Skills and Abilities
There's a lot to be said about the skills. I have separated the to 3 categories, Train-over-time skills, Learn-by-Doing skills and abilities. I'll start by explaining
the first 2, then give an example of how they work and finally tell you a little about the abilities.
Train-over-time skills
These skills are actually quite similar to EVE online skill system. The training of these skills happens in real-time and takes a very long time. Main point is, that
these are the skilled needed to drive certain vehicles, use certain modules and do certain things.
Learn-by-Doing skills
These skills boost your performance with different modules and vehicles etc. Just like in real life, where you get more and more experinced with certain things and
in the end you can use them with your eyes closed. These skills also decay over time, since you forget them.
Now, let me give you that example of how these two skills work:
Player wants to drive a truck and use some machine guns. First he buys truck driving skills and machine gun skills and trains them (there are requirement you must meet
before you can train these skills, but let's not go into that just yet). After he has the skills, he buys a truck and some MGs, mounts the guns and off he goes.
Over the time, he starts to gain truck driving and MG usage Leand-by-Doing skills, thus his truck handling skills get better, so the truck becomes faster and
better/easier to handle and as his MG usage skills get better he starts doing some more damage with the MGs.
After a while, the player decides he wants to try something different, so he buys skills required to mount rocket launchers, trains them, buys some launchers,
throws away the MGs and mounts the launchers. At first, he doesn't do that much damage with the launchers, cause he has no Learn-by-Doing skills for them.
But again, after some time, the player has become even better at handling his truck and also he has learned to do some more damage with the launchers, but at the
same time he has forgotted some of the things he knew about the MGs, so if he changes back to the MGs, he wouldn't be as effective with them as he was before he
switched to launchers.
Few weeks with launchers and the player suddenly decides to again try something different, this time the cannons, again he buy and trains the skills and buys the
cannons and mounts them. But this time, he isn't a complete idiot with the cannons, cause when he was using MGs, in addition to MG usage skills, he also gained
Turret weapon skills, which also boost the cannons.
Hope you aren't completely confused after that explanation, cause there are also the abilities.
Abilities
Almost every MMORPG has these hotbar abilities you use, so does this one. But there is a little trick with them. Usually you have mana or energy or something like
that you use to activate the skills, this game has xp. As you do damage to the enemies, you gain xp to your xp pool. To activate abilities you must pay some
amount of xp to do so. Simple enough, but still something at least slightly new and refreshing. This is also one of those sections that is gonna need a whole
lot of testing and tweaking to make it work like it should, but I believe it is still possible to make it work.
So there you have it, take few good MMORPGs, take few ideas from each and combine them to make something new. Hope you like that system, it took me a long time
to figure out how it should work.