Instanced and/or phased quests or content does not a persistent dynamically changing world make. Instanced/phasing content is nothing more than a Schrödinger's cat scenario on said content. It's neither in one state or another at any point in time, for any particular player, which inherently makes it non-persistent. Unless an alteration to the game world takes effect for everyone at the same time for that particular 'realm', then it simply serves to take away from the persistent world feeling of said game.
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.
/Agree
AoC toyed a bit with something like your last 'graph. They had a quest where you have a cursed item which brings mobs that spawn and attack you at certain intervals; they don't let up until you find a way to get rid of the cursed item. Also, mobs will spawn and attack while you're harvesting in the crafting zones. As a result though, I can't say that the enhancement of the experience was worth, say, a weeks development time, IMO.
It's all a matter of balancing persistant and dynamic areas. Instancing makes this easier, but then you have to worry about having too many. And as you said, the more dynamic event content you put in the persistant world, the harder it is to manage for expoits and flat out enjoyable gaming experience. Often enough it turns out that all the effort isn't worth it.
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.
Tabula Rasa also did this with its various control points and whatnot. I'm also fairly certain that the intensity in which the bane attacked the control points scaled based on the number of PC's in the area. but even so, some CP's were harder to get back than others.
Other than the occasional joy of picking off mobs from fort walls, IMO this system added very little to the game experience compared to what I'd guess was the huge amount of development time and resources spent building it.
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.
You know, I keep seeing this meme, and I keep wondering what the people who promote it are smoking.
"You know what would be COOL? If, like, these MONSTERS appeared in some city, and, like THEY KILLED EVERYONE and there'd be, like, bodies everywhere and stuff, and, like, no one could shop or trade or finish quests or craft 'cause there'd be ALL THESE MONSTERS and then it would be SO AWESOME!"
Reply from the Usual Suspects:" But then everyone would team up to fight the monsters!"
Reply from Reality ('cause I've seen this shit pulled in UO, back in Ye Oldene Dayse):"No, most of the players will just log off, and of those who don't, they'll either leave the city until the stupidity is over or randomly run around looting bodies after using AOE to 'tag' as many monsters as possible. That's assuming the entire thing doesn't cause a lagfest that crashes the server."
Generally, this sort of stuff works only if it's a scheduled, planned, event and everyone knows about it and is ready for it. Even then, it's a crapshoot as to how the player base (and the server) will react. It's not something you can do every day. ("Oh, it's Tuesday? Time for the dragons to attack.")
A huge number of posters on this board, despite often whining about "instancing" and "community" seem to forget a typical MMORPG needs 250K players, minimum, to survive, let alone thrive. When proposing any "great new cool awesome idea", they need to stop asking "Would *I* find this cool?" or "Would me and MY BUDDIES find this cool?" but, "Would the vast majority of the players find this cool, given the huge variance in playstyles, playtime, and skill levels, and, of chose who don't find it cool, how many would find it uncool enough that they'd quit?"
Well I'm in agreement with you. I don't think there are any mmo's out that have a changing world. Guild Wars 2 is coming with an event system that takes the place of quests. The event system is supposed to have world (on a micro level) changing activities, such as a centaur raiding group invading a town, if nobody attacks the centaurs in that town or chases them off then that town will be the centaurs forever (or until the players kill them off). So far that is about the closest I've heard of an mmo having a non-static world.
It sounds interesting, but as I coincidentally mentioned in my above post regarding tabula rasa, it's been done before, with the response being a collective yawn from the gaming community. Heck, it may be the same exact system, with TR and GW coming from NCsoft.
But they've had a few years to improve on it. So, we'll see.
Wow, that will teach me to go to sleep. So many posts, so little time. I'll try to respond to a few comments.
First off, Lizard_SF seems the most put off about the possibility of making a dynamic game world. I like your comments about, and I quote:
"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."
I noted in one post on this that my ideas were nothing special. So I was obviously not thinking this was some 'brilliant idea" and that I was "EVER so much more clever and inventive and innovative". In fact I believe that there are a lot of players (and developers) who want this kind of game.
Now, as for dealing with the "I missed it crowd" you mentioned. That simply goes under the heading of you can't please everyone. This game just wouldn't be for them, but they have lots of static grind games to go play already.
Derros posted, and I quote:
"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?"
Well, since there is at least one game currently under development (maybe more) that are planning on doing a dynamic world system, I have to disagree. Now, as for some hard core people blowing through content, I have two responses. So what? If they play 24 hours a day so that they can get to level 50 in two months, more power to them. It doesn't stop my, or the majority of players, from enjoying the game at a more normal pace. Second, in a world that changes into 'tomorrow' each day, there are new things to explore that were not true yesterday. But regardless of this, my first point still stands, I'm not concerned with how fast you get to level 50, only that the experience along the way is rewarding.
Robsolf notes, and I quote:
"...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."
I would have to reject that rule simply because I can imagine ways to make dynanmic content outside of these limitations, and I do not believe I have a unique idea here. The concept on how to let players make decisions that change the flow of the quest coupled with the game making decisions on possible variables is not that difficult to imagine.
Lizard_SF also posted:
"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 don't assume game designers are uncreative dolts. Actually, I blame the publishers for being too chicken to back innovative and creative developers. There are developers out there right now making creative MMO games, but publishers only want clones of WoW. That's where the "Why" leads me. I'll continue to follow some of the independent developers who are currently sticking their neck out and making a dynamic game world.
Innovation is a risk, granted. And certainly most publishers won't take a risk. This is exactly why we keep getting the same old repetitive static MMO made over and over, and why the average player hops from one to the next, hoping against hope that this one will be different. I reject the concept that a dynamic world will not be that much more fun, and therefore, all MMO games should continue to be the same as all the rest. I believe that a breath of fresh air would draw a very large group of the players to that new and innovative world.
Ceridith wrote:
"I believe that it can, and eventually will be done, and done well. The question is more of a when, and by whom."
I can't agree more. There are several developers working on innovative titles. For now I'm watching Guildwars2, which may have a few interesting elements, and Citadel of Sorcery, which seems to be what I'm really looking for and seems to be taking the greatest leap. I'll also take a look at the new KOTOR offering when it comes out, though it will likely be a little linear for me.
Still not answering the "how". It seems you have a paradox: You acknowledge that Evil Greedy Capitalist Pigs won't invest huge sums into this, but, at the same time, the complexities mandate a huge design team and a huge time investment, as testing ever-changing content strikes me as nightmarish. How do you debug when the quest vanishes? How do you test what will happen when 250K players pound on the engine when your beta pool is much smaller? The regression testing alone gives me a migraine -- imagine what it will take to add some new wrinkle to the dynamic engine when it needs to be tested in combination with every other already existing factor? If the terrain changes dynamically, you've got all sorts of risks of "Stuck on geometry" and "falling through the world" bugs.
Again, I will not claim these are insoluble. I will claim that it will be hard to convince an investor to put in the necessary funds to solve these problems when you can make an equally profitable game for a lot less risk. And, yes, Comrade, it IS all about the money. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, "Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others."
