Warhammer 40K MMO

[Ritterin Sophia]

What about giving IG the ability to command and summon NPC's, as mentioned earlier, just make sure at whatever level they are that they can summon enough NPC's to be a challenge to an SM, and depending on whoever plays smarter wins?

[Hotfoot]

What about giving IG the ability to command and summon NPC's, as mentioned earlier, just make sure at whatever level they are that they can summon enough NPC's to be a challenge to an SM, and depending on whoever plays smarter wins?

That's not going to work for the same reason it doesn't work in City of Heroes: all you need to do is kill the master and you win. The minions are worthless in comparison.

[Quadlok]

What about giving IG the ability to command and summon NPC's, as mentioned earlier, just make sure at whatever level they are that they can summon enough NPC's to be a challenge to an SM, and depending on whoever plays smarter wins?

That's not going to work for the same reason it doesn't work in City of Heroes: all you need to do is kill the master and you win. The minions are worthless in comparison.

Why not make a sort of chain of command where the PC jumps to each of his summons successively as they are killed off, mirroring what would happen irl?

[Hotfoot]

What about giving IG the ability to command and summon NPC's, as mentioned earlier, just make sure at whatever level they are that they can summon enough NPC's to be a challenge to an SM, and depending on whoever plays smarter wins?

That's not going to work for the same reason it doesn't work in City of Heroes: all you need to do is kill the master and you win. The minions are worthless in comparison.

Why not make a sort of chain of command where the PC jumps to each of his summons successively as they are killed off, mirroring what would happen irl?

That would be insanely complex, and very disorienting to the IG player. It would also mean that you would still focus on the most powerful of the group first, then work your way down. It would also have to be done for EVERY race that wasn't Space Marine or Necron. Orks would have to do it, as would Eldar, Tau, Dark Eldar, etc. At this rate, you no longer have an MMORPG, but rather MMO DOTA.

Add to this the fact that Space Marines will still outnumber every other faction by an enormous amount just by sheer popularity makes this even more laughable. You can either play a badass space marine, or you can play a weeny little guy who only survives by having tons of free respawns. What makes it worse is that if you really have someone jump from one character with one set of abilities to another character with another set of abilities every 5-7 seconds while commanding a small group of worthless peons. Even the grand solution to make the lesser species more worthwhile is useless. The only possible way the minion idea would work is if the lesser minions gave their lives to protect yours. Period. Anything else is just useless. Even then, most MMOs have very short ranges, meaning the IG would be even more boned against a space marine with a close combat focus more often than not, but that all depends on how they do the combat system.

But there is a simple solution that GW will be loath to accept: Don't make Space Marines or Necrons playable. There, it's done.

[InnocentBystander]

But there is a simple solution that GW will be loath to accept: Don't make Space Marines or Necrons playable. There, it's done.

Heh, they might as well not make the game.

Of course there is another option. Two sides: Space Marine and Chaos Space Marine.

[Hotfoot]

But there is a simple solution that GW will be loath to accept: Don't make Space Marines or Necrons playable. There, it's done.

Heh, they might as well not make the game.

Of course there is another option. Two sides: Space Marine and Chaos Space Marine.

Hence Space Marine: The MMO

Seriously I have to wonder why they bother sometimes, but I suppose we'll see how it turns out.

[Adrian Laguna]

What about the Adeptus Mechanicus? Seriously, the level of badass inherent in SM doesn't compare to being the Princeps of one of the larger Battle Titans.

Of course, implementing Titans might be problematic, since any battle involving those inevitably also involves thousands of troops, current PC technology might not be able to handle it. At least not at a level of graphical quality that will satisfy the average gamer.

[Hotfoot]

What about the Adeptus Mechanicus? Seriously, the level of badass inherent in SM doesn't compare to being the Princeps of one of the larger Battle Titans.

Of course, implementing Titans might be problematic, since any battle involving those inevitably also involves thousands of troops, current PC technology might not be able to handle it. At least not at a level of graphical quality that will satisfy the average gamer.

Golly, if Jedi are overpowered, jus think of how overpowered the Captain of a Star Destroyer would be! Gosh!

