Questions for furry gamers

[Aaeden]

Wow. I lost track of the other furry board with the info on the game we were planning. I need to dig up the registration email and track back to it...

As far as this discussion goes, the details I want to put out there are as follows:

• RPG games are probably one of the MOST COMMON games. In order to build an awesome furry game, we need to do something insanely new and interesting that hasn't been done before. Stuff like Breath Of Fire and Oblivion already have a furry element, and a game that's an RPG will need to have a unique storyline and game system to be considered just as interesting.
• Mixing all the concepts people are tossing together is interesting but difficult. First off, having an effect on the world around you is MUCH easier on single player games than multiplayer online games. What happens if something changes so that a specific faction of players is eliminated? Can this faction no longer play the game? What about the quests and objectives? Once one person completes them, are they gone forever? Every single time you add a 'feature' to a game, there's a lot more work and support staff required to implement it. 3D game - Multiply the staff and difficulty. Online MMO - Multiply the staff and resources required. Conversation system - Multiply the staff and coding difficulty, including exhaustive analysis of every possible response and interaction.
• Personally, I would suggest starting simple with something along the lines of a furry survival game, where you play in the wilderness as AlanTabby mentioned. Once that's up and running as a potential sort of income, if this is a business thing we'll be looking at, then it's more feasible to attack complex ideas.

But that's just my two cents.

[Aaeden]

Apologies for the double post.

If anyone is interested, I've set up a forum for the gaming initiative a few of us were setting up previously.

http://games.curvedperspective.com

Join if you want to help develop or influence the development of any furry games that we may get out there.

[Aurifer]

One of the things I have against most common... THINGS (Is it only RPGs?) is that the quests follow the lines of "Oh, You Who Are An Adventurer, I need one of: An item, for you to transport an item, accompanyment." For you to have adventure, there has to be something adventurable. In other words, there'll be a war going on, or the world just wouldn't be a really safe place. Maybe there're monsters everywhere, and they only just appeared a few years ago.
In the case of a war, yes, you should be able to defeat the opposing faction. What happens in a war when someone's faction dies? Generally, they're left to find another faction. Their country will be left defeated, and they'll have to rebuild.
In fact, there doesn't even HAVE to be a state of war. Build a nice, peaceful little world. For no reason, players will start dramas by catching neighboring-countries' towns on fire, and soon enough wars will start. It would actually be far simpler than it sounds.
If it was an online world, we could even start it in a single town, with nothing more. We could send out patches as we add more.

A big topic would be cost and such. I'd say we should almost make the game like Runescape; not high-quality, but free, with extra stuff for paying members. This way, people can play it, but you get the full game if you pay.

I'll have to join the forum.

[Aaeden]

The inevitable quest lines are... well... inevitable. The new style of quest is "Bring item A to point B. Bring me 100 of item C. Defeat enemy D and take item E from him, and then bring it to my friend in town F."

What doesn't get explored enough, in my opinion, is matters of moral and decision structure. "Should I do this for this person? Might I get in trouble or in danger for doing this job? Is the quest-giver a pure soul or not?"

That ambiguity will make things a lot more interesting to me.

As for the online concept, I agree that the logistics are a lot simpler than I made them sound, but say your factions are indicated by having a different color cloak, and there are 5 colors of cloaks that we set up in the beginning. Without changing the game code, we can't add another cloak color. So what happens if all of the red-cloaks die off with no way to make new ones? It's stuff we have to add into the logistics. Of course, in games like WoW and such the races can never die off because there are NPCs and ways to create new characters in those races, but if we wanted the world to be truly dynamic, we'd need to allow for the death of an entire player race, and that gets into the "OMG I LOVED THAT RACE, WTF!" concept.

I agree with the costing structure in that sense, although I'd shudder to think I was involved with something as... I don't know... pandering? as RuneScape.

I'm not saying anything is set in stone yet, by any means, but we'll explore each others ideas.

