There’s a mini flood of discussion on why we haven’t seen a breakthrough cyberpunk MMO yet. It started with a yin and yang provided by Brian “Psychochild” Green, and was continued by Ysharros at The Stylish Corpse. Ysharros’ post was more of a “stream of consciousness” post, but as I was reading it, I recognized many of the ideas that I wanted to cover in my Metapalce project MetaPunk, way back when. Seeing as how that project is deader then a…something that’s dead, I figured it would be OK to lay it all out in no particular order.

Beware: Incoming tl;dr.

Defining Cyberpunk

A lot of people seem to like the idea of a Shadowrun MMO, saying that it would be a cool cyberpunk setting. While this setting has elements of CP, it is not cyberpunk. If you were to remove all of the orcs and elves and magic, then yeah, it would fit the bill, but it can’t make up it’s mind between high fantasy or high technology.

CP is about humanity, which negates most of the cast of Shadowrun. It’s about how humanity copes with it’s own progress becoming the proverbial cart before the horse. It’s also about how we are willing to cede control to others (mega-corporations) while at the same time fighting to regain that control. In cyberpunk, the more things slip from our grasp, the harder we fight to regain them.

“Classic” CP is embodied in classics like Neuromancer and the movie Blade Runner: dark, dystopian societies that share several features:

• Urbanization: Most of the world’s population has moved to the cities
• Decimation: War or environmental destruction has made resources more scarce and has forced people into the cities
• Corporations supplanting governments: In CP, central governments are ineffective, having been superseded by corporations with their own standing armies.
• The divide between the haves and have nots: Class warfare has become institutionalized, as the rich secure themselves in glass and steel high-rises, while the rest of the population eke out a life on the dangerous streets.
• Cybernetics: Obviously, humanity has recognized the benefits of replacing their body parts with machinery, either to replace lost or injured parts, or voluntarily to enhance performance.
• Cyberspace: Early cyberpunk featured a virtual world of networked computers that people could “jack into”. Cyberspace is usually presented as an alternate reality, allowing people to actually exist in a world where the limits are dictated by a programmer’s ability.

There’s a lot of other aspects that overlap, like constant violence, drugs and the general degradation of morality. It’s all about the failings of society, the new wild west, or the regression of the human condition.

But also check out Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed! These CP gems feature a lot of traditional CP memes, but take place in a renaissance society of green spaces and law and order. Not every CP setting has to be doom and gloom…although it’s more fun that way!

So what kind of things can we pull from CP to make an MMO? With MetaPunk, things kind of got out of hand during the brainstorming phase. There were a lot of ideas that would make good systems, but which would be impractical to cram into a single title. But for this discussion, let’s assume that development time, cash and technological limitations are no object. Let’s throw down a bunch of ideas to bring a cyberpunk MMO to the masses.

You, The Character

The player character (PC) has no class and no levels. Instead, there’s a Ultima Online style system in place: you are what you do, not the other way around. As you use skills, the skills increase, but because there’s a cap to the total number of skill points you can have, at some point you may have to sacrifice points from one skill to another.

The reasoning is simple: In the dystopian future, the little guys and girls (that’s you) need a wide range of skills to survive, meaning you can never master one subset without sacrificing flexibility.

You, The People

Players can organize into groups – aka guilds, but the type of group you can form depends on how you want to play.

Firstly, there’s corporate divisions. These groups ally themselves with an NPC corporation. Based on the number of missions that their members do, the NPC corporation grants the group reputation points. These points are used at the company store to “rent” weapons and gear for missions given to you by the corporation. The more points you accrue, the better the gear (assuming you have the skills to use it). So long as you work for a corporation, you keep gaining reputation.

But if you leave, or if a member is a total fkward, the group can lose reputation with the parent company. Say, for example, someone decides to sell his high powered sniper rifle on the black market rather then return it to the corporate shed. When the mission is over, he loses rep…and so does the division. This creates some interesting opportunities for divisional drama.

Divisions are directly antagonistic towards members of rival corporations. This isn’t an “us against everyone” situation; instead, NPC corporation A is at odds with NPC corporation B…but not NPC corporation C. Division A can PvP division B, but not C, unless division A leaves corporation A and joins a corporation that opposes corporation C. The ramifications are that this division loses favor with their previous employers, and has to start all over again with their new employers. And maybe there’s a hit out on them for being disloyal. Maybe.

