Arcanum as free MMORGP ?

WTS: 3xDaRk HeLm!!!!1!1!!!!$100000g MSG ME!! Standing out front of GB MaNsIoN!!1!

WTS: 3xDaRk HeLm!!!!1!1!!!!$100000g MSG ME!! Standing out front of GB MaNsIoN!!1!

WTS: 3xDaRk HeLm!!!!1!1!!!!$100000g MSG ME!! Standing out front of GB MaNsIoN!!1!

THAT's why I don't ever want to an Arcanum or Fallout mmorpg. Ever.

 

haha that's all the argument anyone should need right there

 

I'm imagining all of the whispers going back to the guy;

Kryggyrd4453:STFU n00b!! helm sels on AH for 10k eech!!!!1!11
Ravenish0tt:OMW11! If I bye dis you wann cyber?

 

[LFG][1337Virgil] LF1 IORN CLANN have book and magnus, need melee/dodge and glas key holdar!!!!111 NO GNOMES

seriously though, if only someone could get the server software...

 

free client $5 month. 'free' mmos are trash, every single one of them. Some of them would be good if they where not free. Community is important in an mmo. Most of your standard mainstream mmos have about 3 idiots for every 1 decent person, but free mmos? Well, when i play a free mmo i do it almost entirely solo. I maybe find 1 or 2 friends that i play with, but that's it.

Also it would probably be easier to make a new game from the ground up than to convert arcanum into an mmo.

I would like to see a steampunk mmo though. And 3rd person isometric views are great for mmos. Stupid EQ, it ruined mmos by being 3d and attracting people because "zomg teh three dimensions world lulz!1" -_-

Anyway, I registered to comment on this. I don't know why.

 

This pretty much sums up why its a huge no-no. Arcanum as a WoW style RPG would be horrible, but the idea of playing through stock Arcanum with friends makes no sense. So when the Zypher crashed, and Virgil came and found 2-4 people instead of one, who's Nasrudin? He was clearly not well versed in Panarii religion, and now he has to deal with this? Four living ones? What about background stories. I'm sure the half-elf evil mage won't be traveling with the charismatic dwarf techie. How do you manage followers. Does everyone get the average 2/4? You would get huge squads of fighters, and due to different backgrounds you could have Gar in the same group as Torrian kel. And if not, followers would feel confused about who to obey. The thief says stay put, the tank ogre says stay close? Eh!?

 

Well, i must point out that while mmos usually tend to require groups of people doing things togeather, that's not really their point. Their point is to get the best item/highest level/both/something rare or stupidly hard to do, and then stand there, in town, so everyone else can see how you are obviously superior to them.

All about power, mmos, like life, are about collecting power. Power comes in various forms, there is upfront power, having a high level or knowing a spell/skill/whatever that kills everyone, there is the power of knowledge, knowing the game, the power of having lots of friends to call on if you need, power of having loads of cash. Its all power.

Nothing you can do in an mmo, or life, is anything other than gaining power. Don't let your silly human emotions trick you! Being nice to someone is just a way to gain a possible minion. We are all horrible selfish people. Some forms of greed are just seen as nicer than others.

So i say, why do we insist that the person who just sits in his shack building bombs all day is inherently worse than the person out to make a small army, using the time the bomb maker spent soldering togeather his timing mechanisms to help people move (nothing indebts people to you more quickly than spending a day sweating all over their stuff).

Er.. wait, what was this about again?

Yes. MMOs, they are pretty neat. But WoW is certifiably terrible, you can tell its bad because of how popular it is.

Let me tell you a story, its a story of the passing of time, the movements from one age to another.

The first MMO existed when someone decided to take a MUD and give it a graphical user interface. This happened in 1992. Things where going along relatively nicely with a new game coming out now and then until ultima online decided to screw it all up. This attracted commercial interest. Next EQ came out a couple years later, attracted a bunch of idiots. MMOs where now mainstream.

Everyone copied EQ, including WoW, and blizzards fanboys attracted even more people to mmorpg-dom who are all accustomed to the trashy EQ style mmo and there we are.

UO, EQ, WoW. They screwed us over, progressively.

Much like vivendi universal and EA screws over games in general.