Also, many players play games precisely because they are familiar. Face it, we live in a world of change and chaos and uncertainty. There's something comforting about logging in and knowing that there will always be wolf cubs to kill and that Blorg the Indestructible[1] will always be in the Temple Of Extreme Naughtiness. Who wants to log in planning to do some fishing, only to find the lake is gone? (You might also want to consider how players scream when their spell does 47 points of damage instead of 48. Imagine how they'll scream when the entire WORLD changes. Every day. Usually in ways which won't benefit them, personally.)
I also think you GROSSLY underestimate how long it takes to manually create content and how fast players can consume it. If you are promoting random/procedural content, I recommend you dust off a copy of "Elder Scrolls: Arena" and play it for longer than a week.
You want a truly dynamic, ever-changing world that responds to your actions? Find a good Dungeon Master, get some friends together, and roll those 20-siders! Online, it's just not likely to happen soon.
[1]Also "Blorg The Badly Misnamed", since he's destroyed about 42 times a dat.
Mh, i've skimmed through the thread, but haven't seen wurm being mentioned. Why is that?
I think when it comes to games that evolve and change as time moves on, wurm online is a good example how it could work. There are no quests in the game, avoiding the problem with pre-written lore. Players shape the landscape, as terraforming is possible. As time marches on, more and more roads are being built and settlements constructed. No day is like the one before, as players have the ability to completely change the landscape, turn forests into deserts or farmland and even carve tunnels into mountains. The game is not about progression in a prewritten plot, but much more centered on what people will do if you just put them into a world with some tools to shape it.
Wurm shows that an evolving world can be made. It also shows how to not do a combat and magic system, but the world shaping is something i adore.
I've seen eve being mentioned, but it is still extremely static. It does have a rich player made lore, however the devs are focusing much more on prewritten lore and empire space than on improving player ability to permanently leave their mark. The only way to permanently change and thus evolve the world is to drop an outpost in 0.0.
Instanced and/or phased quests or content does not a persistent dynamically changing world make. Instanced/phasing content is nothing more than a Schrödinger's cat scenario on said content. It's neither in one state or another at any point in time, for any particular player, which inherently makes it non-persistent. Unless an alteration to the game world takes effect for everyone at the same time for that particular 'realm', then it simply serves to take away from the persistent world feeling of said game.
That is probably the BEST you will ever get given a MASSIVE multiplayer game. Developers cannot afford to create some dynamic content only to be consumed by 1-2 players.
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.
You know, I keep seeing this meme, and I keep wondering what the people who promote it are smoking.
"You know what would be COOL? If, like, these MONSTERS appeared in some city, and, like THEY KILLED EVERYONE and there'd be, like, bodies everywhere and stuff, and, like, no one could shop or trade or finish quests or craft 'cause there'd be ALL THESE MONSTERS and then it would be SO AWESOME!"
Reply from the Usual Suspects:" But then everyone would team up to fight the monsters!"
Reply from Reality ('cause I've seen this shit pulled in UO, back in Ye Oldene Dayse):"No, most of the players will just log off, and of those who don't, they'll either leave the city until the stupidity is over or randomly run around looting bodies after using AOE to 'tag' as many monsters as possible. That's assuming the entire thing doesn't cause a lagfest that crashes the server."
Generally, this sort of stuff works only if it's a scheduled, planned, event and everyone knows about it and is ready for it. Even then, it's a crapshoot as to how the player base (and the server) will react. It's not something you can do every day. ("Oh, it's Tuesday? Time for the dragons to attack.")
A huge number of posters on this board, despite often whining about "instancing" and "community" seem to forget a typical MMORPG needs 250K players, minimum, to survive, let alone thrive. When proposing any "great new cool awesome idea", they need to stop asking "Would *I* find this cool?" or "Would me and MY BUDDIES find this cool?" but, "Would the vast majority of the players find this cool, given the huge variance in playstyles, playtime, and skill levels, and, of chose who don't find it cool, how many would find it uncool enough that they'd quit?"
Reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves... overuse of rhetorical devices. If only people would actually try to ANSWER half the questions they pose rhetorically, they might discover perfectly legitimate answers.
You want a truly dynamic, ever-changing world that responds to your actions? Find a good Dungeon Master, get some friends together, and roll those 20-siders! Online, it's just not likely to happen soon.
Crazy, I was JUST ABOUT to say that! Though, I bid them good luck finding a DM that will create 2-8 hours of content a day, even at PnP pace.
Robsolf notes, and I quote: "...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." I would have to reject that rule simply because I can imagine ways to make dynanmic content outside of these limitations, and I do not believe I have a unique idea here. The concept on how to let players make decisions that change the flow of the quest coupled with the game making decisions on possible variables is not that difficult to imagine.
While I agree(though we may disagree that MMO's do attempt dynamic content, and also on how much dynamic content is feasible), the poster I was addressing was claiming it should be possible BECAUSE we can make movies, books, tv shows, etc. My point was that dynamic content in a MMO is a far different beast than scripted mediums such as those; they are quite the opposite of dynamic, in fact.
Mh, i've skimmed through the thread, but haven't seen wurm being mentioned. Why is that? I think when it comes to games that evolve and change as time moves on, wurm online is a good example how it could work. There are no quests in the game, avoiding the problem with pre-written lore. Players shape the landscape, as terraforming is possible. As time marches on, more and more roads are being built and settlements constructed. No day is like the one before, as players have the ability to completely change the landscape, turn forests into deserts or farmland and even carve tunnels into mountains. The game is not about progression in a prewritten plot, but much more centered on what people will do if you just put them into a world with some tools to shape it. Wurm shows that an evolving world can be made. It also shows how to not do a combat and magic system, but the world shaping is something i adore.
I've seen eve being mentioned, but it is still extremely static. It does have a rich player made lore, however the devs are focusing much more on prewritten lore and empire space than on improving player ability to permanently leave their mark. The only way to permanently change and thus evolve the world is to drop an outpost in 0.0.
The same is true of A Tale In The Desert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_In_The_Desert), another true "sandbox"[1] game which has a lot of the features people claim to want, but which somehow they never actually like when they seem. (People do like, even love, ATITD, but it doesn't appeal to the "typical" MMORPGer, and, much as they'd rather rip their own liver out than admit it, WoW and Darkfall have a lot more in common than either does with ATITD.)
However, what players seem to want is a game with the same kind of lore, depth, detail, and pre-made content as EQ or WOW, but with the player freedom of more "sandboxy" games to keep rearranging and changing that content. What they want, it seems, is an EQ where you kill some major game boss, ONCE, and then the whole world reacts to that. If you kill the Orc Chief, this changes how the orc tribes work, for EVERYONE, all over the server, forever. No one else can kill the chief. Maybe some new chief arises, or maybe the orc factions split, or something, but it won't just be "kill the 'new' chief who is exactly like the old chief but with a different random name". And multiple this by the hundreds or thousands of potential plot 'pivots' any rich world will have. And make it work for a minimum of 250,000 subscribers (with people leaving and new people coming every day), and make it work for 5 to 10 years (remember, new players are coming in *constantly*, and old players are leaving), and design it within a 2-4 year development cycle, and make it proitable enough to pay development costs and sustain ongoing support while not charging more than the market will bear when you are increasingly competing with "free" item store games.
