A game very similar to Path of Exile but anime styled, with the visual ideal being something like Tree of Savior.
City/hub
While PoE is one of my favorite games and I could spend a lot of words pointing out all the things it does right, part of the motivation for an anime-style PoE comes from the few things PoE doesn't do because the developers have a different interest than me. These things are not necessarily wrong, they're just different focuses. I like MMOs a lot and so I can see an MMO in PoE with a few very small changes.
The smallest change possible to be made to PoE that could make it into an MMO would be having a global shared city/hub for activities other than killing monsters instead of each player being in his own hideout/instance. PoE wasn't built with doing this in mind so this isn't possible to be done in it. The reasons for that are multiple, with the main one being all the crazy cosmetics that would make it impossible to load everything in a city with hundreds or thousands of players.
A game made from the ground up with this in mind would be able to do it, and so if I were to think of this as "suppose you could build a game exactly like PoE in terms of gameplay quality/complexity and also in terms of visual quality (but anime-styled), how would you attack it and bring as many PoE players to your game as possible?", this city/hub idea would be the main thing to focus on.
As a side note, this way of thinking is clearly mistaken and wrong, in reality another ARPG/MMO as good as PoE that was anime-styled wouldn't really steal players from it I don't think because people have very strong reactions to anime, either positively or negatively. What would more likely happen is just a bunch of people who never got into PoE because it was too grim dark getting into the anime game because it's anime, even though it's essentially the same thing gameplay wise.
In any case, even assuming that everything else about the game is the same, the game with the city would already feel like an MMO, because PoE already is kind of an MMO since it has an economy. The only reason it doesn't really feel like one is because there's no sense of shared environment, which this change would fix.
Classes
One of the things I really don't like about PoE is its focus on crafting. I know that it's an ARPG and that items with tons of mods and with tons of crafting possibilities is one of its main points, but I personally just don't like that gameplay. I can avoid it by just buying already crafted items, but it feels wrong, given that pretty much every league has a focus on crafting different types of items. So if I want to interact with each league fully I pretty much have to understand how the game's crafting system works.
This is a problem that has been solved by many MMOs already and it's solved with classes. If someone only likes killing monsters, that's what they should focus on. If someone only likes trading, that's what they should focus on. If someone only likes crafting, that's what they should focus on. MMOs can be played in many different ways and people should focus on the way they like playing, and the game should support that. So tons of MMOs have classes that have specific non-combat related specialties.
In a game with a city/hub where trading happens in real space rather than through an API, you can imagine adventurers coming from spending lots of time grinding their maps and selling their found materials to all sorts crafters, like alchemists, blacksmiths, chefs, herbalists, etc, and then those players would spend their time crafting those materials into better items which the adventurers would use to face more challenging content, and bring better items and so on.
An economy like this could be enabled in the city and it would make the game feel even more like an MMO, and players like me, who don't really like crafting, wouldn't be forced to, because there are people who's specific job is crafting things. Of course, all of those crafting jobs would have to be somewhat interesting on their own, and that would likely take some effort, but it's not something too crazy to imagine.
World
The final change I would focus on, but this one is likely harder to make work properly, is to instead of having players go through maps like in PoE, they go through a fixed, very large and unexplored world. This world would be filled with enemies such that at high levels one would be zooming through the map as fast as players do in PoE, but the world would be so massive in scale that it would support lots of players doing this simultaneously.
The effects of having a huge unexplored world makes for a lot of additional possibilities. Now we can have classes like cartographers, which are concerned with mapping out this huge world in a coherent way and selling their maps to other players, crafters, hunters, etc. Normal adventurers also have an incentive to share/sell information to cartographers about different spawns of enemies, minerals, bosses, etc.
You could also have classes like wayfarers, who are concerned with creating portals between different places so adventurers don't have to walk all the way from their grinding spots to the city and back. You could have classes like squires, who could either be able to setup camps outside the main city, or who could serve as servants for other players, grabbing items from the city for them so they don't have to walk back, and so on.
The main idea is that the city is in the center of the map, and the map expands outwards with enemies all around the city, growing in difficulty the further away you get. The map would be procedurally generated and it would be absolutely massive. Just like in PoE there would be little to no quests, and players would simply focus on grinding out the game, getting more materials/currency, coming back to the city to trade so they can be more powerful, repeat.
