Ultima Online Devs Building Player-Run MMORPG 75
An anonymous reader writes: "A group of former developers for Ultima Online has created a game company called Citadel Studios, and they're working on a new MMORPG called Shards Online. '[CEO Derek] Brinkmann described the game as a player-run MMO, which means at the highest level they can run their own servers and change the settings of that world, altering how long nighttime lasts or how quickly players can gain skills. On the next level down, server administrators can take the form of god characters, who can spawn monsters in the world, create items and launch live events. And in the level below that, players can modify the gameplay code. ... The game is set in a multiverse, where players can travel through different worlds. While all the worlds are unified by the same rule-set, Cotten told Polygon that they are each themed differently, and these themes will offer players a different experience. There's a world inspired by high fantasy. There's a world that is coming out of a steampunk industrial revolution. There's a world that consists of a coliseum in which players can fight each other in player-versus-player battles.'"
well that was new... (Score:5, Insightful)
*cough*MUD*cough*
Ohhh... they just invented MultiMUD (Score:5, Insightful)
And allow me to dust off my crystal ball to predict how this is going to run.
- People will flock to the "shards" where they gather xp the fastest, then complain about the lack of content.
- Balance will be completely off whack because you go to shard A, get weapon A1, go to shard B and get armor B1 because the monster that carries said armor is very susceptible to A1 (which does not matter since nothing like it exists in world B), then go to shard C where every monster gives tons and tons of xp and loot but is really hard to kill... unless you have weapon A1 which deals a damage these mobs don't have any resistance to (because it uses a different ruleset) and wear armor B1 that makes you invulnerable against mobs on shard C (because they use a different formula to calculate armor which makes the armor rate on B1 insanely huge against shard C while it would be quite normal for shard B).
- Interesting, well designed worlds filled with lots and lots of detail that will be deserted because the builder also took balance seriously, while the shards with no meaningful texturing where you mow down mobs by the dozen for free loot will be overrun, in turn giving wizzes the message that players don't give a shit about eye candy and just want free stuff, culminating eventually in the black room with rows and rows of defenseless drones dropping the Ultrasuperspecialawesome Sword of Pwnage with a dropchance of 99.9999% (with an error margin of 0.0001 due to a spawning error caused by the amount of mobs dying at the same time).
- Dozens and dozens of "twisty passages, all looking alike" because for some odd reason wizzes love to create mazes about as much as players loathe running through them.
Oh yeah, I'm so looking forward to that again!
Re:a good idea? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't play such an mmo. It sounds like a chaos for gameplay to me....
Sort of like the different forks of NetHack? ;-)
Re:well that was new... (Score:5, Insightful)
The introduction of the later crap -- PvE-only areas,
Actually, a lot of people *like* to enjoy the universe of their choosing without some douche who's spent half a lifetime grinding up to maximum constantly coming around and squashing players they're not involved with just to screw with them. Halo isn't for everyone. I prefer the games where you can flip PvP on and off.