And then wonder why I'm such a mean old grumpy pants who keeps stomping on their dreams. Yeah, I'm just doing it because I hate innovation. My heart is three sizes too small.
(Think you've got an answer to all of the above. Hooray for you. Now, repeat after me "This has to work for 250,000 to 11 million players, ALL AT ONCE, and it has to keep working for 5-10 years." Then repeat it again. Then again. If you STILL think you've got something that can work and can be implemented profitably, Get Ye To A Venture Capitalist, for you will surely be rich. Alternatively, you're not very good at self-criticism.)
[1]Almost literally. Desert? Sandbox? GET IT? Thank you folks, I'll be here all week.
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.
NO.
RPGs talk about grand adventures.
MMOs talk about persistent worlds with multiple players share part of it somehow.
MMORPGs is a hybrid, you have some of each.
No? What is your point? I don't understand your comment, especially the last line, "MMORPGs is a hybrid, you have some of each." As far as I can see, there aren't ANY MMOs that aren't stagnant repeating worlds. If you know of any, please enlighten me. You know of an MMO that changes, where time flows forward? Where you don't do the same thing as every other player? Where an NPC that hands out a quest only hands that quest out to you? Where what I do today might change the world for tomorrow? Where a quest is more than 'fetch me ten bananas?"
HoT boasts an ever changing world where even two servers serving that game may be vastly different. Each area will have several different "preset" conditions that can be loaded depending on what is goin on in the world. NPCs will not be static and merchants will not always have the same merchandise. Quests will not always be the same and not always given by the same NPCs. Player actions could actually affect how the world looks and operates. The game could even go beyond the preset conditions to unique content for that server should events dictate it. This game has alot of potential.
OP: If you're sick of static worlds than this game could be for you.
I'm sure it must of been said in the many pages of responses but it is an impossibility to do what the original post wants.
You have a good 10,000 players that play per server if not more on most populated MMOs. So if you didn't want the same NPC to hand out the same item each day that means 10,000 new quests PER DAY. An MMO that did that would have like a $10,000+ monthly sub fee to pay for the amount of developers needed to make that happen, not to mention most of the new quests would have to be kill or gather tasks to save time.
Now let's say you just want each player to interact with each NPC once and have a new quests handed out by different NPCs each day. That still means that they have to come up with at least 300 quests per month since players can easily burn through shorter quests. Obviously as a player you'd want a lot of these quests to be interesting and deep = more production time. You probably also want unique art for all the unique rewards = more production time. And of course you want all the rewards to server a purpose and be balanced = more production time. Now as a player you have to track hundreds of new items coming into the game each month and figure out which ones are best for you, only to have new items come next month.
It is not possible for an MMO to be affordable and offer that kind of depth.
Originally posted by Lizard_SF People do like, even love, ATITD, but it doesn't appeal to the "typical" MMORPGer, and, much as they'd rather rip their own liver out than admit it, WoW and Darkfall have a lot more in common than either does with ATITD.)
Indeed. Mmorpgs are stuck in the Player versus Computer mindset. Even pvp based mmos are way too much about player vs. mechanics. However, there are small indie games showing that you can create something resembling a game that does not focus on npc. They do have enough to survive although some are partly unplayable. So if even borderline unplayable games survive with enough players to pay for a server and a dev, i'm semi optimistic that we can see an mmo with an evolving world.
Originally posted by Lizard_SF Almost literally. Desert? Sandbox? GET IT? Thank you folks, I'll be here all week.
You're going to hell for explaining the joke, FYI.
On the upside they add more choice and variety to gameplay. I think being able to choose from a variety of situations to get involved in is very important for a roleplaying game. But also important for a roleplaying game is a story of sorts, story contextualizes your choices and gives them meaning within the imaginary world, as apposed from just a mechanical standpoint. When you have story and choice you have the opportunity to develop a unique character by your choices, develop in the personality sense.
But dynamic worlds and stories don't usually go together. Wurm Online for example is a game that went for a dynamic world and completely dropped story. That among other things really kills the roleplaying in that game for me and as neat as building a house in a cave sounds, I don't feel like I am really developing a character, not to mention that the dynamic nature stems from player made things so the game takes a hit in quality. On the flip side a game that is all story but no choices to be made doesn't have any roleplay either, it is just a story game.
I do think you can have both story and a dynamic world though. You just have to limit what the players can change to things that the developers have made contentions for. Multiple branching story lines you can follow if you want, quests going away or new ones popping up temporarily. Effecting the cities and surroundings by player actions, which open up new content. Capturing new places making new possible content. As well as personal player choices like "kill him or let him go", affecting your character and the way people interact wih them in the world.
I think you could do that, it would be a lot of work no doubt but totally worth it. GM events could work too, but GMs do not have events all to often so inbetween events I think the world should be dynamic on its own or in response to players, but like I said in a controlled way to maintain story and roleplay opportunities.
Don't you worry little buddy. You're dealing with a man of honor. However, honor requires a higher percentage of profit
I'm sure it must of been said in the many pages of responses but it is an impossibility to do what the original post wants.
You have a good 10,000 players that play per server if not more on most populated MMOs. So if you didn't want the same NPC to hand out the same item each day that means 10,000 new quests PER DAY. An MMO that did that would have like a $10,000+ monthly sub fee to pay for the amount of developers needed to make that happen, not to mention most of the new quests would have to be kill or gather tasks to save time.
Now let's say you just want each player to interact with each NPC once and have a new quests handed out by different NPCs each day. That still means that they have to come up with at least 300 quests per month since players can easily burn through shorter quests. Obviously as a player you'd want a lot of these quests to be interesting and deep = more production time. You probably also want unique art for all the unique rewards = more production time. And of course you want all the rewards to server a purpose and be balanced = more production time. Now as a player you have to track hundreds of new items coming into the game each month and figure out which ones are best for you, only to have new items come next month.
It is not possible for an MMO to be affordable and offer that kind of depth.
You have to be realistic with what you want.
I think your numbers are a *bit* off, or at the very least, your understanding of how those numbers are achieved works. Programming is all about templates. Putting something on auto-pilot often requires less work than something that is manually driven, but it requires a complete 'hands-off' approach to the coding. The hardest thing to do while programming is to break things into the smallest morsels possible, functions, and web them together. Often times, we would rather program out in a single file everything we need. In the long term, it leads to more work, but a good programming team would be knowledgeable of this.
I think GMs *should* be actively involved with the world. But rather than 'take control' of an NPC, which is, again, a 'hands on' approach, rather they should simply push a trigger in a chain of events. Events themselves should be triggers of one another, so that the dominoes continue, and players can reverse the flow of domino fall, if you will.
It doesn't require more work, simply a fresh drawing board on the coding end of things.
As far as the flavor text and artwork is concerned, I'm sure these are things that shouldn't be too hard to do, considering, again, that a company encourages the most hands off approach they possibly can. Don't 'task' the developping department to draft up x quests, but rather ask them to draft up senarios based on trigger events. Don't ask the artists to draw specific models- rather encourage creativity, and take even the scrap work and incorporate it for the 'lesser rewards' if you will.
