Concept:
A game built on the concept that the best and most cost effective content is often provided by players and the community that is created around it. For a game to succeed long term, you must create an environment that people become personally attached to and driven to participate in. DraeganMMO will be a PVP focused game where players will choose among multiple factions and compete in an open environment for gear and killpoints. Gear and killpoints will be directly correlated into two different scores. These scores will be listed on leaderboards and constantly updated to provide the player with motivation to achieve a better level of play.
In order to promote community, game servers will be artificially capped at low population levels per faction in order to promote familiarity among usual players. DraeganMMO will also utilize web-based and smartphone technology to help facilitate communication with players in game and offline at all times.
By providing a "playground" for players to compete in, the focus of the game becomes scoring points and interacting with other players and not eagerly awaiting the next content patch to grind through. Imagine it's 2004/2005 again and you're playing in Alterac Valley again with two to three times more people in a map that is twenty to thirty times the size that is persistent and never ends.
Game Theory: Leaderboards
In almost all MMORPGs from Everquest to WOW to Rift, players strive to gain the best gear in the game as most a status of power and notoriety. They enjoy showing it off and bragging about their conquests. The game quickly becomes about what is the best gear in the game and how do I get it. Once that goal is achieved, player time and commitment to logging in and participating in the community often wanes until the next content update is in place. This has almost always been the case with World of Warcraft where players often have to wait six months to a year for ways to compete again.
DraeganMMO wants to take gear acquisition away as the primary focus of the game and install Leaderboards as the primary focus of fame and glory. We want players to constantly be checking the Leaderboards to see how they measure up or see if they have cracked the top 10, 20 etc. Leaderboards are dynamically updated in real time so that the newest piece of gear or the aftermath of the latest PVP battle or skirmish is reflected in the score.
There will be two different leaderboards: TopTwenty and WarHeroes. The TopTwenty is a overall score for your character that is primarily focused on your "gear score" (similar to that of World of Warcraft), your stats, hitpoints, and your killpoint score and bonus points if you're on the WarHeroes list. Essentially it is a score for your character and it's overall power level. It is highly dependent on your gear, and losing gear always negatively reflects your status. WarHeroes is a list of the top twenty PVPers on the server. This list is much easier to calculate. Every time you kill a player you gain points.
The amount of points gained and lost in battle is determined by level difference, rank difference, and how fresh a target the player is. The higher your rank the more points you lose if you are defeated. If you kill a lower level person you gain hardly any points. The more often you kill a single player without killing any other players in between the less points you get each time. WarHero points will also deteriorate after a period of time if you are not participating in PVP.
Account inactivity will also remove you from any Leaderboards.
The full ranking list will not be available but your ranking and score will be. Only those who make the top twenty will be shown to the public, however you will be told if you are the 21st or the 100th and what your score is.
The number of twenty people per Leaderboard is subject to change.
Game Theory: Risk vs. Reward and PVP Gameplay
Since the main thrust of DraeganMMO will be leaderboards, points and competition, we want players to feel equally rewarded when winning and equally punished when they lose. We want to attempt to dissuade players from playing carelessly and we would like to avoid making PVP gameplay a grind for points. Because of this, there has to be real reward and real loss in any conflict. Because of this PVP will have full loot rules.
Lets create a scenario where you have a 5 vs. 5 encounter and once one side is victorious they have killed three other players. The group of 5 will have looted every corpse and move away to a safe area. Assuming the players that were defeated were fully geared, veteran players, the group will now have the enjoyment of divvying up the spoils for upgrades to their own characters or storing gear as backups in storage. We want to create an environment of when you kill a player it's like looting a raid boss and it's time to see what new loot you can get. This should create proper motivation for going out and hunting other players as well as the additional points gained for the WarHero leaderboard.
Losers on the other hand will have lost all their gear and money they had on them and hopefully motivating to play better next time. Risk of loss should also heighten the excitement of playing the game. This loss is also a tricky subject as players often may quit or become frustrated with the game due to the loss of gear. However, in DraeganMMO we are making Gear Acquisition much different than your standard random drop/dungeon boss grind that you come across in every other MMORPG.
Upon death, either in PVE or PVP, you will lose experience as well.
