But isn't that what mmos do already? As you progress new areas and content are made available. It's different everyday you play. You can choose what you're going to do that day. Are you going to do quests or missions, farm mats, craft, explore, meet new people, chat with old friends, etc. As long as you don't let the mmo become a job or a chore to do, and not let yourself fall into a rut, there are many things that have the potential to be entertaining. Every mmorpg is a brand new world to live and explore. What you describe sounds too much like RL to me. I get enough of that, lol. I play mmorpgs to escape it for a while.
If I go to the guy on the corner today, he will offer me a quest to fetch ten wolf tails. If I talk to him six months from now, he will offer the same thing. If my friend talks to him, he will offer the same thing. Everything is the same, every day, for everyone. New areas opened up are must more of the same endlessly repeating day.
That NPC won't offer you the same quest, because you'll have already completed it.
In the midst of most videogames offering 12-30 hours of content, and maybe 150-300 hours of multiplayer max, it's sort of ridiculous that MMORPG players will pump 2000+ hours into a MMORPG then complain about how repetitive the game is -- as if they expect 2000+ hours of completely unique content or something.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Well, I would imagine almost everyone would love to play a game where the world is constantly changing and evolving. The question is at this point is it possible? I'm not a developer or programmer but I would imagine it would be quite a feat to be able to add or change things on an almost daily basis or constantly create content that is basically "one and done" type material. Christ, most of these companies have enough trouble trying to maintain the persistent world model as it is.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Well, I would imagine almost everyone would love to play a game where the world is constantly changing and evolving. The question is at this point is it possible? I'm not a developer or programmer but I would imagine it would be quite a feat to be able to add or change things on an almost daily basis or constantly create content that is basically "one and done" type material. Christ, most of these companies have enough trouble trying to maintain the persistent world model as it is.
That is the question that bothers me most about this idea. I tried working out a system for a dynamic MMO world and after a few iterations it got just as repetitive as any current MMO. If the 'dynamic' part of the game is going to be endless variations on 'kill 10 boars' then I will take a static world any day.
Also considering how MMO companies still have massive problems getting their basic game engine to run 100% correctly, adding dynamicly generated content to the mix is going to make the usual issues way worse.
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.
Name three MMORPG's that in your opinion, were the best of all time, and why.
"There is only one thing of which I am certain, and that's nothing is certain."
After reading through most of the posts on this thread, it is clear why we wont see this anytime soon, because most players want everything spoon fed to them. They are lazy. No wonder they can sit in a chair for hours on end, clicking and pressing.
I suppose you could make a somewhat dynamic world environment, if you are willing to accept a fair amount of it being generic in nature. I find it hard to believe that it could be possible to write enough different 'story' to provide one hundred people with an individual worthwhile experience, let alone thousands. You can probably write story elements which the server might throw together with a certain random element thrown in to spruce it up. Similar like games such as Diablo, Torchlight or Borderlands do it with Mobs and Maps.
Furthermore, it is so nice to see that the EVE nerds made an appearance yet again to blab on how great their favorite land of make believe is, even after it has been made abundantly clear already that no one but them cares about that particular kind of shit. Warms the heart.
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.
Guildwars 2 dynamic quest system will help fixing that but there is more that could be done.
One thing I would like to see in a MMO is seasons, Dx 10 allows it to start snowing and get white or leafs falling off the trees and piling up on the ground. Certain animals and mobs spawns in the winter, others in the spring and so on. Certain herbs can only be picked at spring or summer, or you have to get down deep south to find them in the winter. If a day is 1 hour and a night the same you would get a year in game in a month IRL.
And you could of course add season specific quests then.
I think this would allow the world to feel more alive and you should get the feeling that time goes. Together with a dynamic quest system like Guildwars 2(where your actions affects the world) the entire world would just feel more alive.
Imagine that birds move north in the spring and south in the autumn, stuff like that would create a world that feels more alive.
Todays MMOs feels like that Bill Murray movie (groundhog day? something like that) where he wakes up and everything was exactly the same as yesterday. MMOs with modern computers have so much more potential...
I think were far from a pve focused mmo that changes dynamically.
Kinda why I enjoy pvp focused, open ended mmos.
When players are the content nothing stays the same.
I do have one syggestion though.
Saga of RYzom has GM ran events that change lore forever its world is also pretty cool due to weather/seasons one zones creature spawns and behavior are never the same.
Its the closest i've ever seen a pve focused mmo come to what you want OP.
That is the question that bothers me most about this idea. I tried working out a system for a dynamic MMO world and after a few iterations it got just as repetitive as any current MMO. If the 'dynamic' part of the game is going to be endless variations on 'kill 10 boars' then I will take a static world any day. Also considering how MMO companies still have massive problems getting their basic game engine to run 100% correctly, adding dynamicly generated content to the mix is going to make the usual issues way worse.
But the engine problem here is solved by it being programmed by Jeff Strain, he is the best programmer you can find in this genre. It could pose a problem to many other companies that lack a really experienced lead programmer.
Wait .. if you look at WOW, the world *is* changing constantly for you until you hit level cap. You NEVER repeat the same quest twice. So what is the problem? In fact, with phasing, even the world changes around you. Surely it is the same for everyone but who cares about that as long as it is changing for YOU.
You don't seems to understand what the OP are saying. It is not about repeating quests but that the game should feel as time moves and that you as player actually can do something that affects the entire server.
