Guys, 1) Don't insult me. If you want to compare tech e-peens we can sometime. I work in Tech....have for 20+ years now. I'm an infrastructure manager for an ASP for living....we serve Fortune 500 clients. I know Tech.... and I know the SaS model (which is what MMO's basicly are). The only reason I'm not working for an entertainment company is that I'd have to take around a 50% pay cut for the same sort of position I hold now.... not worth it. 2) Like it or not you ARE conditioned to think in a certain manner..... and it's limiting what possibilities you can envision. 3) The type of game I'm talking about certainly wouldn't be for everyone. However neither are todays MMO's.... ALOT of people are entirely disatisfied with todays flavor of MMO to the point that they are not buying/subbing to them. For people that WANT nothing more then todays stale/static/boring MMO offering....then yeah the current model works just fine. It would certainly be much easier to build/run then the kind of thing I'm proposing. There certainly ARE technical (and orginizational) challenges to the type of thing I'm proposing.... but they are far from insurmountable. Furthermore there is a very large payoff for overcoming them....implimenting these sorts of systems creates a VERY significant product differentiator then the rest of the compitition. 4) No offense, but the design architecture you are talking about sounds entirely inefficient and inflexible. Why would you ever hard-code a mobs behavior with a script directly? You need to think modular design. What you would do would be to have thier behavior (or rather behaviors...as I'd assume you'd want to break it into multiple bits...probably for multiple conditions as well) as a property of thier object (or maybe child-object of thier object...depends on how complex you want to get with the design for mob behavior). You would have a pre-built library of behaviors (These indeed would be built by coders) that you could select from to populate that property. All the GM would be doing.... through the use of thier tool-kit would be modifying the behavior property of the mobs in question to the appropriate one selected from the pre-built library. Once modified, the server objects for the mobs would obviously have to load in the behavior to know what to do and you would be off and running, for that. You'd probably never even touch the Data Tier in that instance...unless you wanted to permanently change the mobs behavior.
I agree, it is clearly that many things that are possible with a MMO have never been tried at all. A dynamic MMO is well possible, Guildwars 2 will have many of these features when it releases but many more are possible if you have a good budget.
Problem as I see it is that companies like EA are traditionalist and wont take any risks. Also does it seems to me that few MMO devs played pen and paper RPGs and tried to recreate that experience, that is what started the genre. Now devs are looking at good selling MMOs and try to make a game with the same but slightly better experience and that is what made the genre stand still for several years.
If Guildwars 2 becomes a hit then most other devs will start with similar dynamic worlds. If someone proves that you can sell a lot of games with something like that it will open up a whole new world. Takes a visionary like Jeff Strain to pull it off. And Guildwars 2 will sell...
Robsolf , Really it's the difference between watching a baseball game and PLAYING in one. There is nothing wrong either activity.....but they are entirely different activities. Watching a baseball game is an entirely passive activity........ and surprisingly so is playing many MMO's. Yes you are pressing buttons.....but ultimately WHATEVER you do doesn't matter a bit to the course of action that occurs. You WILL get to level X....may take you an extra week but you'll get there. You WILL kill Throg the Unready... it may take you 50 tries... but you always get another and eventually you get him. You WILL get the sword of monkey-butts as a reward for killing him.... even though it may take you 10 hours rather then 2. Ultimately after Throg falls (on the 51st attempt) the story WILL progress to Chapter 2, the son of Throg...no matter what. It's like playing in a baseball game where the results of every play is scripted in advance. Yes you may have struck-out on the 1st at bat in the 5th inning but according to the script your SUPPOSED to get a double...so keep redoing the at bat until you get a double...then we can proceede to the next at bat. How BORING is that? That's the same argument you could use for only having one season of softball and never playing the game again. Sooner or later, Team X will beat team Y. It's just a matter of waiting til' team X is too hung over to play right, etc. But I'm done arguing over the metaphor. The only variable is hour many hours of mouse-clicking it takes you to get from A to B to C in the story THEY wrote for you. A big part of the fun of the RPG experience is that it is a COOPERATIVE experience where you participate (at least in part) in writing your OWN story. And yet, whose OWN story, with its twists, turns, and consequences should take precedence in the PERSISTENT world? In may ways, Single Player RPG's are LESS passive then MMORPGs. Absolutely agreed! Of course they are! It's the advantage you have in creating a SINGLE PLAYER GAME! Look at a game like Dragon Age.... at least some of the details of how the game progresses can change based upon the players actions. For instance, if you choose not to help a certain NPC...they won't be around to help you later on in the game. If you choose not to do certain things in the early part of the game.... other details will be slightly different in the later part of the game...and that WILL effect game-play in certain ways. Even the details of the END of the game...will be slightly different....if only in description a bit. You (and your actions) are actually helping to create/write the story.... that's an awesome improvment in the entertainment experience. And WHY IS THAT? WHY can Dragon Age, a single player game, have that kind of effect? Because you are the ONLY ONE PLAYING! First off, AoC attempted just that, to the complaints of many. It has a traditional single player experience in the main quest line, though it is still pretty linear, and people bellyache about THAT! "Yeah, everybody is the hero with 'the mark of Acheron'. How stupid is that? I'm my OWN character, and THEY FORCE THIS STUPID STORY ON ME!". Right back to my Incredibles quote. As a little spoiler... let's put DAO into MMO context. How much better or immersive would the experience be, if NPC X was impregnated with the the babies of 250k players? I don't know what more to say to you that Lizard hasn't already said. People in MMO's have a hard enough time finding groups to finish group quests as it is. Imagine if those people were divided into some 256 shards of reality? Even if you were able to piece the shards together to where you had at least 50% of the quests of any other given shard, how could you logically group 6 people together and stay sane? "Hmmm... in player 2's reality, this quest giver is dead. Let's do the mage tower. Oh... this guy did it already and it's burned to the ground, now. Let's go see the elves in the forest and do their quest chain. What? Player 5 is KoS there cuz one of the city elves saw him wipe out the city elf leader?" Grouping would be an absolutely absurd mess, or would lack all the player continuity of your personal story. With MMORPG's the ONLY variable seems to be the how much time you put in.... that's BORING AS SAND... after you've had a taste of a more interactive experience. And yet, people HAD a more interactive experience in PnP DnD and single player games, AND YET many of them are now playing MMO's and having a blast! Go figure! SPRPG's have been around longer than MMO's, yet many of those people still play and enjoy those MMO's.
Nice, someone who understands how a dynamic system in a MMO can go FUBAR really, really fast=) How is it feasible at all that someone would want to play a game where if they're not the first to go kill the Dragon, they're basically SOL. Seriously, if the Dragon is just gone after the first player or group kills him, what the heck was the point of designing him in the first place when the other 15k players on the server have no way of ever killing him? Do people here actually think its OK to create a boss that can only be killed by 1 person or group on an entire server? Is that actually being suggested because it sure as hell sounds like it=)
Guys, 1) Don't insult me. If you want to compare tech e-peens we can sometime. I work in Tech....have for 20+ years now. I'm an infrastructure manager for an ASP for living....we serve Fortune 500 clients. I know Tech.... and I know the SaS model (which is what MMO's basicly are). The only reason I'm not working for an entertainment company is that I'd have to take around a 50% pay cut for the same sort of position I hold now.... not worth it.
I don't think anyone doubts that you know how a server works. However, you have made it clear that you aren't familiar with what is involved legally, administratively or financially to take on the project you are suggesting for a commercial premium subscription service. Now, if you are trying to suggest that since you are a server infrastructure manager we should accept you as an expert in game design or as a content team lead, then I'd say that's a huge leap into the realm of false authority.
If you are talking about a game for 30 or 40 people, that's something entirely different. I get the feeling that you are talking about a game with a larger playerbase than that, and that's where the logistics and scaling start to make the whole project both unweildy and costly.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
I really don't understand why some people are so vigorously trying to stamp out the idea of the possibility of a dynamic MMO world with depth, that is feasible to develop and maintain. I don't like people stamping out the idea that I can make my own lightsaber. A lot of the components and idea necessary to create such an MMO already exist, and have been used in fragments scattered around the MMO industry for over a decade. And they ARE fragments for a reason. It wasn't like they decided to start making a dynamic world, got lazy, and stopped. By the way, a lazy developer in this economy is an unemployed one.
Most of the trial and error has already taken place, so all that needs to be done is for someone to step up and take all or most of these great game mechanics, and assemble them in a meaningful manner. This reminds me of all those talks I had as a kid with friends, over "what would make the best band, ever?". You'd end up with stuff like "Neil Peart on drums, Les Claypool on bass, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eddie van Halen on guitar, and Steve Winwood on keys".
It doesn't take long for me nowadays, to realize that that would be probably the most horrendous sounding pile of crap you could ever imagine. All it took was thinking about, not what I think is the best of the best, but what pieces fit together to create something brilliant, and what pieces don't.
I like pizza. I like chocolate. but I don't like chocolate on my pizza. So just because it hasn't been done yet, doesn't mean it's impossible, or even that it's not feasible. It simply hasn't been done because no one has stepped up to do it. That's exactly the point. It's NOT impossible. It's just a recipe for disaster that would leave devs with negative subscribers. And your last sentence is nonsense. People stepped up. People did it. Then they went, "Holy crap!!!" and busted tail to fix the mess they made. People have listed tons of examples in this thread, alone.
I hate to say it, but it's attitudes like yours which are why the MMO industry is stagnating and rampantly trying to clone WoW. They're too scared to deviate from what they think is the only way to succeed.
The irony of it all?
WoW succeeded specifically because Blizzard did exactly what I've been suggesting. They took all of the core mechanics that "worked" from past MMOs, and glued them together in a way that worked, and wrapped it up in a nice polished package. Of course there's other reasons why it ballooned as much as it did, but that doesn't change that the core game succeeded because it was a composition of the best ideas and concepts from previous MMOs at the time.
No one is willing to take a chance. Most new MMOs try to emulate WoW's formula, only to fall flat on their faces. Why? It's simple, because you're not going to get people to leave one game, WoW, for what is essentially the same damn thing. You have to differentiate, stand out, and the best way to do that, bar coming up with some completely new and innovative gameplay, is to take all of the successes in mechanic innovations from across the industry, and assemble them together in a meaningful manner.
It's not impossible, and in fact, it's the exact reason why WoW is the king of MMOs right now. Blizzard did their research, and took a chance, and it paid off big.
Nice, someone who understands how a dynamic system in a MMO can go FUBAR really, really fast=) How is it feasible at all that someone would want to play a game where if they're not the first to go kill the Dragon, they're basically SOL. Seriously, if the Dragon is just gone after the first player or group kills him, what the heck was the point of designing him in the first place when the other 15k players on the server have no way of ever killing him? Do people here actually think its OK to create a boss that can only be killed by 1 person or group on an entire server? Is that actually being suggested because it sure as hell sounds like it=)
A few devs have made that mistake in the past, much to the disbelief of their playerbase. It's right up there with 'updating' the look of an item after players have acquired it.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Originally posted by Josher Nice, someone who understands how a dynamic system in a MMO can go FUBAR really, really fast=) How is it feasible at all that someone would want to play a game where if they're not the first to go kill the Dragon, they're basically SOL. Seriously, if the Dragon is just gone after the first player or group kills him, what the heck was the point of designing him in the first place when the other 15k players on the server have no way of ever killing him? Do people here actually think its OK to create a boss that can only be killed by 1 person or group on an entire server? Is that actually being suggested because it sure as hell sounds like it=)
There are actually ways to solve that. If you create a random dragon generator (name and a few random abilities) and let the dragon spawn 1 or 2 times a week it would work fine.
Tremendous events
Quests and instanced missions already existed in the original, but along with these Guild Wars 2 adds a new type of task: "events". An event is a dynamic quest chain and can begin at any time, in any zone of the persistent world. For example (simplified), a dragon attempts to destroy the important town bridge. All players within the zone, regardless of being in a group or not, can now fight the beast. If the assault on the dragon fails and the bridge is destroyed, NPCs from the town will try to reconstruct the bridge after the dragon has left. During that time you will have to guard them from bandits. At the end all players that participated in the event will receive a reward just as with normal quests. These dynamic events will run on an immense scale, with the possibility for multiple events to overlap. Jeff Strain described it in brief as "all over the world there will be something happening!" Normal quests are designed with scaling difficulty suitable initially for solo players and adjusting their degree of difficulty as soon as you are in a group.
Player versus Environment Gameplay
The new persistent world set-up will mean some significant changes for Guild Wars 2’s PvE gameplay. No longer will you be forced into instances in order to explore the world and engage in quests with fellow players, now you’ll be able to meet other players on your travels and join in dynamic events that occur around the world.
Rather than implementing a static world with static quests and missions for players to progress through linearly, as can be seen in games like Aion or World of Warcraft, ArenaNet intends to make PvE gameplay much more engaging, personal and dynamic. One way of accomplishing this is their new dynamic event system, which will prove to be one of the key innovative elements of Guild Wars 2.
