My best Sandbox MMO Idea,

[Dolfie]

My best idea for a new Sandbox MMO.


Basicly i took things from many top games right now and put many of them together and tried to think of ways to fit it toghether into
the game i would like the play more then anything.


Open World full loot pvp/pve game
Terraforming
material crafting system which works with game physics.
Medieval style, no magic.


Idea of the game.
Players will spawn randomly in a selected zone of the world with nothing more then a few cloths.
From this moment on it will be a battle for survival
Players should make sure food water are constantly supplied and also extreme weather can be a threat so a shelter
is vital.Then predatory animals and different semi intelligent humanoid life forms live on this world which are a big
danger and fortification is recommended against all of these natural dangers.
And then of course the most dangerous of all, other players because PvP is allowed everywhere at all times.
The idea is that in the beginning players are almost forced to work together in order to survive permanently and build up a
settlement. However nothing is forced for real, and everybody is 100% free to do whatever they like.
In the beginning the biggest threaths are raids from the different types of humanoids.
If you are not prepared for them, They will mercilessly destroy anything you have build and take all the resourses they find
back to their Bases which can be cities/villages/caves/castles.
Players have only the natural resources to make primitive tools to start cutting trees, make weaponry, start a fire, and slowly
as more materials are being discovered more advanced tools and craft can be made.
Crafting can be done with any material in game and contraptions can be made and bassicly anything you can imagine can be build.
But the natural laws of physics are very important to keep in mind while constructing because if things are not strong enough
Or not in balance disasters can happen and buildings collapse, ships capsize and you name it.
The way mobs work in the game is everything has their own life cycle. And the only way mobs spawn is being born from their mothers.
So it is very possible for species to go extinct. Or for a species to have massive overpopulation.
One very real threat for example is if a semi intelligent humanoid species is too succesfull, they can end up dominating whole
Continents, and with that force players to move away from there. Also this can force player villages to band together against a common
enemy, or both be destroyed by it. Players can also find ways to Tame certain wild animals and use them for a number of different things,
Such as transport heavy work, or beasts of war. However, Creatures in the world can only die once, and will never respawn after death.
So here are a few different types of ways to play this game for example.

Be a fisherman, Fish with a boat or from the shore to supply your village with food.
Be a thief, Steal other peoples hard earned riches.with the risk of death and a bad reputation.
Be a trader, get a horse and carriage and Go from village to village to trade goods and become rich.
Be a pirate, Build a ship find a crew! and plunder the seas.
be an animal tamer/breeder, Go out in the world and find ways to tame and breed many different animals.
Be a smith, Make sure the town is supplied with iron weapons and armor of high quality.
Be a builder, build castle walls towers houses and anything you can imagine.
be an engineer, Use any material to build siege weapons,carriages anything with moving parts bassicly, and anything you can imagine.
Be an assasin, murder people for money
Be everything at the same time, but just much less specialized.
Be a gladiator, Build a gladiators arena and organize matches to find out who is the strongest fighter in the camp/city/world.
Be a hunter, track and hunt any animal big or small and get the meat horns furs and whatever else the beasts may posses, and of course the respect from your friends.
Be a miner, Find precious metals and minerals in the mountains and tunnel deep underground, the underground is also pretty hidden and secret.

Now these are but a few random examples, And it might be hard to choose which type of thing you would like to specialize in.
So the idea is for every player to have two characters at all time.This helps to make the world feel more full and also the game is exceptionally grindy
So for example you can let your builder character build the village wall automatically while you go out to hunt on your hunter character.
Also to make sure people can not ransack the whole village while people are sleeping in RL for example. All characters remain online in game forever.
So you can set them to do certain tasks or stand guard while you are offline.Perhaps people from the same camp could give orders to the offline characters to defend
or work more efficiently, unless players have turned off that option.

You will get better at the things you do, so like that you can level up skills and be more efficient in doing them, Also the tools/weapons you are using influence the effectiveness of whatever you are doing a lot.

Because it takes so long to build a stone wall for example, people will feel truely rewarded when it's finished, and also because it's hard to build it's also very
hard to destroy, so it offers true protection.But it is truely a hardcore game. And people should always be prepared to lose everything they have.
You could have been working 3 years to finish a castle and huge walls and everything. just to lose it the next day in a siege to a stronger enemy. And bassicly start from scratch.
But at the same time it is possible to steal a small boat and with a few friends steal a bigger ship and eventually have a whole fleet for free, which
wouldve cost months and a lot of experience and materials to build. These things bring great pain and excitement at the same time.

