ID:61081
 
Keywords: cyberverse, design
Project Cyberverse (tentative, not-at-all-precious-enough title to worry about registering a domain or anything) is not a humongous project. I'm trying to keep it simple enough to finish it.

The design - my main hurdle - is largely worked out in terms of overall scope of how the parts are working together. In terms of overall scope, I'm about a quarter complete. I can't see the future, but my prognosis is good.

So, let the tipping of my hand begin. Just bear in mind that none of this is set in stone. Most of what I'll be saying is abstract, describing the philosophy behind what I'm making, so I don't paint myself into any corners. What can I say? I like my creative freedom.

Turning the MMORPG genre on its head

Maybe that sounds a tad presumptuous, but technically, that's what I'm doing.

Where the average MMORPG puts you in the role of being a single player in an expansive world, I've turned that on its head: All the players are expansive world manipulators governing several single player units. They build the world, they set up the encounters, they're essentially what a GM is (but without unlimited power).

Why? Two reasons.

First, because the game masters have a whole lot more fun on a massively multi-player scale. A player can only see what's right in front of them, but a GM can rapidly flit about the game universe as they see fit and see a lot more of it at once. Your initial impression might be that the disembodied GM perspective is less immersive, but actually what happens is the aperture opens, you take in a lot more MMORPG goodness than you can as just a single player.

Second, because being just a player character in your average MMORPG is monotonous and a waste of the players' talents. Your average MMORPG interaction is to give the player a quest to kill ten rats, and so the player goes off to do it. The gameplay is simple, successfully killing ten rats may only require selecting the rats, turning on your autoattack, and waiting. It's so simple, an NPC can do it... so that's precisely where I put the burden. The players' role is to direct, not just one NPC, but as many NPCs as they can, and then to reap the benefits of direction.

By putting the players into the GM's perspective, I was able to satisfy one of my two major design goals: interaction. There's plenty of meaningful, game-impacting things for a GM to do, it keeps the player well-occupied with meaningful interactions. In this regard, it's a quantum leap ahead of what most MMORPGs offer.

Of course, the players are not literally as omnipotent as GMs - they are taking the role of players with GM-like powers balanced within the scope of a game. At this point, I was surprised to realize, the game automatically evolved into a somewhat real time strategy like focus.

I want to maintain that pervasive feeling of a living, breathing world that MMORPGs offer. So, unlike your average RTS, the maps are never cleared. Players are tasked with building or destroying dynasties - if they can.

This achieves my second major goal for this design: dynamic content. It's also another major way in which I'm turning MMORPGs on their head - usually, you're the only meaningfully changing thing in a static world - now the world meaningfully changes.

I've some really good ideas along the lines of just how that works, but I haven't ironed them out well enough. So it looks like I've revealed all I'm comfortable revealing so far.