over character resets.
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Now that that's over with, here's some secondary explanation. I understand I'm way out of my league trying to create this on my own. I also know the pitfalls of trying to make a team and developing online games. My current plan is to keep programming the game alone until I have something presentable, and then look into getting some artists to lend me a hand. It also helps that I have cut out many of the difficult aspects of online RPGs including content creation (no quests, only basic story elements, no NPCs whatsoever) and load balancing (the game instances can be very easily seperated on to multiple servers if needed, instances are capped to a manageable number of players).
I currently believe I'm capable of doing all or most of the programming on my own. There is still quite a long road ahead of me, but I can already see the small, dim light at the end of the tunnel. If you have any questions please feel free to shoot. I'm specially interested in any flaws you can see in the admittedly small overview of the game I've presented.
EDIT: I also noticed both imageshack and paint were blowing ass in their own special ways, so I switched the last couple posts to tinypic and will start saving pictures in GIMP. Here's detail mapping that went in before I pass out to honor the occasion:
All of these textures (four diffuse, blend, normal, detail) are really starting to slow down my rendering. hopefully sorting the quads will help this.