Also the penalty to dying should be huge. This is to prevent players from rushing in and hack and slashing everything in their path without consequence.
If people die in the game they will spawn 1 hour later naked with just underwear,in their camp/house If somebody else took controll over that camp,
then they will spawn within 2KM range around their
their old spawn. This will give players fear of death, and will make the gameplay much more realistic.
The panic and berserking rages that this brings about is just legendary.
Such a long spawn timer sucks big time if you die by accident,
however this is also the reason people will have two characters so that it hurts less when one of them dies.
Also people drop everything they were carrying when they die.

It is very important the game runs smooth because there can be wars with many people fighting at the same time, So gameplay>graphics all the way.
And it should be a non targeting system. but you just hit with a sword for example, and wherever you hit you actually hit in that place.
There will be no floating names anywhere and players should think of ways to identify friend from foe in battles.
The only floating text there is is chat.
I'm not sure yet how damage should work. but i want realistic combat, an arrow to the head and you die. unless they shot you in the cheek or something but yeah,
Realistic combat, 1 slice with a samurai sword and you are pretty much dead. And arrow to the knee will make you cripple for about 30 minutes,
and sometimes bleeding must be stopped to prevent dying.

Example of a profesion, so for example you want to be a blacksmith. there should be some mini game bassicly which allows you to form the thing you want to make,
Creating an unique item every time you make something new, also you can get infinitely high level in blacksmitting, and every time make higher quality weapons, which are
more durable and sharp and beautiful. However the higher level you become the harder it is to level up up to a point where leveling up is pure madness.

Just imagine building a ship with 10 people.. working on it for 3 weeks or something to finaly set sail and go on an adventure. Packing everything you got with you
and leaving the shore. Learning how to sail and navigate and explore the world..... Just epic.

Well, this idea is stuck in my mind and i hope i can play it some day!




Game Lore:
Basicly the lore is a complete mystery and nobody knows what happened when they woke up in this natural world, Nobody has any memory of a time before.
It's as if god put them down.
however there are old ruins in certain places from over a thousand years ago and secret
underground catacombs which have clues and small pieces of the puzzle of the ancient history
of this unknown world. Including artifacts of a long forgotten past, As players discover more and dig deeper they begin to uncover the History.

Thanks for reading it! Please let me know what you think, and if you would improve something or leave something out...
It's not refined at all and i just wrote down my idea in short.. But yeah you get the basic idea like this !

[Post]

The usual realistic sandbox survival MMO where you can or be whatever you want... it's nothing new =/
It's never as awesome as it may sound due gameplay limitations and shit, feel free to take a look at Life is Feudal.

Yup, everyone thinks they're original when they think of these things, everyone thinks they'll be so much better than their "casual" MMOs. It never works.

[Treeskee]

spend 3 weeks building a ship with all your friends. Some dude with more friends steals it and you're out 3 weeks of work.

[Ickz]

I just want a MMO with a truly huge and zone-less world. I want to to be able to see mountains off in the far distance and then be able to actually explore on said mountains. When 3d MMOs first became a thing back in 1999 or so, I figured I would see such a thing in the next 10 or 15 years... nope. Maybe sometime in the next 10.

[Wondercrab]

The problem is, of course, delivering on all these ideas in a way that creates fun moment to moment gameplay. If people spend months or years building toward certain goals, how do you make that sheer volume of gameplay enjoyable rather than tedious? If players can die in a single hit, how do you make that kind of combat feel fair and compelling? If the intention of the game is to be exceedingly hardcore, how will it sustain a healthy enough playerbase to make the world feel vibrant and alive, and to facilitate the goal of many people working together to achieve a collective goal?

The devil is always in the details. I'm sure a countless number of devs have had very similar ideas to this (the sheer volume of early access crafting/survival games on Steam can attest to it), but few have every truly realised the goal of creating a game with such broad scope that's as fun in practice as it is in theory.

