Quote:Original post by Infinity99
The game's gonna take place in modern time. I'm gonna make this game have high-speed fights that require good button timing and you gain experience to level up and spend on various upgrades.

You need to be very careful when doing this. You're leaning into the infamous "mixed genre" zone. Combining high speed fights with treadmilling gets the players adenaline pumping, and therefore, he expects more action after-words. That's simple psycology. Eventually, the player gets very bored and starts looking for a random fight, which leads to chaos (not something you want).

The focus of most RPG's is having the fighting similar to the gameplay. I find it very boring, but it doesn't change formats, so in turn, keeps people who like slow, strategic gameplay pleased. That's really your target audience with an MMO. The best way to combine action with calmness is through very scripted events that mix puzzle sovling with action. This is the only reason why the first half-life was so revolutionary... well... that and it's very rich story content that seamlessly mixed with the gameplay. Personally, I don't think the second half life did as good a job with story telling. Just my opinion though.

Quote:Original post by Infinity99
The last thing that has me pondering, the reason why an action mmo has never come to sight. Is it cause the standards for an mmo are too low? High-speed action isn't for mmo?

You are right saying that high speed action isn't for MMO's. High speed implies that you zip through levels and areas without repetition, meaning you would have to have a LOT of places for your players. With an MMO, that's just really not possible.

The other part of that statement that greatly concerned me was you questioning the standards for an MMO. This (and no offense) leads me to belive that you really don't know how the mechanics of such a game works, therefore causing me to belive you would wig out once you found how mind-blowingly hard an MMO is to create even for the world's most brilliant programmers. The MMO standards are possibly the absolute highest in the business today, and they are quickly rising past our technology limitations for anyone who is not an ultra-rich company already.

I really think you should start your goals a little lower. If you were to create a multiplayer 2D game, that would be far more realistic, and would be an impressive start in itself.

EDIT: 2 things...

you can't Trade Mark a story... leading me to belive that you didn't actually trade mark it... meaning that anyone can steal it and get away with it.

I read your story, it's an intersting idea, but I think you took a massive amount of overdone content and combine it into one story. It sounds like a mixture of Doom, Dead Rising, and Psyconauts. Also, how on earth would you turn that into an MMO, it's far too linear, unless you had some kind of level based co-op play.

Maplestory could be considered an action MMO. It is a 2D sidescroller with a lot of timing involved in the gameplay, although more in the jumping quests than in the combat.

Also worth noting is that twitch-based gameplay is very hard to engineer in even a normal multiplayer game, let alone a mmo. The latencies of internet connections are large enough to make this kind of system very hard to make work. Re fast-action mmos though, you might also want to take a look at the Matrix Online.

Quote:Original post by TheKrust
but it doesn't change formats, so in turn, keeps people who like slow, strategic gameplay pleased. That's really your target audience with an MMO. .

????? Ive played in several MMORPG games and they were anything but slow. In Ultima Online for example, the maneuvering was critical and you had a wide range of actions (and combinations of actions) to respond to an environment (NPC/Monsters/other players) that could have you dead very quickly if you did the wrong thing. Tactics were quite time limited and often complex and could require precise position and timing. There was much of the time when things werent so critical and you could play a leisurely game when you wanted to, but very quickly you could head into an area that was extremely hazardous.


It generally wasnt the quick/split second timing that you have in 'twitch' games, but that is pretty much impossible with the current internet lag. So you can have quite a bit of speed for excitement still in a MMORPG and rely on situation/game mechanics complexity (and tactics).

Quote:Original post by Infinity99
Well I really had no idea an mmo was so hard.

Congradulations... you have just put yourself ahead of most other coders out there. You will find it is one of the best qualitys any person aspiring to a project can have, admitting to something over your head that is.

I am a fairly experienced programmer and I know how to write tons of games graphicly, but never would I think about writing an MMO, it's just far beyond my abillities. I could possibly create a 2D multiplayer game if I knew someone with a server, but also bear in mind that it would not be able to host a huge amount of people at once.

Quote:Original post by Infinity99
But judging on what you said, I don't think I'll be going mmo till later on.

Very wise idea. Like I said, it's not unresonable at all if you want to make an RPG or action game out of it. If you can put together a team, I don't doubt that you can roll out something pretty good. However, I will suggest this.

Your game is supposed to be taken seriously. This means that people have to be somewhat drawn in by the graphics. I would for this reason, have a 2D game with depth incorperated. Either can be psudo 3D or overhead, really doesn't matter.

On a side note, it is also a bad idea for people to jump into 3D without very keen knowledge of graphics API's and 2D experience.

I downloaded a game called "Hard Time". It's an indie game based on life in prison. I thought it sounded very interesting so I gave it a shot... I kid you not, this was the worst game I have ever played in my life. It was a shotty attempt at 3D with lob-sided polygons, flat color textures, and horrible resolution.

Not to mention it had a worse optimization than I even thought was possible. I waited (I kid you not) 15 minutes for the game to load, and then it ran at 5 frames per second.... and I'm pushing a gforce 7400 over here.

My point is, start with something small... work your way up, because otherwise you'll end up with something like that. People are far more ready to take a smooth running 2D game seriously than a horrible looknig 3D one.

[Edited by - TheKrust on August 12, 2007 12:19:30 AM]

Quote:Original post by Infinity99

Quote:Original post by TheKrust
The other part of that statement that greatly concerned me was you questioning the standards for an MMO. This (and no offense) leads me to belive that you really don't know how the mechanics of such a game works, therefore causing me to belive you would wig out once you found how mind-blowingly hard an MMO is to create even for the world's most brilliant programmers. The MMO standards are possibly the absolute highest in the business today, and they are quickly rising past our technology limitations for anyone who is not an ultra-rich company already.

I really think you should start your goals a little lower. If you were to create a multiplayer 2D game, that would be far more realistic, and would be an impressive start in itself.

EDIT: 2 things...

you can't Trade Mark a story... leading me to belive that you didn't actually trade mark it... meaning that anyone can steal it and get away with it.

I read your story, it's an intersting idea, but I think you took a massive amount of overdone content and combine it into one story. It sounds like a mixture of Doom, Dead Rising, and Psyconauts. Also, how on earth would you turn that into an MMO, it's far too linear, unless you had some kind of level based co-op play.

Well I really had no idea an mmo was so hard. And frankly, when I was putting my story together, I had Devil May Cry in mind. None of those other titles came to mind. It sounds like a lot mashed together but really, it's not a lot when you put it into play. And the mmo part, easy. Like Guild Wars. Your own map is downloaded to you in the beginning to play through the school part. But once you get home, your on the server. But judging on what you said, I don't think I'll be going mmo till later on.

Quote:Original post by swiftcoder
Also worth noting is that twitch-based gameplay is very hard to engineer in even a normal multiplayer game, let alone a mmo. The latencies of internet connections are large enough to make this kind of system very hard to make work. Re fast-action mmos though, you might also want to take a look at the Matrix Online.

I've always wanted to play that but it's hard to find...well, where I go shopping. And I took the game play engineering into account and as I said earlier, I'm not lowering my standards.

You might want to aim at something more like a single server (64 player...) style game (with quad CPUs servers can do alot more than they used to). That would be a challenge enough by itself. MMOs are pretty much impossible for most people (or even teams of people) as they are huge complicated (usually costly) projects. I think the FAQ here probably covers the reasons.