So i would like to take this time, to point out, that even though the common public conception of what an mmo is, is naturally based upon these more prominent examples. None of them are very groundbreaking or impressive in the grand scheme of things, so looking with the lens of knowledge and experience on the matter i can only say that these should not be taken as examples of the potential for mmos, and as such, should not be cited as a reason why some prospective mmo or another would be inherently a bad idea.

What CAN be given as to why some prospective mmo or another would be an inherently bad idea, is the factual conclusive certainty, what i have myself discovered with over a decade of research in the field, is that MMOs ruin lives. A hell of a drug.

Case in point, me. If not for MMOs i would be successful.

Its not that this is bad, ive gained a lot, i am a space wizard now. With powers. But having the ability to influence my fictional reality while people on the street wonder just what the hell im doing waving my arms around frantically in a seemingly random fashion (their feeble minds can not grasp the subtle complexities of my art) is not something i would necessarily recommend to people.

Therefore my conclusion. An arcanum based mmo would be a wonderful thing, but i could not recommend anyone play any mmo, ever. Therefore i will happily play by myself on the server, just as soon as someone develops it and puts the servers up. The first ever single player mmorpg, if we discount the various elder scrolls.

Wall of text rolls 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20 - You are now a puddle of protein.

 

I disagree that this would be a big problem, either conceptually or technically. The main problem would just be that it would take time to fix some of the problems, and there's no way you could make up for the voice acting. First, there isn't too much conflict over the story, as there doesn't have to be one survivor. No one thought Stennar was the living one because he nearly survived. It's just chance that got the PC on the zeppelin in the first place, so there's no reason why there can't be a few people bound by chance to end up in this situation. Virgil could simply register even more confusion, God knows he's good at it. If there's a problem choosing who ends up talking to Virgil, just have the first person end up there and everyone else passed out around the wreckage until the first player gets them, about 30 seconds later. This can be scripted without much difficulty.

First, who you decide to travel with is already a matter of choice. You can be a mage and have techies already, so why not 2 players that are different? If you're charismatic, you can even get good and evil follower NPCs.

Also, the mechanics are there, even though barely any effort was put into multiplayer. Anyone can ask a follower to join, and you can steal followers if you're more charismatic than the person who asked them to join. If you're doing co-op, this is no problem. Sure, you can fuck over your teammates in Halo co-op as well, but no one uses that as an argument that co-op is impossible because you can kill your own teammate. Again, co-op, not MMO.

Yeah, it would be a pain in the ass to script it to work for other players, so the game doesn't think that one player is doing everything. However, it can be done. More importantly though, it isn't that awfully hard to suspend your disbelief just a little so you can play the Arcanum module with your friends. You've probably already beaten it a dozen times yourself, unless you're Philes. After all, you probably found out about it on terra-arcanum anyway, if someone did it, and everyone would be telling you to not do it until you already beat the game. And, there's always other modules. There is some action in modding right now, and if multiplayer came out, you'd probably see some more small releases that would at least be worth playing.

---------

I agree with a lot of things in this post. Even if Arcanum were an MMO, what is envisioned here is to make it just like these other games, and there's nothing remarkable there. Arcanum (the Arcanum module) would be fun to be played in multiplayer, but certainly wasn't planned for this, let alone an mmo, even if you could remake it as one. I don't know if many people are going to make the argument for Arcanum as an MMO, but I think it would still be a novel idea to have multiplayer working again (or, rather, to just have it working).

I hear you about how destructive MMO's can be, and this is another reminder of why Arcanum shouldn't be adulterated by making it just another MMO, whether free or not (I couldn't begin to say which is worse). After all, there's something that drew each of us to this game in the first place, and that isn't it.

