An Idea for a classless, permadeath-focused MMO

Hey guys... so... my idea would be an MMO similar to Ultima Online. You'd have a bunch of different abilities to level up, and there would be skill trees with rewards, which would give players the proper incentives to become a miner or some kind of farmer, or to go out and kill orcs.

There would also be no quest-giving NPCs and permadeath. So, the entire world would be populated by monsters, and players... and players would be able to set up quests for other players to take on. When setting up these quests, players could offer some kind of gold, or some items, or nothing at all... and the players would also be able to define exactly what the quest was about. (with the option to randomly generate quest text based on the specific goals, or to input their own text)
After creating this quest, people can walk up to the player and accept it. If the player goes offline, a copy of themselves will stay in their place giving out the quest until they log back in (or the quest gets completed).

Now, another player wanders around, sees that player giving out the quest and decides to give it a try. If that player successfully completes the quest, that player would gain whatever rewards were offered, as well as experience points related to the quest's difficulty, and the quest would disappear, since it was completed.
If the quest doesn't get completed, it's still there for anybody to try until it does.

Example: A player wanders around and goes into a cave where they get killed by some giant orc. Now, that player starts a new character and creates a quest to "go find my friend who travelled into this cave and hasn't returned" or something along those lines. The creator sets up player rewards as well as the creator's own rewards (perhaps whatever was on the other player's corpse). Other players look at and choose to accept the quest, and when it gets completed, the player and the quest creator both get whatever rewards were set.
Now, this is just one example of a quest... there could be plenty of other quests types, and they could get super in-depth if the creator chose to go that route.

There would also be sufficient things to do outside of questing, which is an important design element. You could level up your skills, and there would be sufficient rewards in each skill tree. If you're making armor or weapons, you'll get skills related to smithing, if you're creating booze or running a tavern, you'll get skills related to that stuff.
People could also start up player-created shops, that would sell not just items but also services.

The fear of permadeath would also likely keep everybody from just going out and killing monsters, at least until they're a high enough level, or until they've killed enough low-level monsters. Of course, there would have to be a certain balance to the progression if you wanted to be a warrior or an archer or whatnot... and that's part of the challenge around this type of game design.

I think a game like this could be really cool if done right. What do you guys think?

There are certainly precedents for a lot of those elements, though having every quest be player-generated would be a tough sell. There wouldn't be much to do at the very beginning before anyone's had a chance to build up skills and such. I imagine there would have to be controls set on the rewards you could offer for your quests, unless you are imagining that the rewards would have to be actually from the quest creator's inventory.

The game would also need pretty strict control on PVP, or I think you'd just end up with an anarchic, cutthroat situation like in Rust.

I will ALWAYS think permadeath is a bad option in an MMO, unless if you can retain the skills you learned for your next character, or the money or whatever. Imagine dying after playing the game for over a year, and the crushing realization would come that all you've been doing has been absolutely pointless. No one would want to restart after all of that.

I can't imagine a worse game.

EDIT: I'm sorry, that was mean. I just think that permadeath is the worst thing to happen to video games.

Sounds sweet duder, had ideas like this in the past fo sho.

Permadeath is tricky in MMOs but one solution for a game like yours is to have generations. When a character dies, you can roll their son or daughter, brother, mother, etc. This way you keep skills and knowledge in a way that makes sense but are otherwise reset. Possibly you only retain X % of skills. For example rolling the Father/Mother of a character gets 50% skills but 50% gold; rolling the daughter/son gives 80% skills and 20% gold (or something). There's a lot of ways you could use lineage to further open up skill trees and allows people to make really unique characters, but that's a whole other post.

Another solution (which could work hand-in-hand) is to have Constitution like in D&D. So you have a limited number of deaths. As your death counter decreases, you are more likely to move in to less dangerous work (like monster hunting) and open up a tavern. If balanced properly this could work great, since players would have A) a good reason to move on to something mundane in their "later years" and B) not have a constant, intense fear of death, but not make death pointless either.

Ever since I watched Sword Art Online a perma death mmo interested me, their was one... but i forgot the name, it's on steam though and its pretty bad

@geraltitude said:

This sounds pretty cool....huh.

