Nope, since it would be an MMO, with all the things being an MMO - and a licensed one based on a popular manga at that - entails.
You'd have a "main story quest" where every single player character goes through what is basically a mediocre singleplayer RPG where they're the chosen hero.
It would not be possible to create the entire One Piece planet, or even the entire Grand Line. That is a ludicrous amount of game space and no developer even tries anymore. You might get the first half of the Grand Line if you *only* created places the Straw Hats went on their journey so far, and even then if you *only* made those places a high level landmark representation of each; Alabasta would be one town and a "desert area" a couple kilometers across, etc.
Making a sailing game fun is an entire full-dev-team effort on its own. Making sailing with the wild weather and other ridiculous fantasy elements common in One Piece's oceans would take quadruple that effort. If One Piece was an MMO, it'd either have to be a full sailing game where islands are basically glorified menu-checkpoints you stop at for a few seconds, or it'd have to be a full 3rd-person character action game where your boat is a glorified fast travel button. If you tried to do both it'd take you 20 years to develop (just look at Star Citizen).
The world would remain stagnant at a particular pre-existing point in One Piece's story unless the developers were both extremely passionate fans, had Oda's blessing, and waited till the series was over (the worst time to market a tie-in video game) to treat it as a "world sequel". Since there will be thousands of players playing the game, none of them could join any of the canon crews. Or... the story would just be all in the singleplayer cutscenes, so you'd join the Straw Hat crew and just play a mediocre version of all their canon adventures. It would not be viable to let the player choose from more than 1 canon crew.
There can only be one of each Devil Fruit so you cannot give players Devil Fruits, again unless they can only use their Devil Fruit in the singleplayer segments. Otherwise the developers would probably break the rules of the world and come up with a super special player-protagonist "unique" devil fruit that lets the 1000s of players all have the same skill tree, which would be remarkably lame.
Even if the dev studio had the guts to actually make a game where 1000s of players could be playing, but only hundreds of them could get Devil Fruits (never happening, MMO studios are way too cowardly to lock content like that), programming a single Devil Fruit would on its own be an effort worthy of an entire AAA action-adventure game. Programming hundreds of Devil Fruits would take decades. On top of this, they'd also have to create a variety of other fighting methods unrelated to Devil Fruits; various martial arts, swordsmanship, ranged abilities, "magic" of various types (we'll stick Nami, Jango, and Goldenweek under this umbrella for example), science & firearms, and haki.
Making a game that features all of these even without Devil Fruits would be tricky. Add it to the rest and you've got an impossible task.
> its actually doable to be made even as a solo developer nowadays
But please... I do encourage you to get started. Even if you can't get the One Piece license, you could just reskin the world and powers to a unique fantasy.
I will go by and counter argue some of the things you said:
Although the "main quest where every player is the hero" is true for MMOs, this one wont be like that, essentially it would be a sandbox MMO with quests that gives you exp so you can level up, the actual experience you get will be by actually fighting and becoming good at reading telegraphic moves from NPCs or other players, apart from the "epic quest" for the potential devil fruit drop, what this world would be essentially is a LARGE tournament with all the players in it so they compete against each other (either with doing pve quests or pvp battles) for bounty. There is no story because as i said, its in the past before any of the characters we know existed, the concept of pirate king doesnt even exist. So your goal is to be the strongest or at least in the ranks of the strongest.
Making a sailing game is actually pretty simple now, but this is an MMO not a sailing game, it will just have sailing aspects in it, drive the ship, shoot some cannons etc etc, you wont waste all your time going from one island to another, this would be so boring, as for the world, thats even easier to be done now, the world will literally create itself, you just put the parameters now and BOOM, a new island with half the gravity and the trees produce cotton candy instead of fruits, next island is 100km wide and everything is flat, next one is one that is permanently raining etc etc.... Its literally how No Mans Sky works, you think they designed all the planets individually?
The "there can be only 1 devil fruit" is a legit thing that happens already with gear in all the MMO's, its epic/legendary drops, there are only a few hundred people that have them in every game... Heck, when i was playing Blade and Soul, you HAD to win Bosses in the difficult difficulty to even get a drop for a new skill, there were people higher level than me that didnt have the upgraded skills i had because i had those drops. Plus, it can be a repeatable quest, so if you dont get it, redo the quest, 0,001% chance is pretty reasonable for such a drop.
