Interesting MMO gameplay mechanics in lesser known MMOs

I played more than a couple lesser known MMORPGs back in the day and I was sometimes very surprised at the novelty of certain gameplay mechanics and ideas behind them. Some were unconventional, some were clunky but I applaud them for trying something different...

Here are a few examples that come to mind.

1. Player Shops/Kiosks

Instead of trading in an Auction House, players would pick which items in their inventory, what quantity and price they wanted to sell, choose a name for the shop and sit down on the ground and open a shop/kiosk. Players could approach you and buy from your shop when you were AFK. That led to towns being so full of player shops that you wouldn't be able to see the ground texture from all the player models and shop name texts.

Quest items would drop even if you didn't have the quest and they were salable too. So many entrepreneurial spirits would grind thousands of e.g. meat chunks for some quest, then plop down a kiosk right in front of the area with the quest monsters or even right in front the quest giver. It was totally a different trading system than many other, more popular MMOs and in retrospect, was a big differentiator.

2. Teacher/student System

Newer players could become students to more experienced players and the game would provide a small percentage of the money earned by the student to the teacher as tuition. (that would not actually subtract from the student cut, it was just extra money for the teacher). In theory, the student would get more money in return after meeting certain milestones and it was expected of the teacher to answer newbie questions and help where possible.

1. 5 player pilotable endgame ship

This otherwise pretty standard hotkey WoW-like has pretty cool concepts for its endgame (disclaimer: which I didn't actually level to and play but I know of it). After an epic quest chain, a lot of grinding for materials and a ton of other effort, you are able to construct your own big astral ship. It has a few different roles that players can take, from manning guns, checking scanners and navigation or controling actual ship steering and direction. You travel to what are essentially instances with normal “on ground” hotkey combat and loot, you take it back to the ship… What is also interesting, the loot stays on your ship until you dock, so there are also interesting PVP pirating opportunities, where players attack eachothers ships and steal loot!

2. Crafting minigame

A very complicated minigame to explain but not so difficult to understand in game. With a combination of skill and a little bit of luck, people who crafted more items and know the minigame better will be able to craft items of a higher quality and I always thought that incorporating actual player skill into the crafting system is something that's lacking from most crafting systems in video games in general.

• So, my question to you duders and dudettes, what MMO mechanics you thought were unconventional, novel and interesting, even if they didn't quite work?

Star Wars Galaxies had a complex resource and crafting system that I haven't seen since. Resources had multiple stats and were randomly generated, and would be seeded to different worlds automatically. Players had to survey planets for resources and then plant their harvesting equipment to gather the resources - once the resource was gone, that exact resource was gone forever. There may be another similar type of metal or plastic that popped up, but it would not be exactly the same again. This led to some resources that had the best stats in certain categories becoming exceedingly valuable to crafters, since the ultimate quality of a crafted item depended on the statistics of resources that it was made with. For instance, a pistol may take several parts to make, such as a barrel, frame, and a scope. Each part of the pistol had different resource requirements, and the importance of the different stats were weighted differently for each part. For example, the pistol barrel might require a metal with high malleability, while the frame required metals with high strength. The better each part was, the higher quality the end product would be when it came out of a player-owned factory. Anyone could craft a crappy pistol and sell it for a few credits, but only the people most dedicated to finding the best resources could craft top tier pistols that were in high demand and could sell for millions.

This led to certain players on each server becoming known for having the best food, armor, weapons, whatever. It wasn't like in most MMOs where every crafted item was the same - far from it, they were all different, sometimes with drastically different stats. To go along with this, there were player cities and player owned housing where people could set up their own NPC vendors to sell their wares. These NPCs could be named, dressed with different clothing or armor, and loaded up with whatever crafted goods or loot the player wanted to sell. It was pretty cool having a Master Chef alt and spending a couple of hours crafting a bunch of pies, loading them onto vendors, then coming back a couple of days later to empty vendors and millions of credits.

@mb: Wow, that sounds fucking awesome. I've never gotten into MMOs, but the more I hear about Star Wars Galaxies, the more I wish it was still around.

@mb: Ya, this made me think of SWG as well. That game had a ton of fascinating little things that made it so great. It's a shame none of it has ever been replicated since.

@mb: Wow, that sounds amazing! Now I'm really bummed I never tried it out. But yeah, that sounds even more in depth than something like EVE Online, at least for the resource complexity and stats perspective.

But sounds like that system really tries to mimic real world economy in scarcity, quality difference and item/player status.