Seriously, how fucking retarded are you to even MAKE this post? Yes, there are things more powerful than an individual Space Marine, such as a motherfucking Titan. Hey, why stop there? Why not let people command Dreadnoughts and World Destroyers! LOLZ EXTERMINATUS ROFL!

Go shit in your mouth so that something slightly more useful can come out of it.

[Adrian Laguna]

First off, there's no need for the insults. I'm no criticising your points, I'm merely adding that there's other things that will be hard as hell to balance if this MMO is going to work.

Second, a Titan does not have the same problems a Star Destroyer or a space cathedral does. You can separate space and ground combat to keep both balanced. Titans, on the other hand, operate alongside tanks, Space Marines, and regular infantry. Because Titans are also awesome and potentially lots of fun to command, wondering how they could be implemented is as legitimate a concern as how SM will be implemented.

Furthermore the issues regarding the implementation of Space Marines are distinct from the ones regarding Titans. As I already said, there's the graphical problem. Then there's the fact that a Titan is a vehicle, not a player.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

The best way to go about this is probably to make the space marine something that you earn and can only do at top level. It's a title, basically, and maybe a set of gear. Doesn't make you suddenly become better, it's just that only the people who were already the most powerful can become one. Of course, that might not work for the setting, which I admit to not being familiar with.

[Hotfoot]

First off, there's no need for the insults. I'm no criticising your points, I'm merely adding that there's other things that will be hard as hell to balance if this MMO is going to work.

There very well is need for insults here. You're fucking insane if you think it's even remotely feasible to put a fucking TITAN into an MMO as a player-controlled structure/armor/whatever. Nothing even remotely close to that scale has been done EVER. If you want to make a point, you could start by not making one that is so utterly brain dead that it makes Derek Smart look like the PhD he claims to be.

Second, a Titan does not have the same problems a Star Destroyer or a space cathedral does. You can separate space and ground combat to keep both balanced. Titans, on the other hand, operate alongside tanks, Space Marines, and regular infantry. Because Titans are also awesome and potentially lots of fun to command, wondering how they could be implemented is as legitimate a concern as how SM will be implemented.

Fuck you're stupid. Yes it DOES have the same problems, from the huge numbers of weapons on board to the massive deployable complements. What's worse about this is that you realized this in your own post and somehow managed to forget it now. In a game where everyone is a starfighter, giving someone a star destroyer arbitrarily is FUCKING STUPID. The fact that you also just skipped past Walkers, light armor, tanks, and superheavy tanks right to motherfucking titans is further evidence of your lack of thought in the matter. We're still talking about the problems of balancing individual characters for fuck's sake.

Furthermore the issues regarding the implementation of Space Marines are distinct from the ones regarding Titans. As I already said, there's the graphical problem. Then there's the fact that a Titan is a vehicle, not a player.

The why did you think it was even REMOTELY related to the discussion at hand, which was that Space Marines were overpowered? I mean seriously, what possessed you to even think of Titans as even tangentially applicable to this discussion? Nobody was even talking about commanding vehicles at this point. Fuck, why didn't you just point out that playing the God-Emperor or a Chaos God is overpowered because you can control entire empires? In fact, I should point out that playing as Andy Chambers is imba because I can rewrite the game any time I want, lolz.

The point you made added nothing to the discussion at hand and didn't really even prove a valid point. At most all you could do with Titans is make them some sort of Raid where you're defending (or assaulting) a Titan from within.

The best way to go about this is probably to make the space marine something that you earn and can only do at top level. It's a title, basically, and maybe a set of gear. Doesn't make you suddenly become better, it's just that only the people who were already the most powerful can become one. Of course, that might not work for the setting, which I admit to not being familiar with.

That could work, and it might be the best solution, to have high-level human characters have a chance to apply to the Space Marine training, and by the time they hit max level, they can become a Marine of some sort. It's not perfect, but it would prevent millions of space marines from spamming the galaxy, at least for a while. The next problem would be advancement, and what would the other races get in comparison? Eldar would get Aspects, most likely, Guard I guess would get Stormtroopers or some such, 'Nids...well, fuck 'Nids...it could work though. The catch would be I suppose that Marines would be harder to do and such. It's still going to be a bitch and a half to balance properly, I think, especially with the level of disparity involved, and it's not like making marines lower limit being level 80 and everyone else's level 50 is going to make a huge difference if by 90 or whatever Marines are still uberbadass.