The second player group is the street gang. These fine citizens group for protection, and to battle for control of the city. Gangs are for players who want to fight for territory, and who enjoy open PvP. All gangs are in open opposition unless their leaders form an alliance. Their “company store” is all internal, and relies on the black market, which divisional players can’t access directly.

Job Well Done; Payment In Full

The day to day operations are generally jobs given by one’s employer (if a division or solo) or are open PvP (if street gang or ally). For divisionals, the corporation has an agenda, which usually involves butting heads with rival corporations. Sometimes it’s sabotage of production facilities, sometimes it’s stealing stuff (or people) and sometimes it puts a group in direct opposition to another division of a rival corporation. Say division A has been tasked with extracting a scientist from a rival corporate HQ. Now say division B has been tasked with protecting that scientist. Any shortcomings (like a team who doesn’t show up) is fortified with additional NPCs, but both sides have strategies that they can employ to get the best of one another.

In this game, no one is paid in loot. I don’t get paid with shotguns or shiny armor when I complete a project at my real world job (your experience may vary), so all NPC missions pay in cash. Because divisional players can “rent” from the corporation, they don’t necessarily need to carry heavy gear. If they feel that need, however, they can use their hard earned cash to buy from the black market. Every player will need to hit the black market at some point, because the streets are just too dangerous to roam unarmed.

Finding Your Way

With no “classes” to speak of, how do people know what to do? While there’s no institutionalized classes that you can point at and choose, you can train skills that resemble a class. These unofficial groupings can grant specialist titles for the purpose of finding out who’s good at what:

• Mercenary – Combat specialists, usually with high powered weaponry
• Assassin – Close combat specialists, also masters of disguise
• Fixer – Interfaces with the underworld, and can gain rep with both corporations and street gangs as a go-between
• Thug – Street gang member who can fight for territory and access the black market
• Medic – Healer, apothecary and surgeon.
• Media – Reports (and makes) the news through video and screamsheets; has access to advertising outlets
• Hacker – Accesses cyberspace and can bypass and overtake security systems
• Suit – Controls production and generates jobs for divisional players
• Celebrity – A sub-classlet which we’ll get into later ;D

Tearing the City A New One – Combat

I’m not a huge fan of relying on combat to support a game. It’s overused and under-scrutinized, but it is cyberpunk, and people like shooting stuff.

Most CP combat occurs at range, so firearms are the norm. This means that CP combat is more tactical, relying on ambushes, flanking and cover. If a player is in melee range of you, it means you’ve failed, but for some, closing that gap is their bread and butter. Some situations may call for more close-quarters combat. Ideally, combat would be more Rainbow Six then Gears of War, where minimal, strategic fire would take down a standard target. We’re talking bullets against meat, not feathers against tanks.

Seedy Underbelly

The shady side of cyberpunk is always just one alley away. The black market is THE main source of goods. It’s the CP’s auction house. Players can buy common goods from shops (mostly low-powered stuff and consumables), but the real toy store needs to be accessed by fixers and assassins for divisionals (who have access to the company store 24 hours a day, 7 days a week when on duty), or for all gang members.

Should a divisional want to go rogue, they could sell their corporate gear on the BM, but there’s some caveats. For one, corporate gear doesn’t decay or malfunction. Ever. Until it shows up on the BM, and then it starts to wear down. BM gear can be fixed by fixers and hackers, but the longevity and quality of the fix depends on the skill of the repairer. The BM is the great equalizer, allowing gangs to get their hands on corporate gear, and for divisional to “own” some gear that may normally be above their reputation, or be exclusive to another corporation.

Physician, Heal Thyself (And Others)

Healers in the CP world come in three flavors. The first is the average street doc. This guy operates out of a storefront, charges insane rates but keeps his mouth shut. The second is a trained medic. These guys appear on the scene when you’re dying – assuming you’ve paid your insurance. The third are the surgeons. These are the heavy hitters, and the only ones qualified to graft cybernetics to your birth-body.

Healers can also research medicines, neurotoxins and drugs, and are the only class outside of the Suits that can craft.

Smile! You’re On TV!

The Media pseudo class would probably give the server admin an aneurism, and shows how “conceptual” this plan really is.

Media players have a skill with the Camera. This allows them to take short bursts of on-screen action that can later be edited into newscasts that can be viewed by all players. They can also form media outlets, which allow them to publish the screamsheets complete with screenshots, write stories and editorials.

