I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV lately, and combined with running into Matt McMuscles and Liam's playthrough of Castlevania 64, my strange mutant brain mushed the two together. And so I've been thinking about how I'd do a Castlevania MMO.
The 1999 Demon-Castle War is an obvious pick for setting, so I shall be completely ignoring it.
Instead I'd have it be a deliberately noncanon game that pulls heavily from main canon for aesthetics and lore, with some visual and lore nods to Lords of Shadow here and there for seasoning. Dracula has been brought back in secret, and not wasting the advantage of secrecy, built up his strength considerably before revealing himself, leaving him more powerful and ready than ever. Striking by surprise, he annihilates the Belmont clan in one fell swoop... or so he initially believed. But the Trunk of the Family Tree is not the whole bloodline, and countless descendants exist who bear the blood to some notable degree but not the name. Further, Simon Belmont and his young children survived the purge, but Simon, crippled by his previous fight with Dracula, cannot take the fight to the Count this time. His children are FAR too young to be entrusted with this task. And so he uses family records and archives to track down his other relatives, recruiting them into the fight against Dracula's forces. These are the player characters, and YOUR character will gradually become Simon's Heir over the course of the story — the name "Belmont" even becoming appended to your character name late in the story — until his children come of age and save the core bloodline.
Maybe Alucard turns up as a mentor character or something, alongside Saint Germaine (calling yours "an oddly hopeful history"), and the ghosts of past Belmonts (definitely Trevor and Christopher. Maybe throw in a Sonia. Enough to make it feel like "a version of the classic timeline" without being THE classic timeline), and representatives of other Belmont families like the Morris clan, the Renards, etc., along with maybe a Baldwin, Schneider, and a Fernandez Hunter, for nods to the various Gaiden games as well, even if their specific characters can't all appear. Renon from Castlevania 64 is a merchant (magically) in every safe haven, as ever because "
even in hell there is a need for money" and the glorious motherfucker needs no higher motivation.
Players get a potential arsenal much like Portrait of Ruin; all manners of weapons and magic depending on class, and a whip to use as a secondary (or main) weapon that also lends itself well to traversal of the game's open world. Hook onto gargoyles. Swing across chandeliers above ballrooms. Pull yourself onto balconies. Latch onto flying enemies and pull yourself to them... or them to you. Cross chasms. Grab environmental objects. Use momentum to launch yourself. And eventually, high-level traversal abilities could turn the entire European map into a giant traversal playground. Various alchemical arts and technological tools would also be available for certain classes, representing the late 17th century as the end of the Renaissance in Europe and the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.
But the Whip becomes the game's universal weapon system: every class gets a whip, but the whip behaves differently depending upon what that character actually is.
A warrior-type hunter might use it almost like a medieval flail:
WHAM.Big sweeping strikes, knockdowns, armor-breaking, stagger.
A rogue-type hunter could use a whip almost like a dueling weapon: rapid strikes, entanglements, disarms, pulling enemies toward you, yanking yourself toward terrain.
A mage could use it as a conduit.
You lash a demon with the whip, and then your spell travels through the weapon.
Or you crack it against the ground and create a magical glyph.
An alchemist might have a segmented whip with interchangeable heads, allowing different effects: burning oil, silvered tips, electrified coils, explosive charges, poison, holy water capsules, etc.
And the late 17th-century setting gives devs a glorious excuse to let the weapon design get
weird, because the game exists at that at that beautiful historical crossroads where medieval weaponry, Renaissance martial traditions, early firearms, alchemy and emerging scientific thought all coexist.
You could have hunters using flintlock pistols, wheellock weapons, muskets, rapiers, sabres, arming swords, polearms, greatswords, crossbows, alchemical bombs, experimental electrical devices, mechanical traps, clockwork devices, silver/holy/runemarked/enchanted ammunition, various occult apparatuses, etc.
I think you could make the classes feel less like traditional MMO classes and more like Hunter Traditions.
- The Vampire Hunter: classic physical combatant and Belmont Archetype. Whips, daggers, axes, Cross Boomerangs, all the greatest Belmont hits. Straightforward, brutally effective.
- The Arsenalist: weapon master. Can switch between an absurd number of secondary weapons and exploit enemy weaknesses.
- The Alchemist: bombs, transmutations, poisons, acids, oils, buffs, debuffs, experimental medicine. Basically Castlevania's answer to the engineer.
- The Occultist: elemental and ritual magic. Follows in the footsteps of the Belnades family traditions.
- The Ecclesiast: holy magic, relics, exorcism, defensive wards, healing. Importantly, not necessarily "Catholic Cleric" in the MMO sense. Different religious traditions could have different approaches to the supernatural.
- The Scholar: monster identification, exploiting weaknesses, battlefield preparation, magical analysis. Basically the person who actually read the bestiary.
- The Arcane Mechanist: early scientific experimentation. Firearms, clockwork, electricity, optical devices, weird proto-steampunk shit.
The open world would be a gigantic European region where Dracula's influence has begun spreading.
One province might be dealing with werewolves. Another with witches. Another with plague-ridden undead. Another with a vampire aristocracy. Another with Frankenstein-style experiments. Another with ancient ruins containing things that predate Dracula entirely.
And Dracula's forces don't necessarily control everything.
Some humans collaborate with him. Some are terrified. Some worship him. Some are profiteers. Some are actively fighting him. Some don't even believe he's real.
That gives you room for one of the most important things Castlevania occasionally does extremely well:
human horror. Because not everything needs to be "monster attacks village."
Sometimes the monster is the guy who decided that serving Dracula was preferable to starving. Sometimes it's the noble who offers Dracula his peasants in exchange for protection. Sometimes it's the priest who has lost his faith (or kept it in a really, REALLY bad way) and became convinced that humanity deserves damnation. Sometimes it's the schemer who thinks Dracula's return is the greatest opportunity in human history.
As Geralt of Rivia said:
"It's true that I carry two swords, one of iron and one of silver. But BOTH are for monsters."And then sometimes it's just a fucking vampire who lives in a castle and has a pipe organ. Which you can play. Because who am I to stop people from having fun?
Maybe Galamoth and the Time Reaper are messing with this timeline too. Or trying to. I actually like that idea — that Galamoth and his Time Reaper are probing THIS timeline as well, seeing if they can win HERE. And without the Belmonts, they're MUCH closer to winning here…
if they can convince you to get Dracula out of the way for them. Which will not be hard sell for Simon and the players because 1) Galamoth would not be doing that so obviously and 2) they're not as familiar with that threat and Dracula is RIGHT THERE.
So an Expansion endgame plot might actually involve the players RESURRECTING Dracula because he's frankly the less scary option and they need his power to help fight off a temporal incursion by Galamoth because they didn't triage threats appropriately earlier.
Honestly by making a noncanon timeline that borrows from everything Castlevania has been, you could crank out a lot of fun expansions. Galamoth, Actrise, Carmilla, Satan or Zobek from Lords of Shadow, etc. All those could be plausible Expansion Running Bad Guys.
Game could run for YEARS.
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