It's about the approach, but nowhere is it harder or require more work when done properly.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc. We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be. So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away. - MMO_Doubter
HoT boasts an ever changing world where even two servers serving that game may be vastly different. Each area will have several different "preset" conditions that can be loaded depending on what is goin on in the world. NPCs will not be static and merchants will not always have the same merchandise. Quests will not always be the same and not always given by the same NPCs. Player actions could actually affect how the world looks and operates. The game could even go beyond the preset conditions to unique content for that server should events dictate it. This game has alot of potential.
OP: If you're sick of static worlds than this game could be for you.
Something tells me, that by the time this game goes live, the several different conditions will be "two", or whatever number of factions there are, and will largely be based on whether X number of players/teams finished X instance or public quest for the day, or will be based on which faction did the most.
Quest availability, I'd bet, will also be only limited on major quests. Or, they'll just swap out different things on smaller quests; instead of 10 bat wings they'll want 10 wolf armpits, etc. Like the rest of us, Trion has watched to 3 AAA games, AoC, WAR, and CO, flop, in no small part due to lack of content. That they'll lock out any significant amount of their content to players due to "player effected events" I really have to doubt.
That one person will enter the game and alter the state of the game for everyone else is a concept I find pretty unlikely. And as Trion gets closer to the end of their development cycle, I bet they will, too. If they haven't already.
Still, I'd like everybody to find their fandom. Feel free to rub my nose in it should they make this game as you describe(see Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa, Middle Earth Online). AND have a decent amount of content. And have an enjoyable play experience outside of these features. But what I see is a game focused on features that provide little value for the development time it will take. And the cost will likely be overall mediocre gameplay.
But hey, if you like Wurm, it might be better than that.
Originally posted by pojung I think your numbers are a *bit* off, or at the very least, your understanding of how those numbers are achieved works. Programming is all about templates. Putting something on auto-pilot often requires less work than something that is manually driven, but it requires a complete 'hands-off' approach to the coding. The hardest thing to do while programming is to break things into the smallest morsels possible, functions, and web them together. Often times, we would rather program out in a single file everything we need. In the long term, it leads to more work, but a good programming team would be knowledgeable of this. I think GMs *should* be actively involved with the world. But rather than 'take control' of an NPC, which is, again, a 'hands on' approach, rather they should simply push a trigger in a chain of events. Events themselves should be triggers of one another, so that the dominoes continue, and players can reverse the flow of domino fall, if you will. It doesn't require more work, simply a fresh drawing board on the coding end of things. As far as the flavor text and artwork is concerned, I'm sure these are things that shouldn't be too hard to do, considering, again, that a company encourages the most hands off approach they possibly can. Don't 'task' the developping department to draft up x quests, but rather ask them to draft up senarios based on trigger events. Don't ask the artists to draw specific models- rather encourage creativity, and take even the scrap work and incorporate it for the 'lesser rewards' if you will. It's about the approach, but nowhere is it harder or require more work when done properly.
Of course the tradeoff is that with templating you lose the ability to 'fine tune' the experience.
While I am not in game development, a large part of my job as a programmer is to streamline code modules so they can be reused, preferably in a dynamic setting. This means that we can adapt larger portion of our codebase to a new client's requirements without having to code everything from scratch. However, this leaves the result rather 'bland' and we then have to do a lot of 'hand coding' to make the program more functional and appealing to the particular client.
When playing MMORPGs the quests and mobs that I remember the most are those that offered a unique playing experience. These are the one that go beyond the basic templates and put more of a personal touch that is not replicated.
I'm sure it must of been said in the many pages of responses but it is an impossibility to do what the original post wants.
You have a good 10,000 players that play per server if not more on most populated MMOs. So if you didn't want the same NPC to hand out the same item each day that means 10,000 new quests PER DAY. An MMO that did that would have like a $10,000+ monthly sub fee to pay for the amount of developers needed to make that happen, not to mention most of the new quests would have to be kill or gather tasks to save time.
Now let's say you just want each player to interact with each NPC once and have a new quests handed out by different NPCs each day. That still means that they have to come up with at least 300 quests per month since players can easily burn through shorter quests. Obviously as a player you'd want a lot of these quests to be interesting and deep = more production time. You probably also want unique art for all the unique rewards = more production time. And of course you want all the rewards to server a purpose and be balanced = more production time. Now as a player you have to track hundreds of new items coming into the game each month and figure out which ones are best for you, only to have new items come next month.
It is not possible for an MMO to be affordable and offer that kind of depth.
You have to be realistic with what you want.
I think your numbers are a *bit* off, or at the very least, your understanding of how those numbers are achieved works. Programming is all about templates. Putting something on auto-pilot often requires less work than something that is manually driven, but it requires a complete 'hands-off' approach to the coding. The hardest thing to do while programming is to break things into the smallest morsels possible, functions, and web them together. Often times, we would rather program out in a single file everything we need. In the long term, it leads to more work, but a good programming team would be knowledgeable of this.
I think GMs *should* be actively involved with the world. But rather than 'take control' of an NPC, which is, again, a 'hands on' approach, rather they should simply push a trigger in a chain of events. Events themselves should be triggers of one another, so that the dominoes continue, and players can reverse the flow of domino fall, if you will.
It doesn't require more work, simply a fresh drawing board on the coding end of things.
As far as the flavor text and artwork is concerned, I'm sure these are things that shouldn't be too hard to do, considering, again, that a company encourages the most hands off approach they possibly can. Don't 'task' the developping department to draft up x quests, but rather ask them to draft up senarios based on trigger events. Don't ask the artists to draw specific models- rather encourage creativity, and take even the scrap work and incorporate it for the 'lesser rewards' if you will.
It's about the approach, but nowhere is it harder or require more work when done properly.
If you want a lot of new template driven quests then A) it will still take a lot of work to do hundreds of them monthly and they will be completly uninteresting as it will be hundreds of new quests that are the same as the old quest but with the pickup item/kill creature changed and the guy you bring it back to changed. Essentially the template would be "Go kill __ number of ______ then see _____ in ______" Ya that's not fun and it's a waste of developer time. It's already bad enough to see the same quests over and over again, but to see hundreds of the same each month? No thanks that's not fun.
Creating models either through creativity or direction takes time, you have to model, bone, creature texture, creature UVs, create material for texture (or choose the best fitting material) try it in game then make adjustments. It is a time consuming process which is why you see repeated artwork in MMOs already. And that's on a longer time frame with less quests to do.
I really think you do not grasp the amount of time it takes to design, create, test, fix, test the fixes, fix, release. To do it on a scale that is 100 to 1000 times faster and larger then current games already do takes surprisingly 100 to 1000 times more work and more people. It's not like the game companies are paying all these workers to not maximize their time, they already are.
Too many forum users say "It should be easy just do _____", and they're saying that with no concept of how much work actually goes into these games already.
HoT boasts an ever changing world where even two servers serving that game may be vastly different. Each area will have several different "preset" conditions that can be loaded depending on what is goin on in the world. NPCs will not be static and merchants will not always have the same merchandise. Quests will not always be the same and not always given by the same NPCs. Player actions could actually affect how the world looks and operates. The game could even go beyond the preset conditions to unique content for that server should events dictate it. This game has alot of potential. OP: If you're sick of static worlds than this game could be for you.