Game Design: Gear Acquisition
In the majority of MMORPGs on the market today, you'll note that gear is gained by randomly dropped from NPCs in the form of random "green" or "blue" items or it is acquired via defeating bosses in a dungeon. In many games, defeating bosses gain you points or tokens that go to purchasing gear from a vendor. These points or tokens are often limited to a certain number per "dungeon reset". This makes gear and gear sets something that is often worked towards over the course of months. In DraeganMMO this will not be the case, because of Full Loot rules, gear must be more easily accessible and farmable so that players can quickly or easily farm a respectable kit so they can get back into the action faster (assuming they don't get their friends together and hunt down other players to regear themselves).
We want to attempt to make gear a strong focus of the game, but teach players to treat it as transient for the most part.
There will be no random gear in the game, you won't see "of the Monkey" or "of the Eagle" on anything. There will also be no rarity markings so gear won't be blue, green and purple. It will be just gear.
Every NPC will be loaded with a loot table. When an NPC is spawned, it will have a chance to load a certain gear set. So a very powerful dagger will have a 2% chance to load on certain NPCs at the same time a less powerful dagger will have a 50% chance to load. You can even go further and have very rare NPCs loading very rare gear. An NPC can have a 10% chance to load at a spawn timer and a 1% chance to load a piece of gear. NPC spawn rates will vary zone to zone, but NPC spawn rates should be quick enough where players are very rarely waiting around doing nothing.
Depending on development costs and game design, the gear an NPC is loaded with should be shown on their model. So if an NPC spawns with that super rare weapon, you should be able to visually see it.
Gear has no level restrictions, stat restrictions, or is bound to anyone.
Game Design: Gear Deterioration
Because gear is very abundant it will have to deteriorate and be taken out of the game in some fashion. When gear is used in combat, it will take hits to it's score (the score is an arbitrary counter, it will have no effect on the gear's stats). When the score reaches zero, you will have to repair it. Gear can only be repaired so many times before it's broken forever. You can stave off it's deterioration score buy "salvaging" unused gear to mend it, but this only prolongs the inevitable. Gear life time will range from very short term, hours and days assuming normal use, to weeks and months. This will have to be balanced during testing.
Game Theory: World Design, Server Size, Factions and Community Creation
Most games today focus on creating expansive worlds with thousands of players and often advertise that fact. DraeganMMO wants to take the opposite approach and create a smaller world with hundreds of players. We want to create an environment where you are forced to interact with other players. We define interaction as a PVP encounter or simply just noticing another player around you. We think this will help create a gaming environment where you see people more often and when you do see that person, you remember their name or at least recognize it. For a real world analogy, think small town vs. large city. The more personal things are, the more likely you are to play more and stick around.
Game Design: Factions
Because this is a PVP focused game, the game will be divided into three teams, or factions. Players will choose a factions upon character creation. Faction switching may be available as a pay-for service. Factions can communicated via local chat channels like "Yell" and "Say" as well as communicate via certain in-game forums.
Game Design: Server Size
Because we are attempting to make servers feel more small town, we have to limit the amount of players allowed to play at a single time. We will not limit character creation on a server because we want players to be able to play with friends. We would like to start off with a faction cap of 50-100 players at first. That gives up to 300 players max at any given time in the world. This number is subject to change.
With any hard-coded faction game you run into the problems with over and under population, faction dominance and other population issues. Here are some possible solutions to that.
If any faction is not represented on the TopTwenty or WarHeroes leaderboard for a period of seven days (subject to change) anyone of the same faction from another server may freely transfer at any time to that dominated server. Transfers will stay open until a certain percentage of the leaderboards have been taken over by that under represented faction. The theory is that if one faction is dominating a server then they may be richly geared and provide incentive for moving players. However to prevent players from hoping server to server searching for rich targets, there will be transfer penalties to gear, score, experience and restrictions to how often you are able to move. Server transfer for a fee might also be available.
Game Design: World Design
World size is a major factor when it comes to creating a PVP environment that is both exciting and not frustrating. What we mean by this is that it should be small enough that players always have the opportunity to run into other players, but big enough so that they are not always fighting other players.
There is zero instanced content in DraeganMMO.
