A non-combat MMO in a massive world, where the players had to solve epic-scale puzzles. So could it work?

world of warcraft
a bunch of people form a raiding group and
attack a super powered enemy...
using coordination, skill, and puzzle solving
they defeat the various monsters using these techniques.

i know the idea is strained a bit, but in order for group puzzle solving
to be fun, it would have to be similar to the WoW Raid layout.
otherwise - it would end up being one person puzzles, with a general chat channel with a lot of "/1 HI IM NEWB HERE AND HOW DOES YOU SOLVE PUZZLE 11 NEXT TO THE BIG BLACK TREE??"
response: "use your mind fool"
"/1 I DID BUTS CAN YOU JUST HELP ME FIGURE IT OUT?"

problem with multi-user puzzles is you HAVE to have multiple users
other wise there is no point in making it MMO
and once you solve a puzzle, your not goign to want to do it again
or if you do you speed through it- and the new players wont get to appreciate it.

so there will be a lot of time standing in front of a puzzle, going /lfg puzzle 23 part c PLZ HELP


i think the best environment for a game like this would be lan party centric
or ....designed for 4-10 people multiplayer action - where eveyrone is new to the content.

I don't think games Have to be similar to World of Warcraft to be fun. ^_~

Also a Myst type game attracts a different group of people than the "HElP ME PLOX" kids of Counter-Strike and WoW. Although you'd have to make the puzzles fit into some kind of huge storyline which would be very difficult. If you could pull it off though you'd tap into so many online gamers who don't enjoy FPS/MMORPG.

Uru is fantastic. You don't really have the same problems of annoying players as you do in WoW, because the game attracts a different crowd. Pretty much everyone there is very helpful and nice.

I think the biggest problem they have is not enough content / replayability. Most MMOs are specifically designed to get as much replayability out of their content as possible. But puzzles are pretty much the antithesis of replayability, so it's hard. Uru does a few things to try to stretch out the content (including some kind of awkward "hide flags and have other players see how quickly they can find them" kind of game), but those only go so far.

So I don't play Uru now because I pretty much ran out of stuff to do. The good news is that they're constantly releasing more content, so I'm waiting until there is enough new stuff, and I'm going to sign up again to play it. Unfortunately, it probably won't take me very long.

Rather than just have puzzles, if doing this isn't too complicated, why not make it so you solve puzzles to get treasure, and then set up dungeons (with puzzles) to protect your loot. Other players can raid a NPC dungeon or raid yours. Just a thought.

Edit: I thought about this and realized that there is no incentive to have a solvable puzzle, thus you should have a dungeon ranking system (ie, people playing your dungeon say whether it was fun or not, or if it was obviously unsolvable), and the rank-points are the thing with real value. 1,000 rank points and you can upgrade your avatar's hair! Or some silly incentive or other.

Quote:Original post by Zouflain
Rather than just have puzzles, if doing this isn't too complicated, why not make it so you solve puzzles to get treasure, and then set up dungeons (with puzzles) to protect your loot. Other players can raid a NPC dungeon or raid yours. Just a thought.

Edit: I thought about this and realized that there is no incentive to have a solvable puzzle, thus you should have a dungeon ranking system (ie, people playing your dungeon say whether it was fun or not, or if it was obviously unsolvable), and the rank-points are the thing with real value. 1,000 rank points and you can upgrade your avatar's hair! Or some silly incentive or other.

Well, in the context of Uru, I don't think the personal dungeon thing will work as it is very hard to fit such a concept into the overarching world view of Uru. Unless, of course, they open up the SDK and make it possible for people to create linking books and host their own worlds.