The Gaming Den

I've been really thinking about how the next gen of MMO's will look like, and what my ideas are for them. A lot of the ideas are obviously cribbed from here.

Setting

One planet. To make it easy, it's Earth. We know what it's like, we know what is where; and if things are a bit different, we'll be able to accept it as part of "creative license"

Geography

Terrain is modeled coaresly. You can't be expected to model the whole fucking Earth properly, and you won't. Instead, you'll model it "roughly" to how it does look.

Coastlines are just a soft curve all the way along the shore lines.

Only specific mountains (tallest in each continent) are actually made that tall; everything else is pretty much flattish; and procedurally seeded with forests of an appropriate climate type.

NOTE: I could see a way where topographical maps are scanned and used to procedurally generate the height of terrain.

Also, using Google Earth to help generate terrain is a good idea. Creating a program to "read" pictures, and then create rough outlines of what waterways travel through an area, or where forests are, etc. is probably a good idea.


Server

Single, persistant, setting. If EVE can do it for 300k people in a "galaxy", I'm sure that 1 planet + other Planes in other servers is possible. Instanced areas are able to help spread server load.

((more later))

What sort of scale are we talking about here? If you're trying to have a planet based on Earth, it obviously can't be real life sized since trying to fill it all in with interesting things is retarded.

So, is it nearer to 1:100 scale or to 1:1,000,000 scale (random numbers there)?

Then, are you going to keep the same geography for cities or what?

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Keeping it all on one server is interesting but stupid, especially if you are talking about next gen MMOs in general since they will be hoping for users in the low millions. EVE can do it but isn't space mostly empty?

I don't really know enough, but surely you could have different continents being servers at the least?

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Personally I think that next gen MMOs should have the gameworld affected by the users. So a guild could decide to create a settlement somewhere and have various members harvesting wood or ores to build buildings, and if a mine is create

Hmmm... this would only be feasible with a single server to avoid multiple similar worlds confusing things.

Splitting stuff into "continent" servers isn't a bad idea. But really, a single persistent setting is not a "big deal".

The only reason that the "travel across the sea" from one continent to an other is 'handwaved' away in a game like WoW; while the players can travel up and down the entire length of the

Even having "the whole world" done in a rough and undetailed fashion is also pretty easy.

Plotting down landmasses with a map editor isn't that hard; you can seriously paint your borders and then fill them in. If you aren't expecting to actually have anything accurate with your first "edition" or "version" save for coastlines, and locations of major bodies of water and larger rivers (or even rivers that can be seen from satellite footage via Google Earth); then that's an awesome start.

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The idea of players affecting the scenery is one that I'm a fan of. Having players cut down forests and get "X cubic metres" of "decidious" wood, or "coniferous" wood is something that I'm fine with.

If you start simple, and increase the complexity of what players can do, you can seriously have both "established" towns, where players can hand in lugged trees, or mine in the iron mines; and other players can still get iron weapons as a result.

I guess going for an Ultima Online sort of model might work.

Other "basic" things that I'd like to have:

-Scaling items.

Sure, items have "tiers"; in WoW, that's done in the following manner:

-Grey (NPC trash)
-White (Used to craft things; Quest-related items; salable on the Auction House (AH))
-Green (uncommon equipment, crafting items; drops from "regular" monsters in dungeons, and the world; salable on the AH)
-Blue (rare equipment; drops very rarely in the world, also from dungeon
bosses, rarely can be sold on the AH, usually due to being "bind on pickup")
-Purples (epic equipment; only drops in "raid" dungeons, available by handing in "badges" gained at a rate of 1 per "at level" dungeon boss (+2 more if you complete a dungeon); kill 30 bosses, get an epic item for one slot, kill 75; get an item for a more important slot; "higher end" Purples can also be purchased via rarer "single" tokens that drop at a rate of 1 per raid; raids can be done by a player 1/week)

Yes, I'm seriously saying that players should be able to go to lower end dungeons, and get a blue item that still is good for their max level character; or, alternately, not have to go to dungeons all the time to constantly replace gear.

Some players will want to replace gear; and other players do not want to play a "rainbow knight". Since we're talking about a vidja game, the visual aesthetics of a character should seriously be accounted for.

A player in "lower level" dungeon gear is going to be happy wearing their gear if it looks good, and the stats are appropriate for their level.

On some servers, player will seriously farm trash dungeons that are 20 levels lower than themselves just for cosmetic items; like a cool outfit; or an awesome looking weapon. More hardcore players will seriously farm raids that are lower level than themselves. Using 4 PCs, when 40 used to be needed.

I know, because I did that last week. Some player wanted to get the vanilla WoW level 60 raid items for his priestess PC, and I went along to provide AoE DPS and de-cursing; a warrior went along to tank, and we began grinding the massive mobs of elite level 60 creatures, and bosses. They couldn't really hurt us, but it took us about 2 hours to go through the dungeon without pausing to heal, regen mana, or otherwise "rest". The priestess player got the outfit he wanted, and I got a trio of useless weapons (stat-wise), but very impressive graphically, items.

If said items scaled, you would see players consider all instance content to be something to go after.

A possible idea would be to also have dungeon monsters scale (but not raids; even with a 4-man group doing a lvl 60, 40-man raid took about as much time as doing several normal "on par" dungeons.

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An other idea is that where players could get in-game currency, by doing things in the game, like generate content, or create or modify existing geography.

An other idea is this (this one is really crazy, and would rely on a really crazy procedural sort of project. Where things would always get changed to black/white, and shapes would be very realistic, or perhaps overemphasized (think Sin

players entering an area, would be able to choose which area they will load when they enter an area, and as long as they are in an area, they will see that area in a certain way.