Just a random moment where I was thinking about MMORPGs. In my time I've played a lot of MMORPGs and have experience with a wide range of both MMOs and also RPGs separately. I've had fun times, but every time there just feels like there's something else I want out of them. I keep experiencing this more and more where I try new things, get used to them, and find things that I feel like could be better, finding myself wanting more out of everything, wanting better quality or more intriguing complexities or depths. This goes for everything in general, but for MMOs I feel like there's a few things I wanna see at some point.
1) Professions that feel like they matter which can hold their own as a strong foundation to the mechanics.
2) Diverging from class based systems to give better customizability and flexibility to build creation.
3) Baseline foundations for mechanical gameplay depth to play off of.
4) Baseline gameplay that has more engagement than the typical "Click on thing and then click your abilities and it will automatically target and cast."
I feel like the first two are mostly self explanatory; however, for the third one, I wanna see these gameplay foundations that have interesting affect on how you play the game. Like a companion focused base where it plays like an RTS game with your stationary companions acting like buildings and mobile companions acting like units. A ranged attack focused system for spells and physical ranged weapons that play like first or third person shooters that you can just aim and shoot with but that rewards you for hitting weak spots on enemies. A melee focused system that lets you use what ever you get your hands on to fight and brawl to your hearts content that plays more like a souls-like game.
As for the fourth thing, you get a sense for it in the explanation of the third point; however, branching out from how you play the game would be wonderful for making games more interesting and have more depth. Now, I know that this would be a tall ask for an MMORPG, heck, it's a miracle MMORPGs can even make it out of development, but I will always look to the future and see these things that we could do more on. A theoretical way of accomplishing something like this would be building up each foundational of gameplay separately, starting with a game that is an RPG with a lot of focus on professions and the world to build up the world design and profession systems. An RTS game where you are a physical character that you have to manage and protect while fighting with your companions. A souls-like game to work on making clean movement and combat systems. Finally, a game focusing around weaving magic and ranged weapons together in a seamless way that encouraging aiming and precision during boss battles. Then from those games you would have to combine them together, which will be easier if you work them from the ground up to build off each other, and then multiplayer which is a beast in of itself. The creation of the MMO at that point would be taking these individual games, combining them, then mass crowd multiplayer handling which in of itself would likely be the hardest part.
I should say, as a game dev, I know this is not an easy task. I am not calling anyone else out to do this and I couldn't see myself doing this... at least not with out practice. If anyone ever finds this and wants to use this production timeline to try and make their own MMORPG, I HIGHLY encourage it. As for me, well, I always have big visions like this, as you all will know from my prior posts. I hope someday I can play an MMORPG that really hits just right for me, but it is unlikely to ever really happen, and even then perfection is unobtainable; HOWEVER! with that I will say that we always have higher goals we can hit, we always have further we can reach, and I hope I can someday make you all proud.
thank you for reading,
~ W <3 L F ~
