There were some OK shadowrun console games but having a massively multiplayer online RPG or FPS or RTS game all has some game design issues just like shadowrun as a table top rpg has different design issues.

I just want to see what some of you people think the issues might be and what some of the possible solutions could be. Purely as an idle thought exercise.


-One of the obvious changes is that upgrades have a greater gradient. I am assuming that this would not be turn based and so Movement becomes much more important. Small differences in weight, firing speed, range, accuracy, and damage all become more important.

-One of the things that makes a game entertaining for longer is the accumulation of expensive and rare gear. Excluding magical gear, vehicles, and drones the most expensive item in the game is probably delta grade wired reflexes but cyber limbs can be a huge money sink too.

I think there would need to be further room to upgrade in terms of armor, weapons, and cyberware in order for the game to be interesting for longer. There is no equivalent to the super rare drop of loot form a killed enemy. It does not have a logical fit into the shadowrun universe but that element of randomness is part of what makes some games addictive in the same way that gambling is addictive: variable reward paired with variable chance of winning.

Weapon mods and gear mods could be one avenue to have rare items in the way that mass effect did things.

Having henchmen is a game mechanic in a lot of PC and table top RPGs. It gives a player a focus to further prefect. Shadowrun already has this in some ways. Ally spirits, drones, and sprites could all be henchmen of a player, as could other NPC runners.

But all this is just fun fluff. I think the actual mechanics of a traditional shadowrun game would be very very hard to pull off. Hit man was one interesting game that comes to mind that incorporated many ways to solve a mission and elements of stealth and disguise. That game however would not lend its self to multiplayer and it required cleverly set up levels, plus it was not actually that fun a game.

Something more like fallout 3 could be done and so could something like GTA, but those games are single player. Something like Fallout 3 has a complex condition branches for the NPCs that would be complicated by having multiple PCs. Fallout 3 would sometimes get confused with one player showing up where they are not supposed to. Something like GTA has a very shallow set of condition branches. When you are on one mission all the world is set up so that that mission is running. Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 did an ok job of doing a multi player RPG but both were not that fun. Good games but a bit slow.

This is a wall of text but I wanted to get the ball rolling.

I'd recommend checking out the video game Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

A lot of its mechanics are rather similar to shadowrun 4E. Obviously it's lacking the depth of either Vampire: The Masquerade, or Shadowrun. But what they did works well.

One clever thing was making your firearms skill & stat effect the size of your crosshairs in FPS mode. The bullet goes to a random place inside those crosshairs. This automatically makes the necessary difficulty adjustment for long range. Targets further away are smaller, so you're less likely to hit them.

The main problem of any P&P game converting to a real time game of any sort is initiative. The player who is quicker with his mouse is quicker in the game. Wired reflexes wouldn't mean anything.

And if it's an MMO type game, I would suggest looking at Anarchy Online. It's a good example of a futuristic MMO, but uses a lot of mechanics for MMO's that are wholly generic.
It's got a lot of Shadowrun type ideas in it, like cyberware, magic (sorta, it's nano abilities), tons of guns and tons of other gear. Totally misses in terms of flavor though.

Shadowrun has a lot of ideas that could lend themselves well to an MMO type setting, but it would require scrapping the Tabletop rules in favor of more real time action. A big hurdle would be kicking things like Classes and Levels to the curb though, since Shadowrun has never incorporated those things and advancement has always been based on Karma as opposed to Experience Points.

I'm not sure how many MMO's there are out there that have character development that isn't class based, but I'm sure it's not many.

Two out of every three posts on dumpshock would be "omg nerf mages QQ." The other third would be "OMG nerf street samurai QQ."

i imagine it would be fun to tamper with the players' mouse speed and acceleration according to their Initiative and IPs. the street sam has full control over his mouse, only limited by his own gaming skills, while the ini6 IP1 mage is struggling to target his mouse.

I was just thinking this actually. It's probobly the BEST way to simulate the differences in reaction times between various PCs with enhanced reflexes.


