Would you be interested in a classic experience?

[patapo]

Hey I'm new here, it's my first post even. I'm nearly 34 years old and have played Tibia since it first released. In 1997 my dad helped me download the game, log in, and we were met with monsters and pks swarming Thais. My poor level 1 char died over and over again until I finally escaped after a few days of trying. If you were around during those times you know it was utter chaos, it was also full of really fun and memorable RPG moments. If you haven't already I highly suggest looking up the latest Tibia history videos on YouTube to see what was going on during those early days.

I know I'm rambling on like an old man, but those memories from Tibia's first versions are so important to me. I even remember version 6 when I got catfished into dating my first "girlfriend" who scammed me out of 600 gold! So it begs the question, would you be interested in a classic experience like older iterations of the game?

I don't mean logging in and immediately dying in a random deathmatch, I also don't mean re-playing tibia 7.4-9 using the real map, doing the same grind you've done 1000 times, not even bothering to fill map files because you can download them or autofill them on certain clients. I mean Tibia, but full of mystery and lore that have meaning. Going through a library and finding books that hook you onto a quest that couldn't be found without a clever mind. Not just mindlessly grinding out levels so you're the highest level on the server, but actually having to think about a logical approach to a single monster fight that nobody could do alone. A social experience that isn't just about domination, the next dopamine hit from a rare item, or watching numbers go up while the screen flashes from spells, runes, and monster abilities, but a truly difficult existence in an unforgiving world. I truly miss needing a group of people to take down monsters, or rushing a room with eight people to see if you can scope out what's in the room while six of them die to FINALLY discover the secret that has been eluding your group. Or even hunkering down, training skills, finding creative ways to finally kill the monster that's guarding the secret between you and an entire new continent to explore first.

Again, I know I'm rambling, but when I found this site off of a random reddit post it inspired me to want to learn how to make that Tibia. So I'm here mainly looking to see if that Tibia even interests people anymore, and if it does, what version of Tibia do you think would be the best to capture that feeling? I'd love to use contemporary maps to illustrate a beautiful world, not that 7.4 isn't nostalgic, but I'd like to create that 7.4 feeling with more beauty.

If you're still reading, here are some ideas that I had that were inspired by classic tibia as well as Rookgaard.
Experience: I'd want this to be as low as possible, I'd even want it to be less than 1x. I like the idea of shared xp here giving the group more than the standard xp to incentivize playing with friends or even making some friends to play with. I'd also want to boost monster toughness, while nerfing player stats/skills/magic/etc. to make killing those monsters more of an achievement rather than the entire purpose of logging in.

Loot: This would also be lower than 1x and gold would be removed from the game. Instead items that drop would be valuable and have meaning and earning items through achievement outweighs simply buying them after mindlessly grinding for hours or just grabbing your credit card. Again, the purpose of logging in would be about trying to get a group and explore the world rather than finding the best spawn to get gold/items. As well, the world would have a handful of one-of-a-kind items that the truly dedicated and intelligent can only find. Of course the rest of the player base would be able to find rare and enticing items too.

Solo Play: Obviously you can never rely on the longevity of a server, having played hundreds of OTs myself you log in one day and it's full of a thousand players, then a week later it's a ghost town after everyone's already reached max level/items/house/etc. The server I want to craft would be balanced so a person playing solo could potentially reach the highest peak alone, but it should be tough, and you should have some loss along the way.

Mysteriando: Remember learning the orc language through books to buy stuff from the blind orc in Rookgaard? What about hearing about the Nightmare Knights? Or the explorer who prompted the smithing of The Magic Longsword? And what about all the mysteries that are still unsolved in Tibia? I want to create a world akin to CipSoft's original philosophy. Epic quests that don't have a NPC pointing you in every direction, mysteries that span the globe and can only be solved by the brightest and bravest. Entire cities full of civilizations with their own languages that can only be reached by the most daring adventurers. A massive new world full of mystery to explore.

PvP: As much as I hate dying to dominando guilds, I hate it as much to say at least they are creating content. And a world should be full of danger, including the people around you. It should be just as important to make friends as it is to make enemies, and the alliances and friendships that come from the drama can last entire lifetimes. It's a controversial, but I would want to allow PvP starting at level 1. Mind, attempting to kill a player at level 1 with no items, skills, runes, potions, etc. would be very tough, and the bright white skull floating next to your name might earn you more enemies than you intended.

Vocations: This might be just as controversial, but the only way to obtain a vocation would be through a rigorous quest. My idea is that your time spent without a vocation might be just as long, if not longer, than your time employed by one of the four groups. A knight may find themself on a quest to train each of their skills to a certain threshold, a druid to find and commune with a great spirit, a paladin to slay a great beast and return with it's trophy, or a wizard to delve deep into a lost library to find the lost secrets of the world. Mind, each requirment and step to earning a vocation may be impossible without the help of others, and only the truly dedicated would be able to see their quest through.