This change would turn the game into a proper MMO because now not only is the city a shared environment, but the world also is one. This is obviously harder to accomplish, especially with a really big procedurally generated world, but I think it's doable in the very far future once I'm much more experienced as a developer. This also doesn't cost much in terms of content. PoE is a game that has lots of content, but a huge portion of it can be made much simpler once you have proper delineations between different kinds of classes.
For instance, the labyrinth. The labyrinth is a piece of content that was likely pretty hard to make for them and not many people like it. Yet, because they spent so much time doing it, they sort of had to force it on everyone. In anime PoE, lab-like dungeons can be done in such a way that they can only be run by specific classes, like say treasure hunters, and then no one has to interact with it, other than people who really enjoy that content. Basically every league PoE has that people have strong aversions to can be made into class specific content so that the people who like that kind of thing can willingly choose to do it and get rewarded for it in a way that others can't. All of this content can then be made much cheaper, because it doesn't have to justify itself to the rest of the playerbase.
Annoyance
More generally, PoE has the following problem aptly pointed out by some redditors:
The way PoE devs decided to limit access to content is through annoyance, and this happens everywhere in the game, from trading to crafting to ascending your character. If they didn't do this people would get too powerful too fast, and the game would be trivially easy. And if they didn't have the ability for people to get powerful in the first place the game would be boring.
The general solution to this problem, in my view, is more specialization and more socialization. In our society, getting more "powerful" is also annoying, but people can freely choose how exactly they want to be annoyed by the profession they pick. I chose game development because I like it, and I can deal with all of its annoyances because of that. And when I produce something of high value, like a really good video game, people will be able to trade with me for the things of value they built instead.
PoE is moving towards this direction by allowing people to focus on different aspects of the game in their end game content, but it's a bandaid fix. The fundamental issue is that the game has no clearly defined specializations, which means that anyone can do anything, and so like the post mentioned you can get people who do really crazy stuff and deal with all the annoyance the game puts in their path, and you also get people who don't want to deal with any of that (me) who miss out on it.
Specialization fixes this by saying: you can only get this crazy thing if you're this specific class, and if you're this specific class you're giving up being another specific class that would allow you to do another thing better. So if someone wants to do crazy crafts, they pick one of the classes that lets you do crazy crafts, but that prevents them from picking the class that lets them find crazy materials for their crafts.
This separation of concerns means that individuals are focused on different tasks, and when that happens you introduce a natural barrier to content access. Now instead of you having to limit trading because it trading was too easy you'd get too powerful characters, trading can happen normally because what limits character power is coordination between multiple people, since no one person can do everything themselves. This coordination increases socialization, which makes the game more like an MMO.
So the best guilds are the guilds that have the best coordination between their members, and thus they can craft the best equipment, or find the best hunting spots, or find the best mining spots, etc. From specialization you get socialization, and from socialization you get a real MMO, and it simultaneously solves the annoyance problem.
Specialization
To dig a little deeper into the specialization problem, if PoE simply added specialization to it nothing would change much. Let's say that you needed to be a specific class to craft specific modifiers, a specific class to be able to gain access specific materials, and a specific class to be able to alter those materials in such a way that the first class can craft them.
We've now divided the crafting of a few specific modifiers into 3 classes, and they're all needed for making the process work. As PoE stands right now, this wouldn't really prevent individuals from crafting those items as much as they wanted, it would only add more annoyance, which would defeat the purpose of adding specialization in the first place. Why would this happen?
Because PoE is a game made to be played very fast in comparison to most MMOs. Most experienced players can reach a fairly high level in it in just a few days, and unless the crafting of these specific modifiers was gated in the 3 class behind LOTS of grinding, individuals would just spend 1 day making each different character and then when they needed something they would go through the process with their multiple characters. The game is built to encourage this kind of behavior, so simply adding this kind of specialization to it wouldn't work.
The way to make it work is to change the game significantly to not encourage character remaking as often as PoE does, and there are multiple ways to achieve this. One would be adding very onerous tasks, cinematics, dialogue, etc, anything that isn't directly gameplay related that gets in the player's way before he can actually start grinding the game.
This is a tactic used by Genshin Impact, for instance, to prevent account rerolls. To reroll an account in that game you need to get to level 7, and this would be trivially achievable in like 5-10 minutes, but the game adds enough random nonsense upfront that it takes 30-40 minutes, thus decreasing the effectiveness of rerolling like this.
