Katabasis
by jachilli
You know what MMO I want? I want a very specific MMO with three things.
I'm all up in ur phalanx, killing ur hoplites.
I want a game that takes place in Late Antiquity, after the death of Alexander the Great, when his generals were stealing his corpse and propping it up at their camps to show that they were the favored military/ political leader in the absence of a legitimate heir and that everyone else could go chase themselves — until someone else stole the corpse and became the hotshot general. But I don’t want to have to know piles upon piles of historical minutiae. I just want the period in broad strokes, and to be able to play it from there. I want to hurl an Iron Age javelin at a dude and wear a clunky breastplate and maybe stab a guy with a spathe, but I don’t want it to be in a generic Middle Ages environment.
My game also needs freeform unit composition, but with awesome matchmaking. That is, I want to make whatever kind of soldier I feel like at character creation, and then I want to be able to join any “guild” I feel like, and I want the game’s socialization tools to help me find the sort of army for my specific playstyle. That way, the individual player groupings can decide if they want to be focused groups specialized toward one specific tactic, or if they want to be generalists, who take all of the playable character types and adapt their own unique approaches.
Finally, I want persistence. I want character advancement, sure, but I also want to be able to acquire territory and win battles that affect the world and that actually mean something after I log out and log back on. We seized Bactria, you sons of bitches! Now, in gameplay, you have to take it away from us, and we have to defend it. But while we own it, we gain a benefit from it, or we have access to an asset otherwise not available, or we even get a special item available in shops. Whatever. But the point is that we took it, we own it, and it means something.
There. There’s my completely rational, totally doable, niche-market list of terms. Please create a game for me, or please point me toward a game like this that already exists.
That is pretty similar to what I was hoping for with PVP in WoD. Persistent claiming of a city location from other vampire groups and receiving a benefit, such as money, from taking and holding it. So could still throw in clunky breastplates and iron age javelins for the REALLY old vampires too.
Good thinking! We could re-use the combat engine among multiple games and share resources! By the way, I’m wearing a clunky breastplate right now.