Magic: The final controversy before I got to bed would be that this world would be in a low magic age. Choosing the route of magic would almost not make sense with how difficult it would be. Without a word magic, which seemed so prevalent in the world's youth, is now only a whisper. Where the elements once danced freely in the open they must now be found and begged to come out of hiding. And the real controversy here is that since magic is so hard to find, not everyone that wants to become a druid or sorcerer will. It's the coldest, lonliest, and most difficult journey of the four vocations and one can't find magic without the other.\

Cash Shop/Premium/QoL: Non existent. The world will have no barriers for entry, but also no real QoL either. If you want to get somewhere you'll have to walk, or if I figure out a way to program/get someone interested in programming for fun (since no income) potentially earning a license to be flown, or earning the right to use the merchant ships that (very rarely) dot the land. Of course creative forms of travel are welcome and open to discussion, but the world should feel massive and take time to traverse. If at all it came down to it the bare minimum that would be accepted in the way of renumeration would be for server costs/paying for staff, but like wikipedia it would be completely non-profit with all intents of excess going into further development or translucently being donated to charity with no smoke nor mirrors, all out in the open with proof.

There's a lot more, but I'm getting tired and to end I just want to say I love this game and highly doubt this will even get read since it's an entire book, but I'm excited to hear any and all opinions/ideas/criticisms/etc. and even if it only ends up being a discussion I would be so happy just to chat with fans of the game and get flamed for my bad ideas. Thanks for reading if you got this far! Have a good one.

 

[Terotrificy]

I surely would play something like that.

My only advice: Create a very small map with a lot of mysteries and expand it with quality content from time to time according to the players population. At the very end, what you want are player interactions, the bigger the map, the less interactions.
And in my opinion, the size of the map should be dynamic according to the player population (yeah, eventually crop it if player population falls without a recovery)

 

[Wazzup88]

The idea sounds good, and i've been building a map for a somewhat similar experience for several years. Things like this take time, and experience in coding, and money to host. Unforunately for those reasons I think most very cool ideas never come to reality. I built my map for a smaller player base as its mostly RPG style, which seems to be less popular these days. Tibia pvp was cool many years ago, but now games like league of legends or FPS like halo, counter strike etc are much better for pvp and proving skill IMO.

I think you should try to move forward with your dream, I'm an old school player myself and I will continue to work on my project when I get a chance and hopefully some day can release something fun.

 

[Bloodbringer]

I would be interested in such experience, and I bet many people would.

However, spitting out ideas and concepts the way you want it to be is much easier said than done, and I am not talking about resources. Even if you had infinite resources to build such server it would still be a VERY HARD design challenge to achieve what you want, because players will always follow the "least resistance path" (a.k.a meta-game) which most of the time is not the path you "wanted" players to follow, leading to your frustration.

Example: you make GREAT mysteriando quests.
Scenario 1: the rewards for those are very good, and soon they will be easily spoiled and nobody will care about mysteriando but rather only about the reward and looking for a guide on how to do it.
Scenario 2: the rewards are bad, and nobody will care about those as its not worth time spending solving it as you can progress in the game much easier/faster through other manners.
End result is you don't get what you want, because players are not what you hope them to be.

The challenge is: how do you design a game that you can "enforce" a meta-game the way you want the game to be played, while giving enough freedom so it doesn't feel you only have one option to follow. This is a very tough challenge!

Also, there's an underlying problem with any game that belongs to the mmorpg genre: grinding! You argue you don't want people to just go for the max possible xp/h mindlessly grinding, but mmorpgs ultimately rely on repeatability. Unless you are suggesting me some procedural generated map that will provide an infinite world with infinite news challenges, quests, etc, you will end up in a meta-game that relies on repeating your content multiple times to achieve something, this is the core of any mmorpg. Designing a mmorpg game that avoids that mindless and stupid grind is very difficult!

It is not impossible though, but it will require a lot of brainstorming and thinking on the design of the game even before you think about to start developing it!

There's one design concept that I've always dreamed about, which is related to your idea of shared xp: imagine a game where there's no splitting of XP, but rather everyone in a party will always get the FULL XP for the monsters killed by the party. This would be a complete revamp on the meta-game of how Tibia usually works, because strangers that stumble each other in a spawn would feel more motivated to SHARE the spawn (as its so much more worth it, killing faster and getting the same reward as you'd get killing solo), rather than COMPETE for the spawn.
Of course you could come up with other ways to counter-measure that so its balanced, as you said it yourself: you could have way more challenging creatures that requires big teams to be killed, or you could have a mechanism that makes creatures stronger the more people there are in the dungeon, or anything else, the sky is the limit.

 

[Nemphis]

Maybe the server could be somewhat like wow does it where a player can enter pvp mode and gain 10% more xp, or if they dont want any pvp they get no xp buff