Large scale multiplayer survival game that's not combat focused.

News & General Discussion
1

TLDR; Ideas for how to make a game like ARK/Rust/LifeIsFuedal without focusing on combat.

I’d like to get your thoughts on why so many large scale multiplayer survival games tend to lead to combat as the “end game”.
Although it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I mean combat is fun right? However it kind of makes every game in this genre feel the same.
Start with nothing, grind up some basic resources, craft some weapons, build a shack to store your stuff then go out and start the real game!
I feel like the problem is that everything leading up to combat is a boring chore with slow return, then combat is fun and gives high reward. The rewards only get bigger with lower risk as you get more gear, bigger clans etc and then you’re basically just running around killing people for resources you don’t really need.

Why I think this happens in most cases:
-Kill or be killed - there’s no punishment for killing another player in most cases, so it’s always safer to shoot first and ask questions later
-Combat is fun - not only is it fun, it’s one of the ONLY fun things to do in the game. Sometimes building is fun, but if you’re too scared to build something creative, you just end up building some impenetrable monstrosity as quickly as possible to prevent being killed and looted.

What I think could prevent this:
-Punishment for killing - Most surivival games have basic needs - Food, Water and HP. If we can’t punish someone by arresting them, we could introduce new “social” needs. If you kill someone, you might gain a bag of gold, but lose sanity, lose charisma, lose “motivation”. These could all impact the game in other ways, when people see you, if you’re driven mad from all your killing, they wont want to get near you and wont want to trade with you. Your low charisma will prevent you from socialising with other players, driving you further into insantity, and your lack of motivation will prevent your stat gains. This all depends on the constructs of the game, but I believe it would add a lot of depth.

-More interesting professions - whether you’re a weaponsmith, an armourer, a potion master or an engineer, your goal is always to labour away and then equip yourself or others with tools for combat. Why not make this part of the game the fun part? rather than having a button “craft sword” and watching a progress bar, add in customization for every single weapon, switch out handles, sharpen the blade to perfection, balance the sword, test it out on some practise dummies then go back to the table to tweak some more. Go to your local ore supplier and see if he has any rare metals to help give your swords that extra wow factor. Every profession could go into this much depth and you could have so much fun experimenting and selling off your epic creations, that you wouldn’t even want to see such a thing of beauty covered in blood.

I know these things take a lot of work to develop, but I feel this would add so much to a game, and it would cater to a much larger playerbase than just those that are combat driven.

I would love to hear everyones thoughts on this. Suggestions for how to stop people killing each other, without literally disabling combat? Or if you think this is a bad idea outright, say so with reasons :slight_smile:

2

What if there’s a monster that you can’t attack (ethereal maybe?) but that gets drawn to acts of violence.

1 Like
3

Huh? What does this mean?

Edit: oh, are you saying that would kill the player if they act violently? Same issue as one of the suggestions in that it makes combat less fun rather than making other things more fun.

This is probably one of the main reasons. You need a fun loop, and combat is by FAR the easiest way to do that.

This is making combat less fun, not making the rest of the game more fun. The goal is to make the rest of the game more fun.

This is an interesting idea, but would probably require quite a bit of design skill. How do you make crafting a blade fun? Not just the customization - but the actual process itself. How does one make that fun? I’d wager than most of the enjoyment in real life from that comes from the physicality of the effort–setting this piece of metal in a hot fire, then pulling it out at the right time and hammering away at a certain part with your hammer to shape it the way you want (I know nothing about how metalwork is done). You might need to simulate the heating/melting process. You might need to design a system where the player can click on the blade at a certain place to hammer it there, and deform it to a certain shape (which would require mesh deformity I suppose). Perhaps you could have pure metals and alloys as well–pure metals simpler to work with with lesser stats, and alloys more difficult to manipulate but with higher value and stats.

I think there’s potential there, but there’s a whole lot more work to that than just making a bunch of menus the player can click through to poop out a weapon. You could probably do the same with many things. Cooking or tailoring (though tailoring might be troublesome in terms of the amount of control you allow the player, and how to simulate the effects of that) or what have you. But at that point you’re making all of these advanced systems for a single game, rather than one polished set of systems (combat) to base the game around. You’re spreading yourself kinda thin.

2 Likes
4

@EternalAmbiguity Punishment might not be the word I wanted… perhaps consequences? I don’t want every battle to put you at a disadvantage. E.g. If you had clans at war, killing people in the other clan would not give you any negative side effects. Whereas killing an unarmed peasant who was begging for his life would. I’d still want combat to be part of the game, just not where everyone want to get to.