Previously this event system was described as a mechanic that would make players in a zone band together temporarily, in order to achieve common goals, in ways that could change the game world permanently. The old example was that of a dragon attacking a village, which would alert all players in the immediate area to come and help. If you help and the monster is defeated, then you’ll receive plentiful experience and loot. If you fail, then the village’s bridge will be destroyed as it retreats to its lair. A group of builders from a neighbouring village is called in to repair the bridge, but bandits attack them in order to steal the construction supplies. Now players can opt to go help the villagers secure their town from bandit raids.
At this year’s GameCom, a new example was provided of an outpost under attack by centaur raiders. You can choose to aid in the defensive of this town and if you fend the centaurs off then you may be able to counter attack and drive them out of the trading post that serves as their home base. But if you are defeated, then the outpost will be claimed by these centaurs and you can assist guardsmen from nearby villages in reclaiming it.
Obviously this kind of dynamic PvE content generation system should be a source of some incredible social experiences, if it works as advertised. This event-driven system is ArenaNet’s replacement of the archaic questing system found in other MMORPGs and some singleplayer RPGs, lead designer Eric Flannum has already stated: “I think I can safely say that you won’t see a single exclamation mark floating above a character’s head in Guild Wars 2.”
This will essentially turn all PvE content, aside from instanced dungeons and missions, into dynamic content! Not a static world designed in linear fashion by world builders, but a world that facilitates true exploration with continually altering environments and situations all over Tyria.
Yet the PvE features do not stop with the mere introduction of event-driven gameplay.
These are 2 quotes from different guildwars 2 pages, maybe they can clarify some things for you. If everyone reasoned like you would we still play pong instead of MMOs.
Sorry but your arguements boil down to the intellectual equivalent of "Man will never fly". I get the fact that YOU may not like the idea of an interactive/dynamic MMORPG..... guess what your tastes are NOT the same as everyone else on the face of the planet.
The very fact that threads like this keep comming up should tell you that there IS an audience out there for this type of game. Sooner or later, some-one is going to figure out how to make it too.... they already do by drips and drabs now.
Yes there are some technical hurdles to overcome....but absolutely none of them are insurmountable. Furthermore with the ever increasing sophistication of tools that are available....those problems get easier to solve every day.
Certainly there are some draw-backs to a more dynamic world that will turn some people off.... you sound like one of those people...... but there are ALOT of people that are turned off by the static qualities of todays MMO's.
None of the issues you raise are insurmountable....
Quests.... Who says you even NEED quests??? Alot of people play games that don't have quests....are they just fooling themselves?
Plus there ARE ways to do quests in a dynamic game too. It's not like the SAME quests have to be available to every single person in the game.... and accomplished is the SAME exact way....that's just a fallacy.
Heck, even just throwing in a few variables to a quest or area makes the game more dynamic then it is now..... it's not a 100% solution but it's certainly an improvment. Some games are even doing that.
You mentioned LOTRO skirmish system earlier. You HAVE heard of the ENCOUNTERS within that system right? You DO KNOW that the is a VARIABLE right? It's NOT the same encounter every time you run the same skirmish. They have a variable list of foes that you MIGHT face in any given encounter.
Now all you would need to take that system to the next level would be to have FOES that were unlockable in response to some sort of global value (say the number of orcs killed on the server that month) or foes that locked in response to that. Then you allow Dev's to add/subtract or tweak the list of FOES that are availble (say when a new book comes out). Furthermore there is no reason you couldn't take the skirmishes out of a private instance and put them in a public zone somewhere.
Do that and you suddenly have something that starts to resemble a much more dynamic system then what we have today. Is it the perfect dynamic world that we all dream about? No.... but it's certainly an improvment.
With a little extra work..... you could make the foe's name.....and maybe some aspects of thier appearance... or exactly where they pop up in the zone....chosen randomly from a list of preset parameters.... and you add another level of variation to it.
Combine a system like that with the occasional GM run live event.....and don't tell me that MMO's have no ability to do Live Events...because I've been in a few...including one in LOTRO beta.... and once again you are beefing up the dynamism of the game world.
Originally posted by Josher Nice, someone who understands how a dynamic system in a MMO can go FUBAR really, really fast=) How is it feasible at all that someone would want to play a game where if they're not the first to go kill the Dragon, they're basically SOL. Seriously, if the Dragon is just gone after the first player or group kills him, what the heck was the point of designing him in the first place when the other 15k players on the server have no way of ever killing him? Do people here actually think its OK to create a boss that can only be killed by 1 person or group on an entire server? Is that actually being suggested because it sure as hell sounds like it=)
There are actually ways to solve that. If you create a random dragon generator (name and a few random abilities) and let the dragon spawn 1 or 2 times a week it would work fine.
Tremendous events
Quests and instanced missions already existed in the original, but along with these Guild Wars 2 adds a new type of task: "events". An event is a dynamic quest chain and can begin at any time, in any zone of the persistent world. For example (simplified), a dragon attempts to destroy the important town bridge. All players within the zone, regardless of being in a group or not, can now fight the beast. If the assault on the dragon fails and the bridge is destroyed, NPCs from the town will try to reconstruct the bridge after the dragon has left. During that time you will have to guard them from bandits. At the end all players that participated in the event will receive a reward just as with normal quests. These dynamic events will run on an immense scale, with the possibility for multiple events to overlap. Jeff Strain described it in brief as "all over the world there will be something happening!" Normal quests are designed with scaling difficulty suitable initially for solo players and adjusting their degree of difficulty as soon as you are in a group.
Player versus Environment Gameplay
The new persistent world set-up will mean some significant changes for Guild Wars 2’s PvE gameplay. No longer will you be forced into instances in order to explore the world and engage in quests with fellow players, now you’ll be able to meet other players on your travels and join in dynamic events that occur around the world.
Rather than implementing a static world with static quests and missions for players to progress through linearly, as can be seen in games like Aion or World of Warcraft, ArenaNet intends to make PvE gameplay much more engaging, personal and dynamic. One way of accomplishing this is their new dynamic event system, which will prove to be one of the key innovative elements of Guild Wars 2.
Previously this event system was described as a mechanic that would make players in a zone band together temporarily, in order to achieve common goals, in ways that could change the game world permanently. The old example was that of a dragon attacking a village, which would alert all players in the immediate area to come and help. If you help and the monster is defeated, then you’ll receive plentiful experience and loot. If you fail, then the village’s bridge will be destroyed as it retreats to its lair. A group of builders from a neighbouring village is called in to repair the bridge, but bandits attack them in order to steal the construction supplies. Now players can opt to go help the villagers secure their town from bandit raids.
At this year’s GameCom, a new example was provided of an outpost under attack by centaur raiders. You can choose to aid in the defensive of this town and if you fend the centaurs off then you may be able to counter attack and drive them out of the trading post that serves as their home base. But if you are defeated, then the outpost will be claimed by these centaurs and you can assist guardsmen from nearby villages in reclaiming it.
Obviously this kind of dynamic PvE content generation system should be a source of some incredible social experiences, if it works as advertised. This event-driven system is ArenaNet’s replacement of the archaic questing system found in other MMORPGs and some singleplayer RPGs, lead designer Eric Flannum has already stated: “I think I can safely say that you won’t see a single exclamation mark floating above a character’s head in Guild Wars 2.”
This will essentially turn all PvE content, aside from instanced dungeons and missions, into dynamic content! Not a static world designed in linear fashion by world builders, but a world that facilitates true exploration with continually altering environments and situations all over Tyria.
Yet the PvE features do not stop with the mere introduction of event-driven gameplay.
These are 2 quotes from different guildwars 2 pages, maybe they can clarify some things for you. If everyone reasoned like you would we still play pong instead of MMOs.
Wow....had no idea GW2 was going that direction...I will DEFINATELY have to check them out!
Robsolf , Really it's the difference between watching a baseball game and PLAYING in one. There is nothing wrong either activity.....but they are entirely different activities. Watching a baseball game is an entirely passive activity........ and surprisingly so is playing many MMO's. Yes you are pressing buttons.....but ultimately WHATEVER you do doesn't matter a bit to the course of action that occurs. You WILL get to level X....may take you an extra week but you'll get there. You WILL kill Throg the Unready... it may take you 50 tries... but you always get another and eventually you get him. You WILL get the sword of monkey-butts as a reward for killing him.... even though it may take you 10 hours rather then 2. Ultimately after Throg falls (on the 51st attempt) the story WILL progress to Chapter 2, the son of Throg...no matter what. It's like playing in a baseball game where the results of every play is scripted in advance. Yes you may have struck-out on the 1st at bat in the 5th inning but according to the script your SUPPOSED to get a double...so keep redoing the at bat until you get a double...then we can proceede to the next at bat. How BORING is that? That's the same argument you could use for only having one season of softball and never playing the game again. Sooner or later, Team X will beat team Y. It's just a matter of waiting til' team X is too hung over to play right, etc. But I'm done arguing over the metaphor. The only variable is hour many hours of mouse-clicking it takes you to get from A to B to C in the story THEY wrote for you. A big part of the fun of the RPG experience is that it is a COOPERATIVE experience where you participate (at least in part) in writing your OWN story. And yet, whose OWN story, with its twists, turns, and consequences should take precedence in the PERSISTENT world? In may ways, Single Player RPG's are LESS passive then MMORPGs. Absolutely agreed! Of course they are! It's the advantage you have in creating a SINGLE PLAYER GAME! Look at a game like Dragon Age.... at least some of the details of how the game progresses can change based upon the players actions. For instance, if you choose not to help a certain NPC...they won't be around to help you later on in the game. If you choose not to do certain things in the early part of the game.... other details will be slightly different in the later part of the game...and that WILL effect game-play in certain ways. Even the details of the END of the game...will be slightly different....if only in description a bit. You (and your actions) are actually helping to create/write the story.... that's an awesome improvment in the entertainment experience. And WHY IS THAT? WHY can Dragon Age, a single player game, have that kind of effect? Because you are the ONLY ONE PLAYING! First off, AoC attempted just that, to the complaints of many. It has a traditional single player experience in the main quest line, though it is still pretty linear, and people bellyache about THAT! "Yeah, everybody is the hero with 'the mark of Acheron'. How stupid is that? I'm my OWN character, and THEY FORCE THIS STUPID STORY ON ME!". Right back to my Incredibles quote. As a little spoiler... let's put DAO into MMO context. How much better or immersive would the experience be, if NPC X was impregnated with the the babies of 250k players? I don't know what more to say to you that Lizard hasn't already said. People in MMO's have a hard enough time finding groups to finish group quests as it is. Imagine if those people were divided into some 256 shards of reality? Even if you were able to piece the shards together to where you had at least 50% of the quests of any other given shard, how could you logically group 6 people together and stay sane? "Hmmm... in player 2's reality, this quest giver is dead. Let's do the mage tower. Oh... this guy did it already and it's burned to the ground, now. Let's go see the elves in the forest and do their quest chain. What? Player 5 is KoS there cuz one of the city elves saw him wipe out the city elf leader?" Grouping would be an absolutely absurd mess, or would lack all the player continuity of your personal story. With MMORPG's the ONLY variable seems to be the how much time you put in.... that's BORING AS SAND... after you've had a taste of a more interactive experience. And yet, people HAD a more interactive experience in PnP DnD and single player games, AND YET many of them are now playing MMO's and having a blast! Go figure! SPRPG's have been around longer than MMO's, yet many of those people still play and enjoy those MMO's.
Nice, someone who understands how a dynamic system in a MMO can go FUBAR really, really fast=) How is it feasible at all that someone would want to play a game where if they're not the first to go kill the Dragon, they're basically SOL. Seriously, if the Dragon is just gone after the first player or group kills him, what the heck was the point of designing him in the first place when the other 15k players on the server have no way of ever killing him? Do people here actually think its OK to create a boss that can only be killed by 1 person or group on an entire server? Is that actually being suggested because it sure as hell sounds like it=)
Yes, that's EXACTLY what I'm suggesting. Obviously such a game would have problems appealing to people who never learned to share thier toys with others as children.
Note, this really is a problem ONLY if the Dragon is the only Boss that has/will ever exist in the game. In reality there is ALWAYS another BOSS coming along....it's just not the SAME boss as the one that gets killed today.
So what if you didn't get to be the one that killed Throg the Red..... there's a new boss tommorrow, maybe you'll get to kill him. The thing is it will be a DIFFERENT Boss......meaning you WONT know in advance who he is, exactly where he shows up, how to deal with him or what he drops. You'll have to figure it out on the fly as you go. How cool would that be?
Yes, that's EXACTLY what I'm suggesting. Obviously such a game would have problems appealing to people who never learned to share thier toys with others as children. Note, this really is a problem ONLY if the Dragon is the only Boss that has/will ever exist in the game. In reality there is ALWAYS another BOSS coming along....it's just not the SAME boss as the one that gets killed today. So what if you didn't get to be the one that killed Throg the Red..... there's a new boss tommorrow, maybe you'll get to kill him. The thing is it will be a DIFFERENT Boss......meaning you WONT know in advance who he is, exactly where he shows up, how to deal with him or what he drops. You'll have to figure it out on the fly as you go. How cool would that be?