The idea is called Dynamic quests. LOTRO and now also Wow have a very simplified version of this where they instance a place, one instance before a city burns down for the players who havn't come so far in the questline and another one for players who saw it burn down.
In guildwars 2 however can things like this happen to the whole server, a group of players get the mission to defend a small village and if the fail the village will get burn down for the whole server. Later can some other players get a quest to help rebuild it.
If you kill all orcs no orcs will go and attack travelers, if orcs are left unattended for a time by everyone they will organize themselves into warcamps and attack villages.
This is something that WAR should have had but they cut it out because of a budget problem. Arenanet announced it earlier however and will most likely deliver this. If people like it other will follow (Blizzard were fast to add LOTROs instance system to Wow).
Maybe give some ideas you have, or aspects you'd like to see changed.
Now, as to some ideas I have. Well, nothing special there. I'm not trying to write a game here. What I want I have a feeling many people would like as well. What if, for example, I could enter a game where I was on an epic story. In that story were characters (npcs) that were people I'd dealt with in the past. Now, mind you, these aren't people other players have dealt with. These are people that I met on an adventure. I made some friends and some enemies. Now, in the future, because of what I did back then they people are part of my ongoing epic story.
In this story, someone comes to me and says, "Hey, aren't you the guy who slayed that dragon and saved the princess?" To which i reply, yep, that's me." Then they say, "Well, I heard that the wizard who owned that dragon is after you. They say he's hired assassins to take you out. Though you ought to know."
The important part here is that I killed that dragon, not you, not some other player. And... this assassin, is after me, not you, or anyone else. He's after me because of what I did. Now, even though I go on my next adventure, I'm also going to have to keep an eye out for this assassin. Not only that, but his isn't like some PVP guy out to kill me. He has a reason, he has a boss, someone hired this guy. Now that I know it's going on, perhaps i want to track down this wizard and see if I can find out his beef? This is my story now, not someone elses, and unlike a PVP game, this has a story and adventure attached. Unlike PVE grind games, I'm not out doing mindless killing of brainless orcs to gain a level, I'm involved in a continuing story that affects my character's life. I have choices, I can deal with the assassins, go after their boss, make a deal with him, kill him, hire assassins of my own to take him out. I'm barely scratching the surface here.
After reading this, all I can say is step out of the themepark and into the sandbox.
As others have mentioned, creating never ending, unique pve content is quite challenging technically (claims to the contrary by one development team not withstanding) yet a game like EVE already offers most of what you want because the players create the content on a daily basis.
In EVE you can build permanent structures that can never be destroyed, only conquered and controlled by those strong enough to take them.
You can also build a trade empire, and even manipulate the market to you and your allies advantage.
Control of 0.0 space changes endlessly, and the map never looks the same on any given day. With enough time,the entire landscape changes with new empires rising and old ones falling into ruin.
In my own case I live in wormholes, where new sites spawn and new wormholes open daily and offer a variety of options to chose from, including wormholes with different bonus effects (positive and negative), holes with dozens of sites to clear and on occasion, to someone else's wormhole which presents targets of opportunity to fight with. (and on some occasions, they bring the fight to you as we found out)
You want assassins to chase you? Go ahead and insult the wrong person in empire space and have dozens of mercanaries hunting you and your corpmates down for the slight, whether real or imagined.
You want to be a legend (or infamous) for doing a great deed, EVE rings with legendary names of corps and indiviuals who built empires or brought about acts of deceit that felled those same empires.
Maybe one day a development team will create a PVE world that is as dynamic as you are hoping for, but until then you'll find sandbox games like EVE to be the best alternative until they reach the marketplace.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
The problem is the design philosophy used by today's MMO developers.
Creating a persistent and ever changing world is difficult when looking at the issue from a whole through the current design methodology. At a glance, you can't develop content, i.e. quests, in a persistent MMO world without the world making said quests irrelevant at some point. This presents an issue where you are wasting time adding new quests, and removing old quests. But really, the issue again is the philosophy being used to design content. Rather than focusing on dynamic content, and dynamic systems to allow the game world to alter itself, developers tend to follow the more static and manual approach.
It would be possible to design an MMO where the game automatically alters itself, based upon variables altered by players. For example, say there is an NPC town. The more players that frequent said town and shop at it, the more variety of vendors and goods exist in that town, or if there is little traffic then the vendors are very limited. Additionally, if there are many players who hunt MOBs outside of said town, then the 'safer' it becomes, and which also promotes the city to add new buildings, attract more NPCs, etc. If there is little done by players to thin out the MOBs around the town, then the MOB frequency will grow, to the point where the MOBs will start raiding the towns, possibly even destroying buildings or wiping out the entire town. There are many other elements that could be attached to this as well, such as a prosperous town could be a higher target for bandits, which could lead to NPC quests to escort merchants from one town to the other, or fight off bandits, etc.
In the end, the main purpose would be to allow the game world to evolve using automated mechanics that grow/shrink/move points of interests and spawns, or kick off certain events or dynamically created quests. It would allow players to actually have an impact on the world through their actions, which is so sorely lacking in so many MMOs today. There is far too much static in today's MMOs.
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.
Either play sandbox MMOs or try out F2P MMOs. Sandbox have dynamic and evolving game worlds. F2P are usually very community and event focused.
