What if EvE Online were a Fantasy MMORPG?

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What if we took EvE Online, and made a fantasy game out of it — using all of EvE’s mechanisms, as closely as possible? Syncaine claims that EvE has solved nearly all MMO problems. Fine, let’s turn that around.
In EvE, you fly ships from system to system, battling, exploring, gathering resources, trading, or any other purpose you can find. You, though, are not your ship. Your ship can be blowed up. You can try to escape, but maybe you get blowed up, too. But not to worry. Upon word of your untimely demise, a clone will arise from a vat to carry on where you left off.
An eternal warrior, who though all his companions might be killed, though he himself may die, will live again. That drips of fable and fantasy.
Story kind of writes itself from here, doesn’t it?
You start your adult life in your family home on the outskirts of a village. The masters and wizards in the village can teach you much, but their knowledge has limits, and soon you will have to set out from your home in search of your destiny.
You won’t set out alone, though. You’ll have a cart, and a horse. An old sword you inherited from your father. A wooden shield, once painted white. A leather jerkin. And some hired hands — a trained woodsman, who can forage and hunt food for the trip, and maybe an old fighter who has asked to come along on one last adventure.
If you stay on the King’s roads, you’ll be safe, and can find your fortune in the world, never worrying about the wider, wilder, world outside the cities. You’ll find more people who wish to join you as your fame and knowledge grows; more fighters and better ones; a healer; perhaps even wizards to cast spells of divination and warding for you. You’ll bring them back to your village, which will become a city; and your cottage, which will become a castle.
Soon you will have a small army, and now, perhaps, you want to venture off the King’s roads and into the Wild, where monsters dwell and treasure hides. You gather your army and set off. One night, you camp at the edge of an ancient swamp, with crumbling ruins poking from it that resemble the broken ribs of some gigantic creature in the smoky moonlight.
The fog thickens… and from that fog comes a spectral army, slaughtering and slaying and catching you entirely unaware… your army fights back, bravely, but their weapons are no match for the ghostly crew that assails them. The screams of your men and the dead cackle of the specters chase you through the forest, back to the King’s road and back to your city. You rest, set your wizards to finding out who commanded that dread legion, and then slowly begin to amass an army, even greater, to get your revenge…

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29 thoughts on “What if EvE Online were a Fantasy MMORPG?”

  2. lol… totally missed that… I’ve put your blog in my feeds so hopefully won’t miss stuff like that again! Great minds, I guess! My idea would step away from the usual MMO idiom of you, as the player, controlling an avatar directly. You don’t get to do that in EvE, so like EvE, you would be commanding others — you don’t think you’re alone on those giant starships, do you?
    I do believe a Fantasy EvE-like game could be something amazing, just replacing starships with armies and planets with city-states… It could work!

  5. Just wait until your picture is all over this blog when you’re playing Rock Band next week. THEN you’ll have something to say 🙂

  7. Thanks for that link, Nuyan. I’d seen that article but forgotten about it.
    My point with both Syncaine’s and Mr. Rossignol’s ideas is that it doesn’t abstract you, the player, enough. In both, you’re the hero, doing heroic stuff — in their articles, fantasy hero = EvE starship.
    But in EvE, you don’t fight — you just pick targets for your guns and missiles, direct the autopilot to stay within your effective firing range and out of the enemy’s, start the repair bots or the shield enhancers… you’re the captain, you’re the commander, you’re Picard, and all your mount points and stuff are your bridge crew.
    In my “Evecraft”, you would gain the ability to command people of certain talents, build larger cities, enhance your reputation to attract more people, and so on — one step removed, just like EvE. And you as the player would be even one step further removed as, like in EvE, your city would grow and your avatar would study while you were offline; your avatar and your army would travel from place to place on their own if you told them where to go…
    So really, in my “Evecraft”, you’re some omniscient being, commanding your avatar, who then commands his army on your behalf — just like EvE. Instead of a starship, you can learn to command larger and more diverse armies comprising more powerful warriors, priests, sorcerers, knights, cavalry and so on.
    It’s that little extra remove that gives EvE some of its flavor.

