Wishlist for expansion

[Darkhon]

This is probably a crazy idea, but multi-player.

I was thinking earlier as I toasted the enemy lining them up so I could hit them with area effects, goading them into attacking my summoned book of evil, etc that a human would be a far more interesting opponent.

Hear me out, there are three ways I think this could work.

1) Simple Match making


Players can take characters that completed the game and challenge one another through some sort of lobby. Using a simple system of gold to buy units, the players can agree on what family of units are available for the battle. (ALL, necromancers, elves, etc), they pick an arena and have at it.

The Simple system puts a win/loss/dropped (mid game) rating for each player.

Under this simple system, there is no world map. It's just battles.

1) Profit!

I have seen browser based games like gladiatus. (I can give you the website in pm, don't want to spam). Basically, you manage your "Character" through a web based interface.

It is Free to Play.

They make money by selling "Gems" which you can use to buy upgrades and you go through essentially a ladder arena.

Using a similar model, you could allow players to design a character for multiplayer, then it gets saved on your server and as above players go through match making to do arena battles, earning XP until they reach 30th level.

In this model, a first level character would have X gold to spend on basic choices of troops. After every battle all your troops are healed/back to life so you can fight again (so that if you are offline, you don't get wiped out once in battle and then subsequently can never be attacked).

Essentially, it's a loss and some gold raided.

Each level the cap you can spend on troops increases.

Again, no multiplayer world map. Just battles and a web based interface to manage your character perhaps.

1) Mini- MMO

The final idea involves letting say 4-8 people play on the same world map and would require 'respawning' of enemies and quests (possibly, or there maybe another way to do it)

There are a lot of MMOs out there that are finely polished. You can't hope to compete in the traditional MMO market, but what this game would be great for is:

Let players who buy the single player game, pay a monthly fee to manage their own "Online Kingdom". give them very simple tools to modify the game world and finite limits about how many players can be hosted and zones created. You could also make profit here by selling players pre-made zones and extra art.

Essentially a Kingdom-in-a-box, where right from the scratch it's ready for play. Let's say the player gets about six friends who meet regularly or play solo on his server. The player can create them custom npcs, castles, etc using hte various art that comes with the game, script simple quests, etc.

The game can have a few wizards to make creating quests very simple through waypoints and If statements, etc.

The owner in "GM" mode can take over various aspects of the game, including fighting as the monsters if they so choose. They can monitor the game from their home PC and know whos on and watch them.

I realize it sounds ambitious, but I know there are a lot of creative people in the world and one thing I've never seen done well is "Create your own MMO". When a company figures out how to make it simple to get started without technical knowledge, and the hosting is all done for you, they will succeed!