Personally I think this is a pretty lame strategy so that's a no-go for me. Another strategy would be to prevent any kind of powerlevelling. In most MMOs that are grindy you have the concept of powerlevelling, which is getting a higher levelled character to help you kill higher level monsters so you get more XP, and thus level faster through the earlier levels of the game. Preventing this would work somewhat and it definitely should be there, but maybe it should be in a limited form. I think for most grindy games you want some form of compensation for players that already went through the process, and powerlevelling is one of those things that I think should exist in some capacity.
The last thing possible would be to actually just make the game extremely grindy. This is the one that attracts me the most. If to reach the level where you're crafting the specific modifiers you need to simply grind a lot, this would make that achievement that much more impressive and it would limit access to content behind simple autism. This would be especially true if to grind crafts you need to engage in an activity other than actually killing monsters, like a mini-game of sorts.
I have a few ideas for puzzle games that are procedurally generatable, and thus crafting and other non-combat oriented activities could all be this kind of mini-game that's generating these puzzles of increasing difficulty as the player levels up their abilities, and so really good players are actually really good at solving these puzzles. Think of the difference between a really good Tetris player and a normal one, stuff like that should be what the difference between an experienced crafter and a normal one looks like. This has a few obvious problems, which is that now each non-combat class is a small game entirely on its own, but I think that for an MMO that is otherwise entirely grinding this would be entirely reasonable and feasible, even for an indiedev like me to pull off.
Either way, I think only when the game is actually extremely grindy can you pull of the specialization strategy I talked about above. If people can just create new characters and level them up to max effortlessly then the entire point is defeated.
Anime MMO
To summarize, this is what the game described above looks like:
There's a city at the center of the world where everyone spawns. Outside this city there are monsters and materials in all directions that get stronger or more useful the further away from the city. The game is extremely grindy and PvE oriented, although PvP may exist in some form. Players go out, kill monsters or find places to get materials from, come back to the city and repeat. Inside the city there are non-combat oriented classes that generally don't kill monsters to level up, a few examples:
Blacksmith
Blacksmiths use materials to craft and upgrade base physical equipment as well as new kinds equipments for different classes.
Good blacksmiths can craft equipment with extremely high bases: the higher the base the more the equipment benefits from upgrades. They can also craft useful implicit modifiers to bases, which shouldn't be too different from PoE's implicit mods.
They can also upgrade items, which would be the typical +N that things have that improves their stats. Combined with high bases these upgrades can turn items from average to extremely good. However, upgrades always carry with them the chance of breaking items, which a good blacksmith would also have a higher chance to prevent.
A blacksmith that's earning a lot is either crafting extremely high bases/upgrades or doing modifiers/equipment that no other blacksmith can because they figured out recipes that others haven't. This adds two elements to blacksmithing, one of constant improvement (higher and higher bases and upgrades) and one of figuring out something completely new (new recipes). Potentially this could lead to further subclass specialization, but that depends a lot on what the blacksmith mini-game would be.
Enchanter
Enchanters use materials to craft and upgrade base magical equipment as well as adding modifiers to equipments generally.
Enchanters generally focus on enchants around magic and elements, leaving non-magic and physical enchants to Blacksmiths. Good enchanters can craft extremely focused and specific modifiers and equipment. Otherwise the results tend to be pretty random and unreliable, much like using currency to craft in PoE. Like blacksmiths, enchanters can also upgrade magical equipment and the system should work in a similar way to the blacksmith one.
An enchanter that's earning a lot is upgrading or crafting specific equipments with specific modifiers on demand that no other enchanter can because they figured out recipes that others haven't. The different elements of enchanting would be similar to blacksmithing, either focusing on constant improvement or figuring out new magical items and modifiers.
Chef
Alchemist
Herbalist
Engineer
Pardoner
Oracle
Wayfarer
Cartographer
Miner
Squire
(will write out most of these classes later!)
Combat classes are already fairly explored in most games so ideas for them are never an issue.
In any case, as players go through the world they find NPCs responsible for each class change. Unlike most games, those NPCs aren't readily available in the city. This adds a component of randomness to everyone's progress, and it also adds the possibility of a group of people purposefuly hiding the location of an NPC so that others don't get access to that class.
The goal of the game could vary, it could be killing the big bad boss, it could be defending the city and/or outposts from monster invasions, or it could be simply seeing who gets the highest level. This really depends more on the specifics of the game that I haven't fleshed out yet. One thing I know for certain though is that it should be a server-wide goal. There should be very little room for players to go off and just do their own thing and play the game solo. It should be possible, but the game should make it obvious at every point that the player would benefit massively from engaging with the rest of the server more often. It's an MMO, after all.