ALSO PCs with higher reaction attributes and dodge skills will see bullets fired in their direction travel slower (enabling a dodge much easier)

Problem is you can't mess with perception like that. Either the bullets move slower or they don't. Otherwise the guy firing the gun will see a "hit" before the guy dodging sees them even reach the half-way mark as he starts dodging.

Now, as for how the game would look, I would personally use a similar method to how Borderlands did weapons: throw some sh*t together at random and let the player decide if its better. I ended that game with two different shotguns: one that regenerated ammo, had a high capacity, reasonable rate of fire, good DPS (including reload time). The other had 3 shots (with 300% burst--so all three fired on one click), HUGE damage per shot, and awful reload time. The former was for general use, the latter was for "this has to die, now." I killed a crimson lance, point blank, while in"incap/dying" mode by shooting his neigh-invulnerable shield.

Players should always have the option to buying weapons and mods. The one thing that Borderlands lacked was the ability to customize your stuff. Mod slots should be more limited, based on the design of the gun, and the "tech level" (higher tech stuff isn't (much) better, it just gets more slots).

Quest/mission wise it might want to borrow from All Points Bulletin. I haven't played, but I've heard it has a great mechanic for pitting players against each other. This would allow for much more interesting fights than your usual NPC dungeon for some missions (rival gang wars, and such). But you'd also want to include standard story missions where the baddies are NPCs, as it gives a greater depth, such as attacks on corporations where the opposition isn't going to be characters that could be filled by players. Now, having two groups of PCs attack the same target and have to fight each other for the McGuffin, that's also brilliant. Yes, someone will lose, but that's dystopia for you: sometimes you can't win.

What I'd love is for the game to be about team based crime. You get a mission, group up with your runner contacts, and go about it. Missions would be a mix of play types including stealth, interacting with NPCs, information gathering, and of course combat. Think Deus Ex mixed with GTA on crack. Combat would have a range of style from loud/big gun/michael-bay-explosion combat to quiet/stealthy/slit-your-throat combat.

Louder combat brings more furious security response, but has its place in providing distractions or making a fast escape. In an MMO environment, I imagine people could train up their loud combat skills in desert wars PvP play.

Quiet combat would be a mix of equipment choices, martial arts, learning to use stealth to sneak up on enemies. Ample places to use those within the sprawl, pretending to be batman or whatnot.

I agree that special rare/random item drops can be fun, but they'd be rather weird in Shadowrun. Maybe you could replace them with social connections? The rare chances to make friends with people who can access hard-availability items, or help you out in difficulty situations?


An issue would be missing uniqueness; grinding missions for the small chance of getting that special drop clashes a bit with Shadowrun I'd say.

I had considered that option. The problem is, it's not fun. It makes for a perfect hardcore shadowrun game, but it's not fun.

Permadeath for characters.

In all MMO models, this sucks balls. The idea behind MMO being keeping your player playing for long periods of time.

For permadeath to work, bonuses must be small, and accrued quickly.

i don't care, i want permadeath for characters.
yes, this would open up worlds of griefing.
but face it, that is what the world of shadowrun is.

A compromise might be areas where permadeath happens, others where your Docwagon contract is , y'know, affective. Not utterly realistic but more so than the standard.

Permadeath has never, ever, worked well for any MMO.

I only know of one design that even took it into account in a way that would be fun from the player's perspective, and that was that they didn't so much play "a character" but played "a family" of sorts. Their excess characters would do the resource gathering for them (even while the player was offline) and if a character died: no biggie. Got a bunch more just like him back home.

The goal was that the world and the story were emergent and that's what you influenced by playing. Characters themselves were fleeting. Character death usually would create new stories and missions for many people to investigate (as magic was highly forbidden, so if a magic item exploded killing your character it influenced quite a lot).

But this game was the brain child of a friend of mine who...well, he's a little crazy.

So yeah, permadeath only works when the rewards for playing are small and quickly accumulated. Where death is, essentially, a slap on the wrist (thus negating any impact permadeath is supposed to have).

i disagree. I never liked Diablo 2 Softcore aka Tutorial Mode. All my friends and I always only played Hardcore mode. The adrenaline level was much higher leading to much more fun. Especially mocking friends who died some stupid death for being afk or alike.
on the other hand Diablo 2 isn't very difficult

If a SR MMO had permadeath, you would have load of basement dwellers sitting on rooftops offing PCs with sniper rifles just for the lolz. That's fine if all you want is a first person shooter where you can just pick a new archetype and jump back in. Background, what background?