There's more to MMOs than just the mainstream variations of EQ.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Originally posted by Kyleran After reading this, all I can say is step out of the themepark and into the sandbox. As others have mentioned, creating never ending, unique pve content is quite challenging technically (claims to the contrary by one development team not withstanding) yet a game like EVE already offers most of what you want because the players create the content on a daily basis. In EVE you can build permanent structures that can never be destroyed, only conquered and controlled by those strong enough to take them. You can also build a trade empire, and even manipulate the market to you and your allies advantage. Control of 0.0 space changes endlessly, and the map never looks the same on any given day. With enough time,the entire landscape changes with new empires rising and old ones falling into ruin. In my own case I live in wormholes, where new sites spawn and new wormholes open daily and offer a variety of options to chose from, including wormholes with different bonus effects (positive and negative), holes with dozens of sites to clear and on occasion, to someone else's wormhole which presents targets of opportunity to fight with. (and on some occasions, they bring the fight to you as we found out) You want assassins to chase you? Go ahead and insult the wrong person in empire space and have dozens of mercanaries hunting you and your corpmates down for the slight, whether real or imagined. You want to be a legend (or infamous) for doing a great deed, EVE rings with legendary names of corps and indiviuals who built empires or brought about acts of deceit that felled those same empires. Maybe one day a development team will create a PVE world that is as dynamic as you are hoping for, but until then you'll find sandbox games like EVE to be the best alternative until they reach the marketplace.
Well, Eve is set in space and in space can no one tell the time... Player made content is one thing that makes it feels like the time is changing but in a game that is on earth or another planet you should also have stuff like seasons, night cycle, weather (season based) and so on.
That players can build their own towns is a great feature but it is just a part. I think that a mix between sandbox and themepark would make the best game, player should be able to create a lot of the content They should be able to make kingdoms, mint coins for their own independent economy and so on.
But there should also be old pre-made ruins the players can explore and adventure in. I believe in quests but they should be long, hard epic quests, not menial tasks like killing rats or delivering mail.
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.
And your plan for funding this while still retaining the price point of 15.00/month is?
(If your plan involves "Random content" or "player generated content", then replace the costs of developing content with the costs of either making sure the random generator can't produce bugged/exploitable content no matter what combination of factors are involved, or of policing player-created content for everything from exploits to obscenity to copyright violations.)
(While we're at it, also tell me how you'll deal with the "Waaah! I missed it!" crowd, who resent/hate/are pissed at the fact Player X got to do/see/experience something cool which they never will.)
Or, you could do like 99.99% of the other wannabe armchair "developers" on MMORPG.com do, and just assume you've got this absolutely great idea for a feature, and the ONLY reason it's not implemented is that NO ONE had the same brilliant idea as you and you're EVER so much more clever and inventive and innovative than the thousands of professionals in the industry, and now that they've been inspired by your insightful and articulate post, they will immediately get to adding in this feature, which will take them, oh, about a week, at the MOST.
The problem is the design philosophy used by today's MMO developers. Creating a persistent and ever changing world is difficult when looking at the issue from a whole through the current design methodology. At a glance, you can't develop content, i.e. quests, in a persistent MMO world without the world making said quests irrelevant at some point. This presents an issue where you are wasting time adding new quests, and removing old quests. But really, the issue again is the philosophy being used to design content. Rather than focusing on dynamic content, and dynamic systems to allow the game world to alter itself, developers tend to follow the more static and manual approach. It would be possible to design an MMO where the game automatically alters itself, based upon variables altered by players. For example, say there is an NPC town. The more players that frequent said town and shop at it, the more variety of vendors and goods exist in that town, or if there is little traffic then the vendors are very limited. Additionally, if there are many players who hunt MOBs outside of said town, then the 'safer' it becomes, and which also promotes the city to add new buildings, attract more NPCs, etc. If there is little done by players to thin out the MOBs around the town, then the MOB frequency will grow, to the point where the MOBs will start raiding the towns, possibly even destroying buildings or wiping out the entire town. There are many other elements that could be attached to this as well, such as a prosperous town could be a higher target for bandits, which could lead to NPC quests to escort merchants from one town to the other, or fight off bandits, etc. In the end, the main purpose would be to allow the game world to evolve using automated mechanics that grow/shrink/move points of interests and spawns, or kick off certain events or dynamically created quests. It would allow players to actually have an impact on the world through their actions, which is so sorely lacking in so many MMOs today. There is far too much static in today's MMOs.
This is exactly the dynamic quest system that Guildwars 2 will use. Read the link I posted a few posts up.
Like others have said, i dont think we are going to be seeing anything like this in the PvE realm for a long time. Players just blow through content much much faster than devs can make it. Heck we had 50s in Aion in what, a little under 2 months from release? the only way you are going to see an ever changing world, is one like EvE, where player interaction is the focus of the game, and the players are given the tools to change the world for themselves.
Now the OP isn't talking about living another life, I think what he wants is simply what we get when we watch a new series of our TV show or read a new book in a popular series. We want to not only be immersed in a story, but have a feeling of change. If movies, books, and tv shows can achieve this, why can't games? Its simply getting around the fact that in games WE are a part of the content that is delivered. I think this is very possible, every developer knows this is possible; its just damn near difficult to create a dynamic system that allows such flexibility. It ends up being a time consuming and money-sinking task and that lowers the value of such ideas.
Well... because Movies, Books, TV shows are SCRIPTED. the only way to compare those mediums to your MMO is to create a movie/book/show that you can choose to change as a viewer/reader, or create a MMO that runs players through scripted events which your character cannot change. The latter IS done frequently, as you know, and as the OP complains about.