Making the professions fun would definitely be difficult, but I’m sure theres a way you could do it. Perhaps a mini-game where you use you have to balance the sword on the sharpener and you slowly lose balance (like grinding a rail in a skateboarding game), the longer you holder it the sharper it gets. Maybe have a quicktime event when hammering the metal so you need to hit the blade at the right times. And then finally you could have 1 minute to destroy as many target dummies as possible. More kills = better weapon.

The more that I think about it, these things probably aren’t done because there’s so much involved… You’d basically have to make a game around every profession. I guess bloodsport is one of the most popular mechanics so it’s safer to focus that as a game dev?

That could be interesting, when you go insane from killing, you start seeing these ghosts. You have to keep on the move or they’ll catch up to you. To make them go away you either keep running and wait it out or do some acts of kindness. There aint no rest for the wicked :wink:

5

I like where you’ve started with this idea, though I believe your assumption that making combat somehow less desirable “… would cater to a much larger playerbase than just those that are combat driven” is almost certainly incorrect, and at minimum will need some research.

Combat being popular in games, especially within this genre, is not some kind of accident, and I would be surprised if the total player base that wants a survival game that punishes combat, thereby discouraging it, was not significantly smaller than the player base that wants combat to be a prominent game feature.

Don’t let that discourage you though. Not every game needs to cater to the masses. There is plenty of room for niche games out there.

1 Like
6

It really comes down to how it’s marketed, and then once players are sold on the idea, make sure your systems incentivize players to play this way. You make a good example with giving the crafting some depth. The problem I see with this though is not a design one, but a time and budget one. By adding depth to all the things you can do in the game that aren’t combat, you are essential making a whole game for all of those things. So I would say take care to not be too ambitious with how many different things you want to add. However you can tie all things together with one or two set of mechanics to reduce the load on development. Also I agree with EternalAmbiguity, punishing for killing doesn’t make the other things good, just combat bad. Think the card game in Witcher. It stands just fine on it’s own. No need to punish combat to highlight Gwent.

A couple videos come to mind for this project.

This in relation to non combat centric things

and this for a general way to get your mind around encouraging certain kinds of play

Good luck.

7

@Joe-Censored Thanks for your input. So it seems the general consesus is that it’s bad to punish players for doing something they enjoy, that makes sense. I wonder if making other options more enticing is a way to avoid it… It would definitely be an interesting experiment.

@njblair143 Interesting, I watched the first video and although it made some good points, it kind of talked about an entire game without combat. My vision is a game that has combat, but is not the players go-to action.

I wonder if thieves/bandits had an option other than fighting to rob people, then they would do this instead. I don’t simply mean threatening the enemy so they drop their goods then leaving them alive. What if there was a built in “negotation” mechanic. If you are a peaceful social player, your social and negotiation skills will increase. When a player tries to rob you, if your negotiation skills are high enough, you can talk them out of it. Also if you are the robber, you might convince the player to give you something. The only problem here is the player loses control of the situation and it takes away from their freedom. Say the robber steals 100g from you through persuation, but you’d rather fight them. This sounds like an awful idea in theory, but to make persuation just as powerful as combat is the goal here. Perhaps there could be some skillful mechanic in place here where “arguments” and “rebuttles” are actual objects that fly at your screen and you need to shoot them down and counter them, that way it’s not just based on a stat and some rng.

I can imagine this being an interesting game mechanic actually. Imagine a guard has an “authority” stat. A thief is running down the street. The guard launches a “HALT” command at the thief. If the thief fails to dodge the command, he is halted and arrested. If the thief has resistance to authority, he might be able to absorb 1 or 2 halts.

Anyway I’m blabbering, but this has really got my brain going with ideas o.0

8

One can appreciate what you’re trying to get at here. Thing is though, this is essentially a combat system, just with different objects than guns and health bars.

Now whether that’s a bad or good thing, you decide. But this is really little different than standard combat. It’s not a fundamentally different type of gameplay.

9

I don’t think you need to throw out the idea of punishing players for combat. I think there are elegant ways of implementing your goal without it being a negative play experience for anyone. I think the key is probably incentivizing alternatives to combat. Make it generally more advantageous to cooperate, and you’ll get a lot more cooperation than combat, while still allowing players that want to fight to be able to.

For example, in a multiplayer game what if you had a reputation system where cooperative players will know instantly and from a distance who is likely to cooperate and who is likely to try to kill you for your gear. From a distance is key to cut down on the shoot first and ask questions later tendency players may have. Cooperative players will gain advantage with their numbers, sharing of resources, and mutual protection. Known killers can still play their combat oriented version of the game but gain none of the advantages of cooperation since they would likely be killed on sight by virtually everyone. The team players get their favored experience while always being at risk at the fringes from the rogue boogeymen, and the solo killers get their favored experience going it alone trying to pick off the slowest gazelle from the herd so to speak.