  8. From another perspective:
    If Eve was a fantasy game it would be at least twice as popular in the worst case. But this is a false truth because it would also cost four times more, so it wouldn’t exist. Eve-Online was launched as a failure and managed to find its own space from there. If it was a fantasy game it would have ended like “Wish”.
    Eve has almost no worldbuilding, no complex animations, no practice of the details. It’s also very light on bandwidth requirements as the movement is almost completely client-side.
    Fantasy games don’t have a comparable complexity for two reasons. The first is that game companies decided not to dare going down that path, the second is that there are prerequisites before you start contemplating those complex layers.
    There was a recent discussion on the forum where people said WoW was successful because how smooth and fluid it moved. It’s true. Eve-Online is a game that got the complex layer before the basics. In fact the basics of Eve still sort of suck, and the reason why is still a niche game. Relevant but niche.

  10. @Abalieno — what EvE did was take their inspiration from a long line of space trading simulators — all the way back to Star Command, Sundog, Freelancer and Privateer — and make it into an MMO. Trading was the emphasis. Combat was something you generally did only when you had to. A more WoWish game would have come at it from the space combat simulator line — Wing Commander, X-Wing, Tie Fighter and so on. I guess Earth & Beyond and Jumpgate are titles like that.
    EvE Online is actually far more like a Real Time Strategy game than anything else. If you modeled your “Evecraft” from Heroes of Might and Magic, you might well come up with something as deep as EvE in a fantasy setting — and that might do really well indeed.

  11. Heh, I’ve started down the road to writing this sort of post myself several times. I think we even discussed EVE as fantasy a bit during SUWT #4.
    EVE has much to recommend it and I like to pick on a feature and try to translate it into a world of swords and elves.
    A worthy topic with room for many more posts and discussions.
    I had not considered an entity + entourage view as part of the translation. Interesting. I’ll have to go off and ponder that.

  12. If EVE were a fantasy MMO, I’ve gotta confess, I’d probably be playing it. I appreciate the concept, but the cold emptiness of space falls flat for me as a stage for a game. I never even liked Asteroids as a kid.

  13. the ability to warp away in eve pvp is far superior to the normal fantasy pvp escape mechanisms, that has to be incorporated somehow.

  14. You’re in a bad situation, you choose a POI from the list, hit warp and pray you make it away before your pod is sucked in by the twisted debris that used to be your billion ISK ship?
    When you think you have lost all you can lose, suddenly there arises an opportunity to lose even *more* 🙂
    But I got ya covered here. In dire circumstances, you pray for divine intervention; and if you have been devout and your chosen deity isn’t off in the forest carousing with the nature spirits, your avatar and what remains of your fighting force will be delivered to the lavish temple in your home city.
    You DID make it lavish, right? And now you’re going to have to make it MORE lavish and import that really, REALLY pricey priest from Far Hegemonia to bless it… and that’s going to be ANOTHER long trip you have to do 🙂
    I should turn this on Syncaine… can he suggest an EvE mechanism that could not be duplicated in a fantasy setting?

  15. If Eve were on 10 different servers, it wouldn’t have even 1/2 the subscribers is does today. That is the really special thing that sets it apart – there is only one ‘space’ where everyone interacts. I don’t believe there is any way to duplicate that in a fantasy MMO setting.
    To support 10’s of thousands of players on a single server – almost everything that involved gaining experience or needed items would have to be instanced. Or the world would have to be literally as big as Texas. And what if 2000 characters got together in the same place at the same time – what hardware could handle that, client or server side?
    Without instancing everything that was quest, experience, item gaining related (Guild Wars anyone?), its just not possible given all the details fantasy settings need vs empty space and space ships. As Abalieno said “Eve has almost no worldbuilding, no complex animations, no practice of the details.”

  18. The first thing I thought when I saw the title was “Well, I suppose you’d be playing a horse, or perhaps a wagon.”
    In any case, the design that you discuss is really interesting. The idea of gradually growing from a band of adventurers to and army is certainly interesting. However, wonder if this sort of game would be doomed to suffer from some of the basic design problems that keep me out of EVE? Steep learning curve, non-consensual PvP that can destroy days or weeks of progress, newer players at an insurmountable disadvantage versus older players. And I wonder what games like Lineage or RTS MMOs where you do in fact build up an army (I could have sworn I’ve read of at least one) have to teach about whether such a game would be fun to most players.

