Player vs Everything

Ok, so we all want our games to be revolutionary. Well, maybe not always. Some day I’ll go off on a tangent about gamers that say they want cool new stuff, but in reality they are looking for the same ‘ol –same ‘ol. That means it can’t be World of Warcraft. In fact, WoW should be left completely out of any discussion of a new game. Don’t copy ideas “because it worked in WoW”. Don’t disregard ideas “because they do that in WoW”. Easy right? :- )

A 40KMMO should start by embracing the Warhammer 40,000 universe, NOT MMO conventions. Stop assuming there should be things like loot, or potions, or even levels. Those are all tools that date back to Dungeons and Dragons and its antecedent Chainmail. Start from a clean slate. With apologies to Richard Garriot, what we need is a real tabula rasa.


Of course now I am going to sound all hypocritical because I will discuss my vision in terms of other games, and take a top down approach. I hope you’ll trust me though when I say that I game to this design from the other way around. Envisioning the game play and building a game to support that vision.

So at the highest level this should be a war game. It is mostly a realm vs realm game, with a strong player vs player element with a good deal of player vs environment. There! That should be easy to do right? Nice and ambiguous.

So who is fighting who? I’d recommend the sticking to the basics; The Empire, Eldar, Orks, and Chaos. This leaves the door open for expansion factions (Tau, Necrons, etc.) but still gives a good mix, lots of diversity. And diversity is key! The factions will each be very different from each other. I HATE games (Soulstorm I’m looking at you!) that “balance” their factions by giving each similar units. I’ll go into much more detail in future posts, but suffice to say, the way each race is going to seem like an entirely different game when compared to the others.

Quick tangent, if each faction is going to look, act, advance, and play so different from one another, how are you ever going to balance game play? Great question! It’s a universe at war, if one faction begins to get beaten down to badly or gets two powerful, the others may find NPC’s gaining strength and/or advancement curves subtly altering. 40KMMO is going to have to be a dynamic universe.

And it should be just one universe a’la Eve Online (or maybe two or three tops if the player loads force the issue). No picking servers. No servers with different rules. One universe. That may mean lots of instancing, but so be it.

So imagine if you will, with each of our four factions starts out in with home planets. Each planet has a handful of PvE zones. This is where your character is going to get its start and your going to get the introduction to the faction and the game controls. Each Planet will planet will be connected to each of the other factions planets by a set of increasingly “difficult” zones. Close to home, the zones have stronger PvE elements and stronger NPC’s of the character’s faction. As you move closer to the enemy planet, your NPC’s grow weaker, opposing NPC’s grow stronger. Directly in the middle is a balanced no-man’s land where RvR rules.

For example, The Ork home world and the Eldar Home world would set five zones apart. Moving from Ork to Eldar,
Zone O – Ork Stronghold
Zone 1 would strongly favor the Orks,
Zone 2 would favor the Orks
Zone 3 would be balanced, favoring neither Orks nor Eldar
Zone 4 would favor the Eldar
Zone 5 would strongly favor the Eldar
Zone E – Eldar Stronghold
With the same for; Eldar to Chaos, Chaos to Ork, Empire to Eldar, Chaos to Empire, and Empire to Ork.

Connecting all four factions would be a set of zones that balance in the middle set up for true PVE. This would be the only place that you could have split faction groups as in the literature, only under the most exceptional duress should opposing factions work together.

Initially, The zone map looks a bit like a four sided pyramid to start out, with each of the factions occupying one corner and the peak representing the free-fire PvP zone (equidistant from each of the four starting factions).


That’s all for tonight. Future posts will include; “Looting is a capital offense soldier”, “No, this isn’t my level”, and detailed discussion of the four starting factions.