Idea, Concept, Artwork needed for new Sci-Fi MMORPG

[Hawkwings]

Oh, and on the topic of pre-existing universes...

I would advise against it. You won't be able to exactly match the style or substance of the universe that already exists, and that will be held against you by fans of the universe. And they will be very vocal in their disapproval. You'd be better off starting your own, new universe, and avoiding any entanglements that might give people even more opportunity to complain.

[Zablorg]

Oh, and on the topic of pre-existing universes...

I would advise against it. You won't be able to exactly match the style or substance of the universe that already exists, and that will be held against you by fans of the universe. And they will be very vocal in their disapproval. You'd be better off starting your own, new universe, and avoiding any entanglements that might give people even more opportunity to complain.

I would also advise, if possible, that it be fairly rich in background. Having a fleshed out universe often really helps players immerse themselves in the game. And reviewers like that sort of thing in any case.

[Zixinus]

I like the idea of the crew having a social life. That would make an interesting role playing setting, different crews having different forms of party and entertainment. Some more important crew members could get married, have parties, have family they weep for, they could have parties for their promotion, etc. It would be an interesting dynamic.

[Hawkwings]

More ideas, here they come.

FTL:

If you can buy other race’s FTL equipment AND still have your own, battles will go something like this:

One person jumps in with a Grey hyperdrive. He then activates his wormhole generator, and opens a wormhole with a waiting fleet. That fleet comes into the system all at once. Total travel time: instantaneous plus however long wormhole travel takes. Level of surprise? Complete.

Now, unless you make a “1 FTL per ship” limit or make it impossible to buy other race’s FTL, then this is what everyone will do. Those solutions seem kind of forced, so what about having different levels of interdiction for each hyperdrive? Or maybe even three types of interdictors for the three types of FTL? That would make a lot of sense.

Habitable stuff:

Players will congregate at the starting locations, and the places that sell the best stuff or give good missions. There will be a lot of interaction around those places, so you shouldn’t worry about that. But you should also allow players to meet at landmarks that aren’t so populated. If the universe is too small, then where will the smugglers meet that isn’t frequented by other parties?

How about this: Have a little over a dozen really good meeting spots with lots of equipment for sale, events, missions, etc. These will be the hubs of activity. Then have three or four dozen small patrol stations, outposts, research stations, dirt-farmer colonies, whatever. These are the more backwater places that people can choose to meet. There are still ships for sale, equipment, missions, etc, but not as many. To draw people to them, perhaps the equipment is more exotic (or less legal), trading opportunities are good (trade medicine from core hubs to backwater, in exchange for rare metals), and missions are more dangerous (What? Fight a Bug fleet? I thought those only existed in stories!). Now of course, if a few of these backwaters are actually military outposts that constantly fight off high-level enemies, then high-level players will congregate there. That’s fine. There’s still a bunch that really aren’t that valuable, but are good meeting places because they’re out of the way and nobody will notice people there, perfect for illegal stuff.

Finally, the last kind of landmark will be the player-created ones. These should be able to be built anywhere, but also be open to attack and destruction from hostiles. They’d be a place for players and guilds to meet, repair their ships, trade equipment, etc. These stations should also have economies, need food water and medicine, perhaps sell things to neutral traders (if they’re allowed to dock).

Customization:

Please please please don’t have “Primary Weapon Slot” or “Defensive emplacement slot” or stuff like that. It doesn’t make sense. Instead, you could have a ton of hardpoints on your ship for componenets, and each hardpoint has a power value and a structural value. Oh, and of course some are inside the ship and some are outside. So you can only put your BFG on the hardpoint meant for it because that’s the only one with enough power and structural points to hold it, but you could also put Meaningless Subsystem #12 on that hardpoint and it would function just fine. Even better perhaps, because it has more power available to it.
Of course, the two biggest power hogs on the ship would be realspace and ftl engines. Realspace engines should be the only exception to what I just said, since they need so much more than just “power” and “structure”. Lock those slots for engines only.

