I'm not sure about making your own skills. It'd be a very hard one to pull off but I think it may be do-able. Instead of such a huge time limit, I think it'd be more reasonable to increase the requirements as you add more stuff to the skill. In fact, time limit might be something you should be able to adjust. Lets say you wanted to just make a skill that was melee range and did nothing but damage in the most basic form. You should be able to decrease the cast and cooldown times to very low, making you hit faster and harder than a melee fighter. If you could pull off actually using it in battle without dieing in seconds, you could probably become a pretty brutal mage. But then this also opens the chance for excessive tanking. Might be worth trying out some day for someone who has at least a month free time to make a small game using it.
I like the idea of the player monsters. I think it'd work better as a less "special" kind of feature, though. If an announcement is made that someone can be a monster, and it only happens a few time a day, your server will probably get ****ed in the A with a mass amount of disconnects followed by connection requests. Then, for everyone who didn't get in, it was just an annoyance to attempt doing so. I am thinking more of you just log in as a monster at any time you wish and usurp a monster that is on a map with at least one user already on it (if you have larger maps, preferably a monster thats out of view of all users on the map, too). When you die, you just go and usurp some other monster randomly.
The problems I can see with it, though, are that people could just stand there and get wailed on, allowing users to get some easy kills in. Even if you disable chatting and names, external communication can allow individuals to find each other. The importance of this decreases greatly as the game contains more players, though, and if you keep it to more monster-filled maps and the usurped monster is not some kind of super monster, it would probably become more trouble than its worth. Though this means that the "monster hunter" thing wouldn't work well at all, either. You most likely wouldn't want usurped monsters able to change what map they are on or anything of that sort, either, since that could lead to some issues.
What I do like about the idea, though, is that it breaks the predictable AI. Many games even have non-randomized pathfinding so you can predict exactly how a NPC will move through obstacles. Even if you only get another player attacking you every hour or two, you wouldn't ever be able to just sit there and know you're safe because the game's AI never goes to that location even if they can reach it.
The demi-gods may sound good in theory but would probably turn out into the worst disaster to ever hit online games. Having players worship other players? That can't be good. Enough games suffer from egotistical admin. No need to actually integrate ass-kissing as part of the game.
The quest system, even though you are breaking out from quests being almost on a purely per-character basis, its not far from it. Talk to A. Kill B. Bring B's head back to A. But now, instead of B just spawning every X minutes, any player in the game could just walk by B and kill him before you can even reach him. Congratulations, you now have to walk back to A and try all over again. The end result is pretty much the same except theres an added chance of extra annoyance. Or, in the case of the summoned monster, its just an extra annoyance for anyone who walks by his path. Some dick could sit there and constantly start quests that increase the monster count and never finish them (intentionally or not) and now everyone else has more crap to hack through.
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