[Aurifer]

I completely went off on a tangent and started talking about something else. To finish my thought:
Blah blah blah RPG blah blah blah bad quest blah blah blah war. When there's a war (or unsafe land), there are a number of things that need doing. Forget having one person in the entire town who's been bitten by a spider, and needs every player ever to (each) bring him ten spider stingers to make an antidote. What if the townspeople had randomish paths like old RPGs, and they'd sometimes wander into the forest to play or pick mushrooms or whatever? Then they encounter a spider. An adventurer would enter the town on his way to another, might go to the shop and wonder why the shop-keeper is closing. It seems the town is in an uproar because their favourite little girl has been stung by a poisonous beast, all the men have been drafted in the war, and they don't have anyone strong enough to gather reagents for an antidote. The behaviour will be relatively easy to implement, assuming all the townspeople suddenly know when it happens, or after a set delay.
You could help with farmwork, sell wares like food and tools, or build structures. Basically, make more of the world dynamic.

Basically, go through a bunch of decision-making to set behaviours and details down, rather than set quest objectives. Then we just tweak a couple things to make the quests more or less repeating, and you've eliminated the 'inevitable quest lines'.


Anyway, to go on to reply to your post about morals: I think a lot of gamers just want to be able to do what they do (and be told what to do) without having to think. That being said, I think most of the furry community is smarter, more willful, and more moral than 'most gamers'. I'd support a morals-judging system, certainly, but it can't go TOO far. None of this "Unseen forces have noted your actions" crap. If you kill some innocent in the forest with no-one around, no-one will know. (Then again, there's that whole Portrait of Dorian Grey thing).
It would certainly be interesting to create a good law structure.
What would be funny, actually, is if we built some virtual court house, where offenders to certain policies in the EULA or whatever would be tried in a court. Like, you'd be banned by a moderator, and you'd have to go through the court thing before being released. I have no hopes that such a thing would ever work, though. It would be fun, is all I'm saying.


And importantly, developers should ALWAYS leave as much room as possible for extensibility. Can you imagine if Blizzard came to expansion-creating time and realized that the way they programmed, they couldn't add the Blood Elves or Nagas or any other playable races? I'm sure the boss would be really angry with them.
Also, factions wouldn't be as hard as race would be, because you can't just change your race in the middle of the game. Assuming genocide is attempted, though, there would probably still be some here and there. We can keep a demographics engine to assess population centres or whatnot, and new players can start there. At worst, new players will start in captivity, where the last remaining stronghold of their species is occupied by another, or maybe they're kept as slaves here and there.
Working with furries, though, I'd assume such drastic genocidal tendencies won't arise. If they do, I'm sure we can prod the NPCs into becoming just a bit stronger. There are always ways.
At any rate, I'll be something that needs a good amount of balancing and checking.

[Buun]

Damn, it sounds like you furs want a remake of Oblivion with fewer "hyoo-maan" races and more furry ones. Of course, I wouldn't mind that one bit .

I'm pretty much in agreement with everything said so far, but here's a question: Should it be an MMORPG, single player only, or single player with a multiplayer option?

I totaly want a more furrie Oblivion, AND it would be awesome if it was online. D:

[Aaeden]

Online games are really cool... the only downside to running them is the server requirements and logistics. Once you get a thousand people playing something, you need to take into account the actions of thousands of users, not just a single player who interacts with a completely NPC world. It sort of brings up a lot of questions that don't exist in an NPC environment.

If you look at Oblivion, it actually does an amazing job of NPC interaction that rivals many video games out there right now. Take a look at the making of movies to get a better concept of exactly how. In reality, MMORPGs have not got any claim to the AI of single player games, mainly due to the processing power and complexities of interactions that have only really been developed on standalone games.

[Buun]

I sort of have my own opinion of how Oblivion would be if it was an online game.
The npc's would not be as important. As well as some other things.

But yeah,
I won't get into it
*backs off*

I was just saying the general idea of something similar to Oblivion would be sweet.
Though I should have used more words to say that, instead of spur of the moment 'omg woot yea' kind of post.

*scuttles away*