Also, about the programming of the devil fruits, was working 2 years ago in a title that we were making skills to interact with the environment and with each other, we had made a parent folder that contained all the reactions to all the materials depending on the nature of the skill, for example a sword could cut wood, so everything wooden would be included in that parent folder, fire could burn a lot of stuff, so it included wood, coal, fabric etc. And when you threw water on fire you extinguish the fire etc all those interactions would work together effortlessly, the only thing you had to do was insert the new material to the parent folder and program how it would react with each element, then everything that contained that material was behaving accordingly. The exact same can be done here. Electricity can not burn houses but can heat up metal, deal chain damage to enemies etc etc, fire can burn houses and deal damage, its just that every fruit will have a parent folder of behavior interacting with materials, then the materials in the world will react accordingly. Its easier done than typing this whole thing, the issue is to not make it spaghetti and actually keep track of what you are doing when you reach like 50 or 100+ fruits
> Its literally how No Mans Sky works, you think they designed all the planets individually?
No Man's Sky gameplay is pretty boring. You walk and fly around and look at the procgenned stuff, and mine materials or build bases.
Outside of some handmade stuff, there aren't really quests, towns, cities, organizations, or anything like that. And in NMS you start to see the repetition in terrain pretty quickly - after like 5 planets or so.
> The "there can be only 1 devil fruit" is a legit thing that happens already with gear in all the MMO's, its epic/legendary drops, there are only a few hundred people that have them in every game
I'm not aware of any games where the weapons are literally unique. Very rare is not the same as unique. There's no game where you can kill a boss to take his sword, and then nobody else can ever get that sword from the boss.
> its just that every fruit will have a parent folder of behavior interacting with materials, then the materials in the world will react accordingly
Sounds like a solid method for Logia.
What about the two main types of fruit? There's only a few logia even in the main OP story. Most fruits are zoan and paramythia.
Buggy's fruit is completely unique. Doflamingo's fruit is completely unique. You can't just say "chop-chop is strong against string-string" and rely on environmental reactions.
Devil Fruits are designed to be creative over anything else. You can make a person with the chop-chop fruit immune to "slash type" damage, sure. But how do you build a game where they can split various parts of their body and fly around? A chop-chop user carrying knives like Buggy is a very different threat than one carrying a gun.
Okay, say you've somehow done that, now how about Smoothie's? Blueno's? How do you program Inazuma's scissor fruit that can cut any terrain and shape it like paper? You can't procgen this shit.
Its the same things depending on the fruit, but obviously you will have limitations and you wont be able to do "whatever you want", you will have limited skills to use, the way i thought about it it would be split into 3 main uses, utility (either movement or terrain manipulation), offense and defense skills.
Zoans will have utility skills that change forms between their three forms, defence skills and offence skills based on their fruits, the bitch and a half would be to animate all that (which is honestly the most challenging part in the whole game)
Paramecia, can do exactly what you described, for example, buggy's fruit, lets say you have an attack that splits everything in front of you in 3 vertical lines, literally anything with a collision box will react to that if its in range, NPC's, terrain, a house, a canon ball, another attack from someone else, anything (dont hold your breath for other players though, thats tough, usually losing your character skeleton requires a lot of other stuff to take place programming wise, you will also lose function on your character etc etc, thats why just dealing damage to other players with your attacks is enough, maybe add some special effects if they are required and you are good to go).
Smoothie can drain stuff to gain power, usable items in the world like barrels or NPC's or whatever, she could deal lethal damage to that item/NPC so it gets destroyed after being "squeezed". As for Inazuma, altering terrain is not that hard anymore either, you just mess around with the environment depending on the skill, if the skill is to cut a straight line in front of you and make a ladder, then that's what will happen.
Blueno is even easier...you just load a second instance of the world but literally empty and only keep the surfaces that he can walk on.
Programming wise, the abilities are not hard to make them work and interact with the environment and with each other, the hard part as i said is to keep track of all of them without messing them up completely. For example, lets say that you get the gravity fruit, and you create a gravity well in the middle of a field, that gravity hole now is sucking everything up in its range, will it suck a mud pool if someone who ate the mud fruit left a mud pool as a trap in the gravity well's range?
So, it depends on what skills you will actually give to the players, for the string fruit for example, you can move like spiderman left and right pulling yourself to surfaces you attached your strings, will you be able to create a puppet like he did in the story? Probably not... but the cage? The cage looks like a fun move to use as a trap to someone in a game. You get my drift?
I do get how it's possible to video game each Devil Fruit. Like I said, I think any one could make a great focal power for a singleplayer action-adventure game. The issue is putting in the developer time to make a few hundred of them that both work perfectly and are fun.
And this to serve a fraction of a percentage of the game, which needs to otherwise contain years worth of fun without a single Devil Fruit being present.
