"Pulp" MMO?

[The Yosemite Bear]

to your knowledge has anyone created a pulp/20/30/40s style MMO?

you know where you could be gangsters, shadow like avengers, G-men etc. Get a group mob together, and raid someone's speakeasy, or take down a bank?

[Raw Shark]

I saw an all-text MUSH or MUX with that theme / setting once years ago, running 2nd ed WoD.

[Damaramu]

to your knowledge has anyone created a pulp/20/30/40s style MMO?

you know where you could be gangsters, shadow like avengers, G-men etc. Get a group mob together, and raid someone's speakeasy, or take down a bank?

That would be a ton of fun, YB. I'd also love to see a Western themed MMO. You could be a lawman, outlaw, bounty hunter, Indian, etc. Hell, there could be Civil War expansion packs.

Sadly, I've grown tired of the fantasy and WWII/Mid-East themed MMO's and shooters.

I'm hankerin' for a Western!

[Ritterin Sophia]

Sadly, I've grown tired of the fantasy and WWII/Mid-East themed MMO's and shooters.

I'm hankerin' for a Western!

I've never heard of a WWII themed MMO, detailz a pics, or it didn't happen.

[Mr Bean]

Sadly, I've grown tired of the fantasy and WWII/Mid-East themed MMO's and shooters.

I'm hankerin' for a Western!

I've never heard of a WWII themed MMO, detailz a pics, or it didn't happen.

War World II online, the ugliest MMO this side of Everquest. I can't begin to catalog the flaws. The biggest one is that WWII online is only 1940-1941 at best. Not to mention despite being around for half a dozen years, it's still missing a HUGE amount of French and German equipment.

[Molyneux]

to your knowledge has anyone created a pulp/20/30/40s style MMO?

you know where you could be gangsters, shadow like avengers, G-men etc. Get a group mob together, and raid someone's speakeasy, or take down a bank?

That would be a ton of fun, YB. I'd also love to see a Western themed MMO. You could be a lawman, outlaw, bounty hunter, Indian, etc. Hell, there could be Civil War expansion packs.

Sadly, I've grown tired of the fantasy and WWII/Mid-East themed MMO's and shooters.

I'm hankerin' for a Western!

How about City of Heroes or Exteel?
Maybe Final Fantasy XI? It's largely fantasy, but it *does* have guns and robots of a sort...

[Meest]

Someone needs to come up with a good ranged system if any of those genres to work, SWG wasn't exactly the best combat system. It's hard to make a ranged system personal and realistic. Imagine a wild west game where you can take 10 bullets and drop a "healing potion" just in time to pull out the kill.

[Molyneux]

Someone needs to come up with a good ranged system if any of those genres to work, SWG wasn't exactly the best combat system. It's hard to make a ranged system personal and realistic. Imagine a wild west game where you can take 10 bullets and drop a "healing potion" just in time to pull out the kill.

GURPS. If you take a bullet to the head, unless you've got insane superpowers or magic or tech protecting you, or unless you're INSANELY lucky, you're dead.


(Gah...I was kinda asleep when I posted this. Didn't realise that the thread was about MMOs, not RPGs.)

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

That's why non-fantasy MMO's are few and far between, and tend to suck hard. The MMO genre is so shockingly un-innovative that any deviation from the "two guys with lots of HP pounding away at each other" model would be considered financial suicide, and people can only suspend disbelief for that style of combat when it's fantasy. Personally, I can't suspend disbelief even then, but people are so used to seeing game characters take huge sword blows directly to the neck and barely flinch that they're just used to it.

I'd like to see a game where you can max out a character in one day, but death comes easily. One good hit and you're dead, like Bushido Blade. And no pressing a button and watching your guys hack away, either. Advancement would come from accumulating wealth and holdings and trying to become a mover and shaker and seeing how far you can get with each character before he bites the dust. Having the same character for more than a few months at the most would be considered ridiculous, and very lucky to make it past a few days. But nothing like that will ever be seen in a commercial MMO, where a few small deviations from the same boring model is considered risky.

[LaserRifleofDoom]

That's why non-fantasy MMO's are few and far between, and tend to suck hard. The MMO genre is so shockingly un-innovative that any deviation from the "two guys with lots of HP pounding away at each other" model would be considered financial suicide, and people can only suspend disbelief for that style of combat when it's fantasy. Personally, I can't suspend disbelief even then, but people are so used to seeing game characters take huge sword blows directly to the neck and barely flinch that they're just used to it.