Inertia in Space

I already posted about this topic, but if you want a justification for drag-based engines, say something like “the engines suck in space-time from the front and shoot it out the back. As long as the engines are on, space-time itself pushes against them, causing this drag.” Hmm, that gives me a new idea. Let space-sucking engines be a high-level engine for humans and beasts, and let them keep their normal engines too. That way, they can be fleeing from another ship, then suddenly turn on their space-sucking engines, turn around really quickly and be going the other direction, then turn them off and glide away. Perfect escape mechanism for high-level smugglers. Of course, turning the engine on would take some time.

In any case, if you must do drag in space, try not to technobabble it too much. It’s probably beyond the understanding of any of our characters anyways.

Crew interaction

Again, already posted on this, but I have one point to make: crew interaction should change over time. The new guy will become accepted, even liked (or hated). A really dangerous mission that barely succeeded should make the crew like each other better. A mission that failed because of one crewmember failing their job should make other people not like that person, at least temporarily.

[Tekore]

You should definitely allow people to customize the paint, trim, nonessential points, antenna, etc. on ships. One thing that has always irked me on EVE is that every ship of the same type is identical. It might also be nice (if not well explained) if you could customize the appearance of your weapons discharge. I would recommend having a somewhat limited selection of non-pay customizations that could be added as well.

[avatarxprime]

An easy way to get a ton of customization would be to offer a simplistic version of your dev tools for the ships to your clients. They can work offline and design something and upload the design, making it available to everyone. They can design just new part designs or entire ship mods that become available to everyone when they upload them. This way other than your actual design team you also have all this user generated content that anyone can opt to use.

[Commander 598]

Some of these ideas make "Spreadsheets in space" EVE look downright tame by comparison.

For real fun, try developing a full economy. I.e. if it takes raw materials (of different types) to make basic plating for ships, then a blockade of one of the types will prevent basic plating from being made. Or if someone sells a lot of an item on a market, the price to buy that item will drop, but so will items made from it.

You'd think that blockades would work, until you realize that all someone needs to make the item in question is a blueprint and the necessary resources which are more than likely available everywhere or available in a wide enough area that a blockade is exceptionally unfeasible. The closest thing I think EVE has is POS (Player owned station) fuels being created from different types of ice available in different places and certain types of POSs requiring certain types of fuel (Faction specific mostly), meaning that an organized campaign targeted at attacking and destroying ice miners in the "safe" areas (Since high security space is where the non-pvp mining/mission running crowd congregates) could have a significant impact on wars in the nosec (No security) area depending on whether your enemy has a preference for a certain type of POS.

[Master_Baerne]

While this may have already been posted, I've only got a few minutes, so here goes.

Space stations. Make them buildable.

Additional ships. Make them storable on the buildable stations.

Ships you own. Make them programmable, so you don't have to micromanage everything they do.

[Namarie]

This is the same Nexon that a few years ago decided to make all white non-Koreans redundant at the California US Nexus TK offices? Screw you guys.

[bilateralrope]

This is the same Nexon that a few years ago decided to make all white non-Koreans redundant at the California US Nexus TK offices? Screw you guys.

Do you have a source on this ?

And it would be the same company.

[Namarie]

My step father being one of those removed, and the various others we knew personally.

[Typhonis 1]

FTL communications are one area to look ay. How are they handled?

None? then the ships with the fastest FTL are how messages are spread.

Some? AS in heavily controlled? Then you have a Comstar setup with one corperation running the show or massive governmental control .

Next level atre Is Trek where Kirk had to wait for a few hours for a reply to a mesage .

Then there is Hypernet or internet in space.



Missles are tricky in that some enterprising player could slap an automated package on a fighter hull equip ity with weapons and when it runs out of ammo have that suicide into an enemy ship.


A clear distinction between the Core worlds and the Fringe is a must. Core worlds will be civlised and things that would be tolerated in the fringe would be frowned on or outriht illegal in the Core.

Boarding actions....you can encourage people to be careful doing this by haing stray shotts damage equipmwnrt. Afterall like in Hunt ffor Red October there are systems that do not react well to being shot.

