Topia Online - Roguelike MMORPG with perma-death

Discussion in 'Other Games' started by JoshRMT, Dec 11, 2012.

  1. JoshRMT

    JoshRMT Member

    I've been extremely inspired by Dungeons of Dredmor when developing this online game.

    It features many things that our company has always wished an online game would contain. Here is the feature list:
    - A fully player-run world, where every creature is controlled by players.
    - Permadeath ensures that each player takes responsibility for their actions.
    - A powerful crafting system that allow players to create homes or dungeons.
    - Dynamic procedurally generated sandbox world with no 'safe zones'.
    - Every character is always 'logged in', resulting in a true persistent world.
    - Play as any creature in the game, including wolves, vampires, or dragons.
    - Built-in scripting system allows players to create artificial intelligence.
    - Support for thousands of scripted characters on a single game server.
    - Fully customizable game interface allows players to play the way they want.

    We just launched our Kickstarter!
    http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1784263141/topia-online?ref=live
     
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  2. Essence

    Essence Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Looks awesome; I'm totally in. Good luck!
     
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  3. Cream Magneto

    Cream Magneto Member

    this needs to be spread around like WYLDfireeeeeeeeee!
     
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  4. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    No safe zones period. = No purchase from me.

    No 'effing way I am going to play a MMORPG with every jackass making bots to chain-kill everyone else for no reason other than to be jerks. No, not even if you PAID ME TO PLAY IT.
     
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  5. JoshRMT

    JoshRMT Member

    Players can create their own safe-zones by building proper defenses.

    Moreover, Dungeons of Dredmor and other games dont exactly have 'safe zones' either, but people are comfortable with it. This is not the type of game where players will be able to 'chain-kill everyone else for no reason'. The death penalties are severe and it will prevent them from advancing, especially if there is not significant reward for killing other players.
     
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  6. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    There's a HUGE difference between permadeath in a rogue-like and permadeath in an MMO. For one thing, Rogue-likes are MEANT to be games that you play for short periods of time, where you don't make friends between characters/people, where it's quick and easy to reroll if you die, etc. There's not much to character development, the world gets recreated from scratch every time, and so on. I'm not saying that permadeath can't work in an MMO, just saying that it goes counter to what MMOs generally are good at, which means that it's unlikely to have more than fringe appeal. It still could work, if it turns out your niche is big enough. But it's not for people who generally play MMOs.
     
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  7. Ruigi

    Ruigi Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Closest thing to a roguelike permadeath mmo out there is Space Station 13.
     
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  8. JoshRMT

    JoshRMT Member

    Who says that an MMO cannot play like a roguelike? Realm of the Mad God does it just fine.

    Advancement in Topia Online does not work like other MMOs. It will not be extremely frustrating to die, and you can just go back to your house and re-equip. Moreover, there is no 'grinding'.
     
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  9. Essence

    Essence Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Wait. What does permadeath even mean if you can go back your house and reequip?
     
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  10. JoshRMT

    JoshRMT Member

    It means your character's skills are reset.
     
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  11. Essence

    Essence Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Ahhh, OK. So you keep the same items and things you've made and whatnot, but lose your skills? That sounds like something I'd be interested in, depending on how skills and items interact. :)
     
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  12. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    My next impossible question is this:
    How can you prevent skill trainers and other such exploits like gold/gear selling in other MMOs? If you do not have a good means, then those people will make death insignificant for a price. If you have one that is too aggressive, then legitimate players will be unable to get skills back most of the time.
     
    mining likes this.
  13. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Forgetting TomeNET and Mangband? Shame on you Ruigi. :)
     
    mining likes this.
  14. JoshRMT

    JoshRMT Member

    No question is impossible! Death will never be insignificant because influence/skills cannot be created by other players through any other means than time.
     
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  15. Alistaire

    Alistaire Member

    So it's pretty much; if you don't play it you're gonna die horribly.
     
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  16. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    And the same if you do. How many accounts must someone buy to write scripted murder bots and ruin the game for everyone?

    The kickstarter mentions letting players decide what to do. Frankly the player is more often than not a moron that wants easy crap premade and handed to them on a silver platter. When they find out on the first day that (Insert nationality here) coders got together and bough a thousand accounts to code up a unified player slaughter team that can help one another gain skills to set the massive debuff of dying aside... You see where I am going? How can you do what you want to do without people breaking everything?

    I hear one moment saying that death is not the end, and you can regain your skills and equipment by spending time doing stuff, and the next moment I hear that death ios a massive debuff that will not be trivial to overcome. It cannot be both ways.
     
    mining likes this.
  17. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    Obviously, Omni, if you start out by assuming that all of your players are going to be well-behaved, everything will work just fine. But as they say, no plan ever survives its first encounter with the enemy (in this case, the average not-so-well-behaved player is the enemy).

    There is an assumption that game communities can police themselves, and that's the assumption that these devs are making. They aren't claiming that there will not be griefing/pking, but they are saying that WHEN there is a griefer, that the community will be capable of handling that issue. I am very skeptical that that is the case. There is simply so much that can go wrong between theory and execution, simply because determined players can be so very clever. If you are lucky and wind up with a community that is well-behaved enough to make this work, then odds are that you have no more than a few dozen players. More than that, and you are just about guaranteed to have determined troublemakers in your midst.

    Furthermore, as you point out, it's not really permadeath. EQ had some relatively harsh penalties for death, but it wasn't permadeath. You'd suffer sometimes SEVERE penalties, particularly if you got stuck in a death spiral/cycle (which is about as ugly a problem as you could get in any MMO ever). In EQ, some classes could bind themselves anywhere. So, for example, one unfortunate young woman once bound herself at the docks on this island. Well, someone had trained giants to the docks (it could have been her, it could have been someone else -- doesn't matter). She died, lost experience, and reappeared at the docks almost immediately (where she was bound). Whereupon, the giants killed her again... and again.. and so on, until she finally disconnected her modem (it was the only way to get out of that death spiral). In the end, she had lost MANY levels of experience. Permanently. That was MONTHS and MONTHS worth of advancement, down the drain. We are not talking WoW or Rift or whatever, where you could go from level 7 to max in a few weeks. That's how MMOs work now, not how they worked way back in EQ's glory days.

    And that was not permadeath.

    So my question is, are we really talking permadeath, or are we simply talking harsh death penalties? Because if it takes just a few hours to get back to where you were before you died, then THAT is not permadeath. That isn't even that harsh a penalty.
     
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  18. Essence

    Essence Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Looks like you came to the right place for some in-depth criticism of your premise, JoshRMT! If you can come up with an answer that satisfies OmniaNegrum's paranoia, Haldurson's skepticism, and my blind stupidity, you'll be in a quite good place. :)
     
  19. Lorrelian

    Lorrelian Member

    Behold! The concentrated power of the Gaslamp forums! Able to shake you to your very core in less than two dozen posts, upsetting the development of countless games and shattering your mind with cute diggle plushies! Making a game you don't want to suck? Run it past these guys until it works or you loose your will to live! Seriously, we should start charging for this kind of feedback...
     
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  20. Cream Magneto

    Cream Magneto Member

    so how do people handle this sorta thing in Day Z?

    thats another lawless dog eat dog piss in your face world that somehow hasnt imploded and has gained popularity over time.
     
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