Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
Mystery Man in 3D

An MMO version of DOOM

Recommended Posts

Is it possible? I was playing ZDaemon and Zandronum craving online multiplayer, and it just dawned on my that an MMO rendition of Classic DOOM would be stellar...

If this has been discussed before though, I apologize.

Share this post


Link to post

What, like a Planetside-type thing, where each map / round represents a node on a larger, world map? Sounds interesting. Kind of like an ongoing tournament.

Or do you mean levelling up attributes and perks and stuff, like an RPG? That sounds more like COD... Which is fun... but, I dunno...

Share this post


Link to post

I meant the levelling-up, but they both sound fun...

EDIT:
My local buddy looked at your post and said he likes the planetside idea. Whatever way it goes though, I'm sure it'll be exciting...

Share this post


Link to post

I'd be all over a multiplayer persistent world pitting you against monsters with Doomish gameplay.

Share this post


Link to post

That would actually be pretty cool. Like your character starts off on Mars where he levels up and kills some demons gaining him exp points. Then the player can travel to phobos and deimos where large open spaces are inbound for the player to level up, gear up, get exp points, meet some friends along the way, travel the landscapes, screw around, ect. Then he can travel to different planets where the hellspawn have invaded. Maybe even Earth?

That would be an awesome MMO if done right.

Share this post


Link to post
Netherstorm said:

That would actually be pretty cool. Like your character starts off on Mars where he levels up and kills some demons gaining him exp points. Then the player can travel to phobos and deimos where large open spaces are inbound for the player to level up, gear up, get exp points, meet some friends along the way, travel the landscapes, screw around, ect. Then he can travel to different planets where the hellspawn have invaded. Maybe even Earth?

That would be an awesome MMO if done right.


Exactly!

Share this post


Link to post
Phml said:

I'd be all over a multiplayer persistent world pitting you against monsters with Doomish gameplay.


I don't think this could be conceivably done in any Doom engine without obscene amounts of engine nodding, but I would love to see the concept as described. MMO Borderlands with projectiles and player speed and demons, anyone?

That's a lot of "and"s.

Share this post


Link to post

N00b, here:

I think it could, conceivably, be accomplished with some server hyperlinking (like you get in Unreal and Quake 2 - where server commands can transport you between servers). Seems like the hardest part would be the tracking and keeping of player stats.

Share this post


Link to post

Projects like this get shut down quick if there's not enough demand. There was a diablo-like fangame for Doom and it hasn't had any updates in like 3 years. Looked pretty good.

Share this post


Link to post

I think an MMO like this is not feasible. The technical hurdles can be overcome, but ultimately you need LOTS of people to play it every week, several hundred at least, and the numbers are just not there.

Share this post


Link to post

I have a Doom RPG mod where you have RPG like stats etc.
Combine this with a Doom-like MMORPG hub area with quests like Strife has and you have Doom MMORPG.

Share this post


Link to post

Experience levels and upgrades, I can deal with. Just please, if anybody actually makes this, promise me you won't just litter maps with random unarmed Marines that give you quests like "Go kill five Imps then return here."

Share this post


Link to post

Funnily enough, I tried an element of DoomScape months ago. May have posted it already on Doomworld, but I never bothered further than the starting room. It was a pretty appalling job.



Besides, that particular activity is to get through a dungeon completing various puzzles / fights along the way. Every room is pretty much a square - though some other shapes do exist - and it's all orthogonal. In fact, given a random map generator is used, something like this could be done with SLIGE then modified perhaps.


Anyway, an MMORPG doom is an interesting concept and potentially could be really cool, but unlikely to ever surface, sadly.

Share this post


Link to post

I think if someone used SLIGE's ability to randomly generate rooms, you could create a randomly-generated dungeon crawler, MMO or not.

Share this post


Link to post

UAC Scientist: "Demons have invaded our base, and now my research has been scattered all over the City District. Could you please gather my files on the prototype BFG 8000? There's about 5 pages to collect in documentation."

Sergeant: "Atten-hut marine! Those flying red freakfaces have invaded Sector 6! Go kill me 10 Cacodemons and I'll give you this rocket launcher!"

Doom in a MMO setting.....it'd have to be done very carefully. And contain classic Doom gameplay. And have Bloodlines-esque storytelling. And contain easter eggs to Doom mappers. And SteveD would have to be an end boss.

Otherwise no.

Share this post


Link to post
WildWeasel said:

Experience levels and upgrades, I can deal with. Just please, if anybody actually makes this, promise me you won't just litter maps with random unarmed Marines that give you quests like "Go kill five Imps then return here."


You have to find a spaceport which is hidden behind a crate, kill ridiculous numbers of Icon of Sin which guard a Rocket Launcher and bring the Rocket Launcher to me. I will reward you with a Rocket Launcher.

