An idea of a subsystem

[Qunox]

Well i don't know if this is the right place but here it goes:
I don't know if any of you have played the Playstation 2 game: "Phantom Brave".
The reason I'm bringing that game up is because I'm really intrested in it's subsystem.
In Phantom Brave you can infuse "Mana" into your weapon thus unleashing it's inner strenght(unlocking pasive and active abilities granted when equiped with that weapon). When you fight with that weapon equiped it gains Mana.
Each weapon has a list of abilities you can unlock with a price:
Example:
Rusty Dagger: Skillname/Mana cost/Description
Dubble Thrust - 100 ( Attack Twice: Active )
Quickness - 50 ( Increase Initative by 5: Passive)
Bleed - 150 ( Deals medium damage with an chance to inflict Bleed: Active )
ect ect

Also you can fuse two weapons with eachother to:
Increase the Mana(Adding their Mana pools together)
Merge Skills from the two weapons.

I really like this concept and i figured i might want to use it for my Web RPG( It's devoloped with JavaScript(Showing the Information), AJAX(Comunication) and PHP(Backend).
I recently watched "Fable 3 Inside" and Peter said something intressting about their upcomming weapon system. He asked us "How that evil weapon gets evil?, Well by using it for evil" it inspired me to add a twist to Phantom Braves Subsystem. What if you add a Limit for each weapon? Say you can Maximum Infuse 500 Mana into a Elven Dagger? This way you need to think tacticaly about wich Skills to awaken. Maybe you can somehow make it a ultimate weapon, you can like extend that limit BUT their is a chance the weapon will A) Breake or B) Lose all it skills and mana. These are just ideas and I'm just toying around with it.

But in a web game would this system be fun? What are your opinions?

[KunoNoOni]

Wow, sounds really cool! Kinda reminds me of a MUD I used to play along time ago. They had a system sort of like that were you need to meld your weapon to make it stronger. I really liked that idea and believe that other would like it to.


-KunoNoOni

[Jackolantern]

It definitely could be an interesting system. It sort of reminds me of the materia system in FFVII as well. There is one major design decision to make with this type of system though: Weapon collection would likely take a bit more of a backseat in a system like this. That was the reasoning behind the materia system in FFVII. Cloud's trademark huge sword could not easily be traded out by other weapons. But if he can only have one sword through the whole game, how do you make that customizable and interesting? The answer was to allow the sword to "level up" and become customized itself, and it worked out very well. Also, just be careful how much work you are loading up for yourself when you design the system. For example, say you want to have at least 3 unique abilities on each weapon. If you have 40 weapons, that is at least 120 weapon skills you will have to design and program, which could be a lot of work. So as long as your game does not center around gear collecting and you keep your work load realistic, this could work out well and be very fun.

[Qunox]

Well obviously the game needs to be fairly centred around the Mana Crafting. How to balance it with Classes( To add spice ). Why aren't most web games more like MMORPG's?

With JavaScript for displaying data.
AJAX to retrieve the Data ( The sensitive data )
PHP to query, calculate and doing the other back end stuff.
HTML and CSS ( For style and well...HTML stuff...)

Well I was thinking about around 10 -15 different weapons in the beginning with around 10 different Skills. ( That's around 100 to 150 skills. Of course I could reuse some of them so I can reduce the different skills ). I want to design my Webgame to be more classic MMORPG like. Of course this means a LOT more work than usual. Designing the Battle system would take ages and would be the hardest part.

Still I think this subsystem would add some extra fun, hunting for items, crafting and PvPing.
Now I might add an upgrading system too to this subsystem, or to make it less focused on the weapon.... maybe you can infuse Mana into it thus rolling randomly for bonuses? How about that?
The upgrading system would be to +10, and would raise the damage of the weapon.
1-3: 100%
4-5: 60%
5-7: 40%
8: 15%
9: 10%
10: 5%

Of course i would not do this project alone but right now I'm just planing the Engine itself and what i want in it.

[Callan S.]

For me? If it's a play to win game, then it doesn't sound fun - it sounds like collecting the points isn't a matter of skill.

And in terms of a game revolving around story, upgrading a weapon isn't story - or atleast it's not story in the sense that the vast majority of books and movies ever made have story.

That evil weapon sounds closer to story, as it's a condensation of evil acts and so a reflection of the story so far.

There's supposed to be a third type of play, I'll grant. But I don't think this is fun, by itself, in terms of story or play to win.