A similar system can be setup for AI characters when interacting with the player.

1 Like
10

The key difference here though is nobody ends up dead. In a game like rust, death means you lose everything you’re carrying. I think maybe once someone pointed a gun at me and asked me to drop some stuff and then left me alone, I’d love to see more of that.

I like this idea. The only problem is, if you kill the low-rep person on sight, does that lower your rep?

I suppose it would be like you start at neutral rep. Doing bad things turns you into a “bandit”, doing good things turns you into a “hero”. and you have some rep number to determine what degree of player you are.

If you kill someone with a heroic reputation (and you’re not at war etc), you lose reputation. If you kill someone with horribly low reputation, there are no rep penalties, and possibly a rep gain if they have a “scum of the earth” reputation.

People would be less inclined to be a bad guy if everyone can kill them without penalty right? Although I can imagine there being a gang of badasses who dont give a crap about their rep. but that would just make for interesting gameplay :slight_smile:

What would be a good way of displaying someones reputation? blood soaked clothes for lower rep and extra shiney armour for high rep? Could adjust the eye colour, but then you’d have to get up close before you knew what type of person they were!

11

I haven’t read each post, so I’m only responding to OP.

My opinion is that if you don’t want players killing everything, don’t give them the ability to kill anything. Even with strong incentives not to take the most simple solution, I think its just too long been hard wired in gamers brains that the other things in the game world are meant to be killed.

With a lot of incentives to not kill, if killing is still more simple of a solution than not killing, regardless of effectiveness, I think most players will still always go with the most immediate and obvious choice. Then, if they are punished for killing, they’ll probably just be annoyed.

However, if you just don’t have a button that kills other players, and the only way to interact with them is via negotiation, dialogue, etc., I don’t think anybody would have a problem learning the game and playing something different.

Just my speculation. Never played the Sims games except the really old SimCity titles, but weren’t they basically MP games that didn’t involve killing each other?

Additional note:

If it is a survival game, I assume you’d be hunting and thus have some kind of weapons. Perhaps in the case of friendly on friendly the offending person will be automatically ostracized from the group or something? Stoned by AI bots that act as the mouths to feed for the village? I think your answer may come about as you dive further into your game mechanics. Something to fit in with the overall concept that makes sense and doesn’t seem like an arbitrary rule to remind players “killing is bad”.

Now that I ponder the idea a little more, it’s really pretty interesting. A lot of people are attracted to games like Minecraft for the chill atmosphere, the simplicity of gathering things with a creative goal in mind and working on in in almost like a meditative trance. I imagine a lot of people get turned off by the hostility of other players and maybe only play single player. I know I’ve avoided MP in a few games because I didn’t want to deal with annoying people. So maybe a game in which players can only cooperate or not with each other, but never raid and nuisance one another, could find an audience.

3 Likes
12

Very true.

With that in mind, however, what do you think the attacking bandit will do when they “fail” to persuade the innocent victim to hand over their money?

You might consider implementing a combat system which doesn’t kill the character, but instead knocks them unconscious or something. Keeps combat, with some consequences, but not nearly as severe as normal.

You might take a look at Kenshi. Probably plays nothing like the game you have in mind, but you might find the mechanics insightful.

13

@BIGTIMEMASTER I really wouldn’t want to take combat completely away. It’s a fun part of a game. Yes I think the idea of banishing the wrong-doers from the rest of the population is a way to go. Although it would be the other players choice, not a hardcoded rule.

Then there would be no combat. There would have to be a system where instead of being able to swing your sword at someone willy nilly. You’d have to first “engage” them. You’d have a list of actions “Request trade”, “request duel”, “demand money”. If they refuse the duel or demand and fail to persuade you, then combat begins, otherwise you cannot make another request for x time. This “engage” idea would be done away with when you’re on a battlefield of course.

I have thought of this and I like it. Also having a “hidden inventory” where you can store a certain amount of gold and a few precious items which can’t be looted.

I guess it all comes down to the design of the game. Things like having specific battlefields where clans can fight over territory, a wilderness like in runescape where anyone can attack anyone, making large cities peaceful i.e. your weapons are stored at the gate (you could still have brawls in the pub ;)).

FYI, I haven’t actually started developing this game. Just wanted to think it through and design something different to survival MP games out there while maintaining all the fun bits. I’ve got a couple of small projects lined up and I will look into prototyping this one next year some time, it will definitely be a lot of work!

