Castlevania Dungeon Forums
The Castlevania Dungeon Forums => General Castlevania Discussion => Topic started by: DingusBelmondo on March 20, 2011, 12:15:42 PM
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Now I know we all feel differently about Harmony of Despair, but most of the gripes concerned its lack of ingenuity and originality. Imagine if you will, a full fledged, newly constructed game. Imagine HoD + Simons Quest.
My concept would be a massively expansive 2D world with various towns where players could hang out, trade items, buy from shops ect. In between towns would be your typical woods and graveyards where destroying enemies would give you items and exp. Alternate paths would send you to different areas, not unlike OoE. So far, everything follows traditional castlevania format fairly closely. Mansions and smaller castles would be spread across the land, each one being similar to a level in HoD format wise. Each time you would enter one, you would come across gaggles of vampire hunters, spell casters, and monster slayers exploring different sections of the castle for plunder or exp. Alternatively, one could organize mobs to raid through castles. Certain castles would vary in enemy difficulty and strength, minimizing overcrowding, and balancing out difficulty for player levels.
Players could pick classes and customize characters, and pick alignment. Rivaling clans of vampire hunters could potentially duel it out in the middle of a cathedral in glorious 2D.
Certainly a game like this could be created and remain 90% accurate to classic castlevania, other than a few additional gameplay elements, few factors would change.
Oh also, once you got to a high enough level, you would get to enter the massive Dracula's Castle and smite his ass. you can fight him as many times as you want, but there would be few save points in his castle, and he would be exceptionally stronger each time you battled.
Now! Who wants to make it!?
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An interesting concept. Plus, it could be put between OoE and Bloodlines which is when neither the Belmonts nor Alucard are around to stop Dracula.
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World of Castlevania ?
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Somebody was doing just that. Making a multiplayer online cv fan game. It was called Casltevania online. It never did come into fruitation though :'(
-X
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(http://jamiedubs.com/fuckflickr/data/thumb/how%20about%20no%20bear.jpg)
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I don't think a multiplayer CV with Dracula could be a good idea. It would be nice to have some kind of Supernatural MMO where you can choose between various clans (Belmonts, Belnades, new ones etc) to hunt supernatural creatures and with a new evil foe replacing Dracula for the time and with a story barely tied with the canon yet interesting. CV could have a bigger mythos than the whole Dracula vs belmonts thing being that the most important of course, but side stories could work and lots of them. Just to name a few, the necromantic Wars, the battle of 1999 (not the main story but the tale of a common soldier trapped in the castle for example) the Galamoth myth (he surely has different enemies besides Dracula) Death's other works and that stuff. They could even create new characters and stories and tie them under Cv name to create a bigger lore. I mean, CV has the bigest enemy list ever created so why not venturing into new territories?
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Yeah a long while ago a dude named Anapan, a sprite artist named Sonic Reaper (still posts here, too) and a few other people were going to do just this.
In the end, the project started to fizzle out. Anapan eventually fell off of contact, and now it's basically thought of an awesome idea without the programming to back it up.
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you got this!!
Castlevania Online (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTTGkHvfLqw#)
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I don't think a multiplayer CV with Dracula could be a good idea. It would be nice to have some kind of Supernatural MMO where you can choose between various clans (Belmonts, Belnades, new ones etc) to hunt supernatural creatures and with a new evil foe replacing Dracula for the time and with a story barely tied with the canon yet interesting. CV could have a bigger mythos than the whole Dracula vs belmonts thing being that the most important of course, but side stories could work and lots of them. Just to name a few, the necromantic Wars, the battle of 1999 (not the main story but the tale of a common soldier trapped in the castle for example) the Galamoth myth (he surely has different enemies besides Dracula) Death's other works and that stuff. They could even create new characters and stories and tie them under Cv name to create a bigger lore. I mean, CV has the bigest enemy list ever created so why not venturing into new territories?
This.
Agreed, the idea of having various missions and several clans is very cool.
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you got this!!
Castlevania Online (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTTGkHvfLqw#)
lol
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I always thought that a CVO would be cool if it was based on PSO, but with the action elements being more complex
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Yeah a long while ago a dude named Anapan, a sprite artist named Sonic Reaper (still posts here, too) and a few other people were going to do just this.
In the end, the project started to fizzle out. Anapan eventually fell off of contact, and now it's basically thought of an awesome idea without the programming to back it up.
The last time I talked to Anapan he was wanting to become a boiler maker ??? He said the only realistic resort would be in hiring a programmer, since it was required immense time, skill and dedication to program an engine that could handle and run something as huge as CVO. How much realistically would it cost to hire a relatively skilled programmer to code something of this magnitude? I would be willing to start a "fund" of sorts, and have all donations go towards paying a programmer. At the time I was talking to Anapan he said something along the lines of $2000. That was like 6-7 years ago. Even if everyone donated $5 here and there, we'd still need 400 people to donate. And even $2000 I feel is on the small end of the pay scale for a task of this magnitude. It's too bad because the graphics are still there. Tons of original sprites were created for CVO, as well as other characters from the canon being expanded upon. All that is and was always required is a dedicated programmer ...
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You're probably looking at a team of programmers, working over multiple years. I'll low ball it as a 400k project.
That's pretty good for development costs, if you were trying to make a profit off of it. Too bad you never will be able to. This price is also assuming they did NOT have to buy and maintain servers to host the game for everyone.
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Eh, if the "quality" present in Mega Man Online is what we have to look forward to in MMO versions of classic franchises, I'll pass. If the action has to be slowed down that much, it's really not worth it, I say.