 

I would like to see a steampunk mmo.. or just more steampunk games in general ;_;

The thing i like about mmos, is that i hate beating games. I always feel sad at the end. mmos you don't ever finish! And even if you decide to quit, the idea is that all your work and effort is still there, forever, and that you can go back to it if you'd like. But honestly im not sure if this is a good thing or not. Becoming accustomed to it i have found my enjoyment of other games has diminished ;_;

 

Um, no. Four living ones IS an issue .Think about it, why do you go on the mission in the first place? Well, the game initially tries to sway you tworads, "You are the living one, you have a duty to do this." Despite how much there is to explore, a very central part of the story is finding Joachim and helping bates, because you feel a moral connection. Now while there could be a band of thieves who want to exploit them for money, or the dark mages, I'm sure that on the first play all of you thought that you were the living one. And to you saying that it was just chance the PC was there, no. That's the point of the Panarii religion. They believe it was not chance, and that all this happened because you are the reincarnation of nasrudin. Even having the people unconscious would trouble Virgil to the point where he wouldn't help you .He would take you to town, drop you off and be on his way in his religious duty. No need to help you out if you aren't Nasrudin. I don't believe there is any way to do it that wouldn't absolutely ruin the natural immersian level of Arcanum.


In response to the second part, indeed you can. However, this is one very charismatic person who has spent a major part of their life (IE exp points) developing their people skills and becoming a master of persuasion ( literally.) In part I actually agree with this as it is a solid, well thought out point. But again, the reason why I play Arcanum is immersion. As a charismatic person in a squad of 6-8 total people you can keep wraps on everyone. I would feel like if you had one really charismatic person governing potentially 20 people (gotten by the 7-8 total from charismatic + 3/4 total average from other 2-4 followers.) Things would get to hectic to feel realistic. Like I said, keeping Gar and Kel from cutting each other's throats would be tough with so many men. This is a strong point though, and I feel it could be integrated very well if certain mechanics were tweaked. Hypothetically if you could figure a way out and code it in, more power to you!

The third part I completely disagree on, the comparison to halo multi player co-op.

A think about it, a game of arcanum takes HOURS from start to end. Literally many, many HOURS. Depending on the skill level and experience, it could even be days (with every game comes noobs.) And I'm talking total play time here. How do you decide when everyone meets to progress the storyline? What if two people want to play but number three has a paper due tomorrow? Playing the first hour of the game over and over again would get HORRIBLY boring. Stabbing a character in the back in halo isn't a big deal, respawn in 10, back to the action. In Arcanum it is huge and can break someones character. So one super powerful mage deciedes to wipe out everyone else. What the games over for the others? Say the weak halfing who never does jack shit in combat and pours points int Charisma steals your followers and jumps the rest. Jesus that would be annoying. In Halo you can fuck people over, but in Arcanum you can REALLY fuck people over.

Even something simple like deciding who would get what weapons that you found or looted, who kept track of gold, who decided what to spend gold on, how to manage fate points. I'm sorry, but there are too many errors from a story standpoint and a mechanics standpoint to implement it

 

first person in game starts at Crash Sight, everyone else starts at Shrouded Hills. script it.

first person to get a follower gets the follower. script no follower stealing.

first person to loot corpse/chest gets loot. person that loots divides loot how he wants. this includes gold.

 

...

So essentially it's a race to who can get to the chest/follower the fastest? People with higher DX would have a higher chance of getting loot/followers because of their speed? Everyone in the group would hate each other for getting the item they wanted. I'll make a more complete list of things that could go wrong, but I've already jotted down a few.

So do the people in Shrouded hills have to wait for their "leader" to come to them? Or do they just start the quests there. What if one person wants to destroy steam engine, but one person doesn't. If the first person does, than the second person pays for it. How do we decide who gets their way.

The main module was NEVER meant to be played with more than one. No amount of scripting can change that...

 

scripting will solve almost everything .

the main BIG thing it won't solve is World Map sure it is posable to walk without it but it will talk forever and without being able to at least look at it your walking blind. of course you can set up teleporters everywhere to everywhere but you lose random encounters. and you have to wait forever for a shop to restock.

no turn base. that makes Throwing skill about useless.

with only 1 Living One allot of Quests can only start or be continued if that player personally does it. noone but the Living One would be able to get Chukka, Loghaire Thunderstone, Magnus Shale Fist, Raven, or Virgil.

I'm not saying Arcanum stock game should be turned multiplayer. I'm pointing out things you said wont work will work but there are things that wont work that you didn't mention.