But if you want a MMORPG with emphasis on the RP then I think you would need to go for a more cooperative game than a competitive one. Probably even instanced mission runs even though I don't like this so much (but stops griefers ruining your run just for the lolz). You could still have PVP zones where 'elite teams of runners take on each other in no-holds barred combat'. Something like the setup for City of Heroes would work. Note that this game doesnt have permadeath.

For a SR MMORPG to be really good, it needs to support hacking, rigging, magic, astral travel as well as normal firefights. Missions would need to be complex to allow different options for completion, from silent to violent. It would be a nightmare to code, but absolutely amazing if someone could pull it off.

The biggest problem with Shadowrun MMO I can see is that there would have to be a major overhaul of character generation and the Karma system to keep players playing. Players would have to start out street level with bad contacts and little gear, and karma accumulation would have to be slowed down to make for decent playtime. There would be more hard caps on starting stats and gear. Spirits would have to be balanced somehow, and the game as a whole would have to be made much less deadly. They would also have to code two different games, Matrix and Meat. The matrix system would require major overhaul.

I don't like the idea of wired reflexes making it harder to target. I think it should enhance the speed of all actions like firing, reloading and casting. Somebody with wires II will be able to shoot three times faster than somebody without wires. A sammy with wires will be able to swing their sword 3 times faster. I think it should also offer a series of "Maneuvers" such as instant 90/180/270 degree spin.

Also, Permadeath is dumb. I think the way that it should happen is every player starts with a Docwagon contract, good for 1 month. Docwagon is a garaunteed Res, but it costs money and you may not always get back with all of your gear. If you're horribly masochistic you can choose not to renew your contract and save that few extra nY per month, but nobody's going to come for you if you flatline.

Edit: I would kill a man to be hacker in this game.

That, sir, is brilliant.

Edit:
I would like to expand upon that idea:

DocWagon contracts will always res you, but the higher levels of it would "res you sooner" and "res you with less karma loss" etc.

The basic level contract would be "you wake up in a hospital and don't have your gear." I would say that this would be a downgrade option from Standard, the "I die so rarely, its cheaper to just buy new gear." Due to the fact that you'd change zones and start with no stuff, this level of res could happen almost instantly, no need to delay the player unnecessarily. This option will likely be rarely used, but it should be available for those players who want a more hard-core experience but don't want to have real perma-death.

Standard level would be a 5 minute wait, you wake up in a hospital, and have any non-consumable items (armor, gun, etc) but not ammo or drugs. While it's more realistic for people to loot corpses for guns and not ammo it's nicer to the player who died to have their expensive stuff. The karmic dock would be equal to the karma the mission they were on would have gained them (so if it was +30 karma for the whole thing and they died after getting +20, they'd get -30 karma, but only a net -10 from before the mission). Overall this means you can die once every two missions without going backwards, which will we will say is "more often then they should be dying." Karmic loss only while on missions also removes the griefing aspect: you get sniped walking down the street: no karmic loss. Sure, they lose a few minutes, but the player can take a break, use the restroom, get a drink, etc. during this time. The occasional forced break is not a bad thing.

Premium would be a 3 minute wait, wake up in a hospital, have all non-consumable gear and any "market available" consumables (regular ammo, light drugs, etc.). The "you can get it at 7-11" stuff. This option should be sufficient enough that the player would be able to re-join the mission he was on almost immediately. Karmic loss: half mission value.

Gold would be a 2 minute wait (minimum), DocWagon shows up on scene* and resses you, but will not enter a combat scene. No item loss. Karmic loss: quarter mission value.

Platinum would be a 1 minute wait (minimum), DocWagon shows up on scene* and resses you (even in combat). No item or karma loss.