1 Like
14

It definitely sounds worthwhile.

1 Like
15

That’s pretty much exactly what I was referring to. And yes some bad guys may end up working together, probably friends acting as a squad, but things should still go well as long as teams of bandits don’t end up dominating the game. Perhaps you give additional advantages for the hero players like small camps or towns useful for crafting or a small market, but they are guarded by hero aligned NPC’s preventing access to the bandits. Bandits would then have limited crafting abilities and only be able to trade 1 on 1 instead of posting items for sale on a market.

Hero players would be able to more easily customize their gear, while bandits would have to take what they can get with less options other than what dead heroes drop.

Something like eye color I think would require the player to get far too close to determine if they are good or bad, making it more advantageous to attack anyone they see with ranged weapons rather than get close enough to check reputation. Clothing or armor that you can clearly see at distance sounds better to me. You could also consider alignment displayed while looking directly at a player for a few seconds (so players can still be sneaky without some reputation thingy floating over their head, but if you already have spotted the player you can see their alignment displayed even at range).

1 Like
16

Though some players might find it cool…

1 Like
17

@Joe-Censored Maybe a good idea would be hygiene. Over time your character starts to “smell” (flies appear around them) and their clothes get dirty. Cities where crime and violence is low would offer baths and laundry services. Bandits staying out in camps in the wilderness would not have this luxury. Players would learn not to trust people that are smelly/dirty and obviously blood soaked. Would make for an interesting game mechanic which I haven’t seen before! (Except maybe in the sims…)

Edit: Also being dirty would make you more prone to infections

@EternalAmbiguity Yeah if the game had some fantasy element to it, this would be a good solution. Or maybe one of the skills players can level up is Psychoanalysis which lets you see from a distance (and up close) whether a player is “good” or “evil” based on how many crimes they’ve committed. That information isn’t available for everyone, so recruiting a psychoanalyst into your team would be super beneficial.

1 Like
18

Echoing similar thoughts as Joe, incentivizing a player who is playing as a thief to perform thieving tasks instead of performing fighting tasks seems pretty simple. More exp. for setting a trap instead of slashing to death the guard. More exp for a successful trap execution. Whatever the experience point currency is (reputation or whatever) a thief would gain more for doing thief tasks and very few for straight up fighting. Also thieves are never as powerful as other games make them. They should be weak and unable to go up against other players who are fighters.
To incentivize players to be other ‘classes’ that aren’t fighters/warriors, make leveling up or acquiring the fun rewards in the game extremely difficult for warriors. If people still want to play as warriors, they could be lumbering, slow, dim witted, consume more food than they can successfully acquire, and become more tired faster because of lack of consumption.
They can be terrible at building shelters and a host of other shortcomings that deter players to other chosen ‘classes’ or type of play.
If there are no classes in the game - stats and attributes can change based on the players play style, although they are not officially in a class of warrior, there stats reflect the play style. If a player goes berserk hacking and slashing everything in its path, the stats of intelligence, charisma, and others needed to learn techniques to survive are reduced. And the player is informed of this - so they can learn - this isn’t the best play style.

But - I rarely play online multiplayer games so - I’m just thinking here about design - I might be not experienced enough in this type of game to provide thoughtful input.

1 Like
19

You could look at ultima online reputation system.
The had the idea of normal, criminal, murder.
Each state had different results when fighting someone or engaging them.
And the world reacted to them differntly.

If you stole you turned grey for a while. Guards would bother you and you could be attacked withou penalty if I remember correctly.
If you killed blues / normal people you would lower your rep until you became red / murderer.
You could no longer enter towns and everyone would try to kill you.

Yet at the same time seeing a red name apear on your screen was always a little scary.

Ultima was also harsh in that if you were killed all your stuff was available.
I remember it being a very frustrating game at times but also really fun for the same reasons.
It also had lots of skills and crafting that you could do if combat wasn’t your primary desire.

1 Like
20

I think you are approaching this fundamentally backwards. Rather then taking a game that is combat based and working out how to dial it down, why not take a non combat game and dial it up?

MineCraft is a large scale multiplayer survival game, with virtually no focus on combat. Here are a few takeaways:

  • There is no significant reward for killing another player
  • There is no significant penalty for being killed
  • Killing other players tends to be detrimental to achieving the main goals of the game
  • The combat system is fairly unsophisticated compared to the rest of the systems in the game

With those factors in play there is the occasional kill for lols. But otherwise there is very little incentive to fight.

3 Likes