World Design will be based of each faction having a "Home Base" that is heavily guarded and nearly safe. This will allow new players to become comfortable with the game mechanics and have the ability to earn gear. However, a concentrated effort of other players can contest and take over Home Bases, but this should be very rare, and proper game mechanics should be balanced so if this does happen, Home Base will not be permanently camped.
The surrounding areas of Home Base will have the appropriate low level NPCs for low level players to kill for experience and gear. After a certain radius, there will be a "Faction Keep" that is placed at a bottleneck in the terrain that helps protect the faction "Homeland". Alarms, or notification will be globally given if opponents attempt to get by, but there will be game mechanics to allow players to "sneak past".
Think along the lines of HighSec space in EVE.
Outside of each Faction Keep will be a central area to the world that will have a large array of low, middle and high end NPCs for players to kill for experience and gear. The lower and middle level NPCs will provide better rewards and higher experience gain than those in "Homelands". It will also be the only source of High End gear and experience gain. This area will be significantly larger than the Homelands.
There will be one neutral city in the center of the map that will give players places to regenerate health, repair, buy/sell items etc but will be completely open to combat.
Game Design: Community Creation
Creating a community is all about communication. While you are in game you will be able to access and post on the game's official forums. Each server will have their own private forums. These forums will contain one forum for each faction that only that faction can view, as well as a forum that all three factions can view. Players will also be able to access these forums via the web as long as they are logged in with their game account.
The game's official forums will also contain the normal array of forums you typically see as well as open server forums so that players can recruit to new players. These forums will also be available to players in game as well.
Leaderboards will be available for everyone to see via web or mobile apps. You can get up-to-the-minute updates of how things are changing. You will also be able to track a player's ranking (everyone loves graphs) over time as well. Mobile apps will also allow players to communicate with players online at any time using in game channels and tells and vice versa if enabled.
Game Theory: "Class" Design, Combat and Game Mechanics including End Game Play
DraeganMMO is a classless system where players decide which skill and spells their character can use. Skills and spells are placed in a tree of prerequisites that players have to navigate to gain access to. If you can envision the technology tree of any 4X game (see: Civilization, Masters of Orion, GalCiv etc.), players will be able to start off with very basic skills and spells that lead to more adept and important abilities. The amount of skills or spells are person can learn will be determined by race selection.
Combat will be more action oriented, think GW2 or TERA, and less GCD based with use of a hotbar. Player perspective will be limited to close, just over the shoulder view (think Gears of War, but a bit farther out). Combat will have pulses that regulate autoattacks and other mechanics that will act as a dynamic global cooldown but will not limit action.
End Game Play does not exist in DraeganMMO. It is an endless cycle of leveling that slowly creates player power that is steeply curbed at the top end as to not create a gap. This is a design "Remort" system that lets players recreate their character once they reach a certain level and start over at level 1 with increased stats and hitpoints. They keep all their gear, score, points etc.
Game Design: Class, Race, Guilds, Skill and Spell Design
Because DraeganMMO is a classless system players are allowed to select skills and spells of their own choice. However, players are limited to how many skills and spells they are allowed to learn at any given time. These limits are attached to race selection. For example, if you select the prototypical smart but frail race, you may be limited to 10 skills and 40 spells. If you select a hearty race, you will be limited to the exact opposite. In another example, if you select a Human, you might be limited to 20 skills and 20 spells. Numbers at this point are arbitrary, but with a wide array of races, players can chose how to focus their character.
There are six stats in the game, Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma and Constitution that range from values of 1-30 at a character's start. You start the game with a certain amount of points to allocate to your character with 30 being the max. Gear will allow you to go over these statistical limits.
Skills and Spells are both passive and active abilities. Skills also have a score (1-100) that dictate your proficiency with them. For example, Tier 1 abilities will include things like Slashing Weapons and Piercing Weapons. These skills do no limit your gear choices, but effect your overall effectiveness with that weapon. A higher score will result in less missing or give your opponent a greater chance to evade your attack. You will need a certain proficiency level with each skill in order to train in skills in higher Tiers.
Example, a player requires you to be adept at Piercing and Slashing Weapons to be able to train Tier 2 skill Armor Penetration which gives your weapon the ability to ignore a certain percentage of armor rating.