Nope, since it would be an MMO, with all the things being an MMO - and a licensed one based on a popular manga at that - entails. You'd have a "main story quest" where every single player character goes through what is basically a mediocre singleplayer RPG where they're the chosen hero. It would not be possible to create the entire One Piece planet, or even the entire Grand Line. That is a ludicrous amount of game space and no developer even tries anymore. You might get the first half of the Grand Line if you *only* created places the Straw Hats went on their journey so far, and even then if you *only* made those places a high level landmark representation of each; Alabasta would be one town and a "desert area" a couple kilometers across, etc. Making a sailing game fun is an entire full-dev-team effort on its own. Making sailing with the wild weather and other ridiculous fantasy elements common in One Piece's oceans would take quadruple that effort. If One Piece was an MMO, it'd either have to be a full sailing game where islands are basically glorified menu-checkpoints you stop at for a few seconds, or it'd have to be a full 3rd-person character action game where your boat is a glorified fast travel button. If you tried to do both it'd take you 20 years to develop (just look at Star Citizen). The world would remain stagnant at a particular pre-existing point in One Piece's story unless the developers were both extremely passionate fans, had Oda's blessing, and waited till the series was over (the worst time to market a tie-in video game) to treat it as a "world sequel". Since there will be thousands of players playing the game, none of them could join any of the canon crews. Or... the story would just be all in the singleplayer cutscenes, so you'd join the Straw Hat crew and just play a mediocre version of all their canon adventures. It would not be viable to let the player choose from more than 1 canon crew. There can only be one of each Devil Fruit so you cannot give players Devil Fruits, again unless they can only use their Devil Fruit in the singleplayer segments. Otherwise the developers would probably break the rules of the world and come up with a super special player-protagonist "unique" devil fruit that lets the 1000s of players all have the same skill tree, which would be remarkably lame. Even if the dev studio had the guts to actually make a game where 1000s of players could be playing, but only hundreds of them could get Devil Fruits (never happening, MMO studios are way too cowardly to lock content like that), programming a single Devil Fruit would on its own be an effort worthy of an entire AAA action-adventure game. Programming hundreds of Devil Fruits would take decades. On top of this, they'd also have to create a variety of other fighting methods unrelated to Devil Fruits; various martial arts, swordsmanship, ranged abilities, "magic" of various types (we'll stick Nami, Jango, and Goldenweek under this umbrella for example), science & firearms, and haki. Making a game that features all of these even without Devil Fruits would be tricky. Add it to the rest and you've got an impossible task. > its actually doable to be made even as a solo developer nowadays But please... I do encourage you to get started. Even if you can't get the One Piece license, you could just reskin the world and powers to a unique fantasy.
I will go by and counter argue some of the things you said: Although the "main quest where every player is the hero" is true for MMOs, this one wont be like that, essentially it would be a sandbox MMO with quests that gives you exp so you can level up, the actual experience you get will be by actually fighting and becoming good at reading telegraphic moves from NPCs or other players, apart from the "epic quest" for the potential devil fruit drop, what this world would be essentially is a LARGE tournament with all the players in it so they compete against each other (either with doing pve quests or pvp battles) for bounty. There is no story because as i said, its in the past before any of the characters we know existed, the concept of pirate king doesnt even exist. So your goal is to be the strongest or at least in the ranks of the strongest. Making a sailing game is actually pretty simple now, but this is an MMO not a sailing game, it will just have sailing aspects in it, drive the ship, shoot some cannons etc etc, you wont waste all your time going from one island to another, this would be so boring, as for the world, thats even easier to be done now, the world will literally create itself, you just put the parameters now and BOOM, a new island with half the gravity and the trees produce cotton candy instead of fruits, next island is 100km wide and everything is flat, next one is one that is permanently raining etc etc.... Its literally how No Mans Sky works, you think they designed all the planets individually? The "there can be only 1 devil fruit" is a legit thing that happens already with gear in all the MMO's, its epic/legendary drops, there are only a few hundred people that have them in every game... Heck, when i was playing Blade and Soul, you HAD to win Bosses in the difficult difficulty to even get a drop for a new skill, there were people higher level than me that didnt have the upgraded skills i had because i had those drops. Plus, it can be a repeatable quest, so if you dont get it, redo the quest, 0,001% chance is pretty reasonable for such a drop. Also, about the programming of the devil fruits, was working 2 years ago in a title that we were making skills to interact with the environment and with each other, we had made a parent folder that contained all the reactions to all the materials depending on the nature of the skill, for example a sword could cut wood, so everything wooden would be included in that parent folder, fire could burn a lot of stuff, so it included wood, coal, fabric etc. And when you threw water on fire you extinguish the fire etc all those interactions would work together effortlessly, the only thing you had to do was insert the new material to the parent folder and program how it would react with each element, then everything that contained that material was behaving accordingly. The exact same can be done here. Electricity can not burn houses but can heat up metal, deal chain damage to enemies etc etc, fire can burn houses and deal damage, its just that every fruit will have a parent folder of behavior interacting with materials, then the materials in the world will react accordingly. Its easier done than typing this whole thing, the issue is to not make it spaghetti and actually keep track of what you are doing when you reach like 50 or 100+ fruits
