Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General General Question out MMO Turn based game like this

Hello all, I was hoping that maybe the developer could answer this question, but is their a reason why a game like this could not be made as a massive multi-player game?

People would control 1 character, but could group up and move as normal. When anyone enters a hostile situation they enter the turn based system.

Perhaps people that enter the same area as another person or group go into turn based mode. They do not have to fight.

Just curious why there are not large scale turn based MMO's.

As far as waiting on people, there should be a global timer of 15 to 30 seconds, so people need to make their turn and then the game moves on, with or without them.

People could join an open ended combat, say against a dragon, to help if the game is strictly PvE.

I do not know enough about game design to know whether this would work or not.

I just do not like the twitch based games out there today.

Cheers!

Well, turn based strategy is a pretty niche market. Mmos cost lots of money to make, so if you're gonna make an mmo you generally want it to appeal to a wide demographic, so it will make all that money back.

There's also the problem of massive combat, where you have 40+ individual units fighting at once. That means you take a turn, then 40 other people take a turn, then you take a turn. That's a huge wait time that most people wouldn't tolerate.

Mmos tend to have lots of enemies running around, but the enemy AI tends to be pretty simple. Run towards hero, attack, use abilities. The AI for a turn-based strat game like Divinity needs to be much more complicated. Running lots of complicated AI at the same time would be very hard on the server.

That said, there's no reason you COULDN'T make a Divinity OS style mmo. In fact, you can technically do that with Divinity OS with mods. People have already made mods that
-create huge scale battles
-allow 4 different people to play together at the same time
So just combine those and you have a theoretical mmo.

The netcode is already buggy, though, so I doubt it would run particularly well.

MMO will need to have huge budget if you asked me. Larian is not a huge team and not really a rich dev. It's hard to compete in MMO as well as now the big thing is the MOBA and no longer MMO. WoW has dropped half it's subscribers in a short time from 12M to 6.8M if not mistaken and it's probably still dropping as we speak.

I would hope Larian to work on something else than MMO seriously.