Unless I'm really misreading things, which is possible, this game doesn't yet exist. It is very easy to talk about what a game "will" do. Until I can log in and see it working in, at the least, a truly open beta with hundreds of concurrent players, then, it's vaporware.
Even if it works in tests -- even if it works in a nicely controlled staged world with a dozen alpha testers running around -- the level of complexity caused by having tens of thousands of people "changing" the world all the time is mind-numbing. Just thinking of some of the concurrency issues gives me a headache. (For example, let's say I'm on a quest to kill some orcs. Someone else does a quest which kills the orc king and throws the orcs into chaos. What happens to my orcs? What happens if I spend 10 hours doing something for a quest, and then that quest-giver vanishes, forever, due to someone else's actions? Etc, etc, etc. Thinking about possibilities of database corruption and just general sync/timing errors is almost overwhelming. I mean, something as static as WoW still gets glitchy when, for example, I'm doing part 2 of a quest turn-in and someone else comes and does part 1 while I'm talking to the guy. Suddenly, he stops what he's doing with me and goes and does his little song and dance for the other person. I have to re-initiate the conversation when he's done. Multiply this by the entire world... it's a nightmare.)
EVE pretty much has a randomly generated universe and equally random "PVE" content which spawns on demand -- if I'm sent to go kill pirates in System X, the pirates appear when I do. No other player can wipe out all the pirates, there will always be more. Because player and world content is separate, a lot of the issues I mention above don't really matter -- if one corporation builds a space station, and another blows it up, that's that. Sucks if you had ships docked there, but that's part of the game. If you want a more traditional style of quest/level up MMORPG, though, that's not viable. The parts of EVE that are ever-changing are all marked off in a separate zone (granted, it's most of the map). To the best of my knowledge, there's very little game-engine-mediated interaction between player and NPC corporations -- that is, you won't see an NPC faction form a permanent alliance with a player corp, and then attack the enemies of that player corporation. If Corp "A" and Corp "B" hate each other, the various NPC factions don't care. Players can't elminate, or even seriously hinder, any of the games NPC factions. (All of this is as of my last time playing EVE several years ago; I apologize if the game has changed a lot since then.)
As far as the flavor text and artwork is concerned, I'm sure these are things that shouldn't be too hard to do, considering, again, that a company encourages the most hands off approach they possibly can. Don't 'task' the developping department to draft up x quests, but rather ask them to draft up senarios based on trigger events. Don't ask the artists to draw specific models- rather encourage creativity, and take even the scrap work and incorporate it for the 'lesser rewards' if you will. It's about the approach, but nowhere is it harder or require more work when done properly.
Wow.
There's so much wrong with this, I don't know where to start...
I hereby offer a simple challenge to anyone who thinks this sort of things is easy.
Get the Neverwinter design tools.
Build a simple world -- a town, a small dungeon, a couple of starting monster lairs -- and put in all the dynamic, self-modifying, scripts you want. You can do all the things you want to do -- add/delete NPCs, change the terrain, alter quests, all dynamically script driven.
Do that in a way that can sustain, let us say, a mere 16 concurrent players for a week or more of play, without manually going in to fix/change/enhance things. Write the scripts that can keep modifying themselves to provide a constantly changing world that remains consistent and logical to the players. (That is, each change in the world can be traced to a player action that would logically cause that change.) Be sure to allow for the creation and deletion of characters during the course of play, and correctly handle/respond to abandoned/dead storylines.
You don't need to create assets or game rules or any of the other hard work of game design. All you have to do is show how you'd write the algorithms. It's simple, right?
Let us know when it's done, then challenge us to break it -- because real players WILL try to break it, they won't "play nice", they won't "do the right thing", they will try to break it just to break it, because that's what players do. If you can make it unbreakable ANY dynamic, if we can't find anything we can do to cause paradoxes (i.e, one NPC tells us to kill someone who a player has already killed, etc), if we can't find easy exploits or end up running your engine into a dead end (it will keep generating new content no matter what we do, and it won't be constantly repeating content with just the type of monsters and the number of them varied), you will probably have something well worth showing to investors as a proof of concept.
As far as the flavor text and artwork is concerned, I'm sure these are things that shouldn't be too hard to do, considering, again, that a company encourages the most hands off approach they possibly can. Don't 'task' the developping department to draft up x quests, but rather ask them to draft up senarios based on trigger events. Don't ask the artists to draw specific models- rather encourage creativity, and take even the scrap work and incorporate it for the 'lesser rewards' if you will. It's about the approach, but nowhere is it harder or require more work when done properly.
Wow.
There's so much wrong with this, I don't know where to start...
I hereby offer a simple challenge to anyone who thinks this sort of things is easy.
Get the Neverwinter design tools.
Build a simple world -- a town, a small dungeon, a couple of starting monster lairs -- and put in all the dynamic, self-modifying, scripts you want. You can do all the things you want to do -- add/delete NPCs, change the terrain, alter quests, all dynamically script driven.
Do that in a way that can sustain, let us say, a mere 16 concurrent players for a week or more of play, without manually going in to fix/change/enhance things. Write the scripts that can keep modifying themselves to provide a constantly changing world that remains consistent and logical to the players. (That is, each change in the world can be traced to a player action that would logically cause that change.) Be sure to allow for the creation and deletion of characters during the course of play, and correctly handle/respond to abandoned/dead storylines.
You don't need to create assets or game rules or any of the other hard work of game design. All you have to do is show how you'd write the algorithms. It's simple, right?
Let us know when it's done, then challenge us to break it -- because real players WILL try to break it, they won't "play nice", they won't "do the right thing", they will try to break it just to break it, because that's what players do. If you can make it unbreakable ANY dynamic, if we can't find anything we can do to cause paradoxes (i.e, one NPC tells us to kill someone who a player has already killed, etc), if we can't find easy exploits or end up running your engine into a dead end (it will keep generating new content no matter what we do, and it won't be constantly repeating content with just the type of monsters and the number of them varied), you will probably have something well worth showing to investors as a proof of concept.
It's so easy to design these systems? Show me.
The NWN toolset is not designed to properly handle such content, that's the main issue. There has yet to be an MMO with the proper design to facilitate enhanced script driven dynamic alterations to the game world. Once the core framework exists however, it is as simple as creating logic rules and then generating the 'default' world.
Comments
Instanced and/or phased quests or content does not a persistent dynamically changing world make. Instanced/phasing content is nothing more than a Schrödinger's cat scenario on said content. It's neither in one state or another at any point in time, for any particular player, which inherently makes it non-persistent. Unless an alteration to the game world takes effect for everyone at the same time for that particular 'realm', then it simply serves to take away from the persistent world feeling of said game.
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.
/Agree
AoC toyed a bit with something like your last 'graph. They had a quest where you have a cursed item which brings mobs that spawn and attack you at certain intervals; they don't let up until you find a way to get rid of the cursed item. Also, mobs will spawn and attack while you're harvesting in the crafting zones. As a result though, I can't say that the enhancement of the experience was worth, say, a weeks development time, IMO.