To which you're only killing "a" dragon, rather than "the" dragon. Which there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that's exactly how UO operated. There were no named, unique 'character' mobs that were killable, at least not ones that weren't played by Seers for world events. All of the MOBs were all generic and non specific. If they had names, they were randomly generated.
That's not to say that there can't be unique boss mobs, but in my opinion if you were to have one, they should be massive bosses that take a couple hundred people, at least, to take down. An ancient wyrm, or an arch demon, for example. Of course such bosses wouldn't simply be found, and camped, they would be tied to world events.
- ANY computer application has ways to exploit it....what's your point ?? MUDs were exploited all the time...so are modern MMO's.... so are Single-Player RPG's.... so are Online FPS (like Battlefield series). So will anything implimented in future to the end of time. All this is a non-issue. You deal with exploits on the technical side by puting in controls. You deal with problem/disruptive customers on the CSR side. No difference in that between the type of game I propose and the type of MMO's that exist now.
The point is, the more capacity you give for players and volunteer GM's to alter your game, the bigger the mess you make when someone inevitably exploits the system.
And yes, I remember the /emote exploits.... they dealt with it from a technical perspective by making text from /emotes appear differently then text generated by the system....and from a customer service perspective by BANNING Accounts that were exploiting it.
Glad to see you admit that even in a more simple game, people can and will attempt to ruin it. Banishment, to a griefer, is VICTORY.
- GM's very much had the ability to change room descriptions when they wanted. It wasn't even particularly hard to do....they just didn't happen to do it very often. WHO do you think BUILT all those rooms you wandered through?
So then you're talking about a much smaller outfit than you'd see running a MMO, as there's no way you'll see a MMO GM move trees around or change loot classes in a container. Tell me, would you allow volunteer college students that you may have never met face to face the ability to change text? What about available commands? if so, do you have time to dig through all the new commands through all the areas? Can they do this on the fly?
- GM run events happaned FAR more often then you intimate. Invasions, plot-lines, NPC's coming to down....these used to happen almost EVERY night....at least in Gemstone....not sure about DR. The "Weddings" were just a small part of it.... and yes they were a nice little offering. The vendor events were just one of the sorts of things that the GM's ran.
Then they must also run FAR MORE OFTEN than the website intimates. Go see for yourself. Nothing scheduled. rather than go for that wonderful GM run content, people go to MMO's instead to play their horrible, scripted quests in a never changing world.
- Simu's player-base certainly wasn't tiny.... After the move to the web, on a typical night you'd see between 1-3,000 players online on Gemstone on AVERAGE. That's actually pretty close to the average server population in a typical MMO on a typical night. We're talking a TEXT based game here.... that was competeing with Free to Play Muds mostly.
Yep. It was pretty good in its heyday, that's why I played; UO and EQ weren't even enough to get me to jump ship. You seem to think I'm insulting Simu for some reason. The people that would later move on to UO, AC and EQ had few good options for MMRPG other than Simu stuff. Like I said, I played for years, so I must have liked it.
- As far as the GM thing.... I have done just that in a MUD (not one of Simu's)..... I know what's involved. With a well designed toolkit....it's not really ALL that difficult to do.....especialy if the scope of the event your doing isn't insane. You do need some time to get used to the tools though....and a little practice to get good at running an event......and if your working with a crew of others...you obviously need some orginizational skills.
And again, setting something up where player have, as few as 2 things that they can do(move, engage to attack) that aren't just emotes is a far cry from a modern MMO, where any given character class has dozens of special abilities and attacks; special items that give more special abilities and attacks; environments that effect movement, etc... I could go on forever.
- Platinum was around $60-80 per month....and pretty well booked.... on top of that you had other events which were sold individualy. Don't assume that the kind of audience for these games is all poor. There are plenty of people that are willing to pay good money for entertainment.
Wow... I guess it goes to show that some people are flat out nuts when it comes to spending money. Again... hate to keep driving the point home, but... where are they now?
Also, thank you for stressing my point that even in a text based game, live service costs far more than creating an experience that can run on its own. And, if people talk with their wallet, it clearly does not add enough value to keep any but the most loyal.
- RE: Hero's Journey..... yeah that's a big letdown...but totaly understandable. Simu is busy developing, selling and supporting the Hero Engine (from what I understand).... You know the one Bioware is using for TOR. Simu isn't a big enough company to realisticaly tackle that many projects at once. So when the opportunity to commiditize thier engine came along (It WAS the engine they were building for HJ).... they seized it....as it was an immediate ROI (read lots of cash now)... rather then waiting for HJ to be developed, go gold and start pulling in revenue. That's where thier focus went.... can't say I blame them.
Again, you sound as though I'm attacking Simu.
I wondered if it was the same engine. I wouldn't blame them for focusing on the engine, but from a business standpoint, there was no reason to stop work on HJ, if they thought the end result would be worth it. And if they could fill up queues for platinum customers for a text based game at $80 a pop, imagine what they could charge with a full fledged MMO!!!
Sorry, but to me it sounds to me like they found it unfeasible, at least for the moment. Their faq eludes to that, avoiding mention of GM run events in features and giving an indirect answer to the very direct question.
Looking at the progression of this thread I think it is gettign polarized and people are pushed into taking positions more extreme then those they actually believe in.
The way I see it is a question of 'critical mass'. A dynamic system needs a fairly large critical mass of content or it will implode on itself while a more static world can simply scale back as needed.
If you create unique events then you have to make sure that there are enough of these unique events to satisfy your playerbase. That kind of system needs an enourmous amount of 'critical mass' to sustain itself so shortcuts are needed. The content is no longer truly unique but only seems unique. However, you still need a lot of critical mass to achieve this since yoru players will quickly see through the fact that Generic Dragon B is the same as Generic Dragon A but colored red instead of blue.
In many ways you need a 'runaway reaction' that keeps adding content to the dynamic system all the time. As the players keep playing the game they are gonna notice that you are recycling a lot of content and as such must be made to not care by giving them new variations and expanding things. You fail to expand and yoru system will start imploding on itself as it will start resembling a static, repetive game.
Guys, 1) Don't insult me. If you want to compare tech e-peens we can sometime. I work in Tech....have for 20+ years now. I'm an infrastructure manager for an ASP for living....we serve Fortune 500 clients. I know Tech.... and I know the SaS model (which is what MMO's basicly are). The only reason I'm not working for an entertainment company is that I'd have to take around a 50% pay cut for the same sort of position I hold now.... not worth it.
I don't think anyone doubts that you know how a server works. However, you have made it clear that you aren't familiar with what is involved legally, administratively or financially to take on the project you are suggesting for a commercial premium subscription service. Now, if you are trying to suggest that since you are a server infrastructure manager we should accept you as an expert in game design or as a content team lead, then I'd say that's a huge leap into the realm of false authority.
If you are talking about a game for 30 or 40 people, that's something entirely different. I get the feeling that you are talking about a game with a larger playerbase than that, and that's where the logistics and scaling start to make the whole project both unweildy and costly.
Look I'm not trying to claim false authority here..... are you? To say definitively that X would NOT work from a [fill in the blank] standpoint requires the same amount of expert knowledge required to state that it would.
Are you a corporate lawyer or CFO or Project Manager for an MMO...or have similar work experience? If you do then maybe you DO have some insights that I don't. If not, than I don't really think either of us can claim that level of expert opinion in the matter.
Note that in my position I DO a fair bit of project management work as well as managing operating budgets.... but that's kind of besides the point.
Originally posted by GrumpyMel2 Yes, that's EXACTLY what I'm suggesting. Obviously such a game would have problems appealing to people who never learned to share thier toys with others as children. Note, this really is a problem ONLY if the Dragon is the only Boss that has/will ever exist in the game. In reality there is ALWAYS another BOSS coming along....it's just not the SAME boss as the one that gets killed today. So what if you didn't get to be the one that killed Throg the Red..... there's a new boss tommorrow, maybe you'll get to kill him. The thing is it will be a DIFFERENT Boss......meaning you WONT know in advance who he is, exactly where he shows up, how to deal with him or what he drops. You'll have to figure it out on the fly as you go. How cool would that be?
There is 'sharing with others' and there is 'starving together'. How frequent will a new boss appear compared to the size of the playerbase. How long would a new casul player have to wait before they would get their shot at a boss? Most people will be fine with missing a chance at a boss if they know that they will get their own chance at him in a reasonable time and there is plenty of other content to do in the meantime.
Originally posted by GrumpyMel2 Wow....had no idea GW2 was going that direction...I will DEFINATELY have to check them out!
This is actually just a little bit of what will be included in the game, here is a article about it: gamedrone.net/2009/08/21/guild-wars-2-preview/ It is a few months old so there is a little more info out by now, hopefully will the game launch next winter but there is no official release date yet, they will release it when the game is done.
Dynamic worlds will appear in MMOs, maybe not exactly as you thought they would but they will. While most devs are making the same game over and over are there a few companies that thinks out of the box, Arena net is one of those companies.
Robsolf, Sorry but your arguements boil down to the intellectual equivalent of "Man will never fly". I get the fact that YOU may not like the idea of an interactive/dynamic MMORPG..... guess what your tastes are NOT the same as everyone else on the face of the planet. My argument in this context, is more along the lines of, "man should not attempt to teabag a rabid badger". And what makes you think I don't like dynamic content? I think it's terrific in the right context, and would be welcome in some cases. I just haven't heard one here yet that either: 1. Hasn't been done before in some manner. 2. Is feasible to execute and maintain. The very fact that threads like this keep comming up should tell you that there IS an audience out there for this type of game. Sooner or later, some-one is going to figure out how to make it too.... they already do by drips and drabs now. Yes, there is. Like I said, there would also be a market for lightsabers. Yes there are some technical hurdles to overcome....but absolutely none of them are insurmountable. Furthermore with the ever increasing sophistication of tools that are available....those problems get easier to solve every day. I'll say it again for the umpteenth time. THOSE TECHNICAL HURDLES CAN BE OVERCOME. It's the practical ones which cannot. You cannot create a world that players can alter in a way that comes close to SPG's without giving power to the jerks . Certainly there are some draw-backs to a more dynamic world that will turn some people off.... you sound like one of those people...... but there are ALOT of people that are turned off by the static qualities of todays MMO's. If you mean, I will be pissed and quite possibly quit, say, LotRO, if I'm crafting in Rivendell one day and dozens of Orcs charge through, kill me, and burn the Last Homely House to the ground unless the first 100 people to get to the zone stop them, then yes.
However, dynamic content via the skirmishes I am absolutely in love with. And the reason they work is because THEY ARE IN INSTANCES that I create or agree to join. Read back to Lizards point about "players" and "contracts" and you'll see precisely why.
Quests.... Who says you even NEED quests??? Alot of people play games that don't have quests....are they just fooling themselves? And being an ex-Eve player, I was one of them. I could live without them so long as everything I did had some tangible purpose.
I'll be interested to see how GW2 does it. I've given some comments about making quest delivery and implementation more "passive" in previous posts. Again, I don't really care how quests come, I'd as soon be rid of ?'s and !'s forever if there's plenty of clear means for which to advance a story or my character or move along in the world with some form of purpose. But that doesn't mean I want to move back to UO, EQ, and SWG's, "welcome to our big world. Now get to grinding!"
Plus there ARE ways to do quests in a dynamic game too. It's not like the SAME quests have to be available to every single person in the game.... and accomplished is the SAME exact way....that's just a fallacy. Have you played SWG pre-cu? If so, you'd realize that despite there not being "quests", people still tended to do things exactly the same way. And they were usually some for of TK or melee weapon character, or some form of rifleman to do headshots. If you wanted to PvP, those were your choices. And if not, you all wore the same composite armor made from the same materials harvested from the same planet that had all the winning property combinations. No quests, still did everything the same. Difference is, you looked to websites for guides and info insteading of having the info ingame. Point is, randomizing quests or eliminating does little to stop people from grinding. People will look things up in the guide and if they don't get the quest that gives them what they want, they'll move on, and instead of hearing people talk about quest grinds, you'll hear them talking about quest raffles. "Awww man! Boars??? They drop NONE of the things I need. Guess I'll log out til the wolves are back..."
BTW, LotRO does "dynamic content" in the form of crafting quests, also. The mobs tend to be random. Nice touch, but it doesn't change gameplay significantly. If it did, they'd just rework their gameplay around it. feature not liked? Feature avoided.