*Possibly excluding interior spaces to fit with the flavor of "not on Corporate grounds." In such a case where any restrictions cannot be met, it acts as a Premium res in terms of time and location. Players would be informed of this restriction when purchasing the contract, and again at death.

Note: all resses would be from time of death. We shall assume that players also have a stun track and that your proverbial tanks will only get knocked unconscious, not triggering any DocWagon contracts.

You need to make a decision how much of "to hit" is based on player's skill with mouse/keyboard etc. controllers, and how much is based on the character's skills. Too much of the latter feels a bit dumb sometimes, too much of the former can make an unpleasant power difference between players.

I think generally putting a lot of the "to-hit" in the hands of the character is a good idea, because that works well with augmentations that manipulate the speed at which the character acts/reacts, like Wired Reflexes.

One of the big advantages of a computer game is the potential to display the world in really different ways, to people with unusual sensory spectra (thermographic, ultrasound, radar, low-light, astral, AR..)

Another thing you could implement is to make the effects of low Essence really visible, by perhaps changing the color tone of everything you see towards blues and grays, making everything more unpleasant to look at.

Oh yes, definitely.

Though you need to pick the right color scheme. "Gray" might not be the best option if your dystopia is a "dismal gray" to begin with.

I have though played a game that changed the visuals as you were doing better or worse. It was a 3D rhythm platformer (senior project some time before my own). As you collected powerups by doing very well it moved towards a more saturated environment. As you did poorly it moved to monotone, then gritty/grainy, then to "malfunctioning TV" type static just before you died. Never jittery and flickering to impede the player's ability to make jumps, but just enough to feel like the robot you were controlling was on the verge of collapse.

Astral would also need to be highly saturated, but still pastel in nature to give it the right "feel" to it. Auras of living things would be bright, the natural world a soft pastel, the mechanical dull and gray. Mmmm...like an oil painting, I think: no edges and no shadows.

Edit: I also didn't comment on this.



Oh most certainly. But see, you need not follow the table top game at all. In an MMO you can do much much more powerful things and smoothing out the skill curves, rather than having "1 to 6" in everything. Really all you need to do is find or design a generic MMO skill system that works on its own, then layer the ShadowRun flavor over the top of it. (Speaking about spirits, but the same idea applies to the game as a whole) Force 6 spirits are still around, of course, but only because you can only summon them at given levels. It "is" that much better than a Force 5, but there's a long line of player progression between the two. Right when you first get another increment in your ability to summon that larger spirit it's very strong against the things you're expected to fight (though never to the point of "summon one and win this mission" powerful, but closer to "I can summon three that strong today before I can't take the drain, but summoning one will win this fight, but we're going to have more fights than I can summon spirits"*), but as you get stronger and the baddies get stronger, the usefulness will decline, never to uselessness, but almost ("Sure, I can summon one, but it really only adds another person, one who isn't quite as good as we are, but is expendable if it gets shot"). Just before the player begins to feel frustrated with how well their spirits are doing they "get better."

Matrix vs. Meat can be done, there is a game out there (don't recall the name) that did it. Was first person shooter-y. The matrix side wasn't that entertaining, as far as I ever saw, but it did exist. Not Alien Swarm, although it did handle the "protect the hacker" aspect very well. Astral would be sort of a "noclip" with funny colors deal. You'd have to limit how far way a person could get from their body (as well as some other level boundaries) but its all in the name of "for gameplay balance." Player tries to clip out of the level and they get a "there's nothing you need out here" kind of message. Distance from body is just a minor flavor thing, but it keeps the person from scouting too far out and limits them to the immediate information needed ("Is this the right door?" "How many guards in that room?" "Which way now?")

*Think 4th Edition D&D Daily powers. "A daily" if used appropriately will turn a hard fight into an easy one and an easy one into a cut scene. But you only get one per character (not counting Utilities which can be encounter or daily depending, or item dailies which can only be used once each, but you get 1 plus 1 per milestone total--or about 1 every other fight) and could probably get as many as 6 fights in before needing to rest (Tomb of Horrors imposes a limit on extended rests by reducing the number of healing surges regained by a cumulative 1, if you have 8 max, then after your third rest you'll only start that day with 6 after your next you'll have 5, which cuts down on the "rest every two fights" prevalent throughout the D&D system)

I'd think a MMORPG is the way to go...

