   MMORTS - Realistic Idea?
  I just got home from college for winter break and am just relaxing a ton. It feels great to be over with the quarter. Recently with my spare time I have just been browsing the net and catching up on some tech news as well as what has been happening in the game industry. I have also been looking at upcoming games which seem to be sequels to older games or just knock offs of other games. It seems I can't find a FPS without a Glock being in it these days. For heavens sakes the MODs for the games coming out are the same way as well. It seems that the creativity of SOME of the game development community has taken a plunge into the deep end recently. So I have been kicking my creative juices in gear to see if I can come up with some neat original ideas. One of my early ideas was an MMORTS. What do think the logistics of a game like this would be? On top of that do you believe that it is a feasible/realistic idea (not in terms of being creative but something that can be completed)?   
  If you can come up with an RTS engine that can handle really big maps and tons of players, there shouldn't be any problem making it an MMORTS. Sounds like a pretty neat idea.   ;  Ya. I would be pretty stoked to play it to. But what do you think about some of the key elements about the game? Obviously I haven't listed any as I want to know what other people think they ought to be. But for example I have been thinking about what to do when a player logs out. Does he just leave his village/town/city in the control of a computer or does it maybe "vanish" until they return. As if their city no longer has any affect on the world with in the MMORTS.   ;  Well, it's possible.  Although, the only ones I've seen are RTT, not sure if that's what you are thinking of.  There are a few problems I can think of with an MMO that's a "normal" RTS (like Starcraft, Warcraft, etc), such as: What happens when a player leaves the game?  The amount of computing power and bandwidth required to keep track of so many units and structures  What happens when someone is defeated (usually meaning all their buildings are destroyed)? Do they have to start over from scratch? But if you can find good ways around those problems, it might be a pretty good idea (I've wondered about it myself actually).   ;  The big problem combining an RTS with a MMORPG is that there is a direct conflict in how the game progresses.In an RTS, you are gaining an advantage - units, resources, land - until you eventually overwhlem and destroy your opponent. RTS games are divided into missions so that the developer has a reset switch, allowing him to put you back at the beginning (otherwise the entire game would be a single conquest - would you want to play for 20 hours only to discover that your opponent has gained too much of an advantage to win).An RPG allows for constant progress in the same game state - fight new enemies, get new stuff, progress to higher levels. This matches with the persistent nature of a MMO game, a key element of the genre.Trying to fit a persistent world into an RTS game type is a major difficulty. Much like trying to create a persistent game of RISK, you run into the fact that certain players need to gain at the loss of other players, and eventually the losing players will be wiped out. AFAIK there has been only one MMO game that allowed this kind of conquer gameplay, a World War II game that "reset" everytime one side or the other won (each war would last several months).About the only way I think an RTS model would work is if you could remove the persistent territory - perhaps create some RTS themed version of Final Fantasy Tactics - you build an army, and fight individual RTS style battles on random pieces of land, but you never actually gain terrority (instead you gain unit promotions or other stats)   ;  Another question would be how do you introduce new players in a way that gives them a chance? The one experience I have had with a large scale strategy game is the web based game http://www.planetarion.com/ . What I found the few times I tried it was that I'd start a game and get over run by larger players within hours of starting.Maybe if you had a few large teams that players could be a part of. Of course then you have a problem of players getting bored with their assignments. For example, say one team has a base, near the frontlines. Odds are you'd want a player overseeing it in case of attack. What if its never attacked though?A typical rts game has the player collect resources of some kind, to build up an army and then defeat the enemy base. So what we need is a way to make all this fun in a larger environment. For example, it doesn't really make sense to have resource collection happening in the front lines, so you'd want to have that happening automatically, or maybe having the players face saboteurs for example.Also, logistically thinking, rts games often tend to degenerate into who can build the largest number of tanks, which could easily cripple a server.   ;  You guys really got my brain flowing and I appreciate the good feedback so far.Quote:Original post by MichalsonThe big problem combining an RTS with a MMORPG is that there is a direct conflict in how the game progresses.In an RTS, you are gaining an advantage - units, resources, land - until you eventually overwhlem and destroy your opponent. RTS games are divided into missions so that the developer has a reset switch, allowing him to put you back at the beginning (otherwise the entire game would be a single conquest - would you want to play for 20 hours only to discover that your opponent has gained too much of an advantage to win).An RPG allows for constant progress in the same game state - fight new enemies, get new stuff, progress to higher levels. This matches with the persistent nature of a MMO game, a key element of the genre.Trying to fit a persistent world into an RTS game type is a major