Topic: Castlevania Massive Multiplayer Online (concept)

[DingusBelmondo]

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!?

[darkwzrd4]

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.

[Chernabogue]

World of Castlevania ?

[X]

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

[Maedhros]

[Ahasverus]

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?

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

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.

[Oralox]

you got this!!
Castlevania Online

[Chernabogue]

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.

[darkwzrd4]

you got this!!
Castlevania Online

lol

[Vampire Killer]

I always thought that a CVO would be cool if it was based on PSO, but with the action elements being more complex

[Sonic_Reaper]

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 ...

[uzo]

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.

[Munchy]

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.

[Sonic_Reaper]

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.