Unlike the OP, you seem to have something of a grasp of the undertaking involved to give them what they want. A dynamic system to the level the OP wants would probably require, easily, about 4 times the manpower currently required. To the extent of some of their comments(and yours about making a MMO like a movie), you'd need at least one GM for every freaking player online.
The only way to feasibly do such things is to create automated dynamic systems. Examples of such things would be the traveling system in Dragon Age, where random encounters can occur on the road to your destination. But I doubt such things would be adequate for the OP.
It would be possible to design an MMO where the game automatically alters itself, based upon variables altered by players. For example, say there is an NPC town. The more players that frequent said town and shop at it, the more variety of vendors and goods exist in that town, or if there is little traffic then the vendors are very limited. Additionally, if there are many players who hunt MOBs outside of said town, then the 'safer' it becomes, and which also promotes the city to add new buildings, attract more NPCs, etc. If there is little done by players to thin out the MOBs around the town, then the MOB frequency will grow, to the point where the MOBs will start raiding the towns, possibly even destroying buildings or wiping out the entire town. There are many other elements that could be attached to this as well, such as a prosperous town could be a higher target for bandits, which could lead to NPC quests to escort merchants from one town to the other, or fight off bandits, etc.
This was (mostly) the original design for UO, especially things like dynamic spawn in response to player actions.
It failed somewhere beyond hideously, and was ripped out, piece by piece, over the first 2-3 months of the game's existence. (Who remembers NPCs who wanted you to find them pants? Or the wildly swinging spawn rate patch after patch, veering from "Nothing but one bunny" to "Orc camps literally spawning on top of each other so the orcs got stuck on their own tents and can't move"?)
This was also planned, but never implemented, for Star Wars Galaxies. The early attempts just didn't work, and it became obvious that it couldn't be made to work in time for release. When you consider the state of many "implemented" game systems in SWG at release, that should tell you something.
Again, I repeat: Instead of assuming game designers are uncreative dolts and you're all a bunch of unrecognized geniuses, why not ask yourselves, "I wonder if anyone's thought of this idea before? I wonder what happened to it? If I were being paid to design and implement this, what problems might I encounter and how could I solve them?" Begin with the thought "Someone else HAS had this idea and yet it wasn't implemented. Why?", and see where it leads you.
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.
I know of one game i played where they tried to give you a sense of accomplishment in the world. In Horizens there were certain player build projects to build a bridge (which when built, shortened your travel times by a lot or opened up new content) , part of a town, or an artifact that triggered another event.
Too bad the game had a lot of problems in other areas.
Currently playing browser games. Waiting for Albion Online, Citadel of Sorcery and Camelot Unchained. Played: almost all MMO pre 2007
The only way to feasibly do such things is to create automated dynamic systems. Examples of such things would be the traveling system in Dragon Age, where random encounters can occur on the road to your destination. But I doubt such things would be adequate for the OP.
One issue with this is that you end up with multiple player's "encounters" overlapping each other, which means either you have "semi private" encounters (no one can fight "your" monsters), or you have the problem of griefers of all sorts -- those who find ways to spawn monsters on other players, or those who attack and kill someone else's spawn. Neither problem is insoluble, but the effort put into solving it generally isn't worth the payoff in fun. (You also have to consider grouping, and the like -- if Fred is partway through a 'personal quest', and Joe is done with the same quest, and Jane isn't on it at all, what kind of spawn happens?)
The fact is, semi-static (changing only when the developers patch) is fun enough for millions of players. To invest in a truly dynamic world is taking a tremendous risk for a limited payoff -- while "being the star of your own story!" sounds like fun, it has yet to be shown that it actually will work in an MMORPG and be more fun than what people currently have. Given the technical problems already known, not to mention the "unknown unknowns" of what might happen with such a system implemented for 300K+ players at once, it is really worth sinking 50-100 million and 3-5 years of time into something which the players might not want?
I'd love to see slightly more personalized content -- make those 'reputation' scores worth something, have, say, enemy kobolds appear if you're "hated" by kobolds, even in non-kobold territories, or have "extra" kobolds appear when you go into the kobold caves, or something. You still have the problems I outlined above, but they could probably be handled with a fairly simple flagging mechanism. Still, the same caveat applies -- how much more fun will this be vs. how much developer time is required, compared to putting that dev time on something else? IOW, if a developer can spend a week making something which adds 10% more fun for 5% of the players, or 15% more fun for 10% of the players, any sane manager is going to assign him to the latter.
It would be possible to design an MMO where the game automatically alters itself, based upon variables altered by players. For example, say there is an NPC town. The more players that frequent said town and shop at it, the more variety of vendors and goods exist in that town, or if there is little traffic then the vendors are very limited. Additionally, if there are many players who hunt MOBs outside of said town, then the 'safer' it becomes, and which also promotes the city to add new buildings, attract more NPCs, etc. If there is little done by players to thin out the MOBs around the town, then the MOB frequency will grow, to the point where the MOBs will start raiding the towns, possibly even destroying buildings or wiping out the entire town. There are many other elements that could be attached to this as well, such as a prosperous town could be a higher target for bandits, which could lead to NPC quests to escort merchants from one town to the other, or fight off bandits, etc.
This was (mostly) the original design for UO, especially things like dynamic spawn in response to player actions.
It failed somewhere beyond hideously, and was ripped out, piece by piece, over the first 2-3 months of the game's existence. (Who remembers NPCs who wanted you to find them pants? Or the wildly swinging spawn rate patch after patch, veering from "Nothing but one bunny" to "Orc camps literally spawning on top of each other so the orcs got stuck on their own tents and can't move"?)