@choi: @conmulligan: If ya'll are interested in reading about the core design of SWG you can read about it on Raph Koster's website (Developer of SWG and other classic MMOs). It's really good and highlights the successes and failures of what they were trying to do. While some things were taken from it for other MMOs that are still around today, the core concepts have not been replicated since SWG.

The link goes to the first part which talks about their PvP designs and how they invented flagging systems, but he gets into a lot of other stuff in the different parts of that series of blogs.

At first it gave XP equal to the mentors level (which they didn't change for over a year or two). I remember using that system often, but in a way, it was really broken. You would have a (sometimes full) group of low levels go into an instance and the higher level (me, for example) could solo the whole thing and they would stand at the entrance and get tons of xp. Even though the instance did balance to how many players were in the group certain classes could solo the hardest instances easily (my character was a fire brute with super speed so it was very easy for me to do).

I remember leveling a few alts that way as well as helping friends level up. Sometimes new players or players wanting to level alts would pay to have you solo instances while they stood at the door. It's kind of crazy when you think about it.

CoH/CoV was another MMO I played for a long time. Great game. It's really a shame there wasn't much to do at end game beyond leveling alts. Once you'd done everything it became a drag (and don't get me wrong, it still took about 6 months to do everything). Champions is alright, but it's not the same. I do still go back to it from time to time, but it's not as fun to play consistently for whatever reason.

The term "classic MMOs" just violently oriented my brain with the relentless forward march of time.

I feel like around the time F2P started coming out, you'd see all these really creative games coming out of Korea and Europe. In NA at the time pretty much every MMO in development was a WoW-clone, this was when ESO, SWTOR, etc. were in development. Pretty much all these WoW clones were really, really safe, that weren't trying anything new. Because a lot of these Asian MMO's were fairly low budget they came over here a few years after release but never caught on too well. They were always very grindy, fairly repetitive, and eventually the cash shop would become P2W.

However... like every Korean MMO had some 1-2 ideas that were incredible that you'd wish were in a better game. Or else just grin and bear it. Shin Megami Tensei Online had the whole demon fusing mechanic from the SMT games and if you're a Persona fan there would be lots to try out. Not to mention the gear was mostly cosmetic so you just experimented for a cool look, and you usually just looked like an ordinary dude.

Sword of the New World was kind of like an RTS in that you were controlling 3 characters in real time, 3 characters that you created and could customise a good bit, and dozens of unlockable characters to mess around with. Also open world dungeons that somehow worked, kickass music, and CRAZY KILLER ALLIGATORS ATTACKING ON THEIR HIND LEGS!!!

Runes of Magic... I don't think this came from Asia but was probably the most polished WoW clone there for a while, it looked a lot prettier than WoW and had this interesting subclass mechanic, a la GW1 or FFXI. You would level one class, then switch to the other class, carrying over your first class's abilities, then switch back. It was a pretty cool concept, until you played like me, wanted to play a healer so rolled cleric/paladin, and had no fun playing the paladin side. Also the open world PVP was kind of fun at first but then devolved into horrifying gank-fests, people could spawn camp you or make it impossible to complete your objective.

Atlantica Online is an MMO that was doing pretty well for a while there, you created a party and used a turn-based system like classic single-player JRPG's. The actual mechanics seemed fun but the art design and the graphics were ugly for when it came out so I barely gave it a chance.

Perfect World (like the ACTUAL PW, not the publisher it's become), was interesting in that it was a pre-Aion MMO where you could fly around, it had RvR PVP at high levels that was supposed to be fun, and had some other neat ideas. Sadly it seemed really grindy, there wasn't an incentive to go do stuff with my friends, and while the world was fun and open to explore it ended up being pretty repetitive.

Age of Wushu is a sandbox martial arts MMO that I feel like some day I might to back to. It's been often thought of as inspired by EVE Online, except that instead of being in space you're in this Chinese-inspired world. You learn your skills by just alloting time like EVE, but you end up learning these neat martial art skills that look like they're out of a martial arts movie. I feel like with this game the developers had a really great vision, were able to implement great ideas, but sadly the clunky UI and complicated systems made it hard for people to break into. It was very hyped when it came out but most people I feel have forgotten it, even in the MMO community.

ArcheAge: By the time this FINALLY came out in NA, I think many people like myself that had been interested at first had moved on. Not to mention that the sandboxy elements had ended up being mostly removed from the most recent Korean version (Black Desert Online also has this problem), and Trion botched a lot with the NA release.