[bilateralrope]

FTL communications are one area to look ay. How are they handled?

If an MMO doesn't instantaneous communication, people will just use an out of game communication system, leaving the people who don't use such a system at a disadvantage.

So this is an area where the gameplay reality limits you to just one option.

Namarie, I'm looking for something that I use as evidence when I bring this up elsewhere, so a personal statement doesn't help. I'll try looking for a new article after I get back from uni if one hasn't turned up.

[Namarie]

Why would there be a news article? No lawsuit was filed, the people just moved on. Nexus TK California office wasn't even that big, and it serves maybe 1000 customers? I'm just pointing out my disdain for a company that so blatantly selected non-koreans in their desire to downsize (ie all of them). You want some kind of *proof*? A mind probe of the people making the decision would work, otherwise too bad.

[j1j2j3]

Ok, It's monday and i'm back at work.

First of all, thank you everyone for the comments.

1. Player buildable stations -> already in the pipeline - facility to store extra spaceships will be implemented - current thought is to have them be destroyable(albeit very difficult) even when the owner is offline(another incentive to have a bigger guild and spend more time online for defense of station)

2. Customization -> will be implemented very heavily. Game balance customization(weapons , shields, etc) will be slightly less dependant on extra payment items, 'looks' customization will be very dependant on extra payment(2$ for a pink and bright green paintjob) or very expensive in in-game credits(very easy money sink for high level players)

3. Crew system idea has been passed on -> probably will start out very simple but can have depth added after game launch(easy to modify after launch)

4. Multi engined ships -> yes possible but very impractical - we can have it so that engines take up 40% of internal space so that having two different types of FTL drive would make said ship almost unable to fend for itself. Also if you use 'alien' FTL drives said drive becomes very unstable and much less durable(don't know when it will malfunction or be destroyed) - all in all balance problems can be ironed out later.

5. Intertia drive plan is probably dead.

Will keep adding concepts for discussion. Thank you everyone!

P.S. Namarie - I don't know what you are talking about, but I'm sure it could have happened. But as you said it wasn't a big office and there weren't that many employees. It seems that you are implying that Nexon is some kind of racist company, but there is evidence to the contrary(Nexon, Canada has NO Korean permenant staff). But whatever happened I don't think it has any bearing on this thread. This is just to discuss concepts and ideas about my work.

[j1j2j3]

And about the communication system - bilateralrope is right, there is no way an MMORPG can have a delay communication system.

And about the Maple story hacking problem I just spoke to the Maple Live development team and they are currenty in process of moving many systems to the server side + client to client self cross checking. So it should be better soon. I'm not sure if you play or not but that's the story on that.

[Zixinus]

5. Intertia drive plan is probably dead.

Thought that would happen. Game developers always are more afraid to move away from an established tradition or system.

[bilateralrope]

5. Intertia drive plan is probably dead.

So what exactly do you plan to have to make this game significantly different to Eve Online ?

Note that Eve Online does have a system that allows people to play without directly paying CCP, as long as they grind up enough currency (and that is only a lot of effort for new characters).

And about the Maple story hacking problem I just spoke to the Maple Live development team and they are currenty in process of moving many systems to the server side + client to client self cross checking. So it should be better soon. I'm not sure if you play or not but that's the story on that.

One recent hack allowed the hacker to boot seemingly random people from his targets guild without being part of it. Although it's been fixed, I have never heard of hacks like that before in any MMO, and I struggle to see how a client side hack could do this.

[MJ12 Commando]

Thought that would happen. Game developers always are more afraid to move away from an established tradition or system.

Newtonian physics drives are realistic-however, are they fun?

There's a reason newtonian flight was the "advanced" model in I-War-it's easy to screw up and go hurtling at 2,000 km/s into open space in the middle of nowhere.