It's all a matter of balancing persistant and dynamic areas. Instancing makes this easier, but then you have to worry about having too many. And as you said, the more dynamic event content you put in the persistant world, the harder it is to manage for expoits and flat out enjoyable gaming experience. Often enough it turns out that all the effort isn't worth it.
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.
Tabula Rasa also did this with its various control points and whatnot. I'm also fairly certain that the intensity in which the bane attacked the control points scaled based on the number of PC's in the area. but even so, some CP's were harder to get back than others.
Other than the occasional joy of picking off mobs from fort walls, IMO this system added very little to the game experience compared to what I'd guess was the huge amount of development time and resources spent building it.
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.
You know, I keep seeing this meme, and I keep wondering what the people who promote it are smoking.
"You know what would be COOL? If, like, these MONSTERS appeared in some city, and, like THEY KILLED EVERYONE and there'd be, like, bodies everywhere and stuff, and, like, no one could shop or trade or finish quests or craft 'cause there'd be ALL THESE MONSTERS and then it would be SO AWESOME!"
Reply from the Usual Suspects:" But then everyone would team up to fight the monsters!"
Reply from Reality ('cause I've seen this shit pulled in UO, back in Ye Oldene Dayse):"No, most of the players will just log off, and of those who don't, they'll either leave the city until the stupidity is over or randomly run around looting bodies after using AOE to 'tag' as many monsters as possible. That's assuming the entire thing doesn't cause a lagfest that crashes the server."
Generally, this sort of stuff works only if it's a scheduled, planned, event and everyone knows about it and is ready for it. Even then, it's a crapshoot as to how the player base (and the server) will react. It's not something you can do every day. ("Oh, it's Tuesday? Time for the dragons to attack.")
A huge number of posters on this board, despite often whining about "instancing" and "community" seem to forget a typical MMORPG needs 250K players, minimum, to survive, let alone thrive. When proposing any "great new cool awesome idea", they need to stop asking "Would *I* find this cool?" or "Would me and MY BUDDIES find this cool?" but, "Would the vast majority of the players find this cool, given the huge variance in playstyles, playtime, and skill levels, and, of chose who don't find it cool, how many would find it uncool enough that they'd quit?"
It sounds interesting, but as I coincidentally mentioned in my above post regarding tabula rasa, it's been done before, with the response being a collective yawn from the gaming community. Heck, it may be the same exact system, with TR and GW coming from NCsoft.
But they've had a few years to improve on it. So, we'll see.
Wow, that will teach me to go to sleep. So many posts, so little time. I'll try to respond to a few comments.
First off, Lizard_SF seems the most put off about the possibility of making a dynamic game world. I like your comments about, and I quote:
"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."
I noted in one post on this that my ideas were nothing special. So I was obviously not thinking this was some 'brilliant idea" and that I was "EVER so much more clever and inventive and innovative". In fact I believe that there are a lot of players (and developers) who want this kind of game.
Now, as for dealing with the "I missed it crowd" you mentioned. That simply goes under the heading of you can't please everyone. This game just wouldn't be for them, but they have lots of static grind games to go play already.
Derros posted, and I quote:
"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?"
Well, since there is at least one game currently under development (maybe more) that are planning on doing a dynamic world system, I have to disagree. Now, as for some hard core people blowing through content, I have two responses. So what? If they play 24 hours a day so that they can get to level 50 in two months, more power to them. It doesn't stop my, or the majority of players, from enjoying the game at a more normal pace. Second, in a world that changes into 'tomorrow' each day, there are new things to explore that were not true yesterday. But regardless of this, my first point still stands, I'm not concerned with how fast you get to level 50, only that the experience along the way is rewarding.
Robsolf notes, and I quote:
"...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."
I would have to reject that rule simply because I can imagine ways to make dynanmic content outside of these limitations, and I do not believe I have a unique idea here. The concept on how to let players make decisions that change the flow of the quest coupled with the game making decisions on possible variables is not that difficult to imagine.
Lizard_SF also posted:
"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 don't assume game designers are uncreative dolts. Actually, I blame the publishers for being too chicken to back innovative and creative developers. There are developers out there right now making creative MMO games, but publishers only want clones of WoW. That's where the "Why" leads me. I'll continue to follow some of the independent developers who are currently sticking their neck out and making a dynamic game world.
Innovation is a risk, granted. And certainly most publishers won't take a risk. This is exactly why we keep getting the same old repetitive static MMO made over and over, and why the average player hops from one to the next, hoping against hope that this one will be different. I reject the concept that a dynamic world will not be that much more fun, and therefore, all MMO games should continue to be the same as all the rest. I believe that a breath of fresh air would draw a very large group of the players to that new and innovative world.
Ceridith wrote:
"I believe that it can, and eventually will be done, and done well. The question is more of a when, and by whom."
I can't agree more. There are several developers working on innovative titles. For now I'm watching Guildwars2, which may have a few interesting elements, and Citadel of Sorcery, which seems to be what I'm really looking for and seems to be taking the greatest leap. I'll also take a look at the new KOTOR offering when it comes out, though it will likely be a little linear for me.
Still not answering the "how". It seems you have a paradox: You acknowledge that Evil Greedy Capitalist Pigs won't invest huge sums into this, but, at the same time, the complexities mandate a huge design team and a huge time investment, as testing ever-changing content strikes me as nightmarish. How do you debug when the quest vanishes? How do you test what will happen when 250K players pound on the engine when your beta pool is much smaller? The regression testing alone gives me a migraine -- imagine what it will take to add some new wrinkle to the dynamic engine when it needs to be tested in combination with every other already existing factor? If the terrain changes dynamically, you've got all sorts of risks of "Stuck on geometry" and "falling through the world" bugs.
Again, I will not claim these are insoluble. I will claim that it will be hard to convince an investor to put in the necessary funds to solve these problems when you can make an equally profitable game for a lot less risk. And, yes, Comrade, it IS all about the money. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, "Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others."
Also, many players play games precisely because they are familiar. Face it, we live in a world of change and chaos and uncertainty. There's something comforting about logging in and knowing that there will always be wolf cubs to kill and that Blorg the Indestructible[1] will always be in the Temple Of Extreme Naughtiness. Who wants to log in planning to do some fishing, only to find the lake is gone? (You might also want to consider how players scream when their spell does 47 points of damage instead of 48. Imagine how they'll scream when the entire WORLD changes. Every day. Usually in ways which won't benefit them, personally.)
I also think you GROSSLY underestimate how long it takes to manually create content and how fast players can consume it. If you are promoting random/procedural content, I recommend you dust off a copy of "Elder Scrolls: Arena" and play it for longer than a week.
You want a truly dynamic, ever-changing world that responds to your actions? Find a good Dungeon Master, get some friends together, and roll those 20-siders! Online, it's just not likely to happen soon.
[1]Also "Blorg The Badly Misnamed", since he's destroyed about 42 times a dat.
Mh, i've skimmed through the thread, but haven't seen wurm being mentioned. Why is that?