Heck, even just throwing in a few variables to a quest or area makes the game more dynamic then it is now..... it's not a 100% solution but it's certainly an improvment. Some games are even doing that. You mentioned LOTRO skirmish system earlier. You HAVE heard of the ENCOUNTERS within that system right? You DO KNOW that the is a VARIABLE right? It's NOT the same encounter every time you run the same skirmish. They have a variable list of foes that you MIGHT face in any given encounter. I addressed this above. Now all you would need to take that system to the next level would be to have FOES that were unlockable in response to some sort of global value (say the number of orcs killed on the server that month) or foes that locked in response to that. Then you allow Dev's to add/subtract or tweak the list of FOES that are availble (say when a new book comes out). Furthermore there is no reason you couldn't take the skirmishes out of a private instance and put them in a public zone somewhere. Ever ask yourself WHY Skirmishes are in an instance. You might do well to. Do that and you suddenly have something that starts to resemble a much more dynamic system then what we have today. Is it the perfect dynamic world that we all dream about? No.... but it's certainly an improvment. IMO, these are features that are "meh" inspiring to some and downright frustrating to others. All people playing, whether whether the gameplay is quest based or freewill based, have goals in mind. And when you introduce a game mechanic that openly screws with players' ability to fulfill those goals, you'll lose subs. Combine a system like that with the occasional GM run live event.....and don't tell me that MMO's have no ability to do Live Events...because I've been in a few...including one in LOTRO beta.... and once again you are beefing up the dynamism of the game world. Again, make that game yourself and rake in the billions. In the meantime, stop being rhetorical and honestly ask yourself WHY no one has created this game.
MMOs talk about the grand adventure, but they give you the same day over and over again. You kill the same things over and over. Everything stays in the same place, every day is the same as yesterday. The same guy hands out the same lame quest, to everyone, everyday. Everybody does the same lame quests. Time has no meaning, players have no impact. The MMO genre will continue to stagnate and bore the game community until some developer steps up and makes a changing living world. One where time moves forward and tomorrow is different than today.
Well I agree!!! As time passed developers will surely continue to make advance things to developed the game community. After few years gamers are the players inside the game. More likely the Stay Alive movie.. it's a fun game but really scary..
- ANY computer application has ways to exploit it....what's your point ?? MUDs were exploited all the time...so are modern MMO's.... so are Single-Player RPG's.... so are Online FPS (like Battlefield series). So will anything implimented in future to the end of time. All this is a non-issue. You deal with exploits on the technical side by puting in controls. You deal with problem/disruptive customers on the CSR side. No difference in that between the type of game I propose and the type of MMO's that exist now.
The point is, the more capacity you give for players and volunteer GM's to alter your game, the bigger the mess you make when someone inevitably exploits the system.
Believe me, as an Infrastructure Manager (part of my responsibilties deal with security), I fight these sorts of battles all the time. There is ALWAYS a trade-off between functionality provided to end users and security. I always point out the risks involved whenever certain functionality is added for an end-user. Often though, the functionality is more important then the risk involved. Different environments/companies have different tolerances for risk vs functionality. Ultimately the safest thing for a game company to do would not to allow a player to do anything....no looting, no pressing any attack buttons, heck not even connecting to the server.... but then WHO would play that game.
Yes, a game where you place greater power to effect the world in the hands of the players (and the GM's) INHERENTLY incurs greater risks. Thats a given. The question is...is the extra functionality WORTH the risk. The answer to that depends on who you ask...and thier personal preferences. I won't presume to answer for anyone else...but for me...I'd rather experience 5 times the amount of problems I face with exploiters/griefers in a current MMO if it gives me the opportunity to play in a more dynamic game world. Heck....it's not like they are hacking my bank account....at worst it's my fictional characters gold at stake.
And yes, I remember the /emote exploits.... they dealt with it from a technical perspective by making text from /emotes appear differently then text generated by the system....and from a customer service perspective by BANNING Accounts that were exploiting it.
Glad to see you admit that even in a more simple game, people can and will attempt to ruin it. Banishment, to a griefer, is VICTORY.
Fair enough....but banisment means the player community doesn't need to get bothered by that greifer anymore..... unless they open up a new account with a different credit card/billing address.....and eventualy they'll run out of those.
- GM's very much had the ability to change room descriptions when they wanted. It wasn't even particularly hard to do....they just didn't happen to do it very often. WHO do you think BUILT all those rooms you wandered through?
So then you're talking about a much smaller outfit than you'd see running a MMO, as there's no way you'll see a MMO GM move trees around or change loot classes in a container. Tell me, would you allow volunteer college students that you may have never met face to face the ability to change text? What about available commands? if so, do you have time to dig through all the new commands through all the areas? Can they do this on the fly?
No, I'm talking about SIMU.... Thier GM's (many of whom were volunteers) created the rooms you wandered through...it's called "painting". Note that there is no reason...with the proper set of tools a GM in an MMO COULDN'T build areas. Would I let volunteer GM's in an MMO change stuff about areas/mobs/containers.... absolutely..... even on the fly. Of course, I wouldn't do it on day one..... they'd have to PROVE themselves first by working (with restricted persmissions) under a Senior GM. Of course, even the Senior GM's would be restricted to use a pre-built toolkit to make changes..... so the things that were changeable would only fall into certain paramters.
Could some-one play "mole" and end up pulling some emberassing stuff....sure. You could get burned. However we are talking an entertainment venue here... not online banking...or HIPAA records.... the consequences of such exploits are actual fairly negligable.
Furthermore, I don't see how this is qualitatively more risk then using college interns to do actual coding....or contract coders from some foriegn country that you've never met.......and you might be very surprised to learn just how much of that goes on....in applications far more serious then an MMO.
- GM run events happaned FAR more often then you intimate. Invasions, plot-lines, NPC's coming to down....these used to happen almost EVERY night....at least in Gemstone....not sure about DR. The "Weddings" were just a small part of it.... and yes they were a nice little offering. The vendor events were just one of the sorts of things that the GM's ran.
Then they must also run FAR MORE OFTEN than the website intimates. Go see for yourself. Nothing scheduled. rather than go for that wonderful GM run content, people go to MMO's instead to play their horrible, scripted quests in a never changing world.
Simu only lists (or used to...haven't played in a few years) thier publicaly scheduled events on thier calendars. These are probably around 1% of the events that they actualy did. They were CONSTANTLY doing events large and small.... often even multiple different ones going on at the same time.
I was even in a "Guild" I'd guess you'd call it...where we had a regularly scheduled event with a GM every sunday night. He'd occasionaly miss some sunday nights....but this must have went on for a couple of years. Most of the time it would be nothing more then him playing a particular NPC that we had a political relationship with.... but sometimes it would be quite a bit more then that.
- Simu's player-base certainly wasn't tiny.... After the move to the web, on a typical night you'd see between 1-3,000 players online on Gemstone on AVERAGE. That's actually pretty close to the average server population in a typical MMO on a typical night. We're talking a TEXT based game here.... that was competeing with Free to Play Muds mostly.
Yep. It was pretty good in its heyday, that's why I played; UO and EQ weren't even enough to get me to jump ship. You seem to think I'm insulting Simu for some reason. The people that would later move on to UO, AC and EQ had few good options for MMRPG other than Simu stuff. Like I said, I played for years, so I must have liked it.
- As far as the GM thing.... I have done just that in a MUD (not one of Simu's)..... I know what's involved. With a well designed toolkit....it's not really ALL that difficult to do.....especialy if the scope of the event your doing isn't insane. You do need some time to get used to the tools though....and a little practice to get good at running an event......and if your working with a crew of others...you obviously need some orginizational skills.
And again, setting something up where player have, as few as 2 things that they can do(move, engage to attack) that aren't just emotes is a far cry from a modern MMO, where any given character class has dozens of special abilities and attacks; special items that give more special abilities and attacks; environments that effect movement, etc... I could go on forever.
Not sure what your point is here. We aren't talking about having GM's code new functions/mechanics. We are talking about giving them the ability through a toolkit to modify certain parameters of in game objects from a library of pre-created choices. For example, switching the texture property of a building from "wood" to "burnt wood", etc.
Obviously the greater range of things you allow them to modify, the better designed (i.e. idiot proof) toolkit you need for them.....and the more practice they need working with that toolkit before they are unleashed upon the players.
However, it's not all or nothing..... even relatively simple stuff... say using LOTRO online for example...being able to quick-gen a monster players and take it into some of the regular zones to play with/against other players could make a big difference in the play experience for players.
- Platinum was around $60-80 per month....and pretty well booked.... on top of that you had other events which were sold individualy. Don't assume that the kind of audience for these games is all poor. There are plenty of people that are willing to pay good money for entertainment.
Wow... I guess it goes to show that some people are flat out nuts when it comes to spending money. Again... hate to keep driving the point home, but... where are they now?
Also, thank you for stressing my point that even in a text based game, live service costs far more than creating an experience that can run on its own. And, if people talk with their wallet, it clearly does not add enough value to keep any but the most loyal.
Simu's games are around 25 years old at this point (not sure if they are still running now). You've got to admit that's a pretty good run for any online game/service. Is it any surprise that being that dated (and a text game to boot)... they don't enjoy the popularity they once did?
The point was...that people WERE willing to pay a good chunk of change for quality entertainment....and WERE willing to pay a higher monthly fee for an enhanced level of service. That's an axiom that kinda holds true across must industries. Many people will pay more, if they percieve it gives them a better quality of service, better experience.
How else do you think resteraunts get away with charging $30 for a meal if you can get fast-food for $5.
- RE: Hero's Journey..... yeah that's a big letdown...but totaly understandable. Simu is busy developing, selling and supporting the Hero Engine (from what I understand).... You know the one Bioware is using for TOR. Simu isn't a big enough company to realisticaly tackle that many projects at once. So when the opportunity to commiditize thier engine came along (It WAS the engine they were building for HJ).... they seized it....as it was an immediate ROI (read lots of cash now)... rather then waiting for HJ to be developed, go gold and start pulling in revenue. That's where thier focus went.... can't say I blame them.
Again, you sound as though I'm attacking Simu.
I wondered if it was the same engine. I wouldn't blame them for focusing on the engine, but from a business standpoint, there was no reason to stop work on HJ, if they thought the end result would be worth it. And if they could fill up queues for platinum customers for a text based game at $80 a pop, imagine what they could charge with a full fledged MMO!!!
Sorry, but to me it sounds to me like they found it unfeasible, at least for the moment. Their faq eludes to that, avoiding mention of GM run events in features and giving an indirect answer to the very direct question.
I believe the situation was simply the case that they had X number of resources and X amount of capital to invest in resources.... and using those to sell thier engine got them an immediate and significant ROI.
Originally posted by GrumpyMel2 I'll say it again for the umpteenth time. THOSE TECHNICAL HURDLES CAN BE OVERCOME. It's the practical ones which cannot. You cannot create a world that players can alter in a way that comes close to SPG's without giving power to the jerks . Certainly there are some draw-backs to a more dynamic world that will turn some people off.... you sound like one of those people...... but there are ALOT of people that are turned off by the static qualities of todays MMO's. If you mean, I will be pissed and quite possibly quit, say, LotRO, if I'm crafting in Rivendell one day and dozens of Orcs charge through, kill me, and burn the Last Homely House to the ground unless the first 100 people to get to the zone stop them, then yes.
However, dynamic content via the skirmishes I am absolutely in love with. And the reason they work is because THEY ARE IN INSTANCES that I create or agree to join. Read back to Lizards point about "players" and "contracts" and you'll see precisely why.
Quests.... Who says you even NEED quests??? Alot of people play games that don't have quests....are they just fooling themselves? And being an ex-Eve player, I was one of them. I could live without them so long as everything I did had some tangible purpose.
I'll be interested to see how GW2 does it. I've given some comments about making quest delivery and implementation more "passive" in previous posts. Again, I don't really care how quests come, I'd as soon be rid of ?'s and !'s forever if there's plenty of clear means for which to advance a story or my character or move along in the world with some form of purpose. But that doesn't mean I want to move back to UO, EQ, and SWG's, "welcome to our big world. Now get to grinding!" Combine a system like that with the occasional GM run live event.....and don't tell me that MMO's have no ability to do Live Events...because I've been in a few...including one in LOTRO beta.... and once again you are beefing up the dynamism of the game world. Again, make that game yourself and rake in the billions. In the meantime, stop being rhetorical and honestly ask yourself WHY no one has created this game.
The GM live events are unfortunately not something that works in greater number. Either you would have to pay way to many GMs to do them or you would have to trust way to many volunteers with the GM. One you can't afford and the other will be abused in many ways.
But just because someone havn't done something before doesn't mean it is possible. No one made a MMO before UO and Meridian and that turned out fine. It is true that many things that are tried for the first time fails but a few succeeds and change their genres for good, like Quake 2 and half-life did in their time.
I believe that you can make non instanced dynamic content. So does Arena net with Guildwars 2 and they have a lot of experience. So did actually Mythic, they planned a similar but simpler system for WAR but cut it out to budget reasons (with all other good stuff except public quests).
It is however impossible to say if this will become a standard into the next gen MMOs, maybe they will go the sandbox way instead with all stuff player created, maybe they even let players play the monsters themselves, the future is hard to behold.
But Dynamic quests is something that will happen soon, there are several games that works with this even though Guildwars 2 is the only one close to being finished.