[Academia Nut]

No, getting the ability to play Space Marines at a high level like that wouldn't work because for all intents and purposes Marines are a separate species, not an 'upgrade' for high level characters. Hence the problem.

There are however some ways of balancing Space Marines. First, they need to do vehicles somehow, because the vehicles are both highly iconic of the setting and because they are the big levelling element between Marines and non-Marines. IG guys should be getting their hands on tanks before Marines are even half way through their scout training, and the Marines should only get things like Land Raiders when other people already have Baneblades. I doubt they could balance Titans, but still, another awesome thing that Marines simply don't have access to.

And while fluff wise its a bit of a cop-out, there are individual combatants who can eat Terminators for breakfast in hand-to-hand. They're called Imperial Assassins. While I think that they should be at least as hard to play as Marines, if not harder, having a squad of cocky marines get their asses handed to them by a guy with a Callidus or Eversor will teach them that there are far more dangerous things than them around.

The next way to get balance would be crafting. Now, everyone seems to love crafting, but in 40k, having Marines doing herb gathering is just moronic. So more or less, the only people who should get any significant craft skills should be those who have been inducted into the Adeptus Mechanicus. And while yes, people should be able to play Tech Marines, they should have much lower caps on their craft skills. Perhaps to encourage people to play high level Ad Mech guys they should make it so that all the best equipment, say things like artificer armour, inferno pistols, etc. should only be able to be built by players, and high level ones to boot.

Another idea I had was a sort of commander based XP boost. It would work such that if you have certain ranked characters in your group, you get bonus XP, and the commander only gets his own bonus only if he is in a group. The catch will be that while an IG player could attain the rank of general, the Space Marine Captains and Chapter Masters would be NPCs or GMPCs only. This both allows non-Space Marines to advance faster than their counterparts, and gives greater incentive for the 'weaker' player types to band together into curb-stomping mobs. So where the average Space Marine group will just have five guys, the IG guys would have a company with full armour support with PCs and pets.

The last major way to make it harder to play Marines and other high powered classes, but still fun, is to have penitent quests. If a Space Marine player starts performing actions that are negative and out of character, particularly things like griefing, they will eventually be whisked off to their Chapter Master for disciplinary action in the form of a penitent quest, ie. they won't gain XP, honour, loot, etc. until they complete some difficult task to wash away the stain on their honour.

[Hotfoot]

The thing is, at some level, fluff is going to have to take a backseat to gameplay. Unless, of course, you are going to have every death be permanent....

[Academia Nut]

Well of course not, that would drive just about everyone away, and since death is so common in 40k you have to make sure you don't penalize people for dying, especially if they are encouraged to do suitably 'epic' things. Hell, you could even make a good death rewarding. Say make a sort of 'awesome meter' that tracks the number of kills you've made, and it fills up according to the comparative level of the opponents and your health at the time of the kill. When you do die, you could be rewarded with anything from medals to 'The Emperor intervenes!' and you get back up with full health. This would encourage badass, balls to the walls heroics of standing your ground when maybe you should run, while still discouraging IG conscripts from throwing rocks at Khorne berserkers.

You could also make the act of respawning more interesting, saying perhaps that you didn't 'die' per se, but were critically wounded and had to be taken back to the infirmary or field hospital. There you could be given the option of 'Recuperate here' or 'Send me back to the fight!'. If you choose to recuperate you're restorned to full health, if you go back to the fight you are dropped off near where you fell after some travel time, but at low health. The 'respawn' should be suitably awesome and 40kish, like teleporting in, parachuting in, or drop pod assaulting the position, which would just look kick ass on a battle ground PvP area.

Another interesting way to make death fun is to earn scars, because its every 40k'ers dream to be a walking mass of scar tissue standing atop a pile of fallen dead ten feet thick, bellowing your rage at the gods above. So let's say you pick the recuperate option, you can be told that particularly gruesome wounds may have caused a scar to your character, and you can choose whether or not you want to keep it (and removal later should be free of charge since its just a cosmetic thing).

