Game

These are the design documents of a perma-death FPS-style fantasy MMORPG.

Vision and mechanics

The game is intended to be an open-world sandbox where players have to cooperate in a meaningful way. Through perma-death mechanics, the only thing that can be accumulated long-term are resources. As such, trade and cooperation is vital. The characters are highly customisable, and custom spells and attribute builds allow for extreme specialisation, which is needed for a functioning economy.

Characters can develop to take many specific roles, even non-combatant roles. The more specialised a character is, the more he needs to cooperate with others, as they will have weaknesses that make them unsuited for other tasks. Non-combat characters can become much better at manufacturing than combat characters. These characters gain levels through trading instead of fighting, as money can be converted into experience points.

Instead of regular MMORPGs, grinding a high level for your own characters is not the goal, instead, cooperation and collective success is the goal. Players need to cooperate to form settlements, which need to be defended against monster attacks. In order to bring about a stable economy, players need to cooperate to fortify their settlements and to allow crafting characters to achieve high levels to grant access to better equipment. As characters are destroyed on death, there can be a huge turnover of characters, making it challenging to maintain a high overall level in a settlement.

Different regions of the world contain enemies of different strength, so settlements start out in weak regions initially. Higher-levelled characters become more and more expensive to maintain so once settlements house stronger players, they cannot flourish if they don't expand to more dangerous regions, as the resources will no longer suffice for everyone.