See-Saw Quest System
Most of the quest systems out there are designed to work directly with the player(s) on a close level. The See-Saw Quest System affects the entire game and works well if you are using an alignment system.
Add some world flags into the game code. Place a few simple starting quests. When the players finish these quests, turn off that world flag; but then turn a new one on.
Example 1: Shaded goes to the little fishing village. He speaks to an NPC and quickly learns about a lost child in the caves. The code then turns on the flag that loads the girl in the cave. Well, any player can do this quest at the moment. Well if the player is good, the girl is returned to the city and reward given. If the player is evil, the player kidnaps the girl and she is brought to an evil city and turned is forced into slave labor. Well now both earlier flags are turned off, but a new one is turned on.
Example 2: You've gotten to a high level and your magical power has grown to an insane amount. Well you stumbled across a book in a catacombs. It contains the steps to summon an unmentionable create of massive power. Well you go through the steps and summon it. Being an evil mage you gain a good amount of experience and have finished your quest. But you just created one for the good player. This beast you have summoned rushes off into the wilderness. It is not causing chaos and someone needs to slay it.
There is a lot that you could do with this to make quests more interesting. An evil player does a quest that in return opens a quest for a good player. Not only do you allow a more dynamic system for quests, you allow players to leave their mark on the world. Also, since the quests are constantly opening up and changing, it will stay fresh...
Player Monsters
Sometimes you just want to pk and fight rather than level up or explore. But it's risky and you are going to make enemies. Maybe your game is anti-pk. Well this system will provide excitement and draw new players to a game.
Every so often the server will randomly open a slot for a player monster. Well when it does so everyone is alerted. When you go into the login menu the server will send the client a message that a Player Monster is available. The player will click this option. However, they will not be creating a new character. They will enter the game as a random monster. The player will not have a name nor will they see names(This will prevent bias attacks). The monster cannot speak either. You could have flags on the monster to allow them to be nomadic, only enter certain maps, or confined to a certain area.
When the Player Monster position is filled, there will be an alert message to all the players. They can either stay safe or try to hunt it down. It is the Player Monster's job to survive and hunt others. You might take the form of a weak orc or a powerful dragon. Depending on the game, this could easily tie in with the see-saw quest system.
Soul Weapons
At some point everyone wishes they could have a custom weapon made for their character. The Soul Weapon system takes care of that.
Scattered throughout the game there are rare weapons that have been known to have stupendous powers. When a player finds this weapon they can give it a name. Each one has different "personalities".
Soul Eater: Whenever a player pkills another player, the weapon grows in power. Though this is a slow and dangerous method, it can eventually become a dangerous item.
Component Weapon: Gathering different items and bonding them with the weapon will provide unusual results. Once bonded it cannot be removed. It is done through trial an error. A more powerful Component Weapon may alllow five slots. A weaker only one.
Arcane Weapon: Every time a spell is cast upon the player there is a random chance that the item will absorb this power. It is rare and could take the player a long time before it gathers some sort of energy.
Maybe have a class that only uses Soul Weapons. They start off very weak, but can later on channel great powers through these magic weapons. And as a side note, a lot of balancing would be needed here. These are only ideas and not concrete methods.
Demi-Gods
So you have a staff who is helping run and work on the game. They get bored from time to time right? Let them have some real power!
You have a god system where your players can worship different deities. Well each deity is ACTUALLY played by a staff member. Their role in the game is to help people out and take care of issues. Lets give them a bit more.
In Demi-God status, they don't have the power to create items, edit maps, or whatever. They are pretty much very powerful players. Create a system where the Demi-Gods gain GP(not gold pieces), but grant points. When they gain these they can help out players who worship them in the game.
Example 1: You have a player who has just lead victory over an opposing guild. Well their god notices this and has 3 grant points available. They decide to use a GP to chose from a list of items that the Demi-God has access to. These items should relate to the TYPE of god. So if it was a goddess of nature. She might reward the player with an enchanted oak staff. Well the player now is flagged for quite some time. They cannot receive anything else for awhile to prevent abusing.
Example 2: You have gotten stuck in a cave and pretty much out of hp. You know that you will most likely die. So you pray to your god. They may or may not hear it. All you can do is hope. Well the god happens to be online and grants you your prayer. They appear and revive you back to health....but lose 1 GP.