Someone mentioned an EVE like corporate setup and I liked that idea. You could have some gameplay that is tailored to hiring runners for sabotage, retrieval, wetwork, planting...not sure if it would be better to instance that stuff or actually have it affecting other user created corporations (I am leaning towards the latter).

Or maybe instead of user created corporations, you take the big ones and make those factions like WoW.

The point being, you could spend your time running and making your character better or you could run a corporation at a higher level.

I think crafting makes a lot of people happy, so have a lot of gear be craftable. Random drops are good too.

I am really thinking a generally reskinned hybrid of WoW/EVE would be a good starting place. Magic and cyberware has to be there. Matrix could be an overlay, so you could possibly have a team going up against mobs in the physical, astral and matrix all at the same time.

I think to make it a workable game, the Matrix has to have direct damage or control results during combat. Hacking for access to doors, cameras and such, would have to be a very quick failure/success, bascially either getting you unlocking stuff or dumpshocked, as you dont' want your party waiting around for a hack like we do at the table.

PvP could get really interesting...

Personally I would edge away from an EVE like structure, at least in terms of corporations. Runners really shouldn't be creating megacorps.

Now, allowing them to provide services to other players (and have turf wars): That's all cool and such, but it shouldn't be corporations. I think we should think a little more "street" and call them Gangs.

There might be the same tools available (eg. listing missions, marking other groups as friendly, neutral, hostile, etc. as well as a "headquarters," possibly even a shop/store front) but it should be considered organized crime, rather than a legitimate business. The leader should still be expected to be doing runs on occasion.

(Side note: I've edited my prior posts recently)

I'd imagine hacking happening at speed of thought, deckers sifting through cracks in the programming and rapidly punching up nodes, hacking mostly on the fly and editing systems when needed. I think that most situations that require building hacking will probably have to be instanced, and that there should be built-in things for the other group members to do while the hacker does his thing. There should be a spot for the dedicated hacker.

Now, for rigging: How do you balance the character's skill when driving a vehicle versus the player's skill? How do you make black rigger boxes better than default rigs?

Also, I think it would be a great idea if we started a wiki page about this project. An MMO made for shadowrunners, by shadowrunners? I think so. It's a fantastic idea, and if we lay all of the concepts and gameplay elements down, that's half a nice chunk of the development done already.

Played Alien Swarm? Aside from the classic hacker, not Matrix hacker, interface, it's brilliantly executed.



TF2: The Wranger. A player using the Wranger will be able to shoot targets that the sentry can't track, but at the same time, the sentry has amazing accuracy at the things it can see.



Go for it. The project wouldn't ever really be able to go anywhere without the copyright (Microsoft still owns the electronic rights?) but setting up a design shouldn't be an issue (any Catalyst people out there want to weigh in on that?) then if someone who does have legal rights to make a game comes along they can use (or not) our ideas: the wiki is a listing of how we the players think the game needs to be structured in order to retain the flavor while at the same time, advancing beyond the table top.

Microsoft will probably cease and desist the wikipage into non-existence. Just to protect their IP rights.

As they did with the SRO MMORPG.

Call it "If ShadowRun were an MMO...(this is what the players would want to see)"

Now, where to host...

I had considered gangs, but I'd view those most like clans. Since we were going with a wish list, I thought having a higher organization at the corporate level would be cool. The people running that would not be "playing" the same game as those of us wanting to play our characters. I am thinking of the MMO football sim I played for a couple of years. You had a team owner who would pick people to coach (i.e. design plays, scout and gameplan opponents) but the team was also made up of user created players. So, you would want the best players to play, but you also wanted strategic players to scout and gameplan. Two very different kinds of users, playing the same game with vastly different roles.

Maybe the AAA corps would just be plot devices, factions for a single-player or small group storyline where you would play canned missions to enjoy the story and after you put in your 250 hours or so of going through a bunch of different factions, then you could play for some smaller AA user-created corporations.