  19. Ultimately most art assests in fantasy games are a fixed, unchanging backdrop too, with the handy advantage of being able to assume most players are locked on the surface…
    A modern client, with good level of detail mangement, could probably display a disturbingly large number of units in a fantasy-themed universe – consider Supreme Commander on a strong PC, which even in extremis manages frames per second that fleet-combat pilots in EVE only seem able to dream about. As someone said, it’s probably the escalating O(n) bandwidth requirements that cause EVE so much server-side hell, that and the current poor client design. The animation/world detail levels for an terrain-based fantasy universe just change the angle on the graph toward bandwidth catastrophe.
    EVE uses guildwars style instancing already for for most missions – every mission-runner gets their own instance of that mission in a unique location in space. Someone can locate the player, and join them to run the mission as a gang, or just grief them, but there’s no occurences of all five thousand people currently doing Mission 5 of Kill Ten Pirates all hanging around in a single location in space. In black 3D space, that’s semi-credible (though rather lonely). In a terrain-based environment that would be immersion-breaking, and ruin the sense of a single world. But that’s PVE, the horrors of scaling in EVE are issues with trade hubs (Jita) and massive fleet combat (hundreds of players jumping into the same firefight) over territory.
    Ultimately a highly-populated world needs compelling reasons to distribute its population over a geographical area with “manageable” density otherwise, even if it were possibly technically, it just looks damn silly. One thousand hobbits packed inside the Prancing Pony as if it were the London Underground in rush hour, doesn’t make for a convincing world.
    It’s telling that, in the initial designs for EVE’s ambulation project, environments (shops, bars, corporation offices) are going to be limited to 65 (strange number) avatars at any one time. Since there’s to be no combat in these almost purely social environments, and CCP keep talking about realism, architecture, and emotional avatar interaction, I think that’s about immersion management as much as the bandwidth issues.

  20. Well what Supreme Commander does as far as units doesn’t at all approximate a comparable number of actual individual avatars, since for the most part many are duplicates. And none of them occasionally /dance or /wave, neither do they engage in melee where each individual style is calculated for damage, resistances, evades, parries, blocks, ect. If you ever played Dark Age of Camelot, where castle/keep/relic sieges happen daily, having even 100 avatars on screen at once slows down even the hardiest system. Then there is siege works going on, melee happening all over the keeps, keep wall damage being shown – it was hell to try and depend on timing during those large battles, since you were seeing 2-10 frames a second : / The server side calculations going on just to keep track of who is where in relation to everyone else is taxing in and of itself (from what DAOC devs were saying – not an IT professional myself at all).

  21. DAoC had the challenge of making two very different games in one. First was a rather ordinary EQ clone with groups and dungeons and camps and stuff like that. The second was siege warfare and massive battles. These two games had vastly different requirements. If they’d JUST done the massive battle game, they could perhaps have used an overhead or isometric view, or in some other way simplified the view to handle that many people. I remember those battles. They were a lot of fun but man, it was a slideshow.
    In my “Evecraft”, you would have a godlike view of your army — just like in EvE, you are outside of your ship with a wide view of your surroundings, not inside. A first/third person view is an awful perspective on a battle, anyway. You wouldn’t really want to limit yourself to only what your avatar happened to be looking at.
    If you built your game such that you make the compromises necessary to allow massive numbers of units on the screen at once — if your very first task was to demo a hundred units on the screen at the same time — you could do it. Heck, RTS games do it all the time. And like RTS games, in Evecraft, your units would probably not be very unique. Your avatar might be, but when you hire a mounted knight to be part of your team, he’ll have your blazon on his shield and his livery in your colors, but will probably be pretty similar to every other mounted knight on the field — the same as in EvE, every 150mm chaingun is like another.
    Now there’s the matter of the vastness of space becoming the vastness of a world.
    When flying, I want the window seat, so I can look down and see the world pass beneath. It is so, so big. Start a group at Boston and send them to Los Angeles, and they’d take awhile, assuming Homeland Security didn’t catch them. Waypoints at NYC, Philadelphia, Columbus, Chicago, etc. It’s just like EvE. The challenge in a fantasy world would be finding anyone else in that world by chance.
    Well, you know when there’s other players in your system in EvE. And so there will be some way of telling when people are in your area, and you can choose to confront them or ignore them; and maybe sometimes you DON’T know they’re there.
    EvE’s space is black and empty. It’s definitely a lot easier to render than complex fantasy environments 🙂 In Evecraft, the random landscapes would be just that — procedurally generated landscapes, grown from a random seed and the general parameters of the region. You could have trails branch off for mission instances, instant battlefields when people meet… it could be done.
    You’ll hardly ever find yourself in a crowded city with everyone’s entourage around them. In cities, it’d just be your avatar.
    I really think this game could work! Sort of a sandbox-y, RTS-y, MMORPG-y fantasy game. Now, someone should tell me where to go to play it… or pay me to help write it!

