Have you ever played a game and wondered what if you could do something that it doesn’t really allow you to do, for example being able to move around blocks in Minecraft fluidly instead of in sectors, edit the world in Hogwarts legacy with spells, be able to fly in a world like Elden Ring or Elder Scrolls with epic sky battles, have a sims game that simulates more than just sims needs, but whole economies, or a dystopian horror game set in a Minecraft style world. So I was wondering if anyone else had similar ideas for games or fantasies for possible games?
What’s your ideas for games that doesn’t really exist, or might not even really be possible to make?
@hzkvskd an actually good, deep Fantasy sandbox PvP #mmo
Fans of the genre will be aware of the problems and the failures.
Mostly/specifically the existing ones don’t provide structures to prevent griefing. And building some boring hut but having no meaningful interaction with others is something you can just do in Minecraft.
I actually thought about something similar a while back, specifically with a magic system where one player creates puzzles to prevent griefing, sort of like wards or charms in fantasy, and attackers have to solve them to be able to get to the loot and get damaged by the elements if they fail, in a type of Rust PvP setup. It ended up way more difficult when I tried to make a prototype, mostly because you have to allow for a wide range of possibilities while also allowing a wide range of difficulty, but this is something I think would be fun to play, it might just be really hard to implement and balance.
@hzkvskd my personal opinion and intuition is that devs so far just haven’t dared to let the players really take the wheel.
E.g. player run police/justice system, truly letting them control politics and lore. Being part of a guild as a protection thing.
I think players would be creative enough but there would have to be some infrastructure from the dev to bootstrap it and nobody has done that yet.
I don’t know if you’ve played Rust or ARK survival, but those systems fall apart pretty easily and leaves a lot of players unable to enjoy the game due to the group systems being exploited in some way or another. In a lot of cases especially because you have to join a guild for protection if you want to progress, and that leads to more realistic situations where players are exploited and end up leaving the game, because they don’t want to experience reality in a game, they want to escape it. It takes away form the PvP experience by turning it more into a clan fighting game like Last Oasis which was also a mess due to the clans basically destroying all the smaller players before they can actually progress, because groups were extremely overpowered. Last Oasis is basically dead at this point and they did have player based protection system, and it was abused. Therefore a system to equalize the playing field would be cool, and in a fantasy game something like a single player or a small group being more powerful than an entire clan would actually make sense.
@hzkvskd yes, I agree.
I haven’t played them but those are the games I’m referring to that didn’t get it right from what I’ve heard.
I want big player run cities and factions that can maintain the peace. Or at least a realistic chance to do it.
Where the chance of being attacked in the street theoretically exists but there are guards/police and a justice system the make it the exception.
From what I’ve experienced, having players protect other players is not going to work, most people are just going to find ways around it like in real life or actually make things worse for the people they’re protecting, there is no real integrity if you have enough people and corruption is always present. Your best bet is having save zones enforced by the game mechanics, but what I’m suggesting is giving players a way to protect themselves against people abusing systems without relying on other players, because trust in other people is not something you can rely on to keep things fair in a game, while theoretically allowing player owned cities, while keeping them in line with basic expectations.
Emergent altruism is not something you should expect in a game that rewards being a dick. EVE had it right with safe zones and backbiting outside of them.