I think when it comes to games that evolve and change as time moves on, wurm online is a good example how it could work. There are no quests in the game, avoiding the problem with pre-written lore. Players shape the landscape, as terraforming is possible. As time marches on, more and more roads are being built and settlements constructed. No day is like the one before, as players have the ability to completely change the landscape, turn forests into deserts or farmland and even carve tunnels into mountains. The game is not about progression in a prewritten plot, but much more centered on what people will do if you just put them into a world with some tools to shape it.
Wurm shows that an evolving world can be made. It also shows how to not do a combat and magic system, but the world shaping is something i adore.
I've seen eve being mentioned, but it is still extremely static. It does have a rich player made lore, however the devs are focusing much more on prewritten lore and empire space than on improving player ability to permanently leave their mark. The only way to permanently change and thus evolve the world is to drop an outpost in 0.0.
The EVE universe changes everyday, and to some extent so dose Darkfalls.
Playing EVE
Played Darkfall, Played Wow,
That is probably the BEST you will ever get given a MASSIVE multiplayer game. Developers cannot afford to create some dynamic content only to be consumed by 1-2 players.
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.
You know, I keep seeing this meme, and I keep wondering what the people who promote it are smoking.
"You know what would be COOL? If, like, these MONSTERS appeared in some city, and, like THEY KILLED EVERYONE and there'd be, like, bodies everywhere and stuff, and, like, no one could shop or trade or finish quests or craft 'cause there'd be ALL THESE MONSTERS and then it would be SO AWESOME!"
Reply from the Usual Suspects:" But then everyone would team up to fight the monsters!"
Reply from Reality ('cause I've seen this shit pulled in UO, back in Ye Oldene Dayse):"No, most of the players will just log off, and of those who don't, they'll either leave the city until the stupidity is over or randomly run around looting bodies after using AOE to 'tag' as many monsters as possible. That's assuming the entire thing doesn't cause a lagfest that crashes the server."
Generally, this sort of stuff works only if it's a scheduled, planned, event and everyone knows about it and is ready for it. Even then, it's a crapshoot as to how the player base (and the server) will react. It's not something you can do every day. ("Oh, it's Tuesday? Time for the dragons to attack.")
A huge number of posters on this board, despite often whining about "instancing" and "community" seem to forget a typical MMORPG needs 250K players, minimum, to survive, let alone thrive. When proposing any "great new cool awesome idea", they need to stop asking "Would *I* find this cool?" or "Would me and MY BUDDIES find this cool?" but, "Would the vast majority of the players find this cool, given the huge variance in playstyles, playtime, and skill levels, and, of chose who don't find it cool, how many would find it uncool enough that they'd quit?"
Reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves... overuse of rhetorical devices. If only people would actually try to ANSWER half the questions they pose rhetorically, they might discover perfectly legitimate answers.
Crazy, I was JUST ABOUT to say that! Though, I bid them good luck finding a DM that will create 2-8 hours of content a day, even at PnP pace.
While I agree(though we may disagree that MMO's do attempt dynamic content, and also on how much dynamic content is feasible), the poster I was addressing was claiming it should be possible BECAUSE we can make movies, books, tv shows, etc. My point was that dynamic content in a MMO is a far different beast than scripted mediums such as those; they are quite the opposite of dynamic, in fact.
The same is true of A Tale In The Desert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_In_The_Desert), another true "sandbox"[1] game which has a lot of the features people claim to want, but which somehow they never actually like when they seem. (People do like, even love, ATITD, but it doesn't appeal to the "typical" MMORPGer, and, much as they'd rather rip their own liver out than admit it, WoW and Darkfall have a lot more in common than either does with ATITD.)
However, what players seem to want is a game with the same kind of lore, depth, detail, and pre-made content as EQ or WOW, but with the player freedom of more "sandboxy" games to keep rearranging and changing that content. What they want, it seems, is an EQ where you kill some major game boss, ONCE, and then the whole world reacts to that. If you kill the Orc Chief, this changes how the orc tribes work, for EVERYONE, all over the server, forever. No one else can kill the chief. Maybe some new chief arises, or maybe the orc factions split, or something, but it won't just be "kill the 'new' chief who is exactly like the old chief but with a different random name". And multiple this by the hundreds or thousands of potential plot 'pivots' any rich world will have. And make it work for a minimum of 250,000 subscribers (with people leaving and new people coming every day), and make it work for 5 to 10 years (remember, new players are coming in *constantly*, and old players are leaving), and design it within a 2-4 year development cycle, and make it proitable enough to pay development costs and sustain ongoing support while not charging more than the market will bear when you are increasingly competing with "free" item store games.
And then wonder why I'm such a mean old grumpy pants who keeps stomping on their dreams. Yeah, I'm just doing it because I hate innovation. My heart is three sizes too small.
(Think you've got an answer to all of the above. Hooray for you. Now, repeat after me "This has to work for 250,000 to 11 million players, ALL AT ONCE, and it has to keep working for 5-10 years." Then repeat it again. Then again. If you STILL think you've got something that can work and can be implemented profitably, Get Ye To A Venture Capitalist, for you will surely be rich. Alternatively, you're not very good at self-criticism.)
[1]Almost literally. Desert? Sandbox? GET IT? Thank you folks, I'll be here all week.
NO.
RPGs talk about grand adventures.
MMOs talk about persistent worlds with multiple players share part of it somehow.
MMORPGs is a hybrid, you have some of each.
No? What is your point? I don't understand your comment, especially the last line, "MMORPGs is a hybrid, you have some of each." As far as I can see, there aren't ANY MMOs that aren't stagnant repeating worlds. If you know of any, please enlighten me. You know of an MMO that changes, where time flows forward? Where you don't do the same thing as every other player? Where an NPC that hands out a quest only hands that quest out to you? Where what I do today might change the world for tomorrow? Where a quest is more than 'fetch me ten bananas?"
www.heroesoftelara.com
HoT boasts an ever changing world where even two servers serving that game may be vastly different. Each area will have several different "preset" conditions that can be loaded depending on what is goin on in the world. NPCs will not be static and merchants will not always have the same merchandise. Quests will not always be the same and not always given by the same NPCs. Player actions could actually affect how the world looks and operates. The game could even go beyond the preset conditions to unique content for that server should events dictate it. This game has alot of potential.
OP: If you're sick of static worlds than this game could be for you.
Played:EQ,DDO,WoW,EQ2,Eve Online Trial,Fallen Earth,NWN&NWN2
I'm sure it must of been said in the many pages of responses but it is an impossibility to do what the original post wants.
You have a good 10,000 players that play per server if not more on most populated MMOs. So if you didn't want the same NPC to hand out the same item each day that means 10,000 new quests PER DAY. An MMO that did that would have like a $10,000+ monthly sub fee to pay for the amount of developers needed to make that happen, not to mention most of the new quests would have to be kill or gather tasks to save time.
Now let's say you just want each player to interact with each NPC once and have a new quests handed out by different NPCs each day. That still means that they have to come up with at least 300 quests per month since players can easily burn through shorter quests. Obviously as a player you'd want a lot of these quests to be interesting and deep = more production time. You probably also want unique art for all the unique rewards = more production time. And of course you want all the rewards to server a purpose and be balanced = more production time. Now as a player you have to track hundreds of new items coming into the game each month and figure out which ones are best for you, only to have new items come next month.