Share this post


Link to post
Jimi said:

I will reward you with a Rocket Launcher.


A joking statement about MMO's, but the idea of established Doom community members as NPC's in the game doesn't sound bad to me.

As Andrewj said, the technical side can be dealt with (either using a new engine entirely, or a modified GZDoom may do the job), and if players are needed, just do what all the others do. Just advertise it like everywhere. Seems to work for most of them.

Share this post


Link to post
Eris Falling said:

A joking statement about MMO's, but the idea of established Doom community members as NPC's in the game doesn't sound bad to me.

Hell Bent as the "Game world Bellend." SavageCorona with thousands upon thousands of text when he gives you a quest. Vile as a level 80 class who destroys anything in his path with the speed of a cheetah on crack. I think it could work you know, those are just examples though.

Share this post


Link to post

Oh shit, you've got me started...Good job :P

*Before I start on this unnecessarily wrong post, I should reiterate that I played RuneScape for 4 years before joining Doomworld. Around 2010-2011, the game was at it's best ever. Hence some parts of this post may rip off that game. These parts are marked with an asterisk.
Also, I'm assuming that an Earth-based environment* would be used for this.

Vile, along with other prominent speedrunners (Kimo, Rizera, tatsurd, etc) could be combat masters, who assign tasks* to kill say..128 imps. This sort of task would be assigned by the low-level master (Altima? Simply because of his through LP's, it seems fitting) and the player would go to find some sort of colony that is composed of just imps. Obviously, 128 imps roaming around at the same time is a bit much for something on such a massive scale, so the -respawn parameter would be applied to the game by default. There's little ammo and health around the colony, so you should take what you need* from a special UAC supply crate near the combat tutor. Don't take too much, because there is a cost for these items you need, DoomCoins.

But what if you're a higher level and 128 imps is a very easy task? Simple, let's include some variants*, such as the Dark Imp, the Stone Imp, the Soul Harvester, and their fast variants, of course. That may be more of a challenge.

But what's to stop you even on a harder task such as 300 Nightmare Cacodemons just unveiling the BFG and ploughing through them? Just make the BFG9000 and the ammo for it extremely expensive, making it very inefficient to spam BFG cells all over the place.

Trouble is, there's only so many monster variants and weapons that you can use. So would it be bad if there were a clash of realms, where all Doom engine games came together and united under this MMORPG? What would be the problem in killing an Iron Lich with the chaingun? Or shocking a spectre with the Necromancer Gauntlets?
You could even go one further with this idea and include Doomguy, Corvus, Strifeguy etc as recurring adventurers* who tie in with the background story that the game follows. Unlike what ShitScape did last month though, for christ's sake don't kill off one of the gods, especially the one that created the world that you inhabit (Romero). Remember them as the emperors. Their puppets are the parliament (DW moderators), where each member of Parliament rules a certain land*. For example, the marshlands where it always rains? That's ruled over by...guess.
You could also have a rebel member of parliament, who seceded, and unleashed a mass of demons in a region of the world.* Totally not Phoebus.
D'Sparil is probably a recurring very high-level villain (though I don't know much about the other Doom engine games, so I can't say much about this).
I think there should be minor elements involved to break away from the combat, as with any MMORPG. So I give you some sort of construction process*, with some prominent level designers as NPCs relating to it.
Stealing away from Scape again, one cool addition they made in the later days was a large number of musicians dotted throughout the map. When you sat by them, your health would regenerate quicker (though still slowly), as well as a very quick regeneration of run energy (not really applicable here). Still, it would be cool if this could be used to the player's advantage, as well as adding Jimmy, Stewboy, PRIMEVAL et al. as NPCs.
I imagine the boss monsters, such as the Cyberdemon, would have to be greatly toughened up, so they can present a great challenge to even groups of players, and there would probably only be one, maybe 2 throughout the entire game.


I should leave this post here, because I can go on for a very long time.
I loved RuneScape in its heyday, and while I'm not saying Doom MMORPG should be an RS clone, taking the right elements from it (and other MMORPGs of course) and executing them really well is - in my imagination - one of the best things ever created. The only problem I can see that would really hinder it is finding people to work on such a thing, then people maintaining it, and most of all, the legal issues involved with trying to obtain permission for something like this. It's a shame, it looks so good in my head. You could even update the graphics a fair bit without ruining the Doom look IMO.

Anyway, because of the depth of this post, just remember this Springy, and this goes for all other people on these boards. Don't get me started. Even if you don't know that what you're posting will get me started.

Share this post


Link to post

Many large survival maps on ZDaemon already border pretty close on this. No need for a dedicated game, IMO, unless you want persistent in-world stats or something.