The AA board could request certain missions to be completed against other corps and then clans or PUGs could queue those up and play them, whether it was an instance or PvP type play, with the end result being having some small positive or negative outcome to the AA corp. If the AA corp wasn't happy with the runner's performance, they could put out a bounty or maybe apply a preset negative street or faction cred to the team.

Obviously, having competition in the shadows prolongs gameplay, as there are going to be teams that want to be the best...

I think the thing to keep in mind is keeping this realistic from a programming point of view. Meaning, you are going to have to set limits in gameplay and character balance.

While it would be cool to have some full hacking environment to play with, I don't think you can really do that and have a playable game. You'd need to limit what hacking can do. Find a balance that there are still cool things you can do with it that you can't do in the physical or astral, but keep it limited so you are not playing a separate sub-game.

The reality of it is, just like at a real table, that no matter how "fast" you say the matrix will be, you will still have real people playing, so do you really want to ostracize, say 4 other non-matrix players, for 15 minutes while the hacker completes his sub-game? You want the hacker to be worthwhile to be on a team, but you don't want him causing everyone else to wait.

As for riggers, I don't see them as being anything other than summoners. Riggers have a fleet of drones while some mages will have their spirits, and those obviously will have to have pros and cons. Hackers could destroy or get control of drones and turn them against the enemy rigger.

While I haven't thought of proper missions yet, just the aspect of having a team that is playing together and having to monitor the astral and matrix, all at the same time and in real-time, is pretty cool.

The problem with player run corporations in ShadowRun is:

No one would play the wage slave.

automate the wageslaves.

You play the HRT, the executives, the mr Johnsons, the spiders, and hackers. You know, the fun parts.

Yeah, I envision the only thing you are doing at the corporate level is scouting other corps, setting up runs against them, trying to double-cross them in deals...that sort of thing. The nice thing is, if that part of the sim really doesn't appeal to you, you never have to mess with it and just go back to grinding your runner.

And if you keep the megas as plot pieces run by the Devs, you don't care as much about the user created AAs corps.

Its for those types that in say like a football sim, liked to build their stadiums, control ticket and concession prices, built expansions and when it came time to play the "game" just auto-simmed the season. I'm not into that type of play, but there are a lot of people that do like the sim side of business.

And I think for a game like this, you want to start with as big a picture as you can to tailor to as many gamer types as possible.

A Half Life 2 Mod called Dystopia has a pretty good hacking element. Not the best but if you try it out you would see whats possible. Basically there are terminals people with the right mods can jack into and effect the environment from while trying to fight off rival hackers. Now the VR mechanics would be easy to make (IE. the Dystopia Mod), AR on the other hand I have no idea how you would show hacking in that.

I don't think an FPS is going to do Shadowrun justice...

For combat it is, anything less would seem like a cop out. I mean honestly when was the last turn based western rpg released? It's a Japanese thing and a niche market at that. SR combat would be an FPS shooter with the ability to take cover. The RPG elements are outside of combat except for stats/skills and when you put those into a fight think the first mass effect where the higher your skill the smaller the reticle was or in the case of melee combat you can attack faster with your blades/fists/ club, do more damage and can do complicated maneuvers like in Oblivion.

I think a real-time 3rd person works really well.

I think going MMO with the idea is a big mistake, I have had far more fun with single player story, community mods, instanced / persistent servers, and Developer/Publisher DLC of NeverWinter Nights (NWN 1 or 2) than the instanced and hub model of Dungeons & Dragons Online. I hope you understand, even though it is a poor example given it is D&D which has its own grind inherit to its style of leveling. The grind has been something I have come to hate, if I can't get good player / character generated stories to share, it is a waste of my spare time to be on that particular tread mill searching for a bit of game play fun. Besides, you compete against World of Warcraft (WoW) and simply, no one does the grind better than them. The only thing that comes close to competing IMHO is the model used by Guild Wars because of its payment model. Beyond that, why wouldn't a SR MMO just fail like Matrix Online, Planetside, or more recent releases?

At least we know a ShadowRun PC game is conceivably possible because Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines while it had flaws in some of its level design did show some fun game play from the point system character creation that varied well enough and even had its shadow world with magic closely mimicking the real world.