Example 3: The god wishes to unlock a quest. They use 5 grant point to open up a quest for the player. Or possibly creates an item using GPs to run their own quest personal quest. The god of disease uses a few GPs to give a city the plague.
There are many ways you could balance and utilize this system to enhance role playing or keeping players interested. Demi-gods could gain Gift Points every day depending on the amount of players that worship them. Worked out correctly, this could be a powerful feature in the game.
Master Skills
Create your own skill?! I suppose you could get this to work.
In an unique game players get 3 skills total. But they get to create them through a menu editor.
There are many options. You can set the amount of damage it can possibly do. You can set the range of how many squares. You also have a large amount of affects.
Example 1: Set the damage to do 1-10 damage. It has one range. But I want to pick the double damage at night option. I call it Night Ambush.
Example 2: Set the damage to 1-3. It has 5 range. Having more than 1 range the skill now requires a long distant weapon. I pick the multi-hit option. I also want it to do fire damage. I call it Fire Barrage.
Example 3: Set absorb damage to 5. Duration 10 seconds. Pick affect hide. I call it Shadow Run.
There is a penalty though. Each time you make it more powerful, the more delay you can use it again. So if I made an powerful skill, I might only be able to use it every 5 minutes. Also damage and other parts will be capped to prevent abusing.
The best part is yet to come. Well you can create 3 or maybe 5 or maybe 1 every 10 levels. Your pick! But you also can learn 3. Whenever a skill is used upon you, there is a SLIGHT chance you might learn it. Or you could teach it to your friends. Everyone would be talking about that awesome skill so and so made.
There is a lot ways you could go with this. Maybe base it on class. A rogue would have a different set of options than a fighter. Be creative, this would give any game a unique aspect.
That's all from me tonight. I took some sleeping pills before I wrote it all. So some of the spelling might be off or text could be confusing.
I was just hoping to spark the fire back into anyone who lost any motivation.
Feel free to comment/critic any of the ideas. Post some of your own. I'd like to see some of the games out there become a little more creative.
Dragoons Master
Unregistered
shaded Wrote:spark the fire back Tnx :!:
I'm not sure about making your own skills. It'd be a very hard one to pull off but I think it may be do-able. Instead of such a huge time limit, I think it'd be more reasonable to increase the requirements as you add more stuff to the skill. In fact, time limit might be something you should be able to adjust. Lets say you wanted to just make a skill that was melee range and did nothing but damage in the most basic form. You should be able to decrease the cast and cooldown times to very low, making you hit faster and harder than a melee fighter. If you could pull off actually using it in battle without dieing in seconds, you could probably become a pretty brutal mage. But then this also opens the chance for excessive tanking. Might be worth trying out some day for someone who has at least a month free time to make a small game using it.
I like the idea of the player monsters. I think it'd work better as a less "special" kind of feature, though. If an announcement is made that someone can be a monster, and it only happens a few time a day, your server will probably get ****ed in the A with a mass amount of disconnects followed by connection requests. Then, for everyone who didn't get in, it was just an annoyance to attempt doing so. I am thinking more of you just log in as a monster at any time you wish and usurp a monster that is on a map with at least one user already on it (if you have larger maps, preferably a monster thats out of view of all users on the map, too). When you die, you just go and usurp some other monster randomly.
The problems I can see with it, though, are that people could just stand there and get wailed on, allowing users to get some easy kills in. Even if you disable chatting and names, external communication can allow individuals to find each other. The importance of this decreases greatly as the game contains more players, though, and if you keep it to more monster-filled maps and the usurped monster is not some kind of super monster, it would probably become more trouble than its worth. Though this means that the "monster hunter" thing wouldn't work well at all, either. You most likely wouldn't want usurped monsters able to change what map they are on or anything of that sort, either, since that could lead to some issues.
What I do like about the idea, though, is that it breaks the predictable AI. Many games even have non-randomized pathfinding so you can predict exactly how a NPC will move through obstacles. Even if you only get another player attacking you every hour or two, you wouldn't ever be able to just sit there and know you're safe because the game's AI never goes to that location even if they can reach it.
The demi-gods may sound good in theory but would probably turn out into the worst disaster to ever hit online games. Having players worship other players? That can't be good. Enough games suffer from egotistical admin. No need to actually integrate ass-kissing as part of the game.