Share this post


Link to post

I remember I had a very similar idea many years ago, inspired by hearing tales of Arioch and others' exploits in Diablo 2 - A Doom roguelike/dungeon-crawler. There would be a central server on which you made an account, and when you connected you would appear in a central hub from which you could choose to fight your way, either solo or cooperatively, through various challenges, which would be hosted either on the hub or on spoke servers. Each challenge would consist of a series of levels that you had to fight through, gradually getting harder as they progressed, with more/tougher enemies. The challenges would vary in difficulty, with some being gentle Episode 1 style strolls, while others Hell Revealed style slaughter.

Gameplay would stick close to regular Doom: Just lots of bloody combat, with no NPCs, spells, mining, crafting, jumping, flying, etc. But there would be limited stat-building. Killing enemies would gain you XP, which would gradually translate into higher maximum health, armour and ammo load capacity. It'd also be possible to find exceptional weapons on tougher challenges. Nothing ridiculous, just somewhat upgraded versions of the regular weapons, enough to give you a chance on the more impossible levels.

The key thing would be that all gameplay would be "hardcore", e.g. character death would be permanent. No matter how long you spent building up a character, or what stats you'd built up, if you blundered into a Cyberdemon's rocket one day and got taken out, too bad. You'd have to start again from scratch with a new character. Imagine the tension of fighting for your life when you stand to lose months of XP gains if you make a mistake.

I still think it would be fun. You'd have some persistent "MMO" style elements, but it would stick close to the classic Doom experience. You wouldn't need hundreds of people playing to make it fun, you could still have a blast playing solo. It would reward people who invested more time while still being accessible for more casual players. And it would be a great way of showcasing a curated set of good levels.

Come on, surely there's a C/C++ genius reading this who wants to make my dream a reality? :-)

Share this post


Link to post

I think it could work.

I mean, if it is able to build a player-base that plays it regularly.

There definitely are enough Doom mods which are played online often to prove that it is possible to maintain a playerbase. (Such as Mega Man 8Bit DM, Doom Center, Ghouls Vs. Humans)

Anyway, I think it should be designed in a way where it should be optimally played from 2-15 players at once.

Share this post


Link to post

I've always thought Doom with RPG elements would be interesting, and also wondered what an MMO version would be like. It'd be fun to try and make that a reality. I heard about the Diablo Doom project some years ago, completely forgot about that until I read it mentioned in this thread, guess I'll have to check their site out again.

There are technical challenges, I think ZDoom has a peer to peer networking model and not client/server, but I could be wrong. You'd definitely need client/server to implement some type of MMO, as well as ways of storing the data persistently.

For random map generation, OBLIGE is very nice. I liked SLIGE too but the author abandoned the project some years ago I think.

Monster AI would need to be redone to better match MMO gameplay (things like hate lists, pack behavior, etc). As an aside, for my own amusement I've been shamelessly hacking the zdoom source code to implement hate lists, minions, "adds" and other MMO type agro behavior, and then watching the results when monsters infight. Pretty entertaining watching a horde of cacodemons agro on a revenant whose missile went astray and hit one of them.

Share this post


Link to post

As I said, log into any ZDaemon server playing any of these large, crazy, chaotic Coop/Survival megawads when more than 5 people are logged on, and it comes pretty close to what you could expect from a Doom MMO. The only thing missing is inventory/stats/character development missing (though you could say, those that DON'T die on a map and carry over weapons and ammo onto the next are "at a higher level" and "have cooler items" than newly logged-in/previously dead players).

Share this post


Link to post

^ There is a very cool ZDaemon mod made by French doomers where you collect money by killing monsters and after each level you visit the shop where you can buy weapons, ammo, health items, portable items like heretic bombs, etc. It is really well made, with many new weapons, an ability to sell items and to give money to your friends, etc. It was a big hit this year and I believe there are still some servers up (look for BaseQ.fr survival servers).

Share this post


Link to post

A Doom MMO? Any technical issues aside, no. I could perhaps see a Doom 3 MMO being a thing, but turning plain Doom into an MMO would conflict with the original on so many levels unless it was purely PVP:

-Doomguy can, technically, take out cyberdemons with nothing but a pistol. He can even destroy whole armies of Hell just on his own. Any kind of a progression system added to it would totally screw this focal point of these games.

-The whole story of Doom is, multiplayer aside, that a single person can save the entire mortal world. Turning this into an MMO story would, again, ruin the whole point.

The only thing that would make sense to me, besides a huge doomguy vs. doomguy FFA is a multiplayer mode where on first team you have lots of doomguys and the other team has all human players as advanced demons (from caco to cyber?) and then a huge number of AI-controlled imps, zombies and demons. With large enough maps it could be turned into a mildly objective based PVP with, say, 128 players on each side (and hundreds of AI-controlled weak demons).

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×