One way of doing this that would be very simple would be lifting FlyFF's system, where to get max XP you need a full party of separated couples (could be more). This way solo players are forced to at least interact with one person to grind better.
The game also has permadeath. This adds an extra component to the grind and it also adds an extra component of difficulty for non-combat oriented classes. Those individuals will occasionally have to go out into the world, and since they aren't combat focused, that always poses as a threat to their entire character.
The servers also reset every N-months, much like PoE. This is probably the most contentious thing but I think it makes perfect sense with a largely procedurally generated world. Monster, NPC, dungeon, material locations would all be randomized in these resets, making each playthrough of the game for the entire server somewhat fresh and new. Like in PoE, each reset would introduce a new league, which would add to the game in some way from a PvE perspective, but also add new classes, recipes, materials, etc.
So, a mostly procedurally generated permadeath grindy anime MMO with tons of classes. While making an MMO is hard, this would cut out on content creation a lot. It seems that these days most MMOs or MMO-adjacent games focus way too much on stuff that doesn't matter (quests, stories, etc), and this bloats the development of these games. I think indiedevs eventually could make fun MMOs by cutting all of that out and just focusing on what people actually care about in these games, which is either mindlessly grinding or socializing.
NGU: Number Go Up!
A game about numbers going up.
Gameplay Rules
The game is inspired by Incremental Merge, so things will be described with that in mind.
You have a pool of numbers, like cards in a card game
You gain new numbers by waiting or merging numbers during a fight
When you merge numbers enemies take damage for the given merge (1+1 = 2 damage)
You have a main number that is your HP
Enemies are also just numbers and deal damage to your main number over time (not turn based)
Win condition is generally just killing all enemies in a given room without having your HP drop below 0
Metagameplay
A roguelite Slay the Spire-like where you go from node to node fighting numbers with your own numbers. Unlike StS, your pool of numbers is constant throughout the game, meaning you don't renew your numbers every fight. As you go through the map and merge more and more numbers you get more powerful. While in the first fight you might be merging 1+1, in further fights you might be merging 60+60 by default and so on.
There are rooms where you can increase your number pool without having to wait or merge them in a fight. There are rooms where you can also find artifacts, items, more HP, etc. In general special items and artifacts might give you various bonuses, like getting more numbers per merge, increasing the base number of your generated numbers, effects when you deal damage to enemies, when specific types of numbers are merged (like primes), etc.
Gameplay Elements
HP
Number pool
Damage
Base number generation (when you generate a number from waiting by default it's 1, you want this to increase as you get more powerful)
Number generation rate (how fast numbers are generated from waiting)
Merge number generation rate (generate more than 1 number per merge)
Number properties: odd/even, primes, numbers that are valid for a certain formula, etc
Modifiers
+- HP
+- damage
+- base number generation
+- number generation rate
+- merge number generation rate
+- damage on [number property]
+- damage taken on [number property]
Deal damage on [event], where [event] = merge, new number generated, damage taken, property reached, etc
...
It's pointless to keep listing these here because they just come pretty obviously. The various ways in which you can create interesting items out of this system is just natural because it's basically just like any turn based card game, and the mechanics for those are endless.
JUGGLRX
A game about juggling balls.
Gameplay Rules
You have 1 or more paddles, and you can switch between them with the 1-4 keys
If a ball falls you lose 1 HP for the currently selected paddle
If a paddle loses all its HP it can't be selected again until it's revived
Paddles have special skills that help with juggling more balls
Win condition depends on the current map, but might vary between:
Juggling n balls for a duration
Staying alive for a duration
Balls hit your paddles n times
Clearing the map of enemy structures
Metagameplay
Two possibilities:
Roguelite Slay the Spire-like map, with passives and paddles being found in each node that increasingly make juggling more balls easier. Examples of those can be found in the modifiers section. This is a pretty standard setup, the only way it works though if it there are enough gameplay elements and modifiers to be played around with, especially if there are multiple types of builds available that players can go for. That's still questionable so I don't know if this would work yet.
One Finger Death Punch-like static map, with passives and paddles being found as you explore the map. The further out you go the bigger the challenge, with different types of nodes focusing on different gameplay elements and on different skills the player can improve over time. This is the safer option that's less replayable but more controllable and I should go for it in case I can't think of enough modifiers or paddles to have enough variation for a roguelite.