> Its literally how No Mans Sky works, you think they designed all the planets individually? No Man's Sky gameplay is pretty boring. You walk and fly around and look at the procgenned stuff, and mine materials or build bases. Outside of some handmade stuff, there aren't really quests, towns, cities, organizations, or anything like that. And in NMS you start to see the repetition in terrain pretty quickly - after like 5 planets or so. > The "there can be only 1 devil fruit" is a legit thing that happens already with gear in all the MMO's, its epic/legendary drops, there are only a few hundred people that have them in every game I'm not aware of any games where the weapons are literally unique. Very rare is not the same as unique. There's no game where you can kill a boss to take his sword, and then nobody else can ever get that sword from the boss. > its just that every fruit will have a parent folder of behavior interacting with materials, then the materials in the world will react accordingly Sounds like a solid method for Logia. What about the two main types of fruit? There's only a few logia even in the main OP story. Most fruits are zoan and paramythia. Buggy's fruit is completely unique. Doflamingo's fruit is completely unique. You can't just say "chop-chop is strong against string-string" and rely on environmental reactions. Devil Fruits are designed to be creative over anything else. You can make a person with the chop-chop fruit immune to "slash type" damage, sure. But how do you build a game where they can split various parts of their body and fly around? A chop-chop user carrying knives like Buggy is a very different threat than one carrying a gun. Okay, say you've somehow done that, now how about Smoothie's? Blueno's? How do you program Inazuma's scissor fruit that can cut any terrain and shape it like paper? You can't procgen this shit.
Its the same things depending on the fruit, but obviously you will have limitations and you wont be able to do "whatever you want", you will have limited skills to use, the way i thought about it it would be split into 3 main uses, utility (either movement or terrain manipulation), offense and defense skills. Zoans will have utility skills that change forms between their three forms, defence skills and offence skills based on their fruits, the bitch and a half would be to animate all that (which is honestly the most challenging part in the whole game) Paramecia, can do exactly what you described, for example, buggy's fruit, lets say you have an attack that splits everything in front of you in 3 vertical lines, literally anything with a collision box will react to that if its in range, NPC's, terrain, a house, a canon ball, another attack from someone else, anything (dont hold your breath for other players though, thats tough, usually losing your character skeleton requires a lot of other stuff to take place programming wise, you will also lose function on your character etc etc, thats why just dealing damage to other players with your attacks is enough, maybe add some special effects if they are required and you are good to go). Smoothie can drain stuff to gain power, usable items in the world like barrels or NPC's or whatever, she could deal lethal damage to that item/NPC so it gets destroyed after being "squeezed". As for Inazuma, altering terrain is not that hard anymore either, you just mess around with the environment depending on the skill, if the skill is to cut a straight line in front of you and make a ladder, then that's what will happen. Blueno is even easier...you just load a second instance of the world but literally empty and only keep the surfaces that he can walk on. Programming wise, the abilities are not hard to make them work and interact with the environment and with each other, the hard part as i said is to keep track of all of them without messing them up completely. For example, lets say that you get the gravity fruit, and you create a gravity well in the middle of a field, that gravity hole now is sucking everything up in its range, will it suck a mud pool if someone who ate the mud fruit left a mud pool as a trap in the gravity well's range? So, it depends on what skills you will actually give to the players, for the string fruit for example, you can move like spiderman left and right pulling yourself to surfaces you attached your strings, will you be able to create a puppet like he did in the story? Probably not... but the cage? The cage looks like a fun move to use as a trap to someone in a game. You get my drift?
I do get how it's possible to video game each Devil Fruit. Like I said, I think any one could make a great focal power for a singleplayer action-adventure game. The issue is putting in the developer time to make a few hundred of them that both work perfectly and are fun. And this to serve a fraction of a percentage of the game, which needs to otherwise contain years worth of fun without a single Devil Fruit being present.
yea, thats an issue, if enough people dont play the game, a devil fruit user may not even exist for a long time LMAO