This was also planned, but never implemented, for Star Wars Galaxies. The early attempts just didn't work, and it became obvious that it couldn't be made to work in time for release. When you consider the state of many "implemented" game systems in SWG at release, that should tell you something.
Again, I repeat: Instead of assuming game designers are uncreative dolts and you're all a bunch of unrecognized geniuses, why not ask yourselves, "I wonder if anyone's thought of this idea before? I wonder what happened to it? If I were being paid to design and implement this, what problems might I encounter and how could I solve them?" Begin with the thought "Someone else HAS had this idea and yet it wasn't implemented. Why?", and see where it leads you.
I never suggested that designers were uncreative, simply that the design methodology they are using, or being forced to use rather, conflicts with dynamic persistent game worlds.
I am well aware that both UO and SWG had the intent of dynamic systems to make the game world persistent and ever-changing. The problem that both MMOs fell into, was lack of sufficient development time and resources to accomplish perfecting these systems after the core game was created. These systems are not impossible to do correctly, they simply have yet to have a developer take a decent crack at accomplishing it. This is further compounded by the stakeholders that lord over the developers refusing to take a chance and give enough time and resources to developers to work on polishing such a system.
I believe that it can, and eventually will be done, and done well. The question is more of a when, and by whom.
The idea is called Dynamic quests. LOTRO and now also Wow have a very simplified version of this where they instance a place, one instance before a city burns down for the players who havn't come so far in the questline and another one for players who saw it burn down. In guildwars 2 however can things like this happen to the whole server, a group of players get the mission to defend a small village and if the fail the village will get burn down for the whole server. Later can some other players get a quest to help rebuild it. If you kill all orcs no orcs will go and attack travelers, if orcs are left unattended for a time by everyone they will organize themselves into warcamps and attack villages. This is something that WAR should have had but they cut it out because of a budget problem. Arenanet announced it earlier however and will most likely deliver this. If people like it other will follow (Blizzard were fast to add LOTROs instance system to Wow).
LotRO's whole quest/advancement philosophy works this way. When you advance through the epic quests, "time" passes. Once you've completed all quests from Aragorn in the Prancing Pony, for example, his door is locked and you don't find him until Rivendell after the events of weathertop, and then once those quests are done you're locked out of the room and you don't see the Fellowship until Lothlorien, sans Gandalf. Thus, the illusion of the passage of time based on advancement. Of course, the OP wouldn't be satisfied with this. The stuff he wants would pretty much require his own personal dev to write content for him on the fly.
I think many devs "get it", not all, of course. It's just a matter of having dynamic content be feasible and practical in a persistant world. I doubt there will ever come a time when the OP will be satisfied, however, as they clearly state that the want the ingame content to be different for every player every day. The only way I see that being feasible is to do what is already a feature of every MMO. Group up.
How bout GMs earn the money we pay them? Go possess some NPC and create some dynamic situation like attack the town. Kill some noobs. Drop some great loot when you die
Kill some noobs... wow, if there's anything a player would like more than getting ganked by another player, it would be getting ganked by a GM. They may as well put a cancel button on the hotbar.
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If I go to the guy on the corner today, he will offer me a quest to fetch ten wolf tails. If I talk to him six months from now, he will offer the same thing. If my friend talks to him, he will offer the same thing. Everything is the same, every day, for everyone. New areas opened up are must more of the same endlessly repeating day.
That NPC won't offer you the same quest, because you'll have already completed it.
In the midst of most videogames offering 12-30 hours of content, and maybe 150-300 hours of multiplayer max, it's sort of ridiculous that MMORPG players will pump 2000+ hours into a MMORPG then complain about how repetitive the game is -- as if they expect 2000+ hours of completely unique content or something.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Well, I would imagine almost everyone would love to play a game where the world is constantly changing and evolving. The question is at this point is it possible? I'm not a developer or programmer but I would imagine it would be quite a feat to be able to add or change things on an almost daily basis or constantly create content that is basically "one and done" type material. Christ, most of these companies have enough trouble trying to maintain the persistent world model as it is.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
That is the question that bothers me most about this idea. I tried working out a system for a dynamic MMO world and after a few iterations it got just as repetitive as any current MMO. If the 'dynamic' part of the game is going to be endless variations on 'kill 10 boars' then I will take a static world any day.
Also considering how MMO companies still have massive problems getting their basic game engine to run 100% correctly, adding dynamicly generated content to the mix is going to make the usual issues way worse.
Name three MMORPG's that in your opinion, were the best of all time, and why.
"There is only one thing of which I am certain, and that's nothing is certain."
After reading through most of the posts on this thread, it is clear why we wont see this anytime soon, because most players want everything spoon fed to them. They are lazy. No wonder they can sit in a chair for hours on end, clicking and pressing.
I suppose you could make a somewhat dynamic world environment, if you are willing to accept a fair amount of it being generic in nature. I find it hard to believe that it could be possible to write enough different 'story' to provide one hundred people with an individual worthwhile experience, let alone thousands. You can probably write story elements which the server might throw together with a certain random element thrown in to spruce it up. Similar like games such as Diablo, Torchlight or Borderlands do it with Mobs and Maps.
Furthermore, it is so nice to see that the EVE nerds made an appearance yet again to blab on how great their favorite land of make believe is, even after it has been made abundantly clear already that no one but them cares about that particular kind of shit. Warms the heart.