TL;DR: There's some examples of the neat concepts from F2P Asian (and a few western) MMO's that I wish had ended up in better games. Or that those games had improved. Or had better communities. I was a broke kid all through highschool with a shitty laptop and too much time on my hands so instead of playing the big, AAA, subscription-based MMO's I'd bounce around F2P ones. Once I got into college and (shockingly) had some dough (though still a shitty laptop till after college), I did end up playing FFXI and FFXIV for extended periods of time and they've been fun. But overall the mainstream MMO's that have come out have felt so safe, so unimaginative (either a WoW clone or an "action" game that becomes button mashing hack and slash), that I wish we had creative ideas in polished games; not having to choose between creativity and polish.

Also in the end with first DDO, then other mainstream games such as SWTOR, ESO, and so on, going F2P, the interesting F2P games kind of got lost and overwhelmed by these bigger dogs (also the newer Asian grinders got far too anime-ey). I feel like during those days when most MMO players looked down on F2P as MMO's "not as legit" as the "real MMO's," that's when F2P had the most going for it. Now almost EVERY big MMO comes out with a sub, then goes F2P.

@belegorm: @cornbredx: O man, great! I know what I'll be reading in my spare time, thanks.

I played Runes of Magic a little bit and it just seemed like a carbon copy of WoW with a ton more grinding. The only thing that stood out were the Guild Castles that you could build as a guild and upgrade it to have different profession work benches etc.

Basically WoW garrisons for whole Guilds. (years and years before WoW garrisons were a thing...)

I played Perfect World for a tiny bit too, but the interface and overall aesthetic totally turned me off. But yeah, the main differentiator- the flying, just seemed pointless in the early game... Age of Wushu sounds interesting tho...

The game I actually ended up playing the most was Final Fantasy XI. Square Enix saw the success of Everquest, and so wanted to make an MMO that would be that, except for PS2 (which was an untapped MMO market), and also for Japan, which didn't really get into western MMO's that much.

FFXI was innovative in several ways, though still very EQ1-ey, as it introduced some fairly novel features over the years such as:

• Interesting main storylines for each of the expansions
• The possibility of being in multiple guilds at one time
• Full gamepad support on PC and obviously on console (the UI felt clunky until you use a dualshock then it worked perfectly)
• Keyboard support on PS2 so console players could actually chat
• PC, PS2, and 360 players on the same servers playing together, NA, EU, Asian players playing together with a great auto-translate tool to make this possible
• Level sync. This was introduced years after it came out but allowed you to lower your level to someone in your party so you could level together
• Horizontal endgame. By this point WoW and such had introduced the gear treadmill of vertical progression, but due to FFXI's crazy gearswapping mechanics (you would swap out different gear sets for each important move you did, or what situation you were in), they managed to keep all endgame relevant for years and years and there was always different gear to get

the SMT: Imagine (i think thats the subtitle) had player stalls to sell shit and persona like fusing system. That game was really cool despite being old as hell. Its free to play and i recommend people check it out provided its still live

Edit: Just checked and Its offline in NA, still up in Japan it seems.

Keep in mind that player shops have been around since almost the beginning. EQ1 didn't have an auction house at the start but did have player bazaars so what a lot of people did was buy a second account and leave their second character there selling shit.

In FFXI people would often AFK in Rolanberry Fields with their bazaars up, and also you could check someone almost any time to see their bazaar. This lead to the area outside Jeuno becoming known as "RolanMart," or something like that.

In FFXIV 1.0 the developers wanted to avoid auction houses so at first (aside from manually trading), the way to sell stuff was in your bazaar (you had a personal bazaar on you IIRC), but they added these market wards where you could run around and people's retainers would be standing around selling crap.

In the end back in the old days of MMO's you'd have these player shops and such because that's the best you had, you had no AH. In FFXIV 1.0 and some other games they tried to carry the old system over instead of having an AH due to AH's obviously lowering immersion compared to player bazaars. However actually finding something you need is really a lot harder in bazaars/player shops, so AH's are pretty much how it's going to be for all eternity now.

Nothing here about Ultima Online?

Not only did you go out to collect the reagents needed for crafting, you could rename the items and sell them on your vendor NPCs. That you had in your house. That you could decorate with items.

You could buy boats and sail around the seas.

You could tame animals and bring them back to your shack, fence them in, and sheer their fur for wool.

Spells had components that you had to find in the woods. You could carry way past your limit by stuffing bags full of ore/wool and dragging the bags behind you.

City of Heroes had an awesome character creator. Same with Champions Online. It's a shame the games themselves weren't very fun for me. I was really hoping to see some of that character creation flexibility go towards Neverwinter Online, but nope. I was hoping DCUO would have a decent character creator, but it's pretty shitty compared to CO and CoH.