Max proficiency of each skill depends on your base stats.
With each level players are given practice points and train points. You can convert training points into practice points. Training points allow you to learn a new ability while practice points allow you to gain proficiency of a skill up to a certain level; that level is again dependent on base stats.
NOTE: Unlike Darkfall or UO where skill macroing is needed and used, practice points allow most players to practice a skill to a certain point, right away. Only higher tier skills require higher efficiency pre-reqs. This system will be balanced so players aren't subjected to just sitting around casting a spell constantly with macros.
Skills and Spells are trained from specific NPCs throughout the world that can be killed. Early Tier skills and spell are usually found on Homeland NPCs. The more advanced tiers are often found on NPCs in neutral territory and sometimes behind harder to kill NPCs.
Practice and Train points can be respeced at any time for a fee.
In DraeganMMO, a guild is not something that players create to bind themselves under one name, these are referred to as clans. A Guild in DraeganMMO is something that you can join that augments your stats and abilities. For example, if you were to join the Assassin guild you would gain additional base stats in Dexterity, you would also automatically gain high proficiency to Backstab, and high level abilities will become available to you at a lower level and lower proficient pre-reqs. You also gain bonus damage to certain attacks etc. Players can join only a limited number of guilds.
Guildmasters are much like skill trainers as they are spread out throughout the world on NPCs that are killable. Guilds cost a large amount of money to join and are permanent until you decide to leave them.
Game Design: End Game Play
DraeganMMO wants to eliminate the stale raid/gear treadmill often found in other MMORPGs. We do not want players to hit a brick wall in progression, or get to a point where all they are doing is waiting for the next PVE area to progress their character. Many games have used AA systems or something similar to allow players to continue to advance. This has led to problems where you begin to have power creep where a player must be level X with Y points giving newer players a larger slope to climb as the game ages.
The Remort system is an alternative to that, that solves a lot of the perceived problems. Lets use some arbitrary numbers to give you an example of how it works. DraeganMMO will have 100 levels. The majority of skills and spells will sit at the midpoint of the game, around levels 40-60, however some of the more advanced trees will sit at higher levels to act as a motivation for further leveling. If you are a fresh character, at level 50 you will have an option to "Remort". Remorting costs currency to do.
When you Remort you are reverted to level 1. You will have an increase in base hitpoints and mana as well as the opportunity to assign 5 additional stat points. You will also gain extra skill and spell slots as well. You will retain a certain percentage of your learned skills and spell proficiencies if you choose to retrain them.
Experience needed per level is also increased by a certain percentage. Now, as you are now Remort 1 Level 1, you can Remort a second time at level 60, then again at 70 then again at 80 etc. Each time increasing the experience needed per level.
At no time are you forced to Remort or are you forced to stop leveling. You an be Remort 0 Level 100 if you wish. Remorting gives you higher base stats and hps as well as widening your base of skills and spells (think EVE). The hard work is balancing the addition of stats from a Remort 10 person and a Remort 0 person so the power slope is not overwhelming. There will be some diminishing returns to stats.
Game Design: Combat Mechanics
MMORPGs have traditionally been developed around global cooldown, skill cooldown and other hotbar mechanics and less about movement, timing and positioning. Combat mechanics in DraeganMMO will most likely be a hybird. Players will be able to select a certain combination of skills to bring to a battle like a deck. Instead of having the full array of 5 hotbars full of 30 different abilities, a player will have a much smaller selection of active abilities to choose from. Players will be able to switch this in and out at any time while out of combat.
Combat will have "pulses" inside these pulses players will have a chance to dodge, parry or evade attacks as well as execute autoattacks. Active abilities can be used at any time and aren't restrained to pulses. They work like any other combat system.
Inside these pulses, players stats will take over as well as some of the passive skills. In many autoattack based games, players will attack with their weapon every X amount of seconds whether that's weapon dependent (one sword is faster than the other), weapon-type dependent (all daggers are faster than all swords) or a combination of the above. Instead, combat will have pulses where a limited amount of things can happen at any given time.