Guildwars 2 dynamic quest system will help fixing that but there is more that could be done.
One thing I would like to see in a MMO is seasons, Dx 10 allows it to start snowing and get white or leafs falling off the trees and piling up on the ground. Certain animals and mobs spawns in the winter, others in the spring and so on. Certain herbs can only be picked at spring or summer, or you have to get down deep south to find them in the winter. If a day is 1 hour and a night the same you would get a year in game in a month IRL.
And you could of course add season specific quests then.
I think this would allow the world to feel more alive and you should get the feeling that time goes. Together with a dynamic quest system like Guildwars 2(where your actions affects the world) the entire world would just feel more alive.
Imagine that birds move north in the spring and south in the autumn, stuff like that would create a world that feels more alive.
Todays MMOs feels like that Bill Murray movie (groundhog day? something like that) where he wakes up and everything was exactly the same as yesterday. MMOs with modern computers have so much more potential...
I think were far from a pve focused mmo that changes dynamically.
Kinda why I enjoy pvp focused, open ended mmos.
When players are the content nothing stays the same.
I do have one syggestion though.
Saga of RYzom has GM ran events that change lore forever its world is also pretty cool due to weather/seasons one zones creature spawns and behavior are never the same.
Its the closest i've ever seen a pve focused mmo come to what you want OP.
PLaying: EvE, Ryzom
Waiting For: Earthrise, Perpetuum
Wait .. if you look at WOW, the world *is* changing constantly for you until you hit level cap.
You NEVER repeat the same quest twice. So what is the problem? In fact, with phasing, even the world changes around you.
Surely it is the same for everyone but who cares about that as long as it is changing for YOU.
The system is already made and is just getting polished up now, read this theu: www.iloveguildwars.com/2009/11/07/guild-wars-2-what-we-know/
But the engine problem here is solved by it being programmed by Jeff Strain, he is the best programmer you can find in this genre. It could pose a problem to many other companies that lack a really experienced lead programmer.
You don't seems to understand what the OP are saying. It is not about repeating quests but that the game should feel as time moves and that you as player actually can do something that affects the entire server.
The idea is called Dynamic quests. LOTRO and now also Wow have a very simplified version of this where they instance a place, one instance before a city burns down for the players who havn't come so far in the questline and another one for players who saw it burn down.
In guildwars 2 however can things like this happen to the whole server, a group of players get the mission to defend a small village and if the fail the village will get burn down for the whole server. Later can some other players get a quest to help rebuild it.
If you kill all orcs no orcs will go and attack travelers, if orcs are left unattended for a time by everyone they will organize themselves into warcamps and attack villages.
This is something that WAR should have had but they cut it out because of a budget problem. Arenanet announced it earlier however and will most likely deliver this. If people like it other will follow (Blizzard were fast to add LOTROs instance system to Wow).
Now, as to some ideas I have. Well, nothing special there. I'm not trying to write a game here. What I want I have a feeling many people would like as well. What if, for example, I could enter a game where I was on an epic story. In that story were characters (npcs) that were people I'd dealt with in the past. Now, mind you, these aren't people other players have dealt with. These are people that I met on an adventure. I made some friends and some enemies. Now, in the future, because of what I did back then they people are part of my ongoing epic story.
In this story, someone comes to me and says, "Hey, aren't you the guy who slayed that dragon and saved the princess?" To which i reply, yep, that's me." Then they say, "Well, I heard that the wizard who owned that dragon is after you. They say he's hired assassins to take you out. Though you ought to know."
The important part here is that I killed that dragon, not you, not some other player. And... this assassin, is after me, not you, or anyone else. He's after me because of what I did. Now, even though I go on my next adventure, I'm also going to have to keep an eye out for this assassin. Not only that, but his isn't like some PVP guy out to kill me. He has a reason, he has a boss, someone hired this guy. Now that I know it's going on, perhaps i want to track down this wizard and see if I can find out his beef? This is my story now, not someone elses, and unlike a PVP game, this has a story and adventure attached. Unlike PVE grind games, I'm not out doing mindless killing of brainless orcs to gain a level, I'm involved in a continuing story that affects my character's life. I have choices, I can deal with the assassins, go after their boss, make a deal with him, kill him, hire assassins of my own to take him out. I'm barely scratching the surface here.
After reading this, all I can say is step out of the themepark and into the sandbox.
As others have mentioned, creating never ending, unique pve content is quite challenging technically (claims to the contrary by one development team not withstanding) yet a game like EVE already offers most of what you want because the players create the content on a daily basis.
In EVE you can build permanent structures that can never be destroyed, only conquered and controlled by those strong enough to take them.
You can also build a trade empire, and even manipulate the market to you and your allies advantage.
Control of 0.0 space changes endlessly, and the map never looks the same on any given day. With enough time,the entire landscape changes with new empires rising and old ones falling into ruin.
In my own case I live in wormholes, where new sites spawn and new wormholes open daily and offer a variety of options to chose from, including wormholes with different bonus effects (positive and negative), holes with dozens of sites to clear and on occasion, to someone else's wormhole which presents targets of opportunity to fight with. (and on some occasions, they bring the fight to you as we found out)
You want assassins to chase you? Go ahead and insult the wrong person in empire space and have dozens of mercanaries hunting you and your corpmates down for the slight, whether real or imagined.
You want to be a legend (or infamous) for doing a great deed, EVE rings with legendary names of corps and indiviuals who built empires or brought about acts of deceit that felled those same empires.