I'd like to see a game where you can max out a character in one day, but death comes easily. One good hit and you're dead, like Bushido Blade. And no pressing a button and watching your guys hack away, either. Advancement would come from accumulating wealth and holdings and trying to become a mover and shaker and seeing how far you can get with each character before he bites the dust. Having the same character for more than a few months at the most would be considered ridiculous, and very lucky to make it past a few days. But nothing like that will ever be seen in a commercial MMO, where a few small deviations from the same boring model is considered risky.

I think a Wii based MMO would work well for this. I've been thinking a lot about it. If you based sword movement off the movement of the Wiimote, with some sheild functions assigned to the nunchuk, you could have a fairly robust fighting system. The problem would be mages- but simply disallow advanced magic users as player classes.

Simply set up a level cap at 15, high enough for people to want their character to survive for a week, but low ennough where dying isn't a problem.

And by fundamentally changing how people control their character, you change how they expect the world to work.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

True, but I wouldn't have magic at all in such a game. Mount and Blade doesn't have magic, and it doesn't hurt it at all. Would be worse if it were included, actually.

EDIT: I also wouldn't have levels or HP, or classes for that matter. Advancement comes from the acquisition of wealth, equipment, property, and influence. Fighting ability is 100% on the player.

[Molyneux]

True, but I wouldn't have magic at all in such a game. Mount and Blade doesn't have magic, and it doesn't hurt it at all. Would be worse if it were included, actually.

EDIT: I also wouldn't have levels or HP, or classes for that matter. Advancement comes from the acquisition of wealth, equipment, property, and influence. Fighting ability is 100% on the player.

You could include archery on a similar method to Twilight Princess, most likely.

[LaserRifleofDoom]

I've actually sorta worked out a system where your character basicly has one 'ability score'. If you had a score of 30, then you'd have 60 HP, but do 30+/-weapon damage. Which means two hits to kill another average player. The score goes up by one every time you level. It's frighteningly simple.

Low-level monsters might have a score of 15, sso they do less damage and are easy to kill, while a dragon might have 70, so you'd need a team of guys to kill it, and would probably die in one hit.

[lPeregrine]

I'd like to see a game where you can max out a character in one day, but death comes easily. One good hit and you're dead, like Bushido Blade. And no pressing a button and watching your guys hack away, either. Advancement would come from accumulating wealth and holdings and trying to become a mover and shaker and seeing how far you can get with each character before he bites the dust. Having the same character for more than a few months at the most would be considered ridiculous, and very lucky to make it past a few days. But nothing like that will ever be seen in a commercial MMO, where a few small deviations from the same boring model is considered risky.

I think the big problem with a game like that would be keeping the immature idiots out of the game. As much as taking multiple hits without harm breaks suspension of disbelief, I think the flood of suicide characters would be even worse. Especially if making a maxed-out character is so quick, anyone who gets anywhere would be cut down by a horde of suicide alts from their rival.

Without some divine intervention to limit it to mature and serious roleplayers, I think that hypothetical game would resemble QuakeOnline more than an accurate simulation of real life.

[GuppyShark]

Naah, I don't think you quite grasped Arthur's idea.

If SuicideGuy wants to quickly level alts and throw them at Sir ArthurTuxedo of Influenceville, he's welcome to - but a horde of guys attacking one at a time isn't even going to reach the front door of his manor.

[lPeregrine]

Naah, I don't think you quite grasped Arthur's idea.

If SuicideGuy wants to quickly level alts and throw them at Sir ArthurTuxedo of Influenceville, he's welcome to - but a horde of guys attacking one at a time isn't even going to reach the front door of his manor.

It wouldn't just be one guy at a time. He'd just get a few of his friends to mob our hypothetical Major Character. Sure, plenty would die... but death has no penalty for a day-old character, and the day-old character is plenty lethal. Sure, it's completely unrealistic, but that was my point about needing mature roleplayers instead of the average online gamer.

The risk/reward is just too far out of proportion. It costs you nothing to launch a suicide attack or ten, but the target of them has no real defense against it. With the ability to get max combat ability in a day, it just takes a few attempts to get lucky and ruin the target's little empire.