Gameplay Elements
Paddle (each paddle is a class/character)
Paddle responsiveness
Ball spawn rate
Ball overflow limit
Ball gravity
HP
Modifiers
+- paddle responsiveness
+- paddle ability cooldown
+- ball spawn rate
+- ball overflow limit
+- ball gravity
+- HP
+- [modifier] on hit for n hits
Very hard to think up new passives/items for this that make sense and seem actually interesting. Perhaps thinking more about terms of paddle's active skills and how parts of them could be used as passives might help? Either way it's not clear at all if there's enough to it that warrants the roguelite metagameplay.
Improvements and suggestions
Swap paddles with mouse wheel to be able to play with one hand
Timed abilities should give an indication of when they're going to disappear
Anime PoE MMO
A game very similar to Path of Exile but anime styled, with the visual ideal being something like Tree of Savior.
City/hub
While PoE is one of my favorite games and I could spend a lot of words pointing out all the things it does right, part of the motivation for an anime-style PoE comes from the few things PoE doesn't do because the developers have a different interest than me. These things are not necessarily wrong, they're just different focuses. I like MMOs a lot and so I can see an MMO in PoE with a few very small changes.
The smallest change possible to be made to PoE that could make it into an MMO would be having a global shared city/hub for activities other than killing monsters instead of each player being in his own hideout/instance. PoE wasn't built with doing this in mind so this isn't possible to be done in it. The reasons for that are multiple, with the main one being all the crazy cosmetics that would make it impossible to load everything in a city with hundreds or thousands of players.
A game made from the ground up with this in mind would be able to do it, and so if I were to think of this as "suppose you could build a game exactly like PoE in terms of gameplay quality/complexity and also in terms of visual quality (but anime-styled), how would you attack it and bring as many PoE players to your game as possible?", this city/hub idea would be the main thing to focus on.
As a side note, this way of thinking is clearly mistaken and wrong, in reality another ARPG/MMO as good as PoE that was anime-styled wouldn't really steal players from it I don't think because people have very strong reactions to anime, either positively or negatively. What would more likely happen is just a bunch of people who never got into PoE because it was too grim dark getting into the anime game because it's anime, even though it's essentially the same thing gameplay wise.
In any case, even assuming that everything else about the game is the same, the game with the city would already feel like an MMO, because PoE already is kind of an MMO since it has an economy. The only reason it doesn't really feel like one is because there's no sense of shared environment, which this change would fix.
Classes
One of the things I really don't like about PoE is its focus on crafting. I know that it's an ARPG and that items with tons of mods and with tons of crafting possibilities is one of its main points, but I personally just don't like that gameplay. I can avoid it by just buying already crafted items, but it feels wrong, given that pretty much every league has a focus on crafting different types of items. So if I want to interact with each league fully I pretty much have to understand how the game's crafting system works.
This is a problem that has been solved by many MMOs already and it's solved with classes. If someone only likes killing monsters, that's what they should focus on. If someone only likes trading, that's what they should focus on. If someone only likes crafting, that's what they should focus on. MMOs can be played in many different ways and people should focus on the way they like playing, and the game should support that. So tons of MMOs have classes that have specific non-combat related specialties.
In a game with a city/hub where trading happens in real space rather than through an API, you can imagine adventurers coming from spending lots of time grinding their maps and selling their found materials to all sorts crafters, like alchemists, blacksmiths, chefs, herbalists, etc, and then those players would spend their time crafting those materials into better items which the adventurers would use to face more challenging content, and bring better items and so on.
An economy like this could be enabled in the city and it would make the game feel even more like an MMO, and players like me, who don't really like crafting, wouldn't be forced to, because there are people who's specific job is crafting things. Of course, all of those crafting jobs would have to be somewhat interesting on their own, and that would likely take some effort, but it's not something too crazy to imagine.
World
The final change I would focus on, but this one is likely harder to make work properly, is to instead of having players go through maps like in PoE, they go through a fixed, very large and unexplored world. This world would be filled with enemies such that at high levels one would be zooming through the map as fast as players do in PoE, but the world would be so massive in scale that it would support lots of players doing this simultaneously.
The effects of having a huge unexplored world makes for a lot of additional possibilities. Now we can have classes like cartographers, which are concerned with mapping out this huge world in a coherent way and selling their maps to other players, crafters, hunters, etc. Normal adventurers also have an incentive to share/sell information to cartographers about different spawns of enemies, minerals, bosses, etc.