Maybe one day a development team will create a PVE world that is as dynamic as you are hoping for, but until then you'll find sandbox games like EVE to be the best alternative until they reach the marketplace.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
The problem is the design philosophy used by today's MMO developers.
Creating a persistent and ever changing world is difficult when looking at the issue from a whole through the current design methodology. At a glance, you can't develop content, i.e. quests, in a persistent MMO world without the world making said quests irrelevant at some point. This presents an issue where you are wasting time adding new quests, and removing old quests. But really, the issue again is the philosophy being used to design content. Rather than focusing on dynamic content, and dynamic systems to allow the game world to alter itself, developers tend to follow the more static and manual approach.
It would be possible to design an MMO where the game automatically alters itself, based upon variables altered by players. For example, say there is an NPC town. The more players that frequent said town and shop at it, the more variety of vendors and goods exist in that town, or if there is little traffic then the vendors are very limited. Additionally, if there are many players who hunt MOBs outside of said town, then the 'safer' it becomes, and which also promotes the city to add new buildings, attract more NPCs, etc. If there is little done by players to thin out the MOBs around the town, then the MOB frequency will grow, to the point where the MOBs will start raiding the towns, possibly even destroying buildings or wiping out the entire town. There are many other elements that could be attached to this as well, such as a prosperous town could be a higher target for bandits, which could lead to NPC quests to escort merchants from one town to the other, or fight off bandits, etc.
In the end, the main purpose would be to allow the game world to evolve using automated mechanics that grow/shrink/move points of interests and spawns, or kick off certain events or dynamically created quests. It would allow players to actually have an impact on the world through their actions, which is so sorely lacking in so many MMOs today. There is far too much static in today's MMOs.
Either play sandbox MMOs or try out F2P MMOs. Sandbox have dynamic and evolving game worlds. F2P are usually very community and event focused.
There's more to MMOs than just the mainstream variations of EQ.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Well, Eve is set in space and in space can no one tell the time... Player made content is one thing that makes it feels like the time is changing but in a game that is on earth or another planet you should also have stuff like seasons, night cycle, weather (season based) and so on.
That players can build their own towns is a great feature but it is just a part. I think that a mix between sandbox and themepark would make the best game, player should be able to create a lot of the content They should be able to make kingdoms, mint coins for their own independent economy and so on.
But there should also be old pre-made ruins the players can explore and adventure in. I believe in quests but they should be long, hard epic quests, not menial tasks like killing rats or delivering mail.
And your plan for funding this while still retaining the price point of 15.00/month is?
(If your plan involves "Random content" or "player generated content", then replace the costs of developing content with the costs of either making sure the random generator can't produce bugged/exploitable content no matter what combination of factors are involved, or of policing player-created content for everything from exploits to obscenity to copyright violations.)
(While we're at it, also tell me how you'll deal with the "Waaah! I missed it!" crowd, who resent/hate/are pissed at the fact Player X got to do/see/experience something cool which they never will.)
Or, you could do like 99.99% of the other wannabe armchair "developers" on MMORPG.com do, and just assume you've got this absolutely great idea for a feature, and the ONLY reason it's not implemented is that NO ONE had the same brilliant idea as you and you're EVER so much more clever and inventive and innovative than the thousands of professionals in the industry, and now that they've been inspired by your insightful and articulate post, they will immediately get to adding in this feature, which will take them, oh, about a week, at the MOST.
My money's on the latter.
This is exactly the dynamic quest system that Guildwars 2 will use. Read the link I posted a few posts up.
Like others have said, i dont think we are going to be seeing anything like this in the PvE realm for a long time. Players just blow through content much much faster than devs can make it. Heck we had 50s in Aion in what, a little under 2 months from release? the only way you are going to see an ever changing world, is one like EvE, where player interaction is the focus of the game, and the players are given the tools to change the world for themselves.
Now the OP isn't talking about living another life, I think what he wants is simply what we get when we watch a new series of our TV show or read a new book in a popular series. We want to not only be immersed in a story, but have a feeling of change. If movies, books, and tv shows can achieve this, why can't games? Its simply getting around the fact that in games WE are a part of the content that is delivered. I think this is very possible, every developer knows this is possible; its just damn near difficult to create a dynamic system that allows such flexibility. It ends up being a time consuming and money-sinking task and that lowers the value of such ideas.
Well... because Movies, Books, TV shows are SCRIPTED. the only way to compare those mediums to your MMO is to create a movie/book/show that you can choose to change as a viewer/reader, or create a MMO that runs players through scripted events which your character cannot change. The latter IS done frequently, as you know, and as the OP complains about.
Unlike the OP, you seem to have something of a grasp of the undertaking involved to give them what they want. A dynamic system to the level the OP wants would probably require, easily, about 4 times the manpower currently required. To the extent of some of their comments(and yours about making a MMO like a movie), you'd need at least one GM for every freaking player online.
The only way to feasibly do such things is to create automated dynamic systems. Examples of such things would be the traveling system in Dragon Age, where random encounters can occur on the road to your destination. But I doubt such things would be adequate for the OP.
This was (mostly) the original design for UO, especially things like dynamic spawn in response to player actions.
It failed somewhere beyond hideously, and was ripped out, piece by piece, over the first 2-3 months of the game's existence. (Who remembers NPCs who wanted you to find them pants? Or the wildly swinging spawn rate patch after patch, veering from "Nothing but one bunny" to "Orc camps literally spawning on top of each other so the orcs got stuck on their own tents and can't move"?)
