I am sad in my heart. I want a good sandbox MMO like UO was back in the day, or even an acceptable substitute was SWG. Don’t get me wrong, SWG was a mess – it had so many problem I will have to do a whole blog entry on why it sucked. Meanwhile it was a sandbox and I desperately miss those. I heard once that there are two kinds of MMOs, sandboxes and theme parks. Themeparks being something like WoW or LOTRO, the main point of the themepark is to do certain things like… grind quests or monsters to gain levels so you can wave a magical yellow sword around instead of a magical pink sword.
Sandboxes however are pointless. They are what you make of them Like UO or Eve. There really is no point to it, which turns a lot of people off, but it gives you the freedom to do anything you want to do, which I love.
Since there really are no good original MMO ideas floating around, well, ok, there is one… POTBS. I don’t know how hip to that I am. To me it seems like theres not a whole lot to it. They’ve already pretty much stated that theres classes, certain classes get certain boats, etc, etc. It sounds like WoW with boats to me. I don’t know how long it would be fun for me to sail around and shoot cannons at other boats. Maybe a long long time, maybe not. Just doesn’t seem like a lot of variety to me, but I am watching it to see.
Since there are no original MMO ideas floating around I am hereby submitting some that would be fun to me – for people to steal and turn into fun games.
1) Zombies! A horror survival MMO would be so mind bogglingly awsome I dont know where to begin. Mind you not Resident Evil online, I mean a full on sandboxed build a makeshift fortification with your friends and enemies to try and survive a full blown zombie outbreak.
Things you could do in this game. You could be into the “crafting” or engineering side of things and work on building/improving some sort of a shelter against zombies – since this is like.. end of the world as we know it stuff there will not be much in the way of creating ” new” things, more of it would somehow be settled around fixing things and using things for new purposes. So you could maybe steal some sort of a large vehicle and use that vehicle to shove smaller ones around and make a rough circle , then you could gather scrap metal and such and bake this thing even sturdier , you could fashion swords from car bumpers or fix guns, or make improvised flame throwers to mount on this city you are building. Something like that, it’d be about improvisation and scavenging, not ” mine ore, make ore into stuff”.
Combat classes: You would secure the area in tandem with your friends so that engineers could fortify it. Youd go on raids into the surrounding area and get food and medicine and raw materials for use, you’d fight off attacks by other people and by the zombies, you could explore and look for that long lost military depot of … whatever.
I think a zombie game would be fun, survive the zombies survive your friends!
2) Politics! What if there was a game where you were a politician? You had to build up a support base and get yourself elected to some position, from there you attempted to gain higher and higher posts until you eventually became president/dictator/whatever, this gameprobly wouldnt be that great unless it was built into another game somehow.
3) Space exploration! You are all settlers and explorers in the early stages of mans outward surge to the stars, explore, investigate and maybe settle new worlds! There would be very little in the way of fighting in this game but I don’t think a game has to have it. Look at some of the franchises that have THRIVED with lack of ” pew pew” – SimCity, the Sims, all the Tycoon games… there are loads of them. I think space exploration would be fun. It’d work like this: You create a character- he could be a pilot or a botanist or a chemist or , some combination or these traits. You get a starship – you look at a big map(it’ll be really interactive with plots of where people are going, where they’ve been, long range scans o stuff, very elaborate) and pick a destination. Then you pack up yourself and whoever else is going and take off to this far away planet, on the way you could have mechanical problems, or meteors hit your ship and such and you have to deal with this, eventually you have to land on this planet (or are you somehow knocked off coarse and land on the wrong planet?) and explore it, figure out what resources it has, what its ecosystem is like if it has one – all manner of scientific things I can’t speculate on – and then if its good then you can get settlers to come, and try and start a colony and depending on how you set it up it could survive or fail. Once you have a good colony going you can choose to go colonize another planet, or just hang around and see how far you can take it.
4) Think Spore – only as an MMO. Yeah, who do I write the check out to?
I think there is a lot of room to do things games that aren’t necessarily ” shoot at stuff” centric. Hell, the first “shooter” didn’t come out until the 90’s. Whatever happened to adventure games or puzzle games? I know people like these things, why do I always have to want to kill things? I dunno.