If one could find a way to meld NWN community run multi-player with V:TM-B character creation with content created by the community with decent, ease of use GM and map tools, I think a PC developer would have something I would want to buy (hopefully from them directly or through something like Steam, I don't particularly like what Publishers and Retailers are doing to the industry as a whole: especially its paying customers and its content creators the developers). Given time, people naturally add to the shelf life and promote after release sales beyond the initial hype (if there is an effective hype campaign to begin with) with their community content and server support. Who knows how many extra sales there have been for things like Half-Life (1 & 2) or NWN (1 & 2 & DLC) because of that.

If you do insist on going MMO grind and payment model, I don't think the end product would be any more recognizable as SR than the Microsoft FPS travesty of which the only thing I ever saw any good come from was a machinema made by Rooster Teeth (the same people who made the Red vs Blue Halo machinema).

I would see cyberware/bioware/magic that enhances speed/reaction perform a mechanical effect of lessening cool-down refresh times. Say if SR was an MMO, and your toon had wired reflexes... this would increase movement speed, as well as maybe lower the weapon speed of your main hand weapon, ergo increasing DPS.

For combat... stick to real-time combat, with an option for players to switch to a 1st person view for shooting.

For spirits... summoned "pets" with limited duration and 2 choices. Attack or Guard.

For Riggers... this will sound unpopular, but don't let any PC own/use a vehicle if they are NOT a rigger. You want to travel? Pay for a taxi/monorail or get a Rigger PC to commute you to where you wanna go. Also give riggers the ability to "summon" or buy drones "aka pets" that act the same way spirits do for mages. In WoW terms... mages get spirits/pets and riggers are like hunters with animal companions.

For Hackers... they should be sort of treated like WoW Rogues. Wanna get past a door or access a terminal? Use the hacker who will use hacking abilities to crack a code or whatever. There will be some runs where a hacker is needed to get access to certain places or to get/harvest something and the hacker has to be the 1 to grab it.

Instances/quests/runs reward with money, maybe a piece of gear, faction hit, and karma. Karma is used to improve skills/abilities as per normal i would say.

Gear modification... each weapon/piece of gear has limited slots for mods and each mod varies in costs depending on the PC's rating in contact, influence, faction, etc... in order to get good modifications (like the smartlink) the PC must meet certain requirements in level and influence.

How to code for all this, I have no idea... but I am drooling at the thought of a SR MMORPG.

@Saint Hallow
Well, that is begging the question: What is a rigger?

If you push through with it, cyber and bioware will be converted to skills paid with Karma for or chosen when getting a level up.
Money is only to buy gear. To restrict cars to a certain classes really sucks. Cars or motorcycles reduce traveling time. To be unable to use means of transportation really sucks big time.
Guess you would not be able to buy a horse in Oblivion or a mount in Sacred.

Wouldnt the point of a rigger be able to effectivly spawn into the droid (leaving your meat sack somewhere) and carry on with the group. Could be a interesting tactical thing with with atral being a similar situation. Group sometimes have to defend the body while they do a quick scout around.

a mmo would be a very very big challenge and I dont think the current crop of games developers could do it justice

Astral space would be sort easy, you just fly / run around, with the option to quick travel by clicking on a map.

Deep matrix hacking would be easy but dangerous to do on a run. It could be made funner by just sticking to hacking the whole time on the fly and letting your team mates take care of things. The matrix world could be very lame and very easy to do. Fly/run around and attack things in a bland low rez 3d world. Some places could look like tron wile other places look like a real 3d world.

AR I image as widgets on your screen and floating around you. When you see a security camera with the right software on you see some thing floating around it, when you click on that you attempt to hack it. I imagine the AR setup to be highly user customizable. So you might have a hard time seeing the bad guy past all your widgets displaying what team mates see, mini maps, hacking dialog boxes, node maps, virtual pets... Also changing the environment would be fun. Software to virtually tag stuff could be popular if the mechanics made it fun.

Metaplanes would be fun. I think you would make an expansion pack to really explore them.