Other stuff to make the world more alive doesn't exist yet like seasons in a game to mention one. The reason for that is more logical, not only is that a lot more work, the graphical system for snow to truly fall and settle or leaves to fall from the trees and lay themselves realistically on the ground was only implemented in direct X 10. I think it will be implemented in the future but that will take a few more years, most people are still playing dx 9 and someone will have to implement it in a GFX engine in a way so it doesn't use to much resources.
The last 6 years or so have been rather slow with MMO development, the devs have only focused on combat but have only added few things, mobs are still as dumb as they were in EQ and the holy triad is 11 years old with only a few games trying something different (Guildwars for one, DDO also).
I predict that MMOs will change a lot in the next 5 years. Polished versions of EQ wont be enough by then. There are a lot more companies involved now, like Bioware and Bethesda and they will also make an impact on the market with their stuff. The fact that Blizzard is making a new MMO will force them to rethink a lot also if they want another success. A dynamic world is just one of the ways to change stuff.
The industry needs one different game that will show everyone that a game doesn't need to be like Wow and EQ to become large, I think that game will be Guildwars 2 (but I have been wrong before). One different success and everything will be changed.
As I understand it.... The annoyance that the results of an event happening which would interfere with you doing what you wanted to at any given moment (whether by design, or because some-one exploited a power they had) outweighs the entertainment value you might experience from being able to participate in a spontaneous event that actually changes the game world.... do I have it correct?
That's perfectly fine and understandable for YOU as YOUR personal choice. Just as there are many people that like to watch baseball but won't play it because they might get injured, or they'll get dirty or they really don't feel like expending all that energy. That's a perfectly valid choice for them...which there is a market for.
Still doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of other people out there who like to go out and play baseball despite the risk of injury or other downsides.
Looking at the progression of this thread I think it is gettign polarized and people are pushed into taking positions more extreme then those they actually believe in. Or in my case, just misreading my argument as an issue of technical capacity as opposed to the practical realities of creating a world alterable by players. . The way I see it is a question of 'critical mass'. A dynamic system needs a fairly large critical mass of content or it will implode on itself while a more static world can simply scale back as needed. It's a matter of the balancing act. When I see the strides that LotRO has made, IMO, in the past years updates it makes me very optimistic about content in MMO's. Mostly because THEY GET IT. They're focusing on replayability that doesn't have to compromise the persistent world and put it as risk. But lo, folks drop in... "everythings exactly the same day after day after day. I can't do anything to change anything. I give the guy his wolf pelts and he still wants everyone else to bring him wolf pelts!", etc. It becomes pretty clear what they REALLY want. They want the "you're the hero!" stuff they get from single player games. And while some things can be done for that(I've mentioned many that MMO's do already), you can't go much beyond that without sharding out or doing Schroedingers Cat mechanics, where one person sees a thriving village, and another sees corpses and ruin. If you create unique events then you have to make sure that there are enough of these unique events to satisfy your playerbase. That kind of system needs an enourmous amount of 'critical mass' to sustain itself so shortcuts are needed. The content is no longer truly unique but only seems unique. However, you still need a lot of critical mass to achieve this since yoru players will quickly see through the fact that Generic Dragon B is the same as Generic Dragon A but colored red instead of blue. QFT.
Yep... the people wanting the game world to be effected by their actions would be dissatisfied with it, even if a whole different species moved in. It's practically already there in CoX. I've closed the door on one mission, radio'd in, and opened the same door to find a different faction of mobs on the same map. Again, it beats repeating the same mission exactly, but it doesn't do much. And what difference would it be if it weren't an instance? None.
This is why I'm still here trying to make my point. If you go back and look at many of these posts, you'll see that even what Grump is proposing wouldn't be adequate for them. And as I said before, if they even got exactly what they say they wanted, it still wouldn't satisfy them because then EVERYONE would have that ability.
In many ways you need a 'runaway reaction' that keeps adding content to the dynamic system all the time. As the players keep playing the game they are gonna notice that you are recycling a lot of content and as such must be made to not care by giving them new variations and expanding things. You fail to expand and yoru system will start imploding on itself as it will start resembling a static, repetive game. Absolutely. Repeating things makes them repetitive. that's what frustrates me about people who point to a single player game and say, "why can't MMO's be like that?". Truth is, if people played SPRPG's like they did MMO's, they'd be FAR WORSE. Sorry bout my last post, all... I was in a hurry and wasn't clear on a few issues.
Originally posted by GrumpyMel2 That's perfectly fine and understandable for YOU as YOUR personal choice. Just as there are many people that like to watch baseball but won't play it because they might get injured, or they'll get dirty or they really don't feel like expending all that energy. That's a perfectly valid choice for them...which there is a market for. Robsolf, As I understand it.... The annoyance that the results of an event happening which would interfere with you doing what you wanted to at any given moment (whether by design, or because some-one exploited a power they had) outweighs the entertainment value you might experience from being able to participate in a spontaneous event that actually changes the game world.... do I have it correct? It depends. As you may know, Eve Online gives you that experience, though it's not GM/server driven, but rather driven by players. That's the point. If you sign the dotted line in Eve, you go out to 0.0 sec space to a Corp controlled Base, and the next time you log in, you could be parked in a base which is now controlled by enemy players.
That's Eve. That's what to expect. That's what can happen and it doesn't pretend otherwise. I played it for 2 years and actually had the above scenario happen.
But if I log into LotRO, head down to Bree crafting hall to work on crafting legendaries for my guildies, and a GM playing an elite band of Uruk Hai bursts in and kills me, that might quite possibly be my last trip to middle earth.
And seeing as how I played Eve and loved it, I think it's fair to say that I'm a bit more tolerant to "dramatic changes of plans" than your average MMO subscriber. So, IMO, such a mechanic will COST you alot more subs than what you'll GAIN, and will also cost more to maintain, and come with all the potential world breaking pitfalls we've already discussed.
THAT is my point. Still doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of other people out there who like to go out and play baseball despite the risk of injury or other downsides. Different people....different priorties. You could be right. Build the game and find out how many. Eve is doing fine, but their "GM's" actually PAY them 15 bucks a month to create dynamic content.
The GM live events are unfortunately not something that works in greater number. Either you would have to pay way to many GMs to do them or you would have to trust way to many volunteers with the GM. One you can't afford and the other will be abused in many ways.
I believe that you can make non instanced dynamic content. So does Arena net with Guildwars 2 and they have a lot of experience. So did actually Mythic, they planned a similar but simpler system for WAR but cut it out to budget reasons (with all other good stuff except public quests).
I'm interested, but skeptical of GW2. Something about the stuff they say and the way they say it reminds me alot of CO's claim of "no auto-attack". In the end, all it has to do is be a better system than the standard questing system we all know. And according to many, here, it can't be any worse than THAT, right?!
It is however impossible to say if this will become a standard into the next gen MMOs, maybe they will go the sandbox way instead with all stuff player created, maybe they even let players play the monsters themselves, the future is hard to behold.
Sandbox can be done, if, a majority of the time, players feel like they're working toward something; not just out in the woods shootin' wandrin' monstuhs or grindin' mats!
But Dynamic quests is something that will happen soon, there are several games that works with this even though Guildwars 2 is the only one close to being finished.
Other stuff to make the world more alive doesn't exist yet like seasons in a game to mention one. The reason for that is more logical, not only is that a lot more work, the graphical system for snow to truly fall and settle or leaves to fall from the trees and lay themselves realistically on the ground was only implemented in direct X 10. I think it will be implemented in the future but that will take a few more years, most people are still playing dx 9 and someone will have to implement it in a GFX engine in a way so it doesn't use to much resources.
I've heard Ryzom does that, but haven't played it. I think the reason most don't though(other than what you mentioned), is so that, once again, players want a CHOICE as to what kind of weather they adventure in. And you can do this by instead having zones that are perpetually wintery or fally, or springy, etc.
The last 6 years or so have been rather slow with MMO development, the devs have only focused on combat but have only added few things, mobs are still as dumb as they were in EQ and the holy triad is 11 years old with only a few games trying something different (Guildwars for one, DDO also).
DDO tries something different by going straight to the the one that started it all! LOL! The irony...
Mob intelligence is a whole other thread. I thought Tabula Rasa's ai, in comparison, was pretty bright. The problem with mob ai, is the end question that must be asked: Know matter how the AI acts, is it reasonably surmountable in a MMO environment where there are tons of mobs? Imagine if the AI was like Batman: Arkham Asylum where once one of them cries out, the whole forest converges on you(AoC's upper levels are alot like this)? (I hear the l33t idiots out there already, "I'd love it!". BS...)
I predict that MMOs will change a lot in the next 5 years. Polished versions of EQ wont be enough by then. There are a lot more companies involved now, like Bioware and Bethesda and they will also make an impact on the market with their stuff. The fact that Blizzard is making a new MMO will force them to rethink a lot also if they want another success. A dynamic world is just one of the ways to change stuff.
Originally posted by Robs I'm interested, but skeptical of GW2. Something about the stuff they say and the way they say it reminds me alot of CO's claim of "no auto-attack". In the end, all it has to do is be a better system than the standard questing system we all know. And according to many, here, it can't be any worse than THAT, right?!
DDO tries something different by going straight to the the one that started it all! LOL! The irony...
Well, there is actually a lot you can get by going back to pen and paper RPGs and look on them. They have been around since the 70s and have evolved a lot farther than MMOs and varies a lot more between themselves.
As for being skeptical do GW2 and CO have something in Common, Strain (GW2) and Roper (CO) did Diablo together a long time ago. Strain has made Warcraft 3, Guildwars and the basic work for Wow (Kaplan took over after a few years in development). Strain have now quited GW2 however and started a new project, the engine was ready and the main job done.
But to compare Cryptic and Arena net isn't fair, Arenanet was created by 3 of Blizzards top programmers, they are involved in several hit games and know what they are doing. that doesn't mean anyone will like their games but it means that they have a lot of experience and that their games have a certain quality.
Except for Roper, do you even know the name of someone at Cryptic? Their biggest hit game ever is CoX but to me it just felt repetitive with badly written story and the dumbest npcs in MMO history. Roper also made the game Hellgate: London before starting at Cryptic.
Mike O'Brien, Patrick Wyatt and Jeff Strain are playing in a different league than Roper, Needham and whoever the rest in Cryptic are. You can never be 100% sure that past success also means future success but the odds are in their favor.
Originally posted by Robs I'm interested, but skeptical of GW2. Something about the stuff they say and the way they say it reminds me alot of CO's claim of "no auto-attack". In the end, all it has to do is be a better system than the standard questing system we all know. And according to many, here, it can't be any worse than THAT, right?!
DDO tries something different by going straight to the the one that started it all! LOL! The irony...
Well, there is actually a lot you can get by going back to pen and paper RPGs and look on them. They have been around since the 70s and have evolved a lot farther than MMOs and varies a lot more between themselves.
As for being skeptical do GW2 and CO have something in Common, Strain (GW2) and Roper (CO) did Diablo together a long time ago. Strain has made Warcraft 3, Guildwars and the basic work for Wow (Kaplan took over after a few years in development). Strain have now quited GW2 however and started a new project, the engine was ready and the main job done.
But to compare Cryptic and Arena net isn't fair, Arenanet was created by 3 of Blizzards top programmers, they are involved in several hit games and know what they are doing. that doesn't mean anyone will like their games but it means that they have a lot of experience and that their games have a certain quality.
It's not a direct attempt to compare the two companies; rather the 2 claims; goodbye to ?! quests and goodbye to auto-attack. The latter seemed like a case where they made the promise, found they couldn't deliver on it, so they implemented a "worse than auto-attack" system to claim they kept the promise and not have to admit "easier said than done". It's my recollection that Cryptic was about as far into development when they started those claims as AN is now.
I forgot Roper was involved with Hellgate. the recollection is like "remembering" why the couch is covered in black soot.
The event system, as I've read it, seems similar to public quests, with the exception that failure is possible through any of the "Acts", and sends the quest down another chain of events; the strategy may(but hopefully not) involve "player damming" where the worst scenario will play out until enough players come along to finish and reset the quest. So long as either kind of completion yields a reward superior to the other, they may get away with it. But I really have to wonder if they'll manage to make EVERY quest like this, and if that would even be a positive thing as you repeatedly hurry to an area as the quests reset.
Gonna go over these and split. from the Wiki:
The first example shows the arrival of a dragon near a particular town or village. The players nearby that town or village can choose to fight the dragon. If they are successful, the dragon may flee or die, and the players involved are rewarded by the village elder; if the players fail, the dragon destroys a bridge vital to the village. At that time, the village people attempt to build a new bridge, and the players may help them by fending off a group of bandits that see the opportunity to attack.
What happens if they fail to fend off the bandits?
In the second example, if a player happens to be inside a garrison when a scouting party returns, they may overhear the scouts warning of an approaching column of centaurs, intent on destroying the garrison. The players can then participate in defending the garrison from the attacking centaurs. If the players are successful, the garrison may ask them to participate in a counterattack. If they are not successful, or if they weren't at the garrison in time to save the garrison, they may join other soldiers from a nearby town attempting to recapture the garrison.
I assume here, if capturing the garrison fails, it just remains captured?
