The current state of the Early Access build

[VectorStorm]

Hi, everybody! I'm Trevor, the designer and programmer of MMORPG Tycoon 2. This has been kind of a labor of love for me for a *long* time, and now that we're only a bit over a day away from our Early Access launch, I'm really excited (and a little terrified) to finally be showing the game to a much larger group!

First, a few technical details about the game: MMORPG Tycoon 2 is running in a custom game engine written by me, mostly for this game. The "VectorStorm" engine is open source under a very permissive license; feel free to check it out on Github, if you're interested! I've written pretty much everything in the game right now, apart from the third-party libraries we're using; SDL2 (window management, input), FMOD (sound), and PhysFS (file access).

Anyhow, I've had small groups of people testing the game over the past few years, but we're finally to the point where I feel like I'm ready to throw the gates open a little wider and let more people in to give feedback, suggestions, and report issues! The core game simulation is there; at this point it's just ("just", lol) a matter of adding a bunch more content, to really fill the game out!

As development has gone on, we've almost entirely maintained save game compatibility; with only a few exceptions, you can take a save game from three years ago and open it up and use it in the game today! The only bit that's been a little unstable is class/monster costumes; every time I change the way our animation retargeting works, it slightly breaks old character costumes, so they need to be touched up again when you open up those really old saves. I'm trying really hard not to have to do that again,though! It's all working pretty well now.

I wanted to call out a few exciting things which are in the development plan for soon:

1. Dungeons. For me, this is the really big one; I'm really looking forward to getting dungeons into the game! The challenge is how to represent them, since these are 'instanced', and so it's not obvious how to draw them to the screen! There will probably be a lot of experimenting with these!

2. World-Map Raid Bosses. You might have seen the huge dragon visible near the end of the game's trailer; that's *nearly* but not quite in the game yet; it just needs some combat effects and a few missing animations and it'll be ready to go!

3. More disasters/events! The game needs more scripted events for you, the player, to respond to. A lot of the events of the game come from the underlying simulation, but having some authored events adds a little spice!

4. Player organizations! Players should group together and begin making demands (which you can of course ignore!) This is going to be the foundation that support for guilds eventually gets built on top of.

5. And just a whole bunch more variety in buildings, character class models, terrain types, combat effects, and so on.

And of course, I'm really interested in other people's ideas and suggestions. You can leave comments for me here, or over on our Discord or Discourse servers. I'm usually pretty active in Discord while working on the game, and often post a sort of running commentary of what I'm up to there, so if you're interested in that sort of up-to-the-minute devblogging, please join us!

Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/4evvAcc
Discourse: https://discuss.mmorpgtycoon.com/

I hope to hear from you all soon! :D

[Bruce Wayne]

Ok, nice! I only checked the steam update on front page. Good to know. I'll due more diligence in the future. Thanks, all!

[Отиум]

I'm kind of loving it so far.

Here are my suggestions/thoughts after about 10 hours played:

* Ctrl-Z to undo the last action would be just perfect.

* Spinning the character preview removes the sliders in the designer, which feels clunky.

* Removing quests from a quest line feels extremely clunky. It keeps adding new quests at the bottom even though you remove them, unless you remove the very last quest first and so on, in order.

* I want to be able to lock the starting portal to certain classes.

* I would like the ability to create races or factions with their own full set of classes.

* It is important to be able to see more in-depth quest data in a sortable list to see which quests have a low completion percentage.

* In the list of logged in characters, it would be nice to be able to see which class they’re playing.

* More feminine looking options in the designer.

* Dirt paths need to be added, smaller roads that can connect to city roads.

* I feel like I have a lot of players getting stuck and no good way of dealing with it. GMs are too slow to fix them, and I can have 100's of characters stuck in the same spot. While it can be manually fixed by moving them, it's annoying. It would be nice if Developers helped lower the chance of bugged characters over time. Like each version released could slightly raise the chance, but Devs can slowly fix the new bugs over time and so on.

* And as mentioned by others, I would like to be able to jump into the game as a player while the simulation is running.

Edit: More suggestions after 50 hours.

* I would like an upgrade that adds the guild wars 2 style "everyone is in the same party" mechanic, where it's only a net positive to attack the same monster as another player. No kill stealing, no parties necessary.