Plus I did say that Imperial Assassins should be playable, if harder to do than Marines, despite the fact that the Temple Assassins are in the fluff rarer than Marines by several orders of magnitude.

[2000AD]

Plus I did say that Imperial Assassins should be playable, if harder to do than Marines, despite the fact that the Temple Assassins are in the fluff rarer than Marines by several orders of magnitude.

Fluff wise it's a problem though, since assassins are taken at a young range and trained for most of their life.

[Imperial Overlord]

Plus I did say that Imperial Assassins should be playable, if harder to do than Marines, despite the fact that the Temple Assassins are in the fluff rarer than Marines by several orders of magnitude.

Fluff wise it's a problem though, since assassins are taken at a young range and trained for most of their life.

Not a problem. A lot of the IoM's crack personel are taken young. Stormtroopers and commissars are both usually orphans who have been schooled their whole lives, assassins are taken as children, marines as teenagers, inquisitors are sometimes taken young, as are some sanctioned psykers, I imagine a lot of mechanicus are trained/educated from childhood. . . . .

If IG officers/commissars are given the ability to call in say air or artillery strikes, perhaps get a badass hardened veteran as a "pet" and have good group buffing abilities and access to some of the top of the line gear (refractor fields, carapace armor, hellguns, etcetera) I could imagine them as viable in some implementation without bending fluff to badly.

Assassins are already mentioned as viable. Inquisitors are also a possibility and possibly some of the Ad Mech with heavy combat mods (and perhaps a few gun servitor/skitarri pets).

[18-Till-I-Die]

I could think of a way to do Titans in an MMORPG.

It's a Guild-wide effort. If a AdMech force gets a big enough following they can build them, given weeks and weeks of time and resources gathered from numerous extremely difficult quests. Like those HUGE ships in EVE.

Also allow IG and SM et al to build "Titan Killers", but slightly easier and in larger numbers, so they can theoretically defeat a Titan in battle 'rather easily' given a proper strategy and good coordination of forces. Or at least, even if not done right, damage the thing so bad it has to retreat.

[Hotfoot]

Now, see, that's a reasonable thought. It's still very unlikely to reach the final product in my mind because we're talking about a considerable amount of technical issues that would prevent it from working correctly. It could happen, but it probably isn't likely. If they do include titans, at most they'll only include scout-level titans, nothing like the Imperator unless the Imperator is a Raid, which would be ungodly cool, but then it wouldn't really be a true vehicle, it would be a place.

I honestly don't know how I feel about the inclusion of vehicles in the game. I suppose it could work, but if they're going to do anything along the lines of Space Hulk-style zones, you're still going to have significant disparities since vehicles wouldn't fit in those areas.

Also, to date the only MMOs that have really done vehicles have all been severely action-based (Planetside, SWG:JTL, et al.) so I would have to wonder how this would affect the game itself. A Planetside-style 40K could work pretty well, all things considered, and the lack of disparity between level 2 and level 90 would go to the wayside, as most advancement would be for versatility rather than mass improvements.

[InnocentBystander]

Are you guys serious? We're talking about a game where, in all likely hood, the average player is going to be a Space Marine. Titans carry what, a full guard regiment in each freaking leg?

[Academia Nut]

The ones that carry entire regiments in their legs are the super large, super rare Emperor-class Titans, which would really be more like dungeons or plot pieces in a large battle/campaign. No one is advocating that PCs be allowed to use those. However, a Warhound class, which is "only" a scout might be playable because it is "only" about 16.5m tall and doesn't carry weaponry drastically more powerful than some of the stuff the Imperial Guard can field, although admittedly in a more concentrated, mobile and heavily armoured package.

Also, the issue of the "dungeons" comes to mind. There will have to be things like Space Hulks and close quarters hive warfare, which would be roughly approximate to many of the dungeons in standard fantasy fare, but there should also be wide open battlefields where vehicles can roam and massive numbers can duke it out. While Space Marines are good for just about any battle according to the fluff, they are really better suited to surgical strikes in close quarters where their size, speed, and strength are amplified and the massive firepower of armies like the Guard is restricted by the fact that they can't bring it all to bear at once. This is of course the primary problem in balance, is that many of the character types in 40k are incredibly cool but often serve very different roles that might not come out evenly in the environment of an MMORPG.