I suggest reducing the value of the whole "level grinding" thing. Make individual skill levels and better equipment only marginally better for significantly increasing cost. It makes the game a lot more newbie-friendly and also makes it a lot more interesting when a bunch of low-level players with basic ships can materially contribute to the war. If, say, a player at level cap, using equivalent gear (although higher leveled) than a starting player can be taken down by a wolfpack of a couple of 'em, it means any members of a guild can contribute to a large conflict. It also means that a guy who just joined can fly with his friend who's been playing for several months-and be useful too.

Manage the player-side economy some-I am very annoyed at how quickly prices for goodies balloon when you get players involved, since it's possible to get a fundamentally infinite amount of cash. I don't know how you'd do it-you'd probably have to deal with an actual economist, or make it so that if an item starts being too popular NPCs will start selling it.

[Feil]

I, for one, am really, really tired of fuzzy nebula backgrounds in space games.

[Commander 598]

Note that Eve Online does have a system that allows people to play without directly paying CCP, as long as they grind up enough currency (and that is only a lot of effort for new characters).

Also if your ratting ship is stuck in 85% far more often than not hostile space that was SUPPOSED to be filled to the brim with corp/alliance mates. (Yes, I'm talking about Delve)

I, for one, am really, really tired of fuzzy nebula backgrounds in space games.

For the love of god yes. It can be rather distracting in EVE if you have all the right graphics on.

[bilateralrope]

Note that Eve Online does have a system that allows people to play without directly paying CCP, as long as they grind up enough currency (and that is only a lot of effort for new characters).

Also if your ratting ship is stuck in 85% far more often than not hostile space that was SUPPOSED to be filled to the brim with corp/alliance mates. (Yes, I'm talking about Delve)

Just have a mission ship in high sec for a fall back.

I, for one, am really, really tired of fuzzy nebula backgrounds in space games.

For the love of god yes. It can be rather distracting in EVE if you have all the right graphics on.

I find them annoying on all settings.

[Coalition]

And about the communication system - bilateralrope is right, there is no way an MMORPG can have a delay communication system.

Too true. If the MMORPG has a comm delay, then the players are just going to use voice chat programs to compensate. At the very least, instant communications will give them an advantage in trading between worlds. I.e. instead of finding out 2 hours later that a system needs mineral XX and is willing to pay a higher price than normal, they find out immediately, and the player in a system that produces the mineral cheaply is buying up as much as they can and traveling there, donating some of the profits to the Guild.

Out of curiosity, how are you going to handle the FTL systems? Is there going to be a non-FTL ship, basically for going from a planet to its moon(s) and back (cheapest type), a in-system FTL (for going from planet to planet), and a inter-system FTL (from one system to another)? The planet-moon ship is going to be the most profitable per ton of ship, as it doesn't need any FTL core or the related maintenance, but it is severely limited in top speed.

The different types of FTL also allow for ferries, where a planet-planet FTL ship carries non-FTL ships back and forth. It doesn't have to pay the mass (or credits) for a powerful engine, it just charges a fee based on the size of the ship(s) being carried. Ditto for the system-system FTL. This is similar to the Guild Highliners from Dune, or Jumpships from Battletech.

The other option might be FTL gates, similar to Freelancer or Babylon 5. A ship can travel from planet to moon easily, or run the engine on low (low fuel consumption, high specific impulse, really long time), and get to another planet (very slowly). Or pay the fee, and use the planet-planet FTL gate. A similar idea could be used for system-system FTL gates.

This allows for an extra source of revenue for empires, by taxing gate use. Each time an FTL engine is used, it requires certain materials (maintenance). Fixed gates are better (for one reason or another), so taking a gate is cheaper, if you are friendly to the gate owner. Of course, you need time and materials to set it up, and if it gets destroyed, you are SOL.

[Feil]

I, for one, am really, really tired of fuzzy nebula backgrounds in space games.

For the love of god yes. It can be rather distracting in EVE if you have all the right graphics on.

I find them annoying on all settings.

EVE is the worst example of this. At least games like Freelancer had bright colors and high contrast; playing EVE is an exercise in driving a grey ship through grey space using a grey HUD labeled with grey text. Note to everybody: contrast is good.

[Havok]

I never liked pussy "greys".