My Thoughts on MMORTS
 

I chose to make a seperate topic for this because I have a history of "hijacking" other threads unintentionally.

The idea of a MMORTS is one that's been floating around for a couple years now, but no developer has had the guts to go ahead and do it. I've had plenty of time to think on the subject since I first heard of about it, and I would like to share my view on the subject.

In my thoughts on the subject, there was one stumbling point for the longest time. Clearly out of fairness a player should not be vulnerable to attack if offline, but if players are not allowed to attack each other while one is offline, then concrete boundaries and geography in the MMO world is unworkable. The solution may seem to be a "cyber nation" approach where individual kingdoms do not have borders, but rather just an abstract quantity of land without any defined shape. From the trailer, I got a sense that this is the solution that Reverie has chosen to overcome that issue. It is my opinion that this "cyber nation" approach to compromise the the traditional idea of a MMO game with the traditional idea of a RTS will, in fact, doom the hybrid to mediocrity.

In the time that I've had to consider the problem, I've come to think of an entirely different solution: instead of giving each player their own kingdom, a large group of players could instead control a single faction (with many different factions for each race). These factions would have a feudal hierarchy based on merit; if you win battles, you rank higher in your faction, if you lose them, you rank lower. The idea is that you share an empire with many other people, and work together to expand and maintain it. At any given time, a sufficiantly large faction should have enough players online to defend itself (with contingeancies to account for a rare fluke where almost everyone is offline simultaneously).

This approach has three primary advantages over the cyber nation approach. Firstly, there can be a definite world with permeanent geography, and borders and landmarks which follow it. This is important since it allows the world to gain its own history, and different regions to have varying types of importance. Secondly, this allows for a deeper level of connection between players. In addition to long-term grudges of enemies which may occur, players will have an opportunity to form cooperative relationships with others in their faction. Most importantly, however, this setup allows the world to flow. Battles and other events can happen, and players can step in and out of these ongoing conflicts at their leisure without halting the progression. This compromises the RTS and MMO aspects in that it allows players to build a lasting influence in the world, but does not require them to maintain it constantly.

I believe Mech Assault tried something along these lines.

They had a galaxy map with over 50 planets, 50 or 100 I don't quite remember. Anyways, you could join one of five factions and then wage war on a planet. Essentially when you fought on the planet it would be like a regular game, 5 mech vr 5 mechs or whatever you wanted. When you one the battle, your faction took 2% hold of said planet.

Well to say the least it turned out to be fairly flawed. I think the way they are taking is pretty good because people get to feel a pride of ownership in their land. It will feel really cool working your ass off for your own kingdom and then taking territory, fighting to hold the lines, ect. In Mech Assault you never really felt that.

The 2nd issue was that everyone just joined the winning faction. So for example "the green" faction would control 50 % of the planets and 80% of the general population playing the game.

Lastly most people didn't care for the game type so they just played regular quick matches. I hope having more of a personal investment in your territory and kingdom might sway people to playing the persistent version. It will be definitely what I am playing :D.

While I am not at liberty to completely expose our approach to MMORTS yet, I can say that our approach is fresh, and haven`t been tried in any other MMORTS yet.

Our approach is similar to what Guild-Wars did to MMORPG - you still get a feeling of MMO without the monthly fee.

As for "cyber nation" element, in my opinion players care much more about intensity of gameplay - that "cyber nation" approach allows - being able to attack anyone they wish, be it with allies, or by him/herself, at any-time. Instead of being restricted by geography.

However, how complicated can it be to fool players into assigning them a place on a world map which they think belongs only to them?

I got a feeling I just confused you guys even more about what we had plan, if so I apologies.

Well, the phrase "no monthly fee" is always good news as far as I'm concerned. Such a policy makes it much easier to forgive a game's shortcomings and embrace its strengths.

I do agree that the "Cyber Nation" approach and the "Fixed Geography" (for lack of a better term) approach offer different strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps it's just my playstyle, but I prefer a dynamic world which doesn't stop moving just because I'm offline.

I don't think you've so much confused me as raised my interest, however. I'm going to be patient. There's more than one way to make something work.


Which is why you test and fix. Things can be improved with the proper changes. Here's one idea; in order to get larger a faction must recruit more players (makes sense; more territories means more battles means more players are needed to fight them!), but as a faction gets larger a "jackpot" builds up to encourage a civil war. Eventually, there will be enough 'shallow' players in the hierarchy to split the faction and break up the superpowers. Another solution may be to lower the rank benefits for "beating up" weaker kingdoms. To get a high ladder rank you may have to play the underdog, which would encourage the best players to choose weaker factions. This might turn out very well, placing newer players in larger and more powerful nations, and more experienced players in the less prosperous ones.

I do think that will be a problem in any MMORTS setup, offering something innate that can't be found in the traditional setup.

I was actually agreeing with the developers stance with my thread :D.

My retort to you was less defending the ideas I proposed and more to state the fact that ideas can always be refined and improved if they don't work in their original state. I have no doubts there's more than one way to make a great MMORTS, and I can't wait to see what they have in mind, since it really does seem that they have an interesting concept behind the scenes.

A right my bad. For some reason it didn't click with me that you were the topic starter.

I'm as interested as you in seeing what they have in store for the game :D.

i love the idea of MMO-RTS its plain genuise.

:) just read about guildwars 2 I think they will be doing they networking very differ from guildwars and still no feeds per month