[The Yosemite Bear]

They might as well only have 1 playable race, its not like there will be more than a handful of non-space marines

nid rush, kekekekeke

[Adrian Laguna]

There very well is need for insults here. You're fucking insane if you think it's even remotely feasible to put a fucking TITAN into an MMO as a player-controlled structure/armor/whatever. Nothing even remotely close to that scale has been done EVER. If you want to make a point, you could start by not making one that is so utterly brain dead that it makes Derek Smart look like the PhD he claims to be.

And there was a point in time when vehicles had never been done in an MMO, yet they worked in Planetside (or whichever game first had them). I wasn't really making a point at all, rather the purpose of my post was to raise the issue of Titans so as to get some discussion started on the subject. Lo and behold, it did. Though I was hoping for something more along the lines of Academia Nut's posts than your ranting about how stupid I am.

Fuck you're stupid. Yes it DOES have the same problems, from the huge numbers of weapons on board to the massive deployable complements. What's worse about this is that you realized this in your own post and somehow managed to forget it now. In a game where everyone is a starfighter, giving someone a star destroyer arbitrarily is FUCKING STUPID. The fact that you also just skipped past Walkers, light armor, tanks, and superheavy tanks right to motherfucking titans is further evidence of your lack of thought in the matter. We're still talking about the problems of balancing individual characters for fuck's sake.

I never said you should arbitrarily give people Titans. They would first have to earn it, and that would probably require being a Skiiritai for a while, then you have to be crew in a Titan, and eventually you get to command a scout one. From there you move up. I was thinking that the Princeps would only be able to move the Titan and use it's melee weapon, all other weapon emplacements would have to be manned by other players. So to get the full use of, for example, the fairly common Reaver, you'd need four players or six players. Then for further balance, a side can't deploy a Titan unless a more or less equal force opposes it, whether it be super-heavy tanks, massed artillery, or other Titans.

The why did you think it was even REMOTELY related to the discussion at hand, which was that Space Marines were overpowered? I mean seriously, what possessed you to even think of Titans as even tangentially applicable to this discussion? Nobody was even talking about commanding vehicles at this point. Fuck, why didn't you just point out that playing the God-Emperor or a Chaos God is overpowered because you can control entire empires? In fact, I should point out that playing as Andy Chambers is imba because I can rewrite the game any time I want, lolz.

Well, I wanted to talk about vehicles so I brought it up. I thought you had adequately explained your position on Space Marines and that it was a good time to introduce another point in the overall discussion of "Warhammer 40k MMO". As for Chaos Gods and the God-Emperor, that is a complete strawman of me raising Titans. A Titan could potentially be implemented, especially if the game is balanced more or less according to how it is in Warhammer Epic. That's pretty much what I've had in mind all along. Incidentally, using that as a template pretty much balances everything.

The point you made added nothing to the discussion at hand and didn't really even prove a valid point. At most all you could do with Titans is make them some sort of Raid where you're defending (or assaulting) a Titan from within.

I introduced the subject of Titans which I feel does add to the discussion, as shown by Academia Nut's posts.

Also allow IG and SM et al to build "Titan Killers", but slightly easier and in larger numbers, so they can theoretically defeat a Titan in battle 'rather easily' given a proper strategy and good coordination of forces. Or at least, even if not done right, damage the thing so bad it has to retreat.

Space Marines don't need Titan killers. They're so badass they blast a hole in a convenient bulkhead and kill it from the inside.

[The Yosemite Bear]

jsut a thought, what would all of you imperials do if they saw me, as a damn dirty xenos, moving very fast, leaping over your heads, and laughing manically?

[InnocentBystander]

jsut a thought, what would all of you imperials do if they saw me, as a damn dirty xenos, moving very fast, leaping over your heads, and laughing manically?

Shoot you with lasers!

[The Yosemite Bear]

you guardsmen and marines should know it's impossible to hit an Eldar with holosuit, flipbelt, hallucin field, veil of tears, and other buffs working.