The third example involves a player walking along a familiar road, but this time they happen upon a caravan traveling along the road. They can choose to travel with the caravan, and defend it from roving bandits, or not.
Do they enter an instance for this, I wonder? So there aren't tons of caravans with baddies in tow on the roads?
And my golden q' for them all: Is the plan to make these encounters scalable based on attendance?
Comments
I agree, it is clearly that many things that are possible with a MMO have never been tried at all. A dynamic MMO is well possible, Guildwars 2 will have many of these features when it releases but many more are possible if you have a good budget.
Problem as I see it is that companies like EA are traditionalist and wont take any risks. Also does it seems to me that few MMO devs played pen and paper RPGs and tried to recreate that experience, that is what started the genre. Now devs are looking at good selling MMOs and try to make a game with the same but slightly better experience and that is what made the genre stand still for several years.
If Guildwars 2 becomes a hit then most other devs will start with similar dynamic worlds. If someone proves that you can sell a lot of games with something like that it will open up a whole new world. Takes a visionary like Jeff Strain to pull it off. And Guildwars 2 will sell...
Nice, someone who understands how a dynamic system in a MMO can go FUBAR really, really fast=) How is it feasible at all that someone would want to play a game where if they're not the first to go kill the Dragon, they're basically SOL. Seriously, if the Dragon is just gone after the first player or group kills him, what the heck was the point of designing him in the first place when the other 15k players on the server have no way of ever killing him? Do people here actually think its OK to create a boss that can only be killed by 1 person or group on an entire server? Is that actually being suggested because it sure as hell sounds like it=)
I don't think anyone doubts that you know how a server works. However, you have made it clear that you aren't familiar with what is involved legally, administratively or financially to take on the project you are suggesting for a commercial premium subscription service. Now, if you are trying to suggest that since you are a server infrastructure manager we should accept you as an expert in game design or as a content team lead, then I'd say that's a huge leap into the realm of false authority.
If you are talking about a game for 30 or 40 people, that's something entirely different. I get the feeling that you are talking about a game with a larger playerbase than that, and that's where the logistics and scaling start to make the whole project both unweildy and costly.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
I hate to say it, but it's attitudes like yours which are why the MMO industry is stagnating and rampantly trying to clone WoW. They're too scared to deviate from what they think is the only way to succeed.
The irony of it all?
WoW succeeded specifically because Blizzard did exactly what I've been suggesting. They took all of the core mechanics that "worked" from past MMOs, and glued them together in a way that worked, and wrapped it up in a nice polished package. Of course there's other reasons why it ballooned as much as it did, but that doesn't change that the core game succeeded because it was a composition of the best ideas and concepts from previous MMOs at the time.
No one is willing to take a chance. Most new MMOs try to emulate WoW's formula, only to fall flat on their faces. Why? It's simple, because you're not going to get people to leave one game, WoW, for what is essentially the same damn thing. You have to differentiate, stand out, and the best way to do that, bar coming up with some completely new and innovative gameplay, is to take all of the successes in mechanic innovations from across the industry, and assemble them together in a meaningful manner.
It's not impossible, and in fact, it's the exact reason why WoW is the king of MMOs right now. Blizzard did their research, and took a chance, and it paid off big.
A few devs have made that mistake in the past, much to the disbelief of their playerbase. It's right up there with 'updating' the look of an item after players have acquired it.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
There are actually ways to solve that. If you create a random dragon generator (name and a few random abilities) and let the dragon spawn 1 or 2 times a week it would work fine.
Tremendous events
Quests and instanced missions already existed in the original, but along with these Guild Wars 2 adds a new type of task: "events". An event is a dynamic quest chain and can begin at any time, in any zone of the persistent world. For example (simplified), a dragon attempts to destroy the important town bridge. All players within the zone, regardless of being in a group or not, can now fight the beast. If the assault on the dragon fails and the bridge is destroyed, NPCs from the town will try to reconstruct the bridge after the dragon has left. During that time you will have to guard them from bandits. At the end all players that participated in the event will receive a reward just as with normal quests. These dynamic events will run on an immense scale, with the possibility for multiple events to overlap. Jeff Strain described it in brief as "all over the world there will be something happening!" Normal quests are designed with scaling difficulty suitable initially for solo players and adjusting their degree of difficulty as soon as you are in a group.
Player versus Environment Gameplay
The new persistent world set-up will mean some significant changes for Guild Wars 2’s PvE gameplay. No longer will you be forced into instances in order to explore the world and engage in quests with fellow players, now you’ll be able to meet other players on your travels and join in dynamic events that occur around the world.
Rather than implementing a static world with static quests and missions for players to progress through linearly, as can be seen in games like Aion or World of Warcraft, ArenaNet intends to make PvE gameplay much more engaging, personal and dynamic. One way of accomplishing this is their new dynamic event system, which will prove to be one of the key innovative elements of Guild Wars 2.
Previously this event system was described as a mechanic that would make players in a zone band together temporarily, in order to achieve common goals, in ways that could change the game world permanently. The old example was that of a dragon attacking a village, which would alert all players in the immediate area to come and help. If you help and the monster is defeated, then you’ll receive plentiful experience and loot. If you fail, then the village’s bridge will be destroyed as it retreats to its lair. A group of builders from a neighbouring village is called in to repair the bridge, but bandits attack them in order to steal the construction supplies. Now players can opt to go help the villagers secure their town from bandit raids.
At this year’s GameCom, a new example was provided of an outpost under attack by centaur raiders. You can choose to aid in the defensive of this town and if you fend the centaurs off then you may be able to counter attack and drive them out of the trading post that serves as their home base. But if you are defeated, then the outpost will be claimed by these centaurs and you can assist guardsmen from nearby villages in reclaiming it.
Obviously this kind of dynamic PvE content generation system should be a source of some incredible social experiences, if it works as advertised. This event-driven system is ArenaNet’s replacement of the archaic questing system found in other MMORPGs and some singleplayer RPGs, lead designer Eric Flannum has already stated: “I think I can safely say that you won’t see a single exclamation mark floating above a character’s head in Guild Wars 2.”
This will essentially turn all PvE content, aside from instanced dungeons and missions, into dynamic content! Not a static world designed in linear fashion by world builders, but a world that facilitates true exploration with continually altering environments and situations all over Tyria.
Yet the PvE features do not stop with the mere introduction of event-driven gameplay.
These are 2 quotes from different guildwars 2 pages, maybe they can clarify some things for you. If everyone reasoned like you would we still play pong instead of MMOs.
Robsolf,
Sorry but your arguements boil down to the intellectual equivalent of "Man will never fly". I get the fact that YOU may not like the idea of an interactive/dynamic MMORPG..... guess what your tastes are NOT the same as everyone else on the face of the planet.
The very fact that threads like this keep comming up should tell you that there IS an audience out there for this type of game. Sooner or later, some-one is going to figure out how to make it too.... they already do by drips and drabs now.
Yes there are some technical hurdles to overcome....but absolutely none of them are insurmountable. Furthermore with the ever increasing sophistication of tools that are available....those problems get easier to solve every day.
Certainly there are some draw-backs to a more dynamic world that will turn some people off.... you sound like one of those people...... but there are ALOT of people that are turned off by the static qualities of todays MMO's.
None of the issues you raise are insurmountable....
Quests.... Who says you even NEED quests??? Alot of people play games that don't have quests....are they just fooling themselves?
Plus there ARE ways to do quests in a dynamic game too. It's not like the SAME quests have to be available to every single person in the game.... and accomplished is the SAME exact way....that's just a fallacy.
Heck, even just throwing in a few variables to a quest or area makes the game more dynamic then it is now..... it's not a 100% solution but it's certainly an improvment. Some games are even doing that.
You mentioned LOTRO skirmish system earlier. You HAVE heard of the ENCOUNTERS within that system right? You DO KNOW that the is a VARIABLE right? It's NOT the same encounter every time you run the same skirmish. They have a variable list of foes that you MIGHT face in any given encounter.
Now all you would need to take that system to the next level would be to have FOES that were unlockable in response to some sort of global value (say the number of orcs killed on the server that month) or foes that locked in response to that. Then you allow Dev's to add/subtract or tweak the list of FOES that are availble (say when a new book comes out). Furthermore there is no reason you couldn't take the skirmishes out of a private instance and put them in a public zone somewhere.
Do that and you suddenly have something that starts to resemble a much more dynamic system then what we have today. Is it the perfect dynamic world that we all dream about? No.... but it's certainly an improvment.
With a little extra work..... you could make the foe's name.....and maybe some aspects of thier appearance... or exactly where they pop up in the zone....chosen randomly from a list of preset parameters.... and you add another level of variation to it.
Combine a system like that with the occasional GM run live event.....and don't tell me that MMO's have no ability to do Live Events...because I've been in a few...including one in LOTRO beta.... and once again you are beefing up the dynamism of the game world.
There are actually ways to solve that. If you create a random dragon generator (name and a few random abilities) and let the dragon spawn 1 or 2 times a week it would work fine.
Tremendous events
Quests and instanced missions already existed in the original, but along with these Guild Wars 2 adds a new type of task: "events". An event is a dynamic quest chain and can begin at any time, in any zone of the persistent world. For example (simplified), a dragon attempts to destroy the important town bridge. All players within the zone, regardless of being in a group or not, can now fight the beast. If the assault on the dragon fails and the bridge is destroyed, NPCs from the town will try to reconstruct the bridge after the dragon has left. During that time you will have to guard them from bandits. At the end all players that participated in the event will receive a reward just as with normal quests. These dynamic events will run on an immense scale, with the possibility for multiple events to overlap. Jeff Strain described it in brief as "all over the world there will be something happening!" Normal quests are designed with scaling difficulty suitable initially for solo players and adjusting their degree of difficulty as soon as you are in a group.
Player versus Environment Gameplay
The new persistent world set-up will mean some significant changes for Guild Wars 2’s PvE gameplay. No longer will you be forced into instances in order to explore the world and engage in quests with fellow players, now you’ll be able to meet other players on your travels and join in dynamic events that occur around the world.
Rather than implementing a static world with static quests and missions for players to progress through linearly, as can be seen in games like Aion or World of Warcraft, ArenaNet intends to make PvE gameplay much more engaging, personal and dynamic. One way of accomplishing this is their new dynamic event system, which will prove to be one of the key innovative elements of Guild Wars 2.
Previously this event system was described as a mechanic that would make players in a zone band together temporarily, in order to achieve common goals, in ways that could change the game world permanently. The old example was that of a dragon attacking a village, which would alert all players in the immediate area to come and help. If you help and the monster is defeated, then you’ll receive plentiful experience and loot. If you fail, then the village’s bridge will be destroyed as it retreats to its lair. A group of builders from a neighbouring village is called in to repair the bridge, but bandits attack them in order to steal the construction supplies. Now players can opt to go help the villagers secure their town from bandit raids.
At this year’s GameCom, a new example was provided of an outpost under attack by centaur raiders. You can choose to aid in the defensive of this town and if you fend the centaurs off then you may be able to counter attack and drive them out of the trading post that serves as their home base. But if you are defeated, then the outpost will be claimed by these centaurs and you can assist guardsmen from nearby villages in reclaiming it.
Obviously this kind of dynamic PvE content generation system should be a source of some incredible social experiences, if it works as advertised. This event-driven system is ArenaNet’s replacement of the archaic questing system found in other MMORPGs and some singleplayer RPGs, lead designer Eric Flannum has already stated: “I think I can safely say that you won’t see a single exclamation mark floating above a character’s head in Guild Wars 2.”
This will essentially turn all PvE content, aside from instanced dungeons and missions, into dynamic content! Not a static world designed in linear fashion by world builders, but a world that facilitates true exploration with continually altering environments and situations all over Tyria.
Yet the PvE features do not stop with the mere introduction of event-driven gameplay.
These are 2 quotes from different guildwars 2 pages, maybe they can clarify some things for you. If everyone reasoned like you would we still play pong instead of MMOs.
Wow....had no idea GW2 was going that direction...I will DEFINATELY have to check them out!
Nice, someone who understands how a dynamic system in a MMO can go FUBAR really, really fast=) How is it feasible at all that someone would want to play a game where if they're not the first to go kill the Dragon, they're basically SOL. Seriously, if the Dragon is just gone after the first player or group kills him, what the heck was the point of designing him in the first place when the other 15k players on the server have no way of ever killing him? Do people here actually think its OK to create a boss that can only be killed by 1 person or group on an entire server? Is that actually being suggested because it sure as hell sounds like it=)
Yes, that's EXACTLY what I'm suggesting. Obviously such a game would have problems appealing to people who never learned to share thier toys with others as children.
Note, this really is a problem ONLY if the Dragon is the only Boss that has/will ever exist in the game. In reality there is ALWAYS another BOSS coming along....it's just not the SAME boss as the one that gets killed today.
So what if you didn't get to be the one that killed Throg the Red..... there's a new boss tommorrow, maybe you'll get to kill him. The thing is it will be a DIFFERENT Boss......meaning you WONT know in advance who he is, exactly where he shows up, how to deal with him or what he drops. You'll have to figure it out on the fly as you go. How cool would that be?
