What's your idea for a game?

[Delphinus]

If you made a game where there were no NPC quests but you could gain exp in non-combat or combat skills independently, then fleshed out both combat and non-combat and made everyone intereliant (farmer gets flour, eggs, milk in harvest moon style, sells to baker, who bakes and sells cake to adventurers and others), then you could have the start of a real online community, rather than 'lol lets quest together'.

Also players giving quests to other players isn't explored enough

^ in a conversation with Kodos

[Fenn]

^Great idea, to which I add: can non combat skill mechanics/resource collecting be actual parts of the gameplay? As in, more Harvest Moon-style farming where you actually have to think about what you're doing, not "click click click run to bank run back click click click." Same with mining, cooking, and any other skills. Make me feel like getting resources is part of the game, not a necessary evil, because in the latter case it's like having a second job (bad Runescape memories).



Also in the RPG field, I'd like a game that deals with leveling up using a "nutrition" system. It would play off the concept of "you are what you eat." You can consume a amount of food/nutrients at a time until you are full. Food increases your stats, but what stats and by how many would depend on the type and quality food/meal/nutrient.

As an example: healthy foods don't provide any/many immediate boosts, but provide potential permanent stat boosts for players who eat them and then utilize that stat. Eat lots of healthy food and you will benefit in the long term. Junk foods provides immediate stat boosts, but these boosts are temporary and drain over time. Eat a lot of junk food and you will breeze through challenges made for your current level, but as the difficulty mounts you will have to rely on finding increasingly strong junk food to bump your stats up enough. Some foods will also include secondary effects like curing specific illnesses/status effects.

[ClockHand]

Fable II has some nutrition system (reduced in: fat).

[jubeh]

One of the coolest things in fable 2 was making your guy a fat cross dresser. I'm not being sarcastic I think that's seriously cool to have as an option.

[ClockHand]

And fuck a lot of fat hookers.

Yeah, it was cool, like you could actually make your guy fat, evil and flamboyant at the same time, not many games can achieve that. But it was quiet dumb, like anything made you fat, and I'm not kidding.

[jubeh]

Yeah, it was cool, like you could actually make your guy fat, evil and flamboyant at the same time, not many games can achieve that.

That's what I'm talking about. My dude was like a fat kefka from final fantasy mixed with a wild west hooker.

[Delphinus]

^Great idea, to which I add: can non combat skill mechanics/resource collecting be actual parts of the gameplay? As in, more Harvest Moon-style farming where you actually have to think about what you're doing, not "click click click run to bank run back click click click." Same with mining, cooking, and any other skills. Make me feel like getting resources is part of the game, not a necessary evil, because in the latter case it's like having a second job (bad Runescape memories).

That's what I meant when I said to flesh out both combat and non-combat. Harvest Moon probably has the best farming gameplay of any game, although it's a bit slow-paced; you'd need to make crops grow in a day or three (real-time) to have an effective system. Or just make them grow only when the controlling player is online and put them in an instanced set of fields. To effectively farm you need to take care of soil conditions and water the crops at least once every (time period). Make it possible to buy cheap or common farming resources (tomato seeds, cows, etc.) from an NPC merchant, but have rarer resources only be obtainable by adventurers.

As a farmer, you have the option to go and quest by yourself, but you'll be weak as hell. So instead you can post a request up in the local tavern (or something) for adventurers to go and fetch you a Crystal Tree Seed. In exchange you'll give them 500gp and 25 apples (they stop you starving). While at the tavern, you discover the local baker wants some cake ingredients, and will pay you 250gp for them. "Aha!" you think, "This should offset the cost of that Crystal Tree Seed!" So you fulfil his request.

You log off. The next morning, you play again, find that your request's been fulfilled and plant your Crystal Tree Seed. When it's fully grown, it produces between 1 and 5 crystals every 4 hours, depending on soil conditions and how well you care for it. You post up crystals for sale in the local marketplace, and lots of enchanters buy the crystals to produce wands with. Now you're earning a decent amount from crops, animal produce, and crystals, you decide to expand your farm to have 100sqm of field space (it only had 50sqm). This further bolsters your productivity...

So yeah, if handled well, it could be just as fun as any other game. Adventurers are the final consumers of products but there're many crafters who rely on adventurer's services and sell to them. It would require a lot of thought to go into development to make sure no profession was obselete and that any new professions fit into the existing infrastructure well, but I think, if done successfully, it would make for an exciting MMO experience.