* I would like an upgrade that changes how level ranges work and scales players level up and down depending on zone, like in elder scrolls online. This allows players to go to any zone to level.

* The game needs completionist player personalities. Like a level 19 still going to do the new quest in a level 1 area because they need to complete all the quests.

[50 feral kobolds]

I just wanna say thanks for sharing this project with us. I've already had hours of fun

[Professor Goutenbourg]

Absolutely loving this so far. The level of creativity is through the roof. And it can only get better.

Are there any plans for NPC pathing? Like making a guard have a patrol route, or a quest NPC that wanders?

Also, with Quests, are there plans to have more customization? Instead of "See X person, *and return to me*" it would just end the quest there. or add multiple targets to a quest? Like kill 15 monsters, then kill elite boss X, kill elite boss Y, return to npc.

Keep up the great work!

[Mathusaleme]

The possibility of actually playing the game as a player or of having our friends connect to our server with our quests, our monsters, our scenery?

[Desdinova]

I don't know if it's been said, and I don't feel like reading five pages of comments, but support for game genres besides fantasy. Truth be told, it wouldn't take much more than tweaking art assets and color text to cover 90 percent of real life non-fantasy MMOs. (And the remainder of those games are out of scope for this one.)

[bblewittAG]

I would love an option to make an admin character where players can just socialise with you and the other
players gain like +5 boost to social and happiness for a limited time. This can open up another option where
you can release a gathering notice when the admin account will be online and where so that you can host
masses.
If you are given the chance to speak then have reactive options to certain words that are said and that
would maintain the players happiness with the game.

Another option is to have a playable character where you play the game yourself to immerse yourself in to
the world you have created and have the same options as players, such as picking a name, class and looks.
This can open a world of customisation to fix issues that players might have such as monster health, placement
and other various balancing to the world you create that might not be apparent when making the content.

[Sabeos]

It would be somehow nice, when there would be a way to make loot, that let the character change appearence, it would be nice to get an item editor where you can make a drop chance and give it to some monsters like white not so good items or even epic raidboss items :)

[cyberpunkninja]

I have a few ideas for the game. One is to have different dungeon entrances for different themes. For example, elegant dungeon entrances could look like the entry into Blackfathom Deeps, warlike would look like BRD, and so on. The second one i could think of at the time is Expansions. This could be like you pay for a new themed place for players to buy and explore. These themed places could look like Outland, Pandaria, Even the Shadowlands. This could also make an extra money source. I love how the game is turning out so far and hope these ideas will help make mmorpg tycoon 2 a better game.

[Mendoras]

Цитата допису VectorStorm:

Hi, everybody! I'm Trevor, the designer and programmer of MMORPG Tycoon 2. This has been kind of a labor of love for me for a *long* time, and now that we're only a bit over a day away from our Early Access launch, I'm really excited (and a little terrified) to finally be showing the game to a much larger group!

How about a new "state of the Alpha" update for 2022? :)

[Yawn]

I would love to see added :
Mission item pick ups - i.e. Keys, Magguffins, body parts like wolf hearts, Bear skulls etc from Elites)
Keys -used to unlock chests, doors, zones etc
Specified zones for Classes/Races to start in
Selecting an MMO type at the start of the game ( i.e. PVP, Social, etc) having more of an impact on the game play style - ie Selecting PVP focuses more on PVP related content at the start while other MMO types mirror their style)
Quest chains
Also hoping for Gear - Special Weapons, and Armor drops ( to Name yeah designing goes way too far maybe for MMORPG Tycoon 12 (heh) Gear to Name and select its quality rating ( Common, Rare, Epic etc)

[Padank]

decorating and finding ways to spend money to earn version points is a bit tedious at the moment. I'd like to see blueprints (steam workshop?) brought to the game to make it easier to build out more detailed areas while spending more money in the process.

[Rabig90]

This game is AMAZING keep bringing on the content!

[3AZYGAM3R]

This will be a good idea if you guys allow the players to have inventory and allow players collect item for quest. That will open so much more for the game.

[Sakasu Pierrot]

Please revamp the tech tree :( its annoying that i have to open a grid just to spam items to quote on quote level up, add a percentage research tinghy that progress from playing cause the more i added props the laggier it become