People do heavy online play so much now days because it is harder to pirate. I would consider NWN multiplayer though. Its multiplayer was not very fun though. From what I saw it was all just speed runs though the same boring quests.

I do think user created content would be cool, especially if you could code AR stuff to share. The main thing to share would of course be missions. But game balance mods are would also be nice. Fallout 3 has a very nice mod community. But all those mods is also what stops it from being multi player. Every single sharing the game needs the same mods. If you did AR mods then it would not affect anyone but the user. But I can see how this would be hard to implement.


One thing that could keep this game interesting is to have new missions keep coming out and a big story arc mission coming out each season or two. Sort of like how shadowrun has official missions games.

By "people" I take it you are referring to publishers and the developers dependent on them and inevitably if you start into measures to reduce unauthorized copies aka "pirating", then really you are talking about Digital Rights Management (DRM) going online, since online multiplayer has been around before the methods of DRM software became bit by bit more sophisticated. Its part of the reason for the rise of consoles as a dominant sector of the electronic gaming market because the publishers (and thus developers) have more confidence in those platforms to have more hardware restrictive DRM, despite the development kits, certification and restrictive distribution channels (which came about at least in part because the bottom fell out on the market in the 1980s) for those platforms taking a considerable chunk of their development budget and thus being a barrier to entry (why you find so few legitimate Indy developers in the console market) and making publishers (and their developers) averse to risk due to the higher development costs, which seems to have resulted in ridiculous amounts of variations on popular themes (aka clone games, most notably in FPS games) and a franchise focus of trying to milk rabid fans of a particular brand of it aka sequel-itis.

If all you found from NWN multiplayer was speed runs, you missed out on a awful lot of other modes of play, which ran the gamut of full on hackNslash PvP exclusive to exclusively roleplay where more time is spent chatting and emote animations being run then combat and also the range of fully NPC to DM fully run instances of quests. The full range of multiplayer was/is more than even all the available mods, a DM could distribute custom adventures practically on the fly and even more so with help from community DM mods to boot. But that was more or less during its hay day, not sure what remains of the player base and servers at this point, but just like MUDs and such, I am willing to bet there are a few die hards servers and DM'ed group instances still going on to this day for NWN and NWN 2.

It should be noted here that the distribution of content so all the users are using the same version is something that has been around in PC gaming multiplayer for many years now. I guess you weren't around for things like Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament (or whatever) downloading maps when you would join a server? Well, the possibilities are becoming expanded upon if there is support for it, things like cloud distribution programming (think of it roughly like the different p2p file sharing methods) are opening things up for such content heavy instances since it helps take the load off of community content servers. What if other gamers were seeding your mod content that you play with them? Here, this could be a good watch on the digital market (which is very important to PC gaming - and possibly the next generation of consoles - which what the thread is asking about) -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxhGlNbsRxs

And if you are interested in what is possible for AR, VR, Astral or whatever, you really should run a google for articles on things like WoW's phasing, which would allow players to view different runs of the same enviroment, IIRC. http://www.wowwiki.com/Phasing

Ugh, a double post and no delete option that I am noticing in the edit features. Sorry.

Yeah, it wold suck to restrict vehicles to only certain classes. However, for those of us who recall EverQuest and all those times begging for a SoW... travelling via foot is possible or using game-made transports like WoW's Griffon/Wyvern points... it helps make Riggers more viable other than just a wannabe caster who uses drone pets instead of spirits.

A friend of mine had the best idea for wired reflexes:

Done like how that awful XBox 360 game did it: auto-aim of various sensitivities, along with speed boosts, and reload speed. Smart link gives auto-aim (say 1 px per second), wired reflexes gives the smart link bonus (at the lowest level identical, at Wired 2 you'd get 2 px a second, Wired 3 4 px a second) along with movement bonus and reload speed bonus.

Just roll the hacker and the rigger into a single class, and you're no longer worried about being a pseudo-summoner.

Technically, if smartlink is done right, all it provides is a reticle. Which means you wouldn't normally have one.

As soon as you step into a (PvP) Z-zone, you get shot by 100 sniper rifles mounted on 100 renraku stormclouds...