An MMOFPS/RPG focused on players-run faction combat.
There's very little in terms of "personal progression" - instead the game is focused on "faction-wide progression".
Any player can create a new faction (as well as join and leave existing ones), give it a name, description and even its own banner/logo/design which will appear when fit. While most factions are by default hostile against each other, alliances can be made between multiple factions (which comes at some sort of cost).
As in, every faction has its own skill/unlock/progress tree that they can specialize in, unlocking access for new weapons/vehicles/skills/other tidbits that all of their members can then use. There's a universal "baseline" pool of starter assets available to all factions though. (so new factions don't start out with nothing)
There is a large group of player actions that contribute towards "faction experience" (killing enemy players, healing friendly players, repairing vehicles, capturing bases etc.) that when there's a sufficient amount of, players can then vote on to choose what to progress on. They can also opt out and instead allow an AI to choose the best option (based on a couple factors) for them.
Bases are the backbone that any faction leans on. It's the place where players respawn after they die, where they can buy and change their equipment and it generates a relatively small amount of "faction resources".
Faction resources are the currency used for buying more advanced weaponry and other useful equipment such as vehicles or siege defenses.
There's a number of pre-defined bases at the start of a game, with multiple spots spread around the map where players can build new bases. Bases can be captured in a way explained below.
One particularly crucial item that can be bought at a base is a Capture Banner - only one can be bought per base, and its cost is higher the more experience a faction has overall - making it a huge risk for large factions to expand further.
When bought, a capture banner can be brought into the enemy base (a specified area somewhere in the center) by a banner carrying player and held there for some amount of time (depending on the size of a base and faction, it can be as long as 2 minutes, usually lasting about 30 seconds though). Once that happens, enemy players will lose that base and will no longer be able to respawn there, and the base ownership will be given to the enemy.
When a player holding a banner dies, the banner can be picked up by another player from the same team. However if it stays on the ground for too long, it will disappear, and the attacker will be forced to retreat.
Apart from full-blown bases, there are other points of interest around the map for players to fight over:
- resource mines (which are similar to bases but don't require a capture banner, however players can't respawn there and they yield much more currency than a regular base)
- wandering giant monsters, which will attack any player on sight. These powerful NPCs can appear anywhere on the map and will usually require multiple players to take down, and are generally very dangerous, but also very rewarding - the killing faction will receive a large XP boost (if multiple factions were fighting, the experience will be split depending on the amount of damage dealt by the participating sides to the monster) and the monster will drop a large amount of resources that can be then picked up by the players
- supply drops, which contain resources, unique weapons and potentially other equipment
The overall goal is to capture all the available bases or have the most faction experience/resources at the end of a session, at which point a server reset takes place and everything except factions themselves is brought back to the start and the cycle takes place again.
Immediate obvious issues I can see myself:
- faction unlock balance and "faction monopoly" - how to make faction unlocks balanced so no one faction has an advantage significant enough to let them steamroll everyone else and be really attractive for newcomers to join, further making them stronger (a feedback loop of sorts)
- it's a massive-scale MMO = massive costs, especially with the server infrastructure (and I know enough about servers to know that I don't know much, but I know that this stuff would be expensive and complex as hell to run and maintain for any given length of time)
- much chaos would ensue with the faction skill progression, as well as people deliberately wasting team resources on needless shit
- fantasy, sci-fi, modern?
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Topic: Games you wish existed (Read 967915 times)