Each pulse will be two seconds (this time will be heavily tested and tweaked) where players will autoattack. There will be passive skills/buffs/debuffs/attacks that can increase or decrease pulse timing of yourself and opponents. The basis of this is that there will be passive skills that increase the amount of attacks per pulse. So for example a newbie character will attack once with their weapon inside a pulse. A higher level character with Double Attack trained will attack twice during a pulse. An expert character might attack three or four times.
This also works with defensive passives like dodge, parry and block. A new character can only dodge once. Higher proficient characters might be able to dodge 2 or 3 times inside a pulse for attacks that are available to dodge or parry.
In addition to hitpoints and mana, players will also have stamina. Stamina is a resource system for all active skills. Stamina also effects your movement as well. While in combat if your stamina reaches a certain threshold, your movement speed is decreased. Running and walking in combat also consumes stamina. If you are in combat, wounded and attempting to flee, sprinting away will consume stamina forcing players to slow down at times.
Stamina can be augmented to regenerate incredibly fast and is not meant to be a hard limit on simple movement. Low tier spells and skills can be used to regenerate stamina like healing spells. Any movement form outside of combat does not consume stamina. Stamina is there to limit the amount of active skills you have to fire off in combat, allowing you to pay attention more and make skill usage more tactical. Spells cast be cast from Stamina when Mana reaches zero, but depletes it incredibly fast and does not regenerate as fast if used in that fashion.
Passive attack skills aren't just augments like Double and Triple Attack. You can include movements and special effects as well (think Bard songs in Vanguard). These attacks consume zero Stamina and happen during pulses. Certain abilities sync pulses with other character to perform special attacks.
Game Design: Game/Skill Mechanics
This section is mostly to describe two skills called Tracking and Tackling. Tracking is a simple ability that players can use to do what the ability says it does, track other players. If a player has been in the area, a player can track that persons name or simple track that faction and the player will see some sort of graphical overlay dictating footsteps or arrows in the direction that player went.
In greater terms of power levels, newer players will always need to feel useful this comes in the form of tackling, which surprisingly enough from the perspective of someone doing this in 1996, was used in EVE as well. All players have the ability to "tackle" someone. This brings a target to the ground where gear plays no part and only base stats are used to calculate damage. This is a great equalizer when it comes to players who have lost gear or are new to the game. You can also train skills that make you more proficient at this if you choose to use a skill slot for it. Certain stats will give you innate abilities to avoid being tackled etc. Levels also take it into account. Super high level players can be taken out if they get caught by a good tackler and a few friends if they are caught alone.
Game Theory: Game Activities
So basic gameplay has been described. You have a world where you go about leveling. The game is full of PVE areas that either have localized scripted events or rare spawning monsters. Everything has a chance to load gear like in Diablo. You're basic PVE play is out gaining experience and hoping for good drops. You're also out there hunting other players or ambushing popular gear grind spots etc. You're gaining Leaderboard points and basically jockeying for position. If you're on the leaderboards you'll gain some graphical indication to other factions that you're special so you get targeted. That's your standard play.
There are, however, different activities that you can participate in to break up any monotony or boredom.
Game Design: Battlegrounds
Randomly throughout the day battlegrounds will be spawned. These are server wide events that all the players that sign up get ported to an instanced area. Once it begins, it's Faction vs. Faction vs. Faction. If you die, you're out. Once there is only one faction left, it turns into last man standing. The last person standing then gets awarded either currency or gear. This gear is pulled out from the world and not randomly generated. You do not lose experience, killpoints or anything with a death in the battleground.
Game Design: Server Tournaments
Once a week, or month, or randomly, whatever works, the top 5 players of the TopTwenty Leaderboard from each server will be able to enter a tournament like the NCAA Bastketball tournament for additional cash prizes. These fights can be 2v2 or 1v1. Which ever works better depending on balance issues.
Game Design: Server Styles/Types
There will be multiple server types for players to compete on. Players can choose to play on permanent servers where their characters last forever and they can build up to Remort 9000, Level 100 if they want. These players can not take part in certain Server Tournaments, or tournaments with only similar server types. Other server types will vary the lifetime of your character. Some will wipe once a month, once a year (pick a time period), or create races to certain rating levels (i.e. first person to reach a TopTwenty rating of X). Think ladder races from other games. The motivation here is to create the "fresh server race" feel periodically and at predictable times.