[Dolfie]

I know these ideas are not unique, and i know Life is feudal and certain other Survival Sandbox MMO's which also have terraforming.
And i played them and noticed all of them did not feel complete, and i was trying to see which part of those games was fun and tried to put all the fun things from those games together into this game.
For example Minecraft is a good game because it allows you to build anything you can imagine basicly, and the Redstone in minecraft is brilliant.. comparable to the Engineering in this game, however because of in game physics i believe it could be done better then minecrafts redstone system.
Life is Feudal is extremely good, but they tried to make the game too beautiful, so it doesnt feel very smooth and also the combat is just not refined enough, but they've come closest to this game so far i think.
Age of empires always was a super good strategy game and the idea of having workers basicly that can build things up while you make sure there are enough craft materials and protection etc, make it so that even if you dont play for a month.. while your Village/Camp is alive.. your characters always remain playing in that place..
And can be used to further the progress of the camp by being used as workers,defenders or anything that is needed.
7Days to die is also a very good game, the most fun thing in my opinion is that there is a constand threat of zombies which keeps you busy all the time bassicly to prepare for the incomming atacks, This feeling of always busy to prepare and gives reason for people to work together and not fight one another in the beginning of building up settlements. The threats of these Humanoid species, they might look like orcs or bug people or some sort of giant Ants or you name it.. they will keep people in a mode of surviving forever, And people who play this game to not be a warrior and fight all the time, are forced to find a community which can protect them while they contribute to the whole in a different way.
One thing mentioned above is true though.. When the game launches it should have enough player base instantly to make it feel vibrant and alive.. and it should keep enough players to keep the world alive, so i know its tricky... but it can be done.
If we look at the past at WoW for example... There were countless MMO's before WoW and if you wouldve explained WoW to people back then.. they wouldve said its nothing new and games like that already exist... However, it became so successfull because blizz took all the good ideas from every other top game that came before.. and put it together perfectly.. They had enough money and a great development team and they just did it..
And there will be a day in the future when this will happen again!! Mark my words..
And this time, it will be in the same way that WoW did it, with the best ideas from all current games put together in 1 New Best Game.
I truely hope it will somewhat look like this idea i've put on here. Because even though i love wow very much, it's getting old! and with all these new ideas in gaming that are already around... the next best game should also be near!,, i give it 5 years! Anyway thx for the replies peepz!

- - - Updated - - -

Exactly, so it might be better to first join a bigger village before attempting to build something big like this, Making it an even bigger achievement to finally have a ship for yourself.. Because if you could pop a ship into existence it wouldnt be rewarding at all!!

[Deleted]

What about the current developments of the gaming-market makes you think players are interested in that kind of commitment?

[Super Kami Dende]

The work it takes to make that kind of game isn't met with enough profit from people who would actually buy it. The Genre is dying.

[Kazgrel]

This would crash and burn harder than the TORtanic.

[Dolfie]

too bad you guys don't share the passion about this type of games with me, And i thought there would be plenty of people who would have this type of commitment.
There are millions still who have this commitment for WoW, and once its obvious that there is a new best MMO... i guess most of them would go there pretty fast. Anywayzzz i'll just have to wait for the future i guess xD or maybe i should start to study game designing and do it myself :P

[Dolfie]

I get what you are saying, and im jk rly when im saying im gonna make it... But Rust and Ark are good example of people nearly doing it, And my prediction is still that a very similar game to what i've described here will become reality someday.. and it will be grand and im gonna own that shit!
Right now WoW still is so big because its a real MMORPG Which allows people basicly to live a second life.. to keep on building on something, Right now WoW is the Main game which allows people to do that, However millions of us are waiting for something new, And it's comming.. and this is my prediction of what it will be like more or less!! ty

[JamesGoblin]

In his defense, it is indeed very hard to invent anything in MMOs. There is so much forgotten things or even existing mechanics that new folks are unaware of.

I get what you are saying, and im jk rly when im saying im gonna make it... But Rust and Ark are good example of people nearly doing it, And my prediction is still that a very similar game to what i've described here will become reality someday.. and it will be grand and im gonna own that shit!
Right now WoW still is so big because its a real MMORPG Which allows people basicly to live a second life.. to keep on building on something, Right now WoW is the Main game which allows people to do that, However millions of us are waiting for something new, And it's comming.. and this is my prediction of what it will be like more or less!! ty

PS How much of an MMORPG is still left in WoW...I better not start on that. And of course, your enthusiasm and passion are appreciated, you just have to channel it the right way!