Yeah, I think a system like this could work pretty well. Perhaps even something like... the longer you survive the higher the percentage of gold & skills you keep. This way, the player would still want to be careful, and perhaps do more safe tasks instead of just killing, and if they got killed, it would be less of a penalty if they were playing carefully.

Still, I think losing all of your items and having them stay on your corpse is a good penalty by itself, so even if you got your skill & gold percentage to be high, you would still want to play carefully.

Yes, the quest rewards would be taken from the quest creator's inventory. So, you would actually need to HAVE 500 gold, or some kind of rare item, if you wanted to offer a quest that gave them as rewards. Every player would start with a set amount of gold, as well, so... everybody would be able to buy something to start themselves off, or set up an easy quest. There could also be gold spread randomly throughout the world, perhaps in chests in dungeons or other kind of high-risk areas.

Also, the original idea was for there to be no PvP... but perhaps there could be player-initiated battles, or maybe just designated PvP areas. I think for the design of the game to work, there would absolutely need to be areas where players couldn't kill you. (Perhaps just in towns)

@vigorousjammer: Sounds like you fell down and hit your head on a Star Wars: Galaxies - An Empire Divided box.

@nightriff: haha, thanks - but you know this is the internet right? No one's supposed to like anyone else's ideas :D

@kidavenger: oh sweet sweet Galaxies. Had a great career as a cantina musician in that game. I'll never forget this massive tip a Jedi gave me back when there weren't Jedi all over the place. Very cool game.

Yes, totally, and I think your first example of being able to create quests to retrieve/avenge your body or have someone else find is really solid. Finding loot and dead corpses that belonged to actual players seems very cool, especially since the game would probably have a crafting component and the weapons/items could be somewhat unique.

Someone make this game!

rust is almost a permadeath mmo

I used to go on quests, but I took an arrow to the knee?

My personal biggest problem with MMO's is the questing. I think it's an archaic piece game design that needs to be transcended.

Creating a MMO endgame around permadeath is going to be a nightmare for developers. Permadeath is simply too punishing. It's hard to imagine a MMO like that would have any real longevity outside of a niche, hardcore audience.

People become way too attached to their characters to endure a permadeath of that character. Maybe in your MMO that wouldn't happen because they'd get used to it real fast. A better solution would be a quest you had to complete as a spirit to regain your actual body, (and thus all your skills and loot). Something more elaborate than the soul walk from WoW.

Ugh, so classless.

Waiting is a thing that is toxic to MMOs. Do you realize you are proposing not only delivering a "punishment" by killing their character and sequestering their gear, you are expecting them to WAIT for someone else to handle recovering?

There is also the flip side to this: What possible reward would a random player (stranger) will have to take on a quest to go fetch the items that and return them? The "risk vs reward" of this is already bad so to make it reasonable such reward would have to be worth as much as the gear if not much more. Unless there is a mechanical reason that forces them to complete "the quest", why would they bother to return the items? They have the info. They beat whatever it is that killed the other character and has its loot as well. They are already ahead where returning the items is actually a value loss for them.

Constructively, you'd need a pretty compelling system to incentivise the risk death while questing vs the safety of setting quests up against the benefit of setting up quests vs being self sufficient.

In a permadeath world with no world set progression framework (aside from the major milestones of personal skill progression) it would seem preferable to create quests, minor progression milestones, from safety and gain the joint rewards of their completion rather than risk the loss of everything even if it was slower.

At the same time you'd have to provide a good benefit for players to create quests, aside from getting the set rewards back, otherwise there will be little in the way of quests and the players will tend to work on their own for themselves.

It might seem mercenary but at the moment the risk factor of permadeath would cause a level of distrust that would counter the community curated elements, and the standard MMO already has an issue with encouraging co-operation and group play.

There's already a classless, semi-permadeath MMO out there. It's called EVE Online.

Fly any ship you want to as long as you skill up for it, and if you lose the ship, it's gone for good.

@turambar:

Isn't it a tad incongruous to call EVE Online "classless" when it's pretty much Capitalism: The Game?

What you are describing is Star Wars Galaxies when it first came out. You got your build based on how you played- it was basically classless. For example: if you killed things with a pistol you got experience with Pistols. After a long time you could even master Pistols and eventually branch out in Master classes.