Most of the whizbang cool new features you hear about in modern games were all done decade + ago by a small timer lesser known korean (the original home of mmo's sorry Everquest you weren't first), japanese, or chinese developers. For example there is this FTP game cant recall name of that original came out in Korea that got brought to America like 5 years later that had a full on custom character system that still embarrasses everyone else's character gear modding even today. You could transform any piece of gear into the visual look any other piece of gear of the same slot as long as you owned it regardless of it's armor type, all armor had three color layers and all three could be changed individually, and you could hide any piece of gear not just helmet or cloak. It's player housing system was also on par with FF14's just not as graphically cool obviously.

Many years ago I played a whole lot of ROSE online, another Korean MMO that started coming out here. It had the whole shop thing and a really thriving crafting economy. Same kind of thing where the capital city had so many shops you could barely see the ground. Also most or every area had a single world boss kind of enemy that respawned 10 or so minutes after you killed him, but they were hard. Like took the 50 or so people leveling in the area a solid minute or two to kill him. I don't know if the entire game ever came out, but the plan was for there to be 7 planets that players progressed through. I played for months and my friends and I made it to the second planet. At the time there were only the two out (maybe 3?) but the amount of content that would be present if all 7 planets were released was kind of staggering.

Also Tabula Rasa seemed interesting during development, but I never played it as people seemed kinda lukewarm about it when it came out.

Not really an MMO thing but I kinda wish there was a Fire emblem style game that used the Wakfu class types and mechanics. Wakfu is a MMORPG that has SRPG combat style. The fun thing about the game is how unique each classes are and how tactical it can get when playing PvE with friends. There are the standard class type (Warrior, Archer etc.) but there are some really unique classes that serve different purposes and have their own advantages/disadvantages. The positioning system is also something I haven't seen in other SPRG's where there is system that stop people from moving when next to an enemy based on a lock and dodge stat. This can make more powerful enemy's hard to defeat.

Asherons Call had an allegiance systems.

Where your "followers" could earn xp for you.

it ended up being a giant pyramid scheme.

@cronus42: @karkarov: @belegorm: @zelyre: Were you able to collect and trade quest items like all other ingame items in those MMOs too?

Yeah, you're absolutely right... The Kal Online example was just the first time I had any experience with it. The cross realm and cross platform play sounds crazy tho!

@bemusedchunk said:

Haha, I remember the same happening to the Teacher & Student system in KAL as well...

You reminded me of something with that.

Didn't they talk about a killing/hunting trophies system in Warhammer Online where you would be able to customize your character by placing skulls, ears and other trophies from your adventures on your person and armor ? I didn't actually play Warhammer... Was that there and was it any good/meaningful?

When you look at majority of the most successful MMOs in the western market today, they all basically follow the same template. There are maybe two major gameplay differentiators: is it a hotkey MMO, or a more actiony MMO...
All other differences are do they focus more on story, more on exploration, more on social interaction etc...

I've also heard of an MMO (I don't know the name) where a rogue-like class could actually steal items from other players inventories. In that same MMO, I think people would lose items from their inventory when they died and those items became loot for other players etc.
Imagine how much just that change the otherwise pretty similar gameplay and experience...

That's why I find the so unusual or unconventional mechanics appealing, the potential is enormous. I wish MMOs were cheaper to make, so there would be less risk and more incentive for experimentation. As someone pointed out, that's why we see more innovation coming from Korea...

@choi: Ultima Online didn't really have any quests that I can remember. At least, not when I played. I vaguely remember escorting NPCs to towns and freeing NPCs from bandits/monsters, but outside of that, NPCs just served as vendors.

There was no concept of soul bound, though. Anything you had on you, (including the keys to your house, I think) could be traded, looted, or pickpocketed from you. The only secure place to store things was the bank.

Oh yeah, you could pick pocket other players. The bank would be littered with corpses of pickpockets that the guards would catch...

When you died, you'd come back as a ghost at a graveyard and would have to run back to your corpse. When you came back, you'd be in robes. So, a lot of people would wear robes over their armor to hide what they were wearing. You couldn't communicate with other players as a ghost, as your "Look out, player killer!" would show up as oOoooooOOOOOoooooo.

I played Warhamer Online too, but only for a month or two. Maybe it was different at later levels, but it felt like your character just had additional, visible item slots.

@choi: Yes. As long as they weren't "bound". Everything and it's brother being non tradeable was not really a thing until more modern mmo design became the norm like WoW. I remember some seriously old school korean mmo's you had to camp for hours or days to get some bosses and they dropped the best gear in game.... and it was totally sellable if you wanted to do that.

Man, everything I hear about SWG makes it sound like it was fucking incredible.