  23. Pfft, there’s like two hundred MMOs out now or in development according to the lists at MMORPG.com. It’s impossible to be familiar with all of them. Does Darkfall support squad-based battles where, as you gain skill, you learn how to attract better talent and field better armies? That’s the RTS meets MMORPG vibe that EvE has and I would like to see in a fantasy game and hey, if Darkfall has that, I am SO there.
    Thanks for the heads-up!
    Hmm, work blocks that site. I’ll check it out at home. Luckily the weekend is here…

  24. I chose Supreme Commander because it was an example of a highly-concurrent dynamic environment, probably the most audacious of the current RTSs. It tracks actual particle trajactories, and calculates damage based on genuine physical targetting. A fascinating game design decision, and surely one of the reasons why it has scaling issues on even quite high-end machines. A four way Supreme Commander game will be running over a thousand units, hundreds of damageable buildings, potentially thousands of particles in flight simultaneously, deformable terrain, from a pallete of over a hundred animated models, whilst providing a smooth (ish) zoom out and into any part of the viewable battlefield. SC also scales somewhat across multiple client-side cores, something DAOC likely doesn’t. 😉
    As you say, it’s far from an exact analogue of the avatar presentation we’d be talking about, but the same raw client-side power that SC harnesses could be channeled in a different direction and – I would assert – work quite well. 🙂
    The damage/resistences/evades/parries/blocks for MMOs (EVE too) are hopefully all server-side number-crunching – and relatively simple ones at that. We’re talking precomputable lookup tables rather than silly 3d physics. In most avatar games a single character generally effects a small number of other characters during a given damage cycle with the exception of AOE which do do horrible things (smart bombs in EVE appear to cause lag issues, the Titan’s full-grid 250 km radius Doomday is apparently a total horror).
    A sane client with proper LOD scaling, good line-of-sight management and animation culling could chop down hugely on the effort required for on avatar rendering during high-population periods. Emotes, total avatar customisation, and the correct style of blue cloak are great for immersion, but can be filtered with small impact game-play when the client is under stress. Provided characters are reasonably recognisable (and a name floating over a heads always helps) people already do accept compromises in the level of graphical detail on their screen if it results in a useable game.
    Upshot, I think the client-side issues are manageable enough to make a high-population game useable for sane levels of population, provided arbitrary levels of bandwidth and server-side scaling were available. Obviously, they’re not, and although highly scaleable SMP machines are available which might be able to deal with the some of the highly populated environments we’re considering, they’re also enormously more expensive per CPU unit than the average dense Intel server blade. That would substantially alter the cost proposition of the games we’re playing, until Intel and AMD push the core-density up another level.
    And, after all my wishful handwaving, however far we enable the game to scale, inevitably players will blob (it’s even a BF2 tactic, who knew?) beyond the system’s ability to cope, and we will get “too many” people at one place at one time for either the server side or client side to cope. It doesn’t really matter where the limit is, it will be reached. So,
    a) how do we manage that eventuality without crashing the game?
    b) more interestingly how do we provide players with more interesting and entertaining ways to play the game than doing that blobbing the world to death?
    EVE does this by letting the the high-blob endgame become so painful it hurts. That’s aversion therapy, not really a solution. EVE’s other crowd-management tactic – providing instanced PvE – would work less convincingly in a terrain based environment and hurts immersion. Tradehub issues could be resolved by having creative trader systems (a distributed tradehub, with magic gnomes aka Postal Service that move actual goods within the hub).
    Going single-shard doesn’t really make any new problems (if everyone on a WoW server turned up in Stormwind, I bet it would lag horribly and crash) it just makes them much easier to encounter.
    Gosh, rambling. 🙂

