Thats the worst part and probably the biggest barrier. For some reason, many MMO players have always wanted an easy, predictable routine. Give them challenging controls or unpredictable encounters (imagine an FPS MMO with good AI) and they'd be gone after a week.
Yes. Its not that i don't like challenging controls or unpredictable encounters. Its just that when i want that, I play FPS. That sort of play is more suited to a non-network game anyway.
Long games spanning several months if not years aren't suitable for lots of encounters like that. OTOH, 1 or 2 here and there I could see.
But thats not quite the same as MMOs changing. As i said before, you could have parts of the world that change like a switch. From A to B and back again. The world changes more than now. Just not too much, and in a controlled fashion. Any quests you get would be relative to the current state of the game world, and would inevitably involve you effectively flipping that switch.
I can understand that. It's the same reason why I avoid FFA pvp. If I want that kind of action, I'll play FPS where theres no levels, gear, or crappy combat system to get in the way.
And, that's why I'd rather see MMOs take the "persistant world" route. Combat, high end graphics, single player/small group questing are better in OTHER genres. The one thing that has always been unique to MMORPGs is massive player interaction in a massive game world. Stick with it.
What we need to solve the problem that the original poster has pointed out is a fully 3D UO, think about it. In Ultima Online their wasn't some annoying NPC that just gave the same quest to people at the same level etc and no daily quest, seriously why does someone need 10 wolf tails the every day. Anyways in UO the world was big, it was big enough for guilds to pull their resources and build castles right on the main map. I remember I played on the great lakes server and the guild I was in had a castle up by Yew and then the members all ahd their homes surrounding the castle and even had vendors set up, talk about effecting the world. I remember my dad playing a miner/blacksmith for the guild to make money by making armor, mean while I played a more combat player and also had a tailor. My brother had a couple characters as well. We all had different accounts and different PCs and had a great time. We had a pretty large guild as well. I have even seen people go as far on UO back in the day to make a library in their castle of different stuff to do.
Anyways this is what the MMO genre needs a classic UO type game in a new graphics engine type world. I know Ultima IX was a horrible game that was buggy but the level of interaction the game had with the enviroment was incredible, for a 3D engine. I imagine that but as a MMO. It would be awesome. It would be almost a real life simulator in a fantasy setting. I remember sitting down and playing chess with someone in the original UO. I would love to see that type of interaction played out in a 3D MMO. I would still play UO if it didn't get changed, it isn't really the same anymore.
I have played countless MMO's over the years and while I find some to be not so fun, I played some that I found to be quite entertaining and grand adventures. When it comes down to it the MMO experience is subjective, you're going to take away from it what you want to. MMO's will probly not tailor to the individual experience for a looooooong time to come. MMO's actually follow a model akin to the real world; here is the world created and controlled by forces you cannot influence for the most part, there is stuff to do but you have to make the most out of it in whatever ways you can.
I do agree that I would love to see more dynamic content in MMO's, but catering to indivduality in MMO's just isn't gonna happen for awhile. Being one who is going to school for game development, I am hoping that in the years to come I can get into the MMO development market and bring some ideas to the table. One instance of dynamic content I had in mind was a scenario where you have a live event where enemay forces attack a town or smiliar habited and developed area and during this live event one of two things can happen; if enough players rally to the town and manage to defeat all the attacking forces then the town is saved and there are rewards and faction and stuff given to players depending on their involvement (this would work sorta like the pulbic quests of WO), if not enough players rally to the town's defense and/or they are not able to defeat the attacking force then the town is destroyed with other consequences (i.e quest npc's are killed off for a time or moved to a different location etc. If the town is saved then players can go on to run quests in the town and perhaps new quests open up, if the town is destroyed then players can undergo quests to rebuild the town. This scenario ultimately combines public quest mechanics, live event and world changing event all in one. This is just one example of dynamic content that I could think up to illustate how wold changing content could be implemented with current tech,
Yeah, it would be nice to see but that's asking a lot out of developers right now (tongue in cheek here).
Well. In a more positive outlook is that you play with different people and in the social aspect of it all, new things are always happening. The problem is, in order to have personalized or constant/randomized quests, environmental changes, storyline altering from time to time is that it would require a hell of a lot of server maintenance, constant patches and a bigger system requirement on our end. Maybe one day this will all happen as technology in hardware AND gaming advances. Until then. Just be happy that you have MMO's to play period. Otherwise we could all still be pulling out character sheets and rolling die with some cheeto mustached, basement dwelling, overly serious GM. Just saying.
Not so much really. Just requires a different style of coding/development. The old way (We're talking 80's/90's) of doing things was to hard code everything. So you'd write in the code something like Title Bar = Black..... If you wanted to change the Title Bar to Red...you'd have update the code. Horribly inefficient way to code and to provide an online service. The newer way of doing things is basicaly to have everything be a variable and draw the value of that variable from a data store or set it dynamicaly... that way you basicaly don't need to touch the code at all to change things and can do it fairly comfortably on the fly.
So something like Color_Var1 = Select Color from Table 1 where record = FOO. Title Bar = Color_Var1. That allows you to change the color of the Title Bar on the fly without any updates to the code on either the client or server side. You basicaly build your application by plugging in lots of reusable modular elements that are stored in a library into an overall code framework. There are some limitations to that...in that you DO need to update the code if you change the basic framework or when you add brand new stuff to the library... but you can actualy have very dynamic applications if you build your code smartly and have decent sized libraries.