The quest system, even though you are breaking out from quests being almost on a purely per-character basis, its not far from it. Talk to A. Kill B. Bring B's head back to A. But now, instead of B just spawning every X minutes, any player in the game could just walk by B and kill him before you can even reach him. Congratulations, you now have to walk back to A and try all over again. The end result is pretty much the same except theres an added chance of extra annoyance. Or, in the case of the summoned monster, its just an extra annoyance for anyone who walks by his path. Some dick could sit there and constantly start quests that increase the monster count and never finish them (intentionally or not) and now everyone else has more crap to hack through.
90% of all of this is just what the title of the subject says; Concepts and Inspirations. None of what I wrote is something you can just plug into a game. It's more or less designed to make you think about something else, rather than the common MMORPG mold.
Some players will read through and gain nothing out of it. Others might get a new idea. Last night I wrote it all up very quickly. When I have time again I'll add more and fix some of the old ones to be easier to understand.
I'll redo the quest system, cause I don't think I explained well enough.
Bleeding and/or Severing Limbs
For a heavily PK style game.
When a player has been wounded to a certain amount. They begin leaving trails of blood on the map. Or if you wanted a skill to do this.
It would make it easier to chase down enemies.
As for the severing limb parts, this is going to be a stretch. First your game will need to make use of paper dolls. Randomly in combat, someone may strike a deadly blow; removing an arm or even beheading a player.
The sheer entertainment of watching the head of your enemy plopping off would be grand. Add some animations... :twisted:
See-Saw Quest Continued
Some comments about the see-saw quest system was that a player could keep starting a quest and summoning creatures. To get around this...when they start the quest, THAT world flag is turned off. It cannot be turned back on or restarted until someone finishes it.
To move back one step, this first quest cannot be easily started. Before they can even start the quest in the first place, the server must randomly load it available after it has been down for a determined amount of time. Let me give just some sort of example.
No Global Quests are flagged on yet. The server does a check randomly once a day. Suddenly a book spawn in the deep catacombs. Now the game turns flag 1 on. A good player comes across the book and realizes the deadly and chaotic power of this book. They take it. Flag 1 turns off and flag 2 turns on. They go on a series of quests to destroy it. Well when Flag 2 is turned out, a few NPCs in the evil town begin to talk about rumors about "the good player" with the possession of this book. The good player is now on a quest to destroy it and gain "something" from it. I don't need to fill in all the details. Well instead lets say an evil player finds the book. Flag 3 is turned on and Flag 1 is turned off. This evil player has decided to go on a series of quests to summon the beast. During the long quest, they actually "unknowingly" activate some other quests for good players along the way.
It's difficult for me to completely explain the options you have with this. You are not making the quest per the person only. In most games, you can have 7 players all doing the EXACT same quest at the same time. Instead the 7 players would all work together to complete ONE quest.
Also, this system lets players affect the world and feel important. Not just grinding quests that everyone knows about that are readily available and rarely changing.
If this doesn't clarify it let me know. The best way would be for me to write out an entire quest with all the different paths that can be chosen. And then write down all the see-sawed quests that open up for other players in the mean time.
You could have a long quest where evil players spend a week doing it. But at the end, they finally bribe the goblins to do a mass attack on a good player's city. Suddenly a bunch of weak goblins begin to show up. Players are confused so they go and talk to random NPCs; in which they talk about rumors of people bribing the goblins to pillage the local merchants.
But remember, the evil players cannot continuously start this quest. There could be several good quests that might open it up for the evil players. Maybe the good players killed the goblin king and the goblins seek someone to help them get revenge. I can't fill in all the details, it's up to you.
For the limbs one, I know its not multiplayer and hardly graphic, but if you can stand the learning curve, try checking out Dwarf Fortress. You can break, injure, chop off, etc any limb of any creature in the adventure mode (I believe thats the right mode).
I was thinking of adding limb dismemberment into Plagued Dead (when I finally make it), though it was mostly going to be just for a more graphic death and the ability to use limbs sometimes to throw them at enemies or hit them with it. Its one of the reasons I designed my new engine and attempt at Plagued Dead to use a skeletal system - makes it very easy to accomplish graphically. 
For it happening to someone/thing that is alive, I think it'd only work well if they are borderline dead and/or they are expected to be dead within a few seconds anyways. If it actually affects the outcome of the battle, I'm sure it will cause some complaints.
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