There was no quest system beyond getting missions from terminals which were randomly generated.

Players controlled the economy. You could not buy anything unless it was made and sold by other players.

You could build homes, cities, farms, shops, etc.

The Jedi class had permadeath and if you're Jedi character (at the time these were super rare players with intense requirements) was killed they could no longer play and could only walk the world as a "Blue Glowie" (the Jedi Blue ghosts basically).

Not really to your point, but if a Jedi was seen by other players they would immediately be placed on a bounty board and bounty hunters could find them in order to kill them and collect a bounty.

You could not go into combat a lot. There was a system in place where you had to eventually watch dancers/musicians in order to lower your battle fatigue.

You could get wounded in combat and lose a percentage of you HP, MP and AP bars. You would have to pay a doctor (another player practicing in medicine) in order to remove these debuffs.

These kind of MMOs have all but been forgotten and are largely considered unpopular and from a monetary sense it is acted like these games have no place and are failed systems. I dont agree with that, but that seems to be how it is now.

God. I really miss the original Star Wars Galaxies, sometimes. Even though it was directionless, it was a ton of fun. They really fucked it all up trying to get those WoW subs.

Giant alliances like Goonswarm have 100% ship replacement programs. Pure socialism yo.

I think this sounds like a great roguelikelike MMO where you're requiring other people to get items you can't and effectively outsourcing quests so players can request the aid of other players to 'grind' for them? This could effectively work for high level players giving low level player quests, with maybe a splattering of seeding from the developer.

As an example i'm thinking a warrior like player is able to clear dungeon of smashable skellys pretty easilly, but he needs a drop from the dungeon of resilient-yet-weak-to-magic hell spawns. Rather than risk his own neck doing that, cuz permadeath, he'll outsource the quest for someone that can. He found a great wand of moardamage or something so he puts that up for grabs with a modest gold reward. Someone picks it up and has X amount of time to do it (first come first served basis), if the guy who picked up the quest fails there is a consolation prize, let's say, but someone who completes it benefits 2 parties. If the quest isn't completed with X time, it's back on the market again.

Now the game then spreads out into multiple branches of speciality, everyone values his own mortality so wages rare drops they have acquired vs rewards they wish to reclaim. Ideally a player driven economy of 'shit i have' vs 'shit i want' is born and a good game is had by all. Of course this balance and drive is the real sticking point, but from Vigorousjammer's post, that is the game that I see.

just stole your idea for my kickstarter thanks duder

I've actually never played Star Wars Galaxies... and now I'm kinda sad I didn't... :/

Well, the point is, you wouldn't have to wait and do nothing, you can still do plenty of other things while somebody is completing your quest. The reward a stranger could have to take on a quest could be something like added experience points. As for returning the items, what if they were automatically returned upon completion of a quest? There are simple (yet unrealistic) design decisions that could be made to avoid too much griefing of players.

Hmmm, yeah, perhaps players would need more incentive. I think the real reward would be bragging rights, though. The fun of it would come from the challenge of actually getting your character that far.
Although, maybe something the player could show off (like some kind of trophy) would make them want to take on more quests.

Of course, the benefit for creating quests might end up being a problem, but I think that's where the permadeath comes in. There's more of a benefit to some players to stay in town and tend a wheat farm and a shop just to not get killed in the dangerous areas. Of course, the gameplay behind doing that stuff would have to still be fun (Perhaps modeled after something like Reccettear), otherwise nobody would do it.

As for the economy, and how much of a reward is the risk worth... that would all work out dynamically in-game, wouldn't it? Let's say a player sets up a quest and nobody is taking it because the reward is too low... the player could take down that quest and try setting it up with a higher reward. As long as the active quests were easy to navigate, Players would just choose the quests with the higher rewards.

I think it would also be interesting if the game was able to determine how difficult a quest would be before you went on it. This way, you can see a quest with a 5-star difficulty, but opt to do a 4-star one with a slightly less reward because you don't think you're a high enough level to take on a 5-star quest yet.

Basically, there's a whole bunch of small balance tweaks that would have to be done, but I still think the core design would be pretty solid. Of course, it would still need to control well and have some decent looking graphics, etc.

haha yes! exactly. Only now it's like a dozen arrows to the knee.