You could also have classes like wayfarers, who are concerned with creating portals between different places so adventurers don't have to walk all the way from their grinding spots to the city and back. You could have classes like squires, who could either be able to setup camps outside the main city, or who could serve as servants for other players, grabbing items from the city for them so they don't have to walk back, and so on.
The main idea is that the city is in the center of the map, and the map expands outwards with enemies all around the city, growing in difficulty the further away you get. The map would be procedurally generated and it would be absolutely massive. Just like in PoE there would be little to no quests, and players would simply focus on grinding out the game, getting more materials/currency, coming back to the city to trade so they can be more powerful, repeat.
This change would turn the game into a proper MMO because now not only is the city a shared environment, but the world also is one. This is obviously harder to accomplish, especially with a really big procedurally generated world, but I think it's doable in the very far future once I'm much more experienced as a developer. This also doesn't cost much in terms of content. PoE is a game that has lots of content, but a huge portion of it can be made much simpler once you have proper delineations between different kinds of classes.
For instance, the labyrinth. The labyrinth is a piece of content that was likely pretty hard to make for them and not many people like it. Yet, because they spent so much time doing it, they sort of had to force it on everyone. In anime PoE, lab-like dungeons can be done in such a way that they can only be run by specific classes, like say treasure hunters, and then no one has to interact with it, other than people who really enjoy that content. Basically every league PoE has that people have strong aversions to can be made into class specific content so that the people who like that kind of thing can willingly choose to do it and get rewarded for it in a way that others can't. All of this content can then be made much cheaper, because it doesn't have to justify itself to the rest of the playerbase.
Annoyance
More generally, PoE has the following problem aptly pointed out by some redditors:
The way PoE devs decided to limit access to content is through annoyance, and this happens everywhere in the game, from trading to crafting to ascending your character. If they didn't do this people would get too powerful too fast, and the game would be trivially easy. And if they didn't have the ability for people to get powerful in the first place the game would be boring.
The general solution to this problem, in my view, is more specialization and more socialization. In our society, getting more "powerful" is also annoying, but people can freely choose how exactly they want to be annoyed by the profession they pick. I chose game development because I like it, and I can deal with all of its annoyances because of that. And when I produce something of high value, like a really good video game, people will be able to trade with me for the things of value they built instead.
PoE is moving towards this direction by allowing people to focus on different aspects of the game in their end game content, but it's a bandaid fix. The fundamental issue is that the game has no clearly defined specializations, which means that anyone can do anything, and so like the post mentioned you can get people who do really crazy stuff and deal with all the annoyance the game puts in their path, and you also get people who don't want to deal with any of that (me) who miss out on it.
Specialization fixes this by saying: you can only get this crazy thing if you're this specific class, and if you're this specific class you're giving up being another specific class that would allow you to do another thing better. So if someone wants to do crazy crafts, they pick one of the classes that lets you do crazy crafts, but that prevents them from picking the class that lets them find crazy materials for their crafts.
This separation of concerns means that individuals are focused on different tasks, and when that happens you introduce a natural barrier to content access. Now instead of you having to limit trading because it trading was too easy you'd get too powerful characters, trading can happen normally because what limits character power is coordination between multiple people, since no one person can do everything themselves. This coordination increases socialization, which makes the game more like an MMO.
So the best guilds are the guilds that have the best coordination between their members, and thus they can craft the best equipment, or find the best hunting spots, or find the best mining spots, etc. From specialization you get socialization, and from socialization you get a real MMO, and it simultaneously solves the annoyance problem.
Specialization
To dig a little deeper into the specialization problem, if PoE simply added specialization to it nothing would change much. Let's say that you needed to be a specific class to craft specific modifiers, a specific class to be able to gain access specific materials, and a specific class to be able to alter those materials in such a way that the first class can craft them.
We've now divided the crafting of a few specific modifiers into 3 classes, and they're all needed for making the process work. As PoE stands right now, this wouldn't really prevent individuals from crafting those items as much as they wanted, it would only add more annoyance, which would defeat the purpose of adding specialization in the first place. Why would this happen?