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You're probably looking at a team of programmers, working over multiple years. I'll low ball it as a 400k project.
That's pretty good for development costs, if you were trying to make a profit off of it. Too bad you never will be able to. This price is also assuming they did NOT have to buy and maintain servers to host the game for everyone.
Haha, seriously? I'm not talking about extreme genius programmers here, and the engine itself wouldn't be especially complicated (I mean just look at HoD, don't tell me THAT cost anywhere near 400k to program, or even create). As far as the servers are concerned, I would never go that route. The game actually wouldn't be one giant massive world with an unlimited number of players logged onto any active servers, but instead players would use their own computers as "servers", creating rooms and playing with friends or others to a certain capacity on number of players. They then would all have access to the entire game world, without having to worry about other players interfering with kills and treasure and so on from players that they aren't acquainted with or didn't invite.
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The difference between HD and what CVO was suppose to be is enormous. To host what CVO was suppose to be could be quite tricky without a server. There is a reason HD only allows four people on a single large screen. You not only have to think about the single room instance, but the loading and releasing of unused rooms, enemies, and other resources, as well as managing of all the events of a single frame, and synchronizing all the network traffic. Without an adequate setup, even having four player could get tricky for all of that. Not to mention you have to maintain all of that at full speed.
What HD of despair did was basically the cheap way out, and it shows. CVO was meant to be the proper way of doing it, but that's what costs.
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If that's the case, then put this dog to rest, cause it's definitely not realistic by any stretch of the imagination.
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I don't want to sound close minded, but that's not really what I look/yearn for from Castlevania as a fan, and if I was some kind of suit at Konami, I don't think I'd be intrigued by the idea of pursuing that.
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Serve the servants, oh no!
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yay! wall of text! ;D
he.. i toyed with a similar idea once... then HD came into being shattering whatever dream i had of a similar idea being actually taken seriously.
anyways. i belive for such project to fruction, it needs to be more of a spin-off than anything.
my idea was somewhat similar, but will still important differences.
for example, keeping belmonts, or Dracula would end being quite awkward if it's not implemented right. imagine a Belmont clan generation formed by.... 567 brothers and sisters? or Dracula getting raided and killed every.... 30 minutes?
my idea was more centering it trough the figure of the castle, rather than belmonts or dracula. you know, every 100 years dracula comes back only to be killed while exiting his coffin by leather-clad whip-wielders, banishing for other 100 years to come.
the point is banishing it to where? well *puts twilight zone voice* the chaoooooossssss dimenssioooooooon.
now lets think.. what would happen if actually people lived there? how do they got there? maybe the castle took with itself an unfortunate village? or whatever, reasons can be made up quite easily at this point. so.. how it's the chaos dimension? i pictured some quite similar to the limbo planescape on planescape mythos, as an chaothic everchanging madness where matter could only keep form as long as there is a will strong enough to shape it to.
therefore the center of the realm would be compromised by the castle. the castle is being keep stable by dracula's will who could either be dormant semy-aware of its surroundings. or just completely aware and plotting his next return, just not caring if one or two bugs creep inside the castle walls.
also , so we are in the chaos dimension where space don't bend to the same physical rules. the castle can easily be gigantic, almost infinite, containing every possible manifestation of it self on earth without having to obey puny geographical restraints of the normal world, meaning that endless dungeons could be emplaced within, and even villages and towns that have managed to blend in the castle.
outside the castle the world wouldn't be so expansive, but still can give the possibility for some creativity. for example, some of the villages that have been swallowed have managed to cling into existence with all their though and might. making not only the village endure in the sea of chaos, but the villagers willpower would also be capable of shaping their surroundings into areas more akin to what their memories retained of the real world. therefore, spawning forests, mountains, even seas, yet the furthest the landscape goes away the village-town, the more fractured, chaotic and surrealistic it turns.
keeping this theme wouldn't be hard to assume that different villages-towns-havens from different eras could been swallowed and "frozen in time" therefore being possible to have a medieval gothic rumanian town surrounded by forests and mountains, or a ruined victorian aged city, where humans inhabit a small ghetto inside the ruins of the town, while the rest of the city being an hostile place. a little like Ravenloft's realms.
now that we certainly have a world to explore that:
A)have some opportunities o put both classic era and metroidvania era aesthetics, as well as drawing from the general castlevania mythos.
B)don't conflict too much with any storyline at all, and feeling like a spin off.
C)kinda (just kinda) makes sense.
D)bringing something more original than another medieval fantasy setting to the tables of MMOs.
we can get a little into gameplay mechanics. so well.. its an online game, it should be an online CASTLEVANIA game, so what could define a castlevania gameplay? at least for me, i feel than action platforming and exploration are what the games tend to be more about. also 2D is quite strong within the series. so it wouldn't be too wild to try a 2D world with plenty of cooperative platforming and explorations besides lots of monsters to kill and treasures to loot. classes should be kept simple yet original, as certainly fighters, clerics, mages and rouges wouldn't fit as well as demon slayers, monster hunters, alchemists, devil forgemasters, priests, witches and thieves (or pirates! yarr!). and why such humans would like to venture outside this dark devillish world? well, maybe the want to steal artifacts from the castle that help their villages survive, or maybe want to learn more about the demons and monsters and their powers? or just carrying the light of holiness to the deepest pits of hell? or find a way to go back to the real world? etc.
obviously this isn't a serious idea... since is more joyful wondering than actually a project but just out of curiosity, let me know if you would be interested/ feel that this would be a not so wrong way of doing it :p