To which you're only killing "a" dragon, rather than "the" dragon. Which there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that's exactly how UO operated. There were no named, unique 'character' mobs that were killable, at least not ones that weren't played by Seers for world events. All of the MOBs were all generic and non specific. If they had names, they were randomly generated.
That's not to say that there can't be unique boss mobs, but in my opinion if you were to have one, they should be massive bosses that take a couple hundred people, at least, to take down. An ancient wyrm, or an arch demon, for example. Of course such bosses wouldn't simply be found, and camped, they would be tied to world events.
Responses:
- ANY computer application has ways to exploit it....what's your point ?? MUDs were exploited all the time...so are modern MMO's.... so are Single-Player RPG's.... so are Online FPS (like Battlefield series). So will anything implimented in future to the end of time. All this is a non-issue. You deal with exploits on the technical side by puting in controls. You deal with problem/disruptive customers on the CSR side. No difference in that between the type of game I propose and the type of MMO's that exist now.
The point is, the more capacity you give for players and volunteer GM's to alter your game, the bigger the mess you make when someone inevitably exploits the system.
And yes, I remember the /emote exploits.... they dealt with it from a technical perspective by making text from /emotes appear differently then text generated by the system....and from a customer service perspective by BANNING Accounts that were exploiting it.
Glad to see you admit that even in a more simple game, people can and will attempt to ruin it. Banishment, to a griefer, is VICTORY.
- GM's very much had the ability to change room descriptions when they wanted. It wasn't even particularly hard to do....they just didn't happen to do it very often. WHO do you think BUILT all those rooms you wandered through?
So then you're talking about a much smaller outfit than you'd see running a MMO, as there's no way you'll see a MMO GM move trees around or change loot classes in a container. Tell me, would you allow volunteer college students that you may have never met face to face the ability to change text? What about available commands? if so, do you have time to dig through all the new commands through all the areas? Can they do this on the fly?
- GM run events happaned FAR more often then you intimate. Invasions, plot-lines, NPC's coming to down....these used to happen almost EVERY night....at least in Gemstone....not sure about DR. The "Weddings" were just a small part of it.... and yes they were a nice little offering. The vendor events were just one of the sorts of things that the GM's ran.
Then they must also run FAR MORE OFTEN than the website intimates. Go see for yourself. Nothing scheduled. rather than go for that wonderful GM run content, people go to MMO's instead to play their horrible, scripted quests in a never changing world.
- Simu's player-base certainly wasn't tiny.... After the move to the web, on a typical night you'd see between 1-3,000 players online on Gemstone on AVERAGE. That's actually pretty close to the average server population in a typical MMO on a typical night. We're talking a TEXT based game here.... that was competeing with Free to Play Muds mostly.
Yep. It was pretty good in its heyday, that's why I played; UO and EQ weren't even enough to get me to jump ship. You seem to think I'm insulting Simu for some reason. The people that would later move on to UO, AC and EQ had few good options for MMRPG other than Simu stuff. Like I said, I played for years, so I must have liked it.
- As far as the GM thing.... I have done just that in a MUD (not one of Simu's)..... I know what's involved. With a well designed toolkit....it's not really ALL that difficult to do.....especialy if the scope of the event your doing isn't insane. You do need some time to get used to the tools though....and a little practice to get good at running an event......and if your working with a crew of others...you obviously need some orginizational skills.
And again, setting something up where player have, as few as 2 things that they can do(move, engage to attack) that aren't just emotes is a far cry from a modern MMO, where any given character class has dozens of special abilities and attacks; special items that give more special abilities and attacks; environments that effect movement, etc... I could go on forever.
- Platinum was around $60-80 per month....and pretty well booked.... on top of that you had other events which were sold individualy. Don't assume that the kind of audience for these games is all poor. There are plenty of people that are willing to pay good money for entertainment.
Wow... I guess it goes to show that some people are flat out nuts when it comes to spending money. Again... hate to keep driving the point home, but... where are they now?
Also, thank you for stressing my point that even in a text based game, live service costs far more than creating an experience that can run on its own. And, if people talk with their wallet, it clearly does not add enough value to keep any but the most loyal.
- RE: Hero's Journey..... yeah that's a big letdown...but totaly understandable. Simu is busy developing, selling and supporting the Hero Engine (from what I understand).... You know the one Bioware is using for TOR. Simu isn't a big enough company to realisticaly tackle that many projects at once. So when the opportunity to commiditize thier engine came along (It WAS the engine they were building for HJ).... they seized it....as it was an immediate ROI (read lots of cash now)... rather then waiting for HJ to be developed, go gold and start pulling in revenue. That's where thier focus went.... can't say I blame them.
Again, you sound as though I'm attacking Simu.
I wondered if it was the same engine. I wouldn't blame them for focusing on the engine, but from a business standpoint, there was no reason to stop work on HJ, if they thought the end result would be worth it. And if they could fill up queues for platinum customers for a text based game at $80 a pop, imagine what they could charge with a full fledged MMO!!!
Sorry, but to me it sounds to me like they found it unfeasible, at least for the moment. Their faq eludes to that, avoiding mention of GM run events in features and giving an indirect answer to the very direct question.
Looking at the progression of this thread I think it is gettign polarized and people are pushed into taking positions more extreme then those they actually believe in.
The way I see it is a question of 'critical mass'. A dynamic system needs a fairly large critical mass of content or it will implode on itself while a more static world can simply scale back as needed.
If you create unique events then you have to make sure that there are enough of these unique events to satisfy your playerbase. That kind of system needs an enourmous amount of 'critical mass' to sustain itself so shortcuts are needed. The content is no longer truly unique but only seems unique. However, you still need a lot of critical mass to achieve this since yoru players will quickly see through the fact that Generic Dragon B is the same as Generic Dragon A but colored red instead of blue.
In many ways you need a 'runaway reaction' that keeps adding content to the dynamic system all the time. As the players keep playing the game they are gonna notice that you are recycling a lot of content and as such must be made to not care by giving them new variations and expanding things. You fail to expand and yoru system will start imploding on itself as it will start resembling a static, repetive game.
I don't think anyone doubts that you know how a server works. However, you have made it clear that you aren't familiar with what is involved legally, administratively or financially to take on the project you are suggesting for a commercial premium subscription service. Now, if you are trying to suggest that since you are a server infrastructure manager we should accept you as an expert in game design or as a content team lead, then I'd say that's a huge leap into the realm of false authority.
If you are talking about a game for 30 or 40 people, that's something entirely different. I get the feeling that you are talking about a game with a larger playerbase than that, and that's where the logistics and scaling start to make the whole project both unweildy and costly.
Look I'm not trying to claim false authority here..... are you? To say definitively that X would NOT work from a [fill in the blank] standpoint requires the same amount of expert knowledge required to state that it would.
Are you a corporate lawyer or CFO or Project Manager for an MMO...or have similar work experience? If you do then maybe you DO have some insights that I don't. If not, than I don't really think either of us can claim that level of expert opinion in the matter.
Note that in my position I DO a fair bit of project management work as well as managing operating budgets.... but that's kind of besides the point.
There is 'sharing with others' and there is 'starving together'. How frequent will a new boss appear compared to the size of the playerbase. How long would a new casul player have to wait before they would get their shot at a boss? Most people will be fine with missing a chance at a boss if they know that they will get their own chance at him in a reasonable time and there is plenty of other content to do in the meantime.
This is actually just a little bit of what will be included in the game, here is a article about it: gamedrone.net/2009/08/21/guild-wars-2-preview/ It is a few months old so there is a little more info out by now, hopefully will the game launch next winter but there is no official release date yet, they will release it when the game is done.
Dynamic worlds will appear in MMOs, maybe not exactly as you thought they would but they will. While most devs are making the same game over and over are there a few companies that thinks out of the box, Arena net is one of those companies.
Well I agree!!! As time passed developers will surely continue to make advance things to developed the game community. After few years gamers are the players inside the game. More likely the Stay Alive movie.. it's a fun game but really scary..
Responses:
- ANY computer application has ways to exploit it....what's your point ?? MUDs were exploited all the time...so are modern MMO's.... so are Single-Player RPG's.... so are Online FPS (like Battlefield series). So will anything implimented in future to the end of time. All this is a non-issue. You deal with exploits on the technical side by puting in controls. You deal with problem/disruptive customers on the CSR side. No difference in that between the type of game I propose and the type of MMO's that exist now.
The point is, the more capacity you give for players and volunteer GM's to alter your game, the bigger the mess you make when someone inevitably exploits the system.
Believe me, as an Infrastructure Manager (part of my responsibilties deal with security), I fight these sorts of battles all the time. There is ALWAYS a trade-off between functionality provided to end users and security. I always point out the risks involved whenever certain functionality is added for an end-user. Often though, the functionality is more important then the risk involved. Different environments/companies have different tolerances for risk vs functionality. Ultimately the safest thing for a game company to do would not to allow a player to do anything....no looting, no pressing any attack buttons, heck not even connecting to the server.... but then WHO would play that game.
Yes, a game where you place greater power to effect the world in the hands of the players (and the GM's) INHERENTLY incurs greater risks. Thats a given. The question is...is the extra functionality WORTH the risk. The answer to that depends on who you ask...and thier personal preferences. I won't presume to answer for anyone else...but for me...I'd rather experience 5 times the amount of problems I face with exploiters/griefers in a current MMO if it gives me the opportunity to play in a more dynamic game world. Heck....it's not like they are hacking my bank account....at worst it's my fictional characters gold at stake.
And yes, I remember the /emote exploits.... they dealt with it from a technical perspective by making text from /emotes appear differently then text generated by the system....and from a customer service perspective by BANNING Accounts that were exploiting it.
Glad to see you admit that even in a more simple game, people can and will attempt to ruin it. Banishment, to a griefer, is VICTORY.
Fair enough....but banisment means the player community doesn't need to get bothered by that greifer anymore..... unless they open up a new account with a different credit card/billing address.....and eventualy they'll run out of those.
- GM's very much had the ability to change room descriptions when they wanted. It wasn't even particularly hard to do....they just didn't happen to do it very often. WHO do you think BUILT all those rooms you wandered through?
So then you're talking about a much smaller outfit than you'd see running a MMO, as there's no way you'll see a MMO GM move trees around or change loot classes in a container. Tell me, would you allow volunteer college students that you may have never met face to face the ability to change text? What about available commands? if so, do you have time to dig through all the new commands through all the areas? Can they do this on the fly?
No, I'm talking about SIMU.... Thier GM's (many of whom were volunteers) created the rooms you wandered through...it's called "painting". Note that there is no reason...with the proper set of tools a GM in an MMO COULDN'T build areas. Would I let volunteer GM's in an MMO change stuff about areas/mobs/containers.... absolutely..... even on the fly. Of course, I wouldn't do it on day one..... they'd have to PROVE themselves first by working (with restricted persmissions) under a Senior GM. Of course, even the Senior GM's would be restricted to use a pre-built toolkit to make changes..... so the things that were changeable would only fall into certain paramters.
Could some-one play "mole" and end up pulling some emberassing stuff....sure. You could get burned. However we are talking an entertainment venue here... not online banking...or HIPAA records.... the consequences of such exploits are actual fairly negligable.
Furthermore, I don't see how this is qualitatively more risk then using college interns to do actual coding....or contract coders from some foriegn country that you've never met.......and you might be very surprised to learn just how much of that goes on....in applications far more serious then an MMO.
- GM run events happaned FAR more often then you intimate. Invasions, plot-lines, NPC's coming to down....these used to happen almost EVERY night....at least in Gemstone....not sure about DR. The "Weddings" were just a small part of it.... and yes they were a nice little offering. The vendor events were just one of the sorts of things that the GM's ran.
Then they must also run FAR MORE OFTEN than the website intimates. Go see for yourself. Nothing scheduled. rather than go for that wonderful GM run content, people go to MMO's instead to play their horrible, scripted quests in a never changing world.
Simu only lists (or used to...haven't played in a few years) thier publicaly scheduled events on thier calendars. These are probably around 1% of the events that they actualy did. They were CONSTANTLY doing events large and small.... often even multiple different ones going on at the same time.
I was even in a "Guild" I'd guess you'd call it...where we had a regularly scheduled event with a GM every sunday night. He'd occasionaly miss some sunday nights....but this must have went on for a couple of years. Most of the time it would be nothing more then him playing a particular NPC that we had a political relationship with.... but sometimes it would be quite a bit more then that.
- Simu's player-base certainly wasn't tiny.... After the move to the web, on a typical night you'd see between 1-3,000 players online on Gemstone on AVERAGE. That's actually pretty close to the average server population in a typical MMO on a typical night. We're talking a TEXT based game here.... that was competeing with Free to Play Muds mostly.
Yep. It was pretty good in its heyday, that's why I played; UO and EQ weren't even enough to get me to jump ship. You seem to think I'm insulting Simu for some reason. The people that would later move on to UO, AC and EQ had few good options for MMRPG other than Simu stuff. Like I said, I played for years, so I must have liked it.