[Stark]

Looking at WoW and GW, most MMO players are just looking for multi Diablo. That's the market.

[GuppyShark]

Yeah, but if your manor house has NPC guards it's going to take a huge effort for those five or six guys to get in. And with permadeath it's going to take them a while to level up to the point where they can try again.

[phred]

I wouldnt mind seeing Rifts online.
One thing I think could make MMOs a little better woud be long term effects for near-death/dying. AFAIK there arent any, at least not on any game Ive played. the closest Ive seen is the xp loss in EQ and thats not that big of a deal.

[Uraniun235]

Yeah, but if your manor house has NPC guards it's going to take a huge effort for those five or six guys to get in. And with permadeath it's going to take them a while to level up to the point where they can try again.

That could be abused... if you got a character up to the point where even five or six other characters couldn't get at him, then whoever's got that much influence could start making alt-characters and use the finances and security of his prime character to help get him started even quicker.

I don't think most people would have the patience for this sort of game; it's not like you can 'practice' combat without risking death, and you'd be constantly working your ass off for something which can be taken away in an instant by some guy walking up and popping you off out of nowhere. A lot of people will just get frustrated and walk away.

It's two totally different models of gameplay in opposition here. For the guy who enjoys amassing wealth and influence, it would be like playing a hypothetical "SimCity: Cold War" which is like every other SimCity except that every year there's a 1/10 chance that nuclear war breaks out and your city is completely destroyed. For the guy who enjoys combat, it would be incredibly frustrating having to wait a whole day and plow through a bunch of boring wheeling and dealing every time he gets killed. I guess you'd have a few hardcore players who really grok the "omg realism", but not nearly enough to be a profitable MMO.

And if victory is 100% dependent on player skill, the game would rapidly come to be dominated by veterans who have the patience to sit through countless deaths and learn how to master the game's interface and combat system, while newbies get slaughtered so quickly and rapidly that they get frustrated and quit.

[CDiehl]

One thing I think could make MMOs a little better woud be long term effects for near-death/dying.

Do you know what the problem with that is? If you make death or near-death hurt that much, players will be much less apt to take risks, so they're not going to have as much fun.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Most of the criticisms of permadeath systems assume that everything else will be the same as other MMO's, a boring level grind, so who wants to do all that grinding and then get killed and have to do it again? But that's not really what I was proposing. If each character's experience is unique and based on a climb to the top in a 100% player-driven economy and political system, then getting killed and having to start over is an adventure. And the vulnerability of those at the top is just a fact of life that everyone accepts. Anyone who survives more than a month with one character would be in some kind of Top 10.

[Covenant]

Most of the criticisms of permadeath systems assume that everything else will be the same as other MMO's, a boring level grind, so who wants to do all that grinding and then get killed and have to do it again? But that's not really what I was proposing. If each character's experience is unique and based on a climb to the top in a 100% player-driven economy and political system, then getting killed and having to start over is an adventure. And the vulnerability of those at the top is just a fact of life that everyone accepts. Anyone who survives more than a month with one character would be in some kind of Top 10.

Yeah, a grind is awful. But why does it have to be so bad? Why not remove the arbitrary levelling system and make it much less ridiculously bland? I think the level-and-lewt gameplay model is boring, stupid, and outdated anyway. If you remove that, you make a permadeath much less painful. You can also make a distinction between KO'd and Dead. Beating someone to unconsciousness is just as useful in a fight as taking a brick to their head afterwards. If you make killing someone a rare and violent act, as opposed to the milder, more acceptable brutality of merely wounding them, then killing is still a rare punishment and you can still have an active PVP battle.

For justification, throw in some bullshit Yakuza Honor rule or something, so that if you kill someone, you get all sorts of heat on you. You can even make it so killing someone makes faction ranks decrease, so guilds will encourage their members not to kill folks, and won't be willing to hire known, unrepentant murderers (unless they already don't care about their faction rank, which is fine if you're willing to be a frontier bandit force).

[ray245]

I thought GTA 4 is going to be MMO...

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Basically, I think these ideas are workable for a commercial game, just maybe not one with a multi-million dollar budget. But it would be important not to call it an MMO, but rather invent a new name for the supposedly new genre the game creates. If you call it an MMO and it doesn't have a totally non-standard setting like EVE, people will expect an MMO and when they find out it's so different the MMOrons (did I just invent a new term?) will turn on you.