Note, pretty much ALL applications (including MMO's) built these days are going to use the later style of coding. It's just that MMO's don't really apply that to making the game-world world more dynamic during play. What they use it ALOT for are things like skinning....and customizing the UI...and to help the Dev's themselves when building the World.
Comments
Getting too old for this $&17!
Yes. Its not that i don't like challenging controls or unpredictable encounters. Its just that when i want that, I play FPS. That sort of play is more suited to a non-network game anyway.
Long games spanning several months if not years aren't suitable for lots of encounters like that. OTOH, 1 or 2 here and there I could see.
But thats not quite the same as MMOs changing. As i said before, you could have parts of the world that change like a switch. From A to B and back again. The world changes more than now. Just not too much, and in a controlled fashion. Any quests you get would be relative to the current state of the game world, and would inevitably involve you effectively flipping that switch.
I can understand that. It's the same reason why I avoid FFA pvp. If I want that kind of action, I'll play FPS where theres no levels, gear, or crappy combat system to get in the way.
And, that's why I'd rather see MMOs take the "persistant world" route. Combat, high end graphics, single player/small group questing are better in OTHER genres. The one thing that has always been unique to MMORPGs is massive player interaction in a massive game world. Stick with it.
What we need to solve the problem that the original poster has pointed out is a fully 3D UO, think about it. In Ultima Online their wasn't some annoying NPC that just gave the same quest to people at the same level etc and no daily quest, seriously why does someone need 10 wolf tails the every day. Anyways in UO the world was big, it was big enough for guilds to pull their resources and build castles right on the main map. I remember I played on the great lakes server and the guild I was in had a castle up by Yew and then the members all ahd their homes surrounding the castle and even had vendors set up, talk about effecting the world. I remember my dad playing a miner/blacksmith for the guild to make money by making armor, mean while I played a more combat player and also had a tailor. My brother had a couple characters as well. We all had different accounts and different PCs and had a great time. We had a pretty large guild as well. I have even seen people go as far on UO back in the day to make a library in their castle of different stuff to do.
Anyways this is what the MMO genre needs a classic UO type game in a new graphics engine type world. I know Ultima IX was a horrible game that was buggy but the level of interaction the game had with the enviroment was incredible, for a 3D engine. I imagine that but as a MMO. It would be awesome. It would be almost a real life simulator in a fantasy setting. I remember sitting down and playing chess with someone in the original UO. I would love to see that type of interaction played out in a 3D MMO. I would still play UO if it didn't get changed, it isn't really the same anymore.
Thanks for letting me comment,
God Bless,
Dustin
†
I have played countless MMO's over the years and while I find some to be not so fun, I played some that I found to be quite entertaining and grand adventures. When it comes down to it the MMO experience is subjective, you're going to take away from it what you want to. MMO's will probly not tailor to the individual experience for a looooooong time to come. MMO's actually follow a model akin to the real world; here is the world created and controlled by forces you cannot influence for the most part, there is stuff to do but you have to make the most out of it in whatever ways you can.
I do agree that I would love to see more dynamic content in MMO's, but catering to indivduality in MMO's just isn't gonna happen for awhile. Being one who is going to school for game development, I am hoping that in the years to come I can get into the MMO development market and bring some ideas to the table. One instance of dynamic content I had in mind was a scenario where you have a live event where enemay forces attack a town or smiliar habited and developed area and during this live event one of two things can happen; if enough players rally to the town and manage to defeat all the attacking forces then the town is saved and there are rewards and faction and stuff given to players depending on their involvement (this would work sorta like the pulbic quests of WO), if not enough players rally to the town's defense and/or they are not able to defeat the attacking force then the town is destroyed with other consequences (i.e quest npc's are killed off for a time or moved to a different location etc. If the town is saved then players can go on to run quests in the town and perhaps new quests open up, if the town is destroyed then players can undergo quests to rebuild the town. This scenario ultimately combines public quest mechanics, live event and world changing event all in one. This is just one example of dynamic content that I could think up to illustate how wold changing content could be implemented with current tech,
Yeah, it would be nice to see but that's asking a lot out of developers right now (tongue in cheek here).
Not so much really. Just requires a different style of coding/development. The old way (We're talking 80's/90's) of doing things was to hard code everything. So you'd write in the code something like Title Bar = Black..... If you wanted to change the Title Bar to Red...you'd have update the code. Horribly inefficient way to code and to provide an online service. The newer way of doing things is basicaly to have everything be a variable and draw the value of that variable from a data store or set it dynamicaly... that way you basicaly don't need to touch the code at all to change things and can do it fairly comfortably on the fly.
So something like Color_Var1 = Select Color from Table 1 where record = FOO. Title Bar = Color_Var1. That allows you to change the color of the Title Bar on the fly without any updates to the code on either the client or server side. You basicaly build your application by plugging in lots of reusable modular elements that are stored in a library into an overall code framework. There are some limitations to that...in that you DO need to update the code if you change the basic framework or when you add brand new stuff to the library... but you can actualy have very dynamic applications if you build your code smartly and have decent sized libraries.
Note, pretty much ALL applications (including MMO's) built these days are going to use the later style of coding. It's just that MMO's don't really apply that to making the game-world world more dynamic during play. What they use it ALOT for are things like skinning....and customizing the UI...and to help the Dev's themselves when building the World.