I’ve always wanted to build an MMO, for a few reasons. One is the sheer technical challenge. The scale, complexity, and number of unique and interesting problems that need to be solved. Two, I really enjoyed old school MMOs. I grew up playing games like everquest, ultima online, shadowbane, everquest2, warhammer online. PvP MMOs in particular are interesting because no one has really cracked that particular nut very well yet. Albion Online has definitely come the closest. But I don’t really enjoy the top down perspective. Crowfall now defunct, due to I’d argue poor design and netcode, was fun for a bit until we all realized the developers didn’t really know how to make a game not crash or balanced, much like Shadowbane.
Balance… that’s the nut to crack. PVP MMOs almost always devolve into a zerg. One clan or guild gets so overwhelmingly large (or the whole continent of China in Shadowbane’s case) that it makes it impossible for smaller guilds to compete or have fun. Albion tried something interesting where they nerfed the damage depending on how many people were hitting a particular target, not sure if that’s still a thing. They also had a neat mechanic where if too many showed up in an area, it would set everyone’s map to a big red blob, letting you know a zerg was coming.
I digress, the point is, I’d like to play around with making a max 25 person clan/guild, with max 3 guild per alliance type system. Friendly fire outside of your immediate guild would make it far harder to zerg, maybe there are some other interesting mechanics? Basically, I just want a system I can play with these various mechanics in. That and I really love netcode and want to write something that works with 1k+ users concurrently.
I’ve started a similar project with my twitch series on building a turn based PVP MOBA, but I lost steam once I realized that I’d end up having to make ‘seasons’ and building skins or other silly content, as opposed to building a fun game. So yeah this time focus will just be on building a scalable system that semi works, not trying to actually make a real MMO RPG.
So hang tight I’ll start posting technical gibberish soon!
a place to jot 