- As far as the GM thing.... I have done just that in a MUD (not one of Simu's)..... I know what's involved. With a well designed toolkit....it's not really ALL that difficult to do.....especialy if the scope of the event your doing isn't insane. You do need some time to get used to the tools though....and a little practice to get good at running an event......and if your working with a crew of others...you obviously need some orginizational skills.
And again, setting something up where player have, as few as 2 things that they can do(move, engage to attack) that aren't just emotes is a far cry from a modern MMO, where any given character class has dozens of special abilities and attacks; special items that give more special abilities and attacks; environments that effect movement, etc... I could go on forever.
Not sure what your point is here. We aren't talking about having GM's code new functions/mechanics. We are talking about giving them the ability through a toolkit to modify certain parameters of in game objects from a library of pre-created choices. For example, switching the texture property of a building from "wood" to "burnt wood", etc.
Obviously the greater range of things you allow them to modify, the better designed (i.e. idiot proof) toolkit you need for them.....and the more practice they need working with that toolkit before they are unleashed upon the players.
However, it's not all or nothing..... even relatively simple stuff... say using LOTRO online for example...being able to quick-gen a monster players and take it into some of the regular zones to play with/against other players could make a big difference in the play experience for players.
- Platinum was around $60-80 per month....and pretty well booked.... on top of that you had other events which were sold individualy. Don't assume that the kind of audience for these games is all poor. There are plenty of people that are willing to pay good money for entertainment.
Wow... I guess it goes to show that some people are flat out nuts when it comes to spending money. Again... hate to keep driving the point home, but... where are they now?
Also, thank you for stressing my point that even in a text based game, live service costs far more than creating an experience that can run on its own. And, if people talk with their wallet, it clearly does not add enough value to keep any but the most loyal.
Simu's games are around 25 years old at this point (not sure if they are still running now). You've got to admit that's a pretty good run for any online game/service. Is it any surprise that being that dated (and a text game to boot)... they don't enjoy the popularity they once did?
The point was...that people WERE willing to pay a good chunk of change for quality entertainment....and WERE willing to pay a higher monthly fee for an enhanced level of service. That's an axiom that kinda holds true across must industries. Many people will pay more, if they percieve it gives them a better quality of service, better experience.
How else do you think resteraunts get away with charging $30 for a meal if you can get fast-food for $5.
- RE: Hero's Journey..... yeah that's a big letdown...but totaly understandable. Simu is busy developing, selling and supporting the Hero Engine (from what I understand).... You know the one Bioware is using for TOR. Simu isn't a big enough company to realisticaly tackle that many projects at once. So when the opportunity to commiditize thier engine came along (It WAS the engine they were building for HJ).... they seized it....as it was an immediate ROI (read lots of cash now)... rather then waiting for HJ to be developed, go gold and start pulling in revenue. That's where thier focus went.... can't say I blame them.
Again, you sound as though I'm attacking Simu.
I wondered if it was the same engine. I wouldn't blame them for focusing on the engine, but from a business standpoint, there was no reason to stop work on HJ, if they thought the end result would be worth it. And if they could fill up queues for platinum customers for a text based game at $80 a pop, imagine what they could charge with a full fledged MMO!!!
Sorry, but to me it sounds to me like they found it unfeasible, at least for the moment. Their faq eludes to that, avoiding mention of GM run events in features and giving an indirect answer to the very direct question.
I believe the situation was simply the case that they had X number of resources and X amount of capital to invest in resources.... and using those to sell thier engine got them an immediate and significant ROI.
The GM live events are unfortunately not something that works in greater number. Either you would have to pay way to many GMs to do them or you would have to trust way to many volunteers with the GM. One you can't afford and the other will be abused in many ways.
But just because someone havn't done something before doesn't mean it is possible. No one made a MMO before UO and Meridian and that turned out fine. It is true that many things that are tried for the first time fails but a few succeeds and change their genres for good, like Quake 2 and half-life did in their time.
I believe that you can make non instanced dynamic content. So does Arena net with Guildwars 2 and they have a lot of experience. So did actually Mythic, they planned a similar but simpler system for WAR but cut it out to budget reasons (with all other good stuff except public quests).
It is however impossible to say if this will become a standard into the next gen MMOs, maybe they will go the sandbox way instead with all stuff player created, maybe they even let players play the monsters themselves, the future is hard to behold.
But Dynamic quests is something that will happen soon, there are several games that works with this even though Guildwars 2 is the only one close to being finished.
Other stuff to make the world more alive doesn't exist yet like seasons in a game to mention one. The reason for that is more logical, not only is that a lot more work, the graphical system for snow to truly fall and settle or leaves to fall from the trees and lay themselves realistically on the ground was only implemented in direct X 10. I think it will be implemented in the future but that will take a few more years, most people are still playing dx 9 and someone will have to implement it in a GFX engine in a way so it doesn't use to much resources.
The last 6 years or so have been rather slow with MMO development, the devs have only focused on combat but have only added few things, mobs are still as dumb as they were in EQ and the holy triad is 11 years old with only a few games trying something different (Guildwars for one, DDO also).
I predict that MMOs will change a lot in the next 5 years. Polished versions of EQ wont be enough by then. There are a lot more companies involved now, like Bioware and Bethesda and they will also make an impact on the market with their stuff. The fact that Blizzard is making a new MMO will force them to rethink a lot also if they want another success. A dynamic world is just one of the ways to change stuff.
The industry needs one different game that will show everyone that a game doesn't need to be like Wow and EQ to become large, I think that game will be Guildwars 2 (but I have been wrong before). One different success and everything will be changed.
Robsolf,
As I understand it.... The annoyance that the results of an event happening which would interfere with you doing what you wanted to at any given moment (whether by design, or because some-one exploited a power they had) outweighs the entertainment value you might experience from being able to participate in a spontaneous event that actually changes the game world.... do I have it correct?
That's perfectly fine and understandable for YOU as YOUR personal choice. Just as there are many people that like to watch baseball but won't play it because they might get injured, or they'll get dirty or they really don't feel like expending all that energy. That's a perfectly valid choice for them...which there is a market for.
Still doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of other people out there who like to go out and play baseball despite the risk of injury or other downsides.
Different people....different priorties.
The GM live events are unfortunately not something that works in greater number. Either you would have to pay way to many GMs to do them or you would have to trust way to many volunteers with the GM. One you can't afford and the other will be abused in many ways.
I believe that you can make non instanced dynamic content. So does Arena net with Guildwars 2 and they have a lot of experience. So did actually Mythic, they planned a similar but simpler system for WAR but cut it out to budget reasons (with all other good stuff except public quests).
I'm interested, but skeptical of GW2. Something about the stuff they say and the way they say it reminds me alot of CO's claim of "no auto-attack". In the end, all it has to do is be a better system than the standard questing system we all know. And according to many, here, it can't be any worse than THAT, right?!
It is however impossible to say if this will become a standard into the next gen MMOs, maybe they will go the sandbox way instead with all stuff player created, maybe they even let players play the monsters themselves, the future is hard to behold.
Sandbox can be done, if, a majority of the time, players feel like they're working toward something; not just out in the woods shootin' wandrin' monstuhs or grindin' mats!
But Dynamic quests is something that will happen soon, there are several games that works with this even though Guildwars 2 is the only one close to being finished.
Other stuff to make the world more alive doesn't exist yet like seasons in a game to mention one. The reason for that is more logical, not only is that a lot more work, the graphical system for snow to truly fall and settle or leaves to fall from the trees and lay themselves realistically on the ground was only implemented in direct X 10. I think it will be implemented in the future but that will take a few more years, most people are still playing dx 9 and someone will have to implement it in a GFX engine in a way so it doesn't use to much resources.
I've heard Ryzom does that, but haven't played it. I think the reason most don't though(other than what you mentioned), is so that, once again, players want a CHOICE as to what kind of weather they adventure in. And you can do this by instead having zones that are perpetually wintery or fally, or springy, etc.
The last 6 years or so have been rather slow with MMO development, the devs have only focused on combat but have only added few things, mobs are still as dumb as they were in EQ and the holy triad is 11 years old with only a few games trying something different (Guildwars for one, DDO also).
DDO tries something different by going straight to the the one that started it all! LOL! The irony...
Mob intelligence is a whole other thread. I thought Tabula Rasa's ai, in comparison, was pretty bright. The problem with mob ai, is the end question that must be asked: Know matter how the AI acts, is it reasonably surmountable in a MMO environment where there are tons of mobs? Imagine if the AI was like Batman: Arkham Asylum where once one of them cries out, the whole forest converges on you(AoC's upper levels are alot like this)? (I hear the l33t idiots out there already, "I'd love it!". BS...)
I predict that MMOs will change a lot in the next 5 years. Polished versions of EQ wont be enough by then. There are a lot more companies involved now, like Bioware and Bethesda and they will also make an impact on the market with their stuff. The fact that Blizzard is making a new MMO will force them to rethink a lot also if they want another success. A dynamic world is just one of the ways to change stuff.
And I'm looking forward to it!
Well, there is actually a lot you can get by going back to pen and paper RPGs and look on them. They have been around since the 70s and have evolved a lot farther than MMOs and varies a lot more between themselves.
As for being skeptical do GW2 and CO have something in Common, Strain (GW2) and Roper (CO) did Diablo together a long time ago. Strain has made Warcraft 3, Guildwars and the basic work for Wow (Kaplan took over after a few years in development). Strain have now quited GW2 however and started a new project, the engine was ready and the main job done.
But to compare Cryptic and Arena net isn't fair, Arenanet was created by 3 of Blizzards top programmers, they are involved in several hit games and know what they are doing. that doesn't mean anyone will like their games but it means that they have a lot of experience and that their games have a certain quality.
Except for Roper, do you even know the name of someone at Cryptic? Their biggest hit game ever is CoX but to me it just felt repetitive with badly written story and the dumbest npcs in MMO history. Roper also made the game Hellgate: London before starting at Cryptic.
Mike O'Brien, Patrick Wyatt and Jeff Strain are playing in a different league than Roper, Needham and whoever the rest in Cryptic are. You can never be 100% sure that past success also means future success but the odds are in their favor.
Well, there is actually a lot you can get by going back to pen and paper RPGs and look on them. They have been around since the 70s and have evolved a lot farther than MMOs and varies a lot more between themselves.
As for being skeptical do GW2 and CO have something in Common, Strain (GW2) and Roper (CO) did Diablo together a long time ago. Strain has made Warcraft 3, Guildwars and the basic work for Wow (Kaplan took over after a few years in development). Strain have now quited GW2 however and started a new project, the engine was ready and the main job done.
But to compare Cryptic and Arena net isn't fair, Arenanet was created by 3 of Blizzards top programmers, they are involved in several hit games and know what they are doing. that doesn't mean anyone will like their games but it means that they have a lot of experience and that their games have a certain quality.
It's not a direct attempt to compare the two companies; rather the 2 claims; goodbye to ?! quests and goodbye to auto-attack. The latter seemed like a case where they made the promise, found they couldn't deliver on it, so they implemented a "worse than auto-attack" system to claim they kept the promise and not have to admit "easier said than done". It's my recollection that Cryptic was about as far into development when they started those claims as AN is now.
I forgot Roper was involved with Hellgate. the recollection is like "remembering" why the couch is covered in black soot.
The event system, as I've read it, seems similar to public quests, with the exception that failure is possible through any of the "Acts", and sends the quest down another chain of events; the strategy may(but hopefully not) involve "player damming" where the worst scenario will play out until enough players come along to finish and reset the quest. So long as either kind of completion yields a reward superior to the other, they may get away with it. But I really have to wonder if they'll manage to make EVERY quest like this, and if that would even be a positive thing as you repeatedly hurry to an area as the quests reset.
Gonna go over these and split. from the Wiki:
The first example shows the arrival of a dragon near a particular town or village. The players nearby that town or village can choose to fight the dragon. If they are successful, the dragon may flee or die, and the players involved are rewarded by the village elder; if the players fail, the dragon destroys a bridge vital to the village. At that time, the village people attempt to build a new bridge, and the players may help them by fending off a group of bandits that see the opportunity to attack.
What happens if they fail to fend off the bandits?
In the second example, if a player happens to be inside a garrison when a scouting party returns, they may overhear the scouts warning of an approaching column of centaurs, intent on destroying the garrison. The players can then participate in defending the garrison from the attacking centaurs. If the players are successful, the garrison may ask them to participate in a counterattack. If they are not successful, or if they weren't at the garrison in time to save the garrison, they may join other soldiers from a nearby town attempting to recapture the garrison.
I assume here, if capturing the garrison fails, it just remains captured?
The third example involves a player walking along a familiar road, but this time they happen upon a caravan traveling along the road. They can choose to travel with the caravan, and defend it from roving bandits, or not.
Do they enter an instance for this, I wonder? So there aren't tons of caravans with baddies in tow on the roads?
And my golden q' for them all: Is the plan to make these encounters scalable based on attendance?