 

No doubt Bates is a very important part of the story, but after Shrouded Hills, the Virgil/Bates thing fades in importance to a side plot. Consider: without Virgil in your party at the right point, you can't even get Joachim to join anyway. And, while I would always suggest that people pursue Joachim's notes, it really only affects the Molochean Hand, and it isn't the only way to do so.

Also, it really doesn't matter if the Penarii think you are the Living One. They had no knowledge of the blimp crash, and don't come to any realizations in its immediate aftermath. Virgil is a strong believer, but he's obviously not knowledgable about the Penarii religion, and he's only one person. Joachim seems far more interested in your safety, not godhead, and many Penarii elders are difficult to persuade or are doubtful. The ones who do so are also generally skeptical just like most people in the game, saying something like "that is an almost believable story, but I think you might be telling the truth," etc. The prophecy of the Living One is clearly central for the Penarii, but they don't exist for this purpose - even if you discount maintaining the wards, they are far more concerned with moral uprightness and perhaps ceremony. As they had nothing to do with the blimp accident, as becomes more clear as the game progresses, it is obvious that what Virgil makes out to be a divine event is a coincidence.

And no, I didn't really think I was the Living One, and as every PC response in Virgil's first dialog suggests either doubt or has Virgil be insulted when you try to assume the role of Living One, it seems that Troika never intended it to be this simple. I think it would have been very disappointing if things were actually that simple, and not consistent with the intricacies of Arcanum's storyline. I think there are a lot of motivations for seeking Bates, one of which is that from the very outset, people are trying to kill you. Plus, I wanted to build a mechanized arachnid, and I paid like fifty fuckin' dollars for the thing...

Yeah, I agree that you couldn't remove the Penarii aspects of the early game, that would be terrible. But Arcanum is complex, and adding complexity and doubt here would be consistent with what Troika did.

I agree with this. You're pointing out what is already a big problem for experienced Arcanum players: it's too easy. With even 2 players, it would be ridiculously simple. Indeed, with a very persuasive character, it barely involves combat between the PC and anyone, if you don't tell your followers to back off.

That's true, even when we're not talking mmo. I guess you better hope your friends aren't too much of assholes, just like in any other game. Yeah, if you die in Halo, you respawn, but if you keep killing each other, you could still be at it for days, until someone quits. And, like Halo, I doubt you are going to go find a stranger to play co-op with, especially considering the amount of time involved. If you want to do co-op with a stranger, play Vormantown.

You might be right about dying, though. Clearly, you're gonna want to put points into something that can resurrect people, as loading and saving every few minutes wouldn't cut it. However, you could also script the game to respawn players at the Crash Site after, say, thirty seconds, and only end the game if everyone and their followers are dead for a few seconds (even Virgil resurrects you sometimes). And, you can use scripts to prevent your teammates from looting your stuff, should they be assholes. In the end, you just have to play with people you half-trust, and considering the limited number of people who'd play, everyone will soon get to know everyone.

The quests are the only things that need a lot of editing, and I think this could be a team effort. With some effort in this area, I think a standard model could be found where a lot of the work could be bypassed, i.e. by telling everyone except the first player that the NPC "has already asked someone else to take care of it," etc. No one wants to search for "crash site survivor" in each dialog and change it to "crash site survivors," but it's a pretty simple procedure.

I think that the problems are practical, as there would be a lot of work to do, but it's hard to find a compelling theoretical reason why this can't be done.

As with all other things, you'd have to use group decision-making processes. As we're not talking mmo, this is not so much more serious than another game, although the possible plot branches are more varied. No doubt, a mmo would be both painful and impossible, because you'd have to allow every person to complete quests, and make unlimited followers so that each person could have one. That's without the difficulty of frame rate, and changing the .exe to increase the maximum number of players. Without a doubt, THAT is technically impossible with the available tools. But playing with another 2-3 individuals in the Arcanum module, which I expect will mostly involve killing whatever NPCs you come across, would still be a fun experience, although not exactly as authentic as playing it as designed.