Didn't Tale in the Desert do something similar?

[CypressDahlia]

Harvest Moon probably has the only farming gameplay of any game.

[Fenn]

That's what I meant when I said to flesh out both combat and non-combat. Harvest Moon probably has the best farming gameplay of any game, although it's a bit slow-paced; you'd need to make crops grow in a day or three (real-time) to have an effective system. Or just make them grow only when the controlling player is online and put them in an instanced set of fields. To effectively farm you need to take care of soil conditions and water the crops at least once every (time period). Make it possible to buy cheap or common farming resources (tomato seeds, cows, etc.) from an NPC merchant, but have rarer resources only be obtainable by adventurers.

As a farmer, you have the option to go and quest by yourself, but you'll be weak as hell. So instead you can post a request up in the local tavern (or something) for adventurers to go and fetch you a Crystal Tree Seed. In exchange you'll give them 500gp and 25 apples (they stop you starving). While at the tavern, you discover the local baker wants some cake ingredients, and will pay you 250gp for them. "Aha!" you think, "This should offset the cost of that Crystal Tree Seed!" So you fulfil his request.

You log off. The next morning, you play again, find that your request's been fulfilled and plant your Crystal Tree Seed. When it's fully grown, it produces between 1 and 5 crystals every 4 hours, depending on soil conditions and how well you care for it. You post up crystals for sale in the local marketplace, and lots of enchanters buy the crystals to produce wands with. Now you're earning a decent amount from crops, animal produce, and crystals, you decide to expand your farm to have 100sqm of field space (it only had 50sqm). This further bolsters your productivity...

So yeah, if handled well, it could be just as fun as any other game. Adventurers are the final consumers of products but there're many crafters who rely on adventurer's services and sell to them. It would require a lot of thought to go into development to make sure no profession was obselete and that any new professions fit into the existing infrastructure well, but I think, if done successfully, it would make for an exciting MMO experience.

Didn't Tale in the Desert do something similar?

Yeah! We could probably make this an app for crying out loud. Turn on your iPhone or Android to manage farming, buying and selling for a few days, then log on using a PC to play the full game. It would be a neat way to suck players in to the game too.

The biggest challenge is preventing every player from being sucked into adventuring, a.k.a. make sure the other roles players can chose are somehow as exciting or at least as enjoyable in some way as adventuring, even if it's a different kind of fun. Farmer isn't exactly a thrilling lifestyle. To add to the unknown element, there should be dynamic factors like weather, seasons, geography, and wildlife to contend to. Keeping track of weather reports and learning from past experiences would be important, as would understanding what grows best at what time of year in what soil, and what animals and insects are attracted or repelled by certain plants and how to defend against them.

[Delphinus]

Fenn, a good model for how interactions between different characters would work in this hypothetical MMO can be found in the Three-Sector Hypothesis of economics. The aim would be to have a balance similar to the models of the Traditional or Transitional periods here. Adventurers and merchants would be the only service roles, and to an extent the line between the adventurer and merchant would be slim, while the number of primary and secondary-sector workers would be rather large and fill the non-combat roles of the game.

I've already stated how adventurers would make their living: by fulfilling contracts for farmers, bakers, etc. Merchants would make money by purchasing goods directly from their producers and selling them elsewhere at a profit. In a town where there are few miners and many blacksmiths, the more precious mined goods will sell at a premium. Gold, silver, hell, mithril, assuming a fantasy setting, would make you a bomb. So merchants would spend their time shipping goods from one town to another, and probably fighting bandits on the way. This provides a benefit to the merchant as well as to the overall economy - the merchant receives money, and the prices of goods all over the kingdom are equalised.

For that matter, the bandits who intercept merchants while they travel would be a valid position for players to play: their aim is to kill the merchants and take their goods. Particularly notorious bandits could have contracts put on their heads by irate merchants, and this gives adventurers another job: escort duties. I imagine both the position of a notorious bandit and of a well-known guard would hold some prestige. Imagine your horror as a newbie adventurer when The Dread Rogerstein and his band of ruffians shows up on a routine assignment, ganks you and the merchant you're trying to protect, and takes all your gear. To add insult to injury, you fail your escort mission.

With a model like this the complexity just keeps on spiraling on and on. Unlike Runescape, where non-combat skills served very little purpose, this would make them essential and a worthy pursuit.