Because PoE is a game made to be played very fast in comparison to most MMOs. Most experienced players can reach a fairly high level in it in just a few days, and unless the crafting of these specific modifiers was gated in the 3 class behind LOTS of grinding, individuals would just spend 1 day making each different character and then when they needed something they would go through the process with their multiple characters. The game is built to encourage this kind of behavior, so simply adding this kind of specialization to it wouldn't work.
The way to make it work is to change the game significantly to not encourage character remaking as often as PoE does, and there are multiple ways to achieve this. One would be adding very onerous tasks, cinematics, dialogue, etc, anything that isn't directly gameplay related that gets in the player's way before he can actually start grinding the game.
This is a tactic used by Genshin Impact, for instance, to prevent account rerolls. To reroll an account in that game you need to get to level 7, and this would be trivially achievable in like 5-10 minutes, but the game adds enough random nonsense upfront that it takes 30-40 minutes, thus decreasing the effectiveness of rerolling like this.
Personally I think this is a pretty lame strategy so that's a no-go for me. Another strategy would be to prevent any kind of powerlevelling. In most MMOs that are grindy you have the concept of powerlevelling, which is getting a higher levelled character to help you kill higher level monsters so you get more XP, and thus level faster through the earlier levels of the game. Preventing this would work somewhat and it definitely should be there, but maybe it should be in a limited form. I think for most grindy games you want some form of compensation for players that already went through the process, and powerlevelling is one of those things that I think should exist in some capacity.
The last thing possible would be to actually just make the game extremely grindy. This is the one that attracts me the most. If to reach the level where you're crafting the specific modifiers you need to simply grind a lot, this would make that achievement that much more impressive and it would limit access to content behind simple autism. This would be especially true if to grind crafts you need to engage in an activity other than actually killing monsters, like a mini-game of sorts.
I have a few ideas for puzzle games that are procedurally generatable, and thus crafting and other non-combat oriented activities could all be this kind of mini-game that's generating these puzzles of increasing difficulty as the player levels up their abilities, and so really good players are actually really good at solving these puzzles. Think of the difference between a really good Tetris player and a normal one, stuff like that should be what the difference between an experienced crafter and a normal one looks like. This has a few obvious problems, which is that now each non-combat class is a small game entirely on its own, but I think that for an MMO that is otherwise entirely grinding this would be entirely reasonable and feasible, even for an indiedev like me to pull off.
Either way, I think only when the game is actually extremely grindy can you pull of the specialization strategy I talked about above. If people can just create new characters and level them up to max effortlessly then the entire point is defeated.
Anime MMO
To summarize, this is what the game described above looks like:
There's a city at the center of the world where everyone spawns. Outside this city there are monsters and materials in all directions that get stronger or more useful the further away from the city. The game is extremely grindy and PvE oriented, although PvP may exist in some form. Players go out, kill monsters or find places to get materials from, come back to the city and repeat. Inside the city there are non-combat oriented classes that generally don't kill monsters to level up, a few examples:
Blacksmith
Blacksmiths use materials to craft and upgrade base physical equipment as well as new kinds equipments for different classes. Good blacksmiths can craft equipment with extremely high bases: the higher the base the more the equipment benefits from upgrades. They can also craft useful implicit modifiers to bases, which shouldn't be too different from PoE's implicit mods.
They can also upgrade items, which would be the typical +N that things have that improves their stats. Combined with high bases these upgrades can turn items from average to extremely good. However, upgrades always carry with them the chance of breaking items, which a good blacksmith would also have a higher chance to prevent.
A blacksmith that's earning a lot is either crafting extremely high bases/upgrades or doing modifiers/equipment that no other blacksmith can because they figured out recipes that others haven't. This adds two elements to blacksmithing, one of constant improvement (higher and higher bases and upgrades) and one of figuring out something completely new (new recipes). Potentially this could lead to further subclass specialization, but that depends a lot on what the blacksmith mini-game would be.
Enchanter
Enchanters use materials to craft and upgrade base magical equipment as well as adding modifiers to equipments generally. Enchanters generally focus on enchants around magic and elements, leaving non-magic and physical enchants to Blacksmiths. Good enchanters can craft extremely focused and specific modifiers and equipment. Otherwise the results tend to be pretty random and unreliable, much like using currency to craft in PoE. Like blacksmiths, enchanters can also upgrade magical equipment and the system should work in a similar way to the blacksmith one.
An enchanter that's earning a lot is upgrading or crafting specific equipments with specific modifiers on demand that no other enchanter can because they figured out recipes that others haven't. The different elements of enchanting would be similar to blacksmithing, either focusing on constant improvement or figuring out new magical items and modifiers.