 

Last week I downloaded and tried a free MMORPG called Cabal online. It sucked. Don't waste your time on it. It's a typical cookie-cutter online sludge factory. For some reason the devs thought it would be a good idea to let people turn their on screen characters into walking talking shop-bots so as soon as you spawn in whatever town you're in, you're smacked in the face with literally an entire forest of floating names, trade shouts, requests, selling shouts, etc. It's so horrendous you can't even see the environment you're trying to navigate through. The setting is your typical stock fantasy setting. There are only 3 classes to choose from. Each character has a total of 3 faces and hair styles to choose from. The gameplay itself is your typical Skill-use/Cool-down, rinse-repeat combat system. No inovation, no ambition, no creativity whatsoever.

So it really left me yearning for a descent MMO that doesn't focus soley on combat or skill progression or gold farming or XP grinding or craptastic fantasy settings. I'm looking for something with more character development/interaction. I'd love a game outside of a Tolkien-setting ripoff. I'm looking for something with a more modern setting, maybe even a bit futuristic, or more civilized like Steampunk, that has interesting plots/quests dealing in corporate espionage, or spying and intelligence gathering. A game that, as you recruit and travel with your party, you're all trying to unravel some kind of conspiracy and solve mysteries together. Not just hacking and slashing at everything or shooting at everything that moves.

Is there even a game like this out there?

Another thing that really irks me is how all MMO's HAVE to be entire worlds. It's so degrading to have to take hours to foot it miles and miles in game across pointless environment to get to the next town or quest when even in the real world even a homeless bum could scrape enough change together for a bus ride across town. And all the quests are always the same. I find games (single or multiplayer) that take place in just 1 or 2 cities much more immersing and detailed than games that try to connect entire continents with nothing but bland fields and trees and barren wastelands and then make you WALK the distance in between or put level restrictions on fast travel (FF Online severly guilty of this).

 

I'll edit this later with a more complete list. And I have to disagree, massive amounts of scripting won't change the foundation/mechanics of the game so much to make it work. Sorry, finals.

 

First things first, I don't think this is possible, let alone feasible. I think a MMORPG is impossible. However, I think multiplayer could be managed, with a small group on the map. However, for the sake of arguing, I'll go along with it.

What if you didn't know who the Living One was? Say there's 300 people, and of them, only 1 is the Living One? Also, to make it more competitive: the chests respawn, but it's semi-random what's in them, and they respawn slowly. Say that the "Living One" meets certain ideals, and, as the game plays through, who the Living One is is decided by the actions that they make, and isn't confirmed until you get to Nasrudin? Also, players that know prior to the announcement wouldn't be allowed to tell. I know there's a lot of flaws with this idea, but I thought it up, and figured I'd toss it into the melting pot.

 

The thing with Arcanum is that you decide for yourself if you're the Living One or not. It is not certain that you are, or that you aren't. It is not your deeds that make you the more or less probable incarnation of Nasrudin (who obviously can't be incarnated for reasons experianced players know of), but your choice in the matter.

The entire Living One scenario would have to be replaced by something else.

If you were to make a multiplayer mod for Arcanum, I think you should start out in a new, small town (maybe Vormantown) and work your way out of there into the rest of Arcanum. You can read about the IFS Zephyr in the papers, and maybe even visit the crash site; but you won't find any Virgil or would-be Living One there. Maybe, on your way out, the Molochean Hand stops you and tries to make sure that no-one leaves the site alive. So what of the Living One, then? Leave that to the imagination of the players. Maybe characters like Gudmund and such can mention something like "the one/ones before you", but that's all.

How many players, then? Tops five or six, maybe, and all travelling in a party with a party leader. The leader decides which areas to go to, where you're going on the world map - everything. The leader handles money, interaction with NPCs and quests. Experiance is divided in the group as usual, and loot/items are destributed as the players wish.

I really can't see any other way this could work without the game going bananas. You can't have several independant players; for time- and quest-reasons, they must be in the same party.

These are all just my ideas, though. Maybe you've thought of something better.

 

For the Living One, a new NPC could be added who is the LO and you and your party escort him around doing the quests. Or maybe the stipulation of who the LO is would be determined before everyone connects to the game. Though this would most likely only work with a cap on who members would be in a party. I'm thinking like how Diablo was handled on line...6 or 8 members max. But then it wouldn't really be a true MMORPG.