This was also planned, but never implemented, for Star Wars Galaxies. The early attempts just didn't work, and it became obvious that it couldn't be made to work in time for release. When you consider the state of many "implemented" game systems in SWG at release, that should tell you something.
Again, I repeat: Instead of assuming game designers are uncreative dolts and you're all a bunch of unrecognized geniuses, why not ask yourselves, "I wonder if anyone's thought of this idea before? I wonder what happened to it? If I were being paid to design and implement this, what problems might I encounter and how could I solve them?" Begin with the thought "Someone else HAS had this idea and yet it wasn't implemented. Why?", and see where it leads you.
I know of one game i played where they tried to give you a sense of accomplishment in the world. In Horizens there were certain player build projects to build a bridge (which when built, shortened your travel times by a lot or opened up new content) , part of a town, or an artifact that triggered another event.
Too bad the game had a lot of problems in other areas.
Currently playing browser games. Waiting for Albion Online, Citadel of Sorcery and Camelot Unchained.
Played: almost all MMO pre 2007
One issue with this is that you end up with multiple player's "encounters" overlapping each other, which means either you have "semi private" encounters (no one can fight "your" monsters), or you have the problem of griefers of all sorts -- those who find ways to spawn monsters on other players, or those who attack and kill someone else's spawn. Neither problem is insoluble, but the effort put into solving it generally isn't worth the payoff in fun. (You also have to consider grouping, and the like -- if Fred is partway through a 'personal quest', and Joe is done with the same quest, and Jane isn't on it at all, what kind of spawn happens?)
The fact is, semi-static (changing only when the developers patch) is fun enough for millions of players. To invest in a truly dynamic world is taking a tremendous risk for a limited payoff -- while "being the star of your own story!" sounds like fun, it has yet to be shown that it actually will work in an MMORPG and be more fun than what people currently have. Given the technical problems already known, not to mention the "unknown unknowns" of what might happen with such a system implemented for 300K+ players at once, it is really worth sinking 50-100 million and 3-5 years of time into something which the players might not want?
I'd love to see slightly more personalized content -- make those 'reputation' scores worth something, have, say, enemy kobolds appear if you're "hated" by kobolds, even in non-kobold territories, or have "extra" kobolds appear when you go into the kobold caves, or something. You still have the problems I outlined above, but they could probably be handled with a fairly simple flagging mechanism. Still, the same caveat applies -- how much more fun will this be vs. how much developer time is required, compared to putting that dev time on something else? IOW, if a developer can spend a week making something which adds 10% more fun for 5% of the players, or 15% more fun for 10% of the players, any sane manager is going to assign him to the latter.
This was (mostly) the original design for UO, especially things like dynamic spawn in response to player actions.
It failed somewhere beyond hideously, and was ripped out, piece by piece, over the first 2-3 months of the game's existence. (Who remembers NPCs who wanted you to find them pants? Or the wildly swinging spawn rate patch after patch, veering from "Nothing but one bunny" to "Orc camps literally spawning on top of each other so the orcs got stuck on their own tents and can't move"?)
This was also planned, but never implemented, for Star Wars Galaxies. The early attempts just didn't work, and it became obvious that it couldn't be made to work in time for release. When you consider the state of many "implemented" game systems in SWG at release, that should tell you something.
Again, I repeat: Instead of assuming game designers are uncreative dolts and you're all a bunch of unrecognized geniuses, why not ask yourselves, "I wonder if anyone's thought of this idea before? I wonder what happened to it? If I were being paid to design and implement this, what problems might I encounter and how could I solve them?" Begin with the thought "Someone else HAS had this idea and yet it wasn't implemented. Why?", and see where it leads you.
I never suggested that designers were uncreative, simply that the design methodology they are using, or being forced to use rather, conflicts with dynamic persistent game worlds.
I am well aware that both UO and SWG had the intent of dynamic systems to make the game world persistent and ever-changing. The problem that both MMOs fell into, was lack of sufficient development time and resources to accomplish perfecting these systems after the core game was created. These systems are not impossible to do correctly, they simply have yet to have a developer take a decent crack at accomplishing it. This is further compounded by the stakeholders that lord over the developers refusing to take a chance and give enough time and resources to developers to work on polishing such a system.
I believe that it can, and eventually will be done, and done well. The question is more of a when, and by whom.
LotRO's whole quest/advancement philosophy works this way. When you advance through the epic quests, "time" passes. Once you've completed all quests from Aragorn in the Prancing Pony, for example, his door is locked and you don't find him until Rivendell after the events of weathertop, and then once those quests are done you're locked out of the room and you don't see the Fellowship until Lothlorien, sans Gandalf. Thus, the illusion of the passage of time based on advancement. Of course, the OP wouldn't be satisfied with this. The stuff he wants would pretty much require his own personal dev to write content for him on the fly.
I think many devs "get it", not all, of course. It's just a matter of having dynamic content be feasible and practical in a persistant world. I doubt there will ever come a time when the OP will be satisfied, however, as they clearly state that the want the ingame content to be different for every player every day. The only way I see that being feasible is to do what is already a feature of every MMO. Group up.
How bout GMs earn the money we pay them? Go possess some NPC and create some dynamic situation like attack the town. Kill some noobs. Drop some great loot when you die
Kill some noobs... wow, if there's anything a player would like more than getting ganked by another player, it would be getting ganked by a GM. They may as well put a cancel button on the hotbar.