Chef
Alchemist
Herbalist
Engineer
Pardoner
Oracle
Wayfarer
Cartographer
Miner
Squire
(will write out most of these classes later!)
Combat classes are already fairly explored in most games so ideas for them are never an issue.
In any case, as players go through the world they find NPCs responsible for each class change. Unlike most games, those NPCs aren't readily available in the city. This adds a component of randomness to everyone's progress, and it also adds the possibility of a group of people purposefuly hiding the location of an NPC so that others don't get access to that class.
The goal of the game could vary, it could be killing the big bad boss, it could be defending the city and/or outposts from monster invasions, or it could be simply seeing who gets the highest level. This really depends more on the specifics of the game that I haven't fleshed out yet. One thing I know for certain though is that it should be a server-wide goal. There should be very little room for players to go off and just do their own thing and play the game solo. It should be possible, but the game should make it obvious at every point that the player would benefit massively from engaging with the rest of the server more often. It's an MMO, after all.
One way of doing this that would be very simple would be lifting FlyFF's system, where to get max XP you need a full party of separated couples (could be more). This way solo players are forced to at least interact with one person to grind better.
The game also has permadeath. This adds an extra component to the grind and it also adds an extra component of difficulty for non-combat oriented classes. Those individuals will occasionally have to go out into the world, and since they aren't combat focused, that always poses as a threat to their entire character.
The servers also reset every N-months, much like PoE. This is probably the most contentious thing but I think it makes perfect sense with a largely procedurally generated world. Monster, NPC, dungeon, material locations would all be randomized in these resets, making each playthrough of the game for the entire server somewhat fresh and new. Like in PoE, each reset would introduce a new league, which would add to the game in some way from a PvE perspective, but also add new classes, recipes, materials, etc.
So, a mostly procedurally generated permadeath grindy anime MMO with tons of classes. While making an MMO is hard, this would cut out on content creation a lot. It seems that these days most MMOs or MMO-adjacent games focus way too much on stuff that doesn't matter (quests, stories, etc), and this bloats the development of these games. I think indiedevs eventually could make fun MMOs by cutting all of that out and just focusing on what people actually care about in these games, which is either mindlessly grinding or socializing.
NGU: Number Go Up!
A game about numbers going up.
Gameplay Rules
The game is inspired by Incremental Merge, so things will be described with that in mind.
Metagameplay
A roguelite Slay the Spire-like where you go from node to node fighting numbers with your own numbers. Unlike StS, your pool of numbers is constant throughout the game, meaning you don't renew your numbers every fight. As you go through the map and merge more and more numbers you get more powerful. While in the first fight you might be merging 1+1, in further fights you might be merging 60+60 by default and so on.
There are rooms where you can increase your number pool without having to wait or merge them in a fight. There are rooms where you can also find artifacts, items, more HP, etc. In general special items and artifacts might give you various bonuses, like getting more numbers per merge, increasing the base number of your generated numbers, effects when you deal damage to enemies, when specific types of numbers are merged (like primes), etc.
Gameplay Elements
Modifiers
It's pointless to keep listing these here because they just come pretty obviously. The various ways in which you can create interesting items out of this system is just natural because it's basically just like any turn based card game, and the mechanics for those are endless.
JUGGLRX
A game about juggling balls.
Gameplay Rules
nballs for a durationntimesMetagameplay
Two possibilities:
Roguelite Slay the Spire-like map, with passives and paddles being found in each node that increasingly make juggling more balls easier. Examples of those can be found in the modifiers section. This is a pretty standard setup, the only way it works though if it there are enough gameplay elements and modifiers to be played around with, especially if there are multiple types of builds available that players can go for. That's still questionable so I don't know if this would work yet.
One Finger Death Punch-like static map, with passives and paddles being found as you explore the map. The further out you go the bigger the challenge, with different types of nodes focusing on different gameplay elements and on different skills the player can improve over time. This is the safer option that's less replayable but more controllable and I should go for it in case I can't think of enough modifiers or paddles to have enough variation for a roguelite.
Gameplay Elements
Modifiers
nhitsVery hard to think up new passives/items for this that make sense and seem actually interesting. Perhaps thinking more about terms of paddle's active skills and how parts of them could be used as passives might help? Either way it's not clear at all if there's enough to it that warrants the roguelite metagameplay.
Improvements and suggestions