Through these media outlets, media player can sell advertising, which includes screamsheets, on-air commercials and billboard spaces around the city. These ads can be bought by player groups for recruitment purposes, to threaten rivals, or to secretly pass messages back and forth. Ads are really important when it comes to the selling of crafted goods.

Ideally, these media productions are available OUTSIDE of the game as well, through a website set up and managed by the outlet, but within the hosting framework of the game operator.

Jacking In

The hacker is the most iconic CP character, and this treatment is no exception. The hacker is the only pseudo class able to enter cyberspace for business, though everyone should be able to get in to the general “common areas”. To do so, the hacker needs to be stationary and connected to a cyberdeck, so having her at an off-mission site is probably a good idea. A cyberdeck holds programs, which are the in-cyberspace skills, abilities and gear that the hacker has to work with. If she forgets her counter ICE app once she’s started a run, too bad. Economy is the name of the game (a la Guild Wars).

Cyberspace itself is a dynamic creation. Hackers can create networks in the physical world, which appear in cyberspace as constructs of any kind. Say a divisional hacker sets up a divisional database for his group. This contains the divisions bank account, all of their personal computers and a data store. This network appears as a node in cyberspace. The implications, I hope, are obvious.

Every construct in cyberspace can be entered or attacked. EVERY CONSTRUCT, especially those under player control. Part of a mission might be the acquisition of another player’s blueprints, which are stored on his file server which is part of a network designed by a hacker. This hacker SHOULD have applied layers of defenses because another hacker will be along shortly to put them to the test to acquire those blueprints.

Working For The Man

A corporate player is in charge of construction and crafting. They are the industrialists who supply gear to the players, and who issue the orders to attack their rivals for personal gain.

Crafting takes place at a very high level. Suits need to set up harvesting points outside the city using a systemwhichhasnotbeenfleshedoutbutisreallycool. These operations bring in materials which vary in the qualities that they bring: some may conduct heat well, but are very flimsy. Others may be diamond-hard but aren’t very malleable and are difficult to work with. The attributes of the materials contribute to the properties and quality of the end product (a la SWG).

But first, there’s R&D. Suits will select a class of item to make – weaponry, armor, programs, and so on – and will then choose the part to make – a barrel for a rifle, for example, or a subroutine. They throw some mats into the machine and run the simulation. Several real-time minutes or hours later, a result is returned: if the player keeps it, it’s a blueprint which requires those exact materials. If they trash it, the mats are gone and it’s back to square one.

The blueprints are stored on the corporate server (see the section on Jacking In for why this matters). A BP is then put into production, but first a suit has to acquire production facilities, complete with rent and maintenance costs. These facilities are both virtual (a menu for the suit) and instanced (for players who get a job to blow up an opponent’s production facilities). Once the items are in production, the suit can collect them and distribute them to various outlets, or use them in NEW blueprints to make final products like sniper rifles or low energy lightbulbs.

Superstar!

The celebrity sub pseudo class is available to all players, and isn’t skill based. Instead it depends on a general system of presence.

For example, newscasters will quickly earn presence in the positive direction. Pretty much everyone else is neutral. As players group up, join divisions or gangs, they gain presence which must be maintained over time. Players who solo will find their presence slide into obscurity.

The ramifications are many. The higher a person’s presence, the more visible they are, and the more well known they can be considered. In some cases, players need a high presence to gain entrance to exclusive clubs. In others, they won’t get more secretive job offers because they draw too much attention. However, players with low presence won’t get into the hot new nightclub, but they will be inundated with job offers for clandestine jobs where discretion is needed.

Part of this system is the importance of fashion. CP worlds are generally very superficial, and dress can be very important in certain situations. You can’t just throw on kevlar and camo and head out for a night on the town. Certain clothing can boost or decrease your presence. Even wearing appropriate street clothes when “off duty” or gang colors can help maintain a certain level of presence.

Celebrity status also plays into a group dynamic. If a group of similar nobodies meet up, they get certain bonuses for being “The Expendables”. Likewise, famous players who tackle a mission get certain bonuses for being “The A-Team”. Problems can arise when there’s too much disparity between presence of group members, even resulting in debuffs for the whole group.

Get A Room!