  25. Well I never did play SupCOm, but I experienced several large 100-150 person raids and sieges in DAOC, and I promise, unless everyone is just moving in a straight line (follow the leader), the chaos of all those people suddenly doing there own thing or engaging in melee – it was gameplay breakingly laggy. I have never played WoW on my new machine, but I imagine walking into Ironforge into a crowd of 100+ people even milling around in front of the mailbox/AH, things would grind.
    It sounds like Eve has plenty of room to avoid that kind of congestion, yet gameplay and FPS still suffers greatly when it does occasionally happen. So hardware on both sides of the wire still need tweeking to enjoy the great detail of seeing the rivets on an avatars armor, or the huge explosions of ships, in any great numbers on screen at once.
    That leaves either what Guild Wars does – instanced cities – or maybe what Tipa suggested – some way to simulate peeps instead of the 1st person view that we are used to. Bleh. Stick figure MMO anyone?

  26. Who knows how the DAoC client was written, but it originates in a world of (now) antique graphics cards, when a home SMP box was a rare thing. Machines are enormously more capable then they were three, left alone five years ago. EVE’s client design is ten years old – the new client (released Real Soon Now) will make the client-side massively more scalable, so the devs are saying. That seems to be unusual for an MMO – getting major infrastructure and asset improvements during its lifespan, but then EVE is an odd data point.
    Guild Wars instanced world model was, I suspect, partially a response to their business model. Without subscriptions to support their ongoing operations, I think all their backend systems would have to be a low-cost and backend-light as possible. Minimising the number of interacting players keeps that O(n) nice and low, with bandwidth and CPU-levels consumed down to a minimum.
    Tipa’s RTS elements sound something like Dreamlords done right, not that I’ve never played it. The idea of an RTS MMO appealed to me greatly, but it seems to solve the hybridising of the MMO and RTS elements in a “Civ Versus Warcraft” way that doesn’t appeal to me at all. I’d love to be able to play a Homeworld Online-style game or Warcraft 2 Online), but it has to be done in a way that encourages a seamless world and “realistic” interaction.

  27. Hmmm…if the actual gameplay were deep enough, a top down RTS style RPG MMO could work. Either with 100’s of units that you control like Tipa is suggesting, or just your 1 avatar with 100’s if not 1000’s or other player controlled all existing in one world (server). You could really ramp up the size of the world as the population grows, and even make building your own cities via player housing wherever you wanted to set down roots, with a building type crafting skill to determine what sort of dwelling you could make. But lets say a weapon crafter could put up a booth automatically anywhere he wanted to sell his gear, which would then work like an seller/buyer NPC. And if more then a certain number of these booths are layed down in a given area, they automatically merge into 1 to keep congestion of duplicate booths down. Players who craft beverages/food could build a pub : )
    Probably just a nitch market for that though “/

  28. Darkfall is skill-based (no character levels) with 500 skills & spells, with total freedom about what you can use at any time. Squad-based battles are the order of the day in Darkfall, since the game is clan-versus-clan (clans = guilds) wars over actual in-world territorial control. Clans build cities and clan politics will be a huge thing in Darkfall. Gaining and donning items have a less importance than in other MMORPGs since items are cheap and the game is full-loot so you drop everything if you are killed. But the items are easily replaced, so its no so much of a big deal. There will be hundred-person seiges in Darkfall but the frame-rates wont be so bad since they have rather medium-graphics.
    Darkfall is part RTS, part MMO, part RPG.
    Go to youtube and look up the video called “Darkfall is coming” by muffins.

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