difficulty. Much like trying to create a persistent game of RISK, you run into the fact that certain players need to gain at the loss of other players, and eventually the losing players will be wiped out. AFAIK there has been only one MMO game that allowed this kind of conquer gameplay, a World War II game that "reset" everytime one side or the other won (each war would last several months).About the only way I think an RTS model would work is if you could remove the persistent territory - perhaps create some RTS themed version of Final Fantasy Tactics - you build an army, and fight individual RTS style battles on random pieces of land, but you never actually gain terrority (instead you gain unit promotions or other stats)It seems like what you are saying is that when you take out RPG and add RTS to MMO you then take away the element of making progress in a game. And in turn there is not defined way to make the game or the world in which you are playing progress. Am I kind of understanding what you are saying?Now I am just trying to answer what ever problems may arise right away. This is just kind of a brain storming session. But what if you did this...The world in which we played our MMORTS had you allying with a certain faction. For simplicitys sake we will say Faction A and Faction B. The goals of Faction A and B would be to overcome the opposing faction. We could then make the computer  the overseer of these factions and direct players to help them overtake the other faction. In doing this players would be given certain tasks that would have to complete by the overseer computer. In completing the task maybe it would give Faction A/B a small increase in their advantage over the other faction. Eventually all of these small incrases in the advantage would compound to a large advantage where any given Faction would be able to try to overtake the other Faction. Going back to the idea of completing these missions, the player would also recieve a benefit. Maybe the overseer computer would determine (through difficulty of the mission per say) that you will be eligible for a continous supply shipment, or a regiment of troops, or maybe an incrase in a unit cap or something. Maybe with that idea combined with say a unit cap idea where you don't build your typical farms to increase your unit cap but you actually have to do something for your faction to have them recongnize you as a good "mayoral manager" of a town, the computer will allow you to incrase your unit cap. And with an increase of a unit cap you will be able to expand your town, add additional military units, have a more "in depth" economy, etc. Do you think this would kind of take care of the progress of the game in a wholistic sense as well as for the individual player getting to see their town growing from rewards?   ;  One type of MMORTS that I would love to see is a cooperative one where all of the players are factions allied under one goal such as the defense of their home planet from an invading (AI) force.Players would build up strong defenses and armies and collaborate to fight the invaders. It would cater to all types of players. Those on the front line could build massive defensive structures and fixtures while others concentrated on attacking and built their bases behind defensive players. Since you dont have pvp combat the game lends itself well to a sector-per-server design, perhaps divided by water mountains or planets.  This sort of solution solves several of your problems.When a player logs out, his establishment remains and units are controlled by an AI in defensive mode. The Enemy AI should, in these cases, opt to attack players who are logged in, while offline AI allies react intellegently. The enemy can be designed not to "screw" offline players too. When an offline player's units react to an ally under attack, it can first evaluate if there is any chance of being attacked since it will have knowledge of the enemy AI.When a player is defeated all is not lost. Previous accomplishments could be accounted for in some kind of restart monetary system. When a strong player dies he is given funds to restart his base somewhere safe, yet does not lose research or anything besides physical units.In regard to the advantage situation, the enemy ai could easily adapt to keep the game balanced, but still allow truly excellent efforts to possibly defeat it.There would also have to be some kind of system to reward players who miss the prospect of beating other humans, such as customization of the land they control, decoration, ranking, epic technologies, etc... something tangable that will remain after invaeders attack. Maybe even some RPG-esque super avatar who gains power and represents the players faction....oh you asked about completed. sorry.As with most MMO games, you could probably complete the engine and some simple content that would suffice for a fun RTS, but the MMO part will likely not happen without a lot of resources and will defintely not happen without an excellent team. So sure, its technically possible, but unless you can organize some good people then you probably will never finish it. The genre is worth a good shot even though few big developers really try it.   ;  How about if the game is played at different scales. You could have skirmishes take place in a traditional rts map style arena. Skirmishes are arrange from a global perspective, players can opt to move armies around and are presented with a list of current uncontrol armies in conflicts that need commanders? Uncommanded armies would be sitting ducks, easily slaughtered.   ;  Sony tried making an MMORTS, called Sovereign, but it got cancelled. Given that they've made and are operating several MMO games, they probably know a fair bit about how to do it, so the fact that they couldn't make the idea fly should mean something.I think the game design questions are the hardest, though: what happens when you log out?   