I’m a fan of housing, so I want housing. All players get a sh*tty apartment, gratis. These apartments are generally in older, crumbling brownstones on the fringe of the city, and are instanced by floor. You can pick where you want to reside, so you and friends can take over a whole floor, or a group a whole building. Or you can randomize it and meet new people!

The common areas on a floor can be decorated by the residents. Carpet, wall coverings, and decor can be changed either by individuals or by committee.

Beyond this, the ideas are pretty standard: visitors can visit, players can decorate their own apartment, etc.

Based on reputation, players can trade up to new accommodations closer to the city’s hub: more space, better conditions and more options.

Each apartment comes with a personal PC that serves as the player’s bank, email and personal stash. And yes, it can be hacked.

On Death And Dying

Death is never permanent for the well-heeled player, but while you’re down for the count, know that people will be looting your body. You’d do it to them if the tables were turned. Since this cannot be avoided, players can buy insurance to cover eventual loses, and to ensure that the meat wagon will appear in time to salvage your vital organs for transplantation and resuscitation at any one of their clean and professional establishments. Those without insurance should hope there’s an altruistic or desperate street doc passing by.

The quality of your “after care” determines the effectiveness of your recovery. If the game uses a body location system, it might be possible to blow someone’s arm to hamburger, requiring a cybernetic limb upon resuscitation. Good facilities can get you up and running quickly and without too much after effects. Bad doctors can reduce your core stats. Permanently. Unless they talk you into more cybernetics, or you rely on drugs.

And The Biggie: Cybernetics and Your Humanity

At some point, every player will turn to cybernetics out of need or greed. Bad deaths may require it to return stats to normal, but more often, players would probably graft cybernetics for bonuses to existing stats, or to take advantage of some of the features they provide. And because it’s cyberpunk, not meatpunk.

The advantages of cybering up are immense. For example, a cyber eye can give bonuses to to-hit calculations, or could provide IR vision. A cybernetic arm might conceal a weapon, or might provide a few secure hiding spots (more inventory). Legs might increase speed, and other parts might increase fortitude.

But for every squishy piece lost, so goes a bit of sanity. There comes a time when too much of the original human has been replaced, and the creature is no longer human itself. At this point, either the character suffers adverse effects (random NPCs and PCs become flagged for PvP), or the player becomes “unusable”, turning instead into an NPC under AI control that rampages like a instance boss throughout the city. Cybernetics should be a heavy burden on the playability of the character, with a real tradeoff between buff and losing all of one’s hard work over the long haul.

Tying It All Together

If you’ve reached this point legitimately, thank you! And congratulations. Your Internet Award is in the (e)mail.

I realize that this all seems like a horribly glossed over mountain of ideas with little cohesion or, worse yet, feasibility, but circle back to the opening of the post. Cyberpunk is as much about society as it is about the individual. Cyberpunk is what happens when we put technology and profit ahead of humanity, to the point where “arms race” means replacing your arm with a metal analogue concealing a high caliber rifle just so you can leave your apartment from time to time. It’s about putting faith in systems that are inherently unsafe from those with the smarts and the dedication and lack of compulsion to steal from us for their own gain. It’s also about the division of the haves and the have-nots, the corporate titans who seclude themselves in penthouses of glass and steel while the majority of humanity scuttle about the smog and fight each other over the scraps of a better time.

Each player plays a role, but basic rules of survival in the cyberpunk universe dictate that no one person can fulfill one role completely. Everyone needs many skills to survive, and maybe through dedication, to flourish. Some have more opportunities then others, either through being at the right place at the right time, or through hard work, or through being beholden to someone, but there’s a diverse ecology of people that make up any cyberpunk universe. Neuromancer gave us the template for the mercenary characters. Max Hedroom gave us the template of the media characters. Even today we see the hubris of corporate titans circumventing the laws and even making attempts to dictate them (lookin’ at you, Google/Verizon!). Everyone has his or her role to play, and we find ourselves thrown together sometimes in unlikely scenarios where we need to put our talents together to affect the outcome in our favor, and often times against superior odds.

Most of the ideas in this post were cribbed from other games I’ve played over the years, but I’m unapologetic. A lot of them haven’t been seen since they were originally introduced, and that’s a shame. Other ideas are so off the wall I doubt any of them could be (or should be) implemented, but this post is in service to the idea, not the reality. It’s to show how cool a cyberpunk MMO could be, even if some of the more wild features could be toned down and included in a real world project.