It is not possible for an MMO to be affordable and offer that kind of depth.
You have to be realistic with what you want.
However, there are small indie games showing that you can create something resembling a game that does not focus on npc. They do have enough to survive although some are partly unplayable. So if even borderline unplayable games survive with enough players to pay for a server and a dev, i'm semi optimistic that we can see an mmo with an evolving world.
You're going to hell for explaining the joke, FYI.
Dynamic worlds are tricky.
On the upside they add more choice and variety to gameplay. I think being able to choose from a variety of situations to get involved in is very important for a roleplaying game. But also important for a roleplaying game is a story of sorts, story contextualizes your choices and gives them meaning within the imaginary world, as apposed from just a mechanical standpoint. When you have story and choice you have the opportunity to develop a unique character by your choices, develop in the personality sense.
But dynamic worlds and stories don't usually go together. Wurm Online for example is a game that went for a dynamic world and completely dropped story. That among other things really kills the roleplaying in that game for me and as neat as building a house in a cave sounds, I don't feel like I am really developing a character, not to mention that the dynamic nature stems from player made things so the game takes a hit in quality. On the flip side a game that is all story but no choices to be made doesn't have any roleplay either, it is just a story game.
I do think you can have both story and a dynamic world though. You just have to limit what the players can change to things that the developers have made contentions for. Multiple branching story lines you can follow if you want, quests going away or new ones popping up temporarily. Effecting the cities and surroundings by player actions, which open up new content. Capturing new places making new possible content. As well as personal player choices like "kill him or let him go", affecting your character and the way people interact wih them in the world.
I think you could do that, it would be a lot of work no doubt but totally worth it. GM events could work too, but GMs do not have events all to often so inbetween events I think the world should be dynamic on its own or in response to players, but like I said in a controlled way to maintain story and roleplay opportunities.
Don't you worry little buddy. You're dealing with a man of honor. However, honor requires a higher percentage of profit
I think your numbers are a *bit* off, or at the very least, your understanding of how those numbers are achieved works. Programming is all about templates. Putting something on auto-pilot often requires less work than something that is manually driven, but it requires a complete 'hands-off' approach to the coding. The hardest thing to do while programming is to break things into the smallest morsels possible, functions, and web them together. Often times, we would rather program out in a single file everything we need. In the long term, it leads to more work, but a good programming team would be knowledgeable of this.
I think GMs *should* be actively involved with the world. But rather than 'take control' of an NPC, which is, again, a 'hands on' approach, rather they should simply push a trigger in a chain of events. Events themselves should be triggers of one another, so that the dominoes continue, and players can reverse the flow of domino fall, if you will.
It doesn't require more work, simply a fresh drawing board on the coding end of things.
As far as the flavor text and artwork is concerned, I'm sure these are things that shouldn't be too hard to do, considering, again, that a company encourages the most hands off approach they possibly can. Don't 'task' the developping department to draft up x quests, but rather ask them to draft up senarios based on trigger events. Don't ask the artists to draw specific models- rather encourage creativity, and take even the scrap work and incorporate it for the 'lesser rewards' if you will.
It's about the approach, but nowhere is it harder or require more work when done properly.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
www.heroesoftelara.com
HoT boasts an ever changing world where even two servers serving that game may be vastly different. Each area will have several different "preset" conditions that can be loaded depending on what is goin on in the world. NPCs will not be static and merchants will not always have the same merchandise. Quests will not always be the same and not always given by the same NPCs. Player actions could actually affect how the world looks and operates. The game could even go beyond the preset conditions to unique content for that server should events dictate it. This game has alot of potential.
OP: If you're sick of static worlds than this game could be for you.
Here's a quick writeup from E3.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/69423
Something tells me, that by the time this game goes live, the several different conditions will be "two", or whatever number of factions there are, and will largely be based on whether X number of players/teams finished X instance or public quest for the day, or will be based on which faction did the most.
Quest availability, I'd bet, will also be only limited on major quests. Or, they'll just swap out different things on smaller quests; instead of 10 bat wings they'll want 10 wolf armpits, etc. Like the rest of us, Trion has watched to 3 AAA games, AoC, WAR, and CO, flop, in no small part due to lack of content. That they'll lock out any significant amount of their content to players due to "player effected events" I really have to doubt.
That one person will enter the game and alter the state of the game for everyone else is a concept I find pretty unlikely. And as Trion gets closer to the end of their development cycle, I bet they will, too. If they haven't already.
Still, I'd like everybody to find their fandom. Feel free to rub my nose in it should they make this game as you describe(see Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa, Middle Earth Online). AND have a decent amount of content. And have an enjoyable play experience outside of these features. But what I see is a game focused on features that provide little value for the development time it will take. And the cost will likely be overall mediocre gameplay.
But hey, if you like Wurm, it might be better than that.
Of course the tradeoff is that with templating you lose the ability to 'fine tune' the experience.
While I am not in game development, a large part of my job as a programmer is to streamline code modules so they can be reused, preferably in a dynamic setting. This means that we can adapt larger portion of our codebase to a new client's requirements without having to code everything from scratch. However, this leaves the result rather 'bland' and we then have to do a lot of 'hand coding' to make the program more functional and appealing to the particular client.
When playing MMORPGs the quests and mobs that I remember the most are those that offered a unique playing experience. These are the one that go beyond the basic templates and put more of a personal touch that is not replicated.
I think your numbers are a *bit* off, or at the very least, your understanding of how those numbers are achieved works. Programming is all about templates. Putting something on auto-pilot often requires less work than something that is manually driven, but it requires a complete 'hands-off' approach to the coding. The hardest thing to do while programming is to break things into the smallest morsels possible, functions, and web them together. Often times, we would rather program out in a single file everything we need. In the long term, it leads to more work, but a good programming team would be knowledgeable of this.
I think GMs *should* be actively involved with the world. But rather than 'take control' of an NPC, which is, again, a 'hands on' approach, rather they should simply push a trigger in a chain of events. Events themselves should be triggers of one another, so that the dominoes continue, and players can reverse the flow of domino fall, if you will.
It doesn't require more work, simply a fresh drawing board on the coding end of things.
As far as the flavor text and artwork is concerned, I'm sure these are things that shouldn't be too hard to do, considering, again, that a company encourages the most hands off approach they possibly can. Don't 'task' the developping department to draft up x quests, but rather ask them to draft up senarios based on trigger events. Don't ask the artists to draw specific models- rather encourage creativity, and take even the scrap work and incorporate it for the 'lesser rewards' if you will.
It's about the approach, but nowhere is it harder or require more work when done properly.
If you want a lot of new template driven quests then A) it will still take a lot of work to do hundreds of them monthly and
they will be completly uninteresting as it will be hundreds of new quests that are the same as the old quest but with the pickup item/kill creature changed and the guy you bring it back to changed. Essentially the template would be "Go kill __ number of ______ then see _____ in ______" Ya that's not fun and it's a waste of developer time. It's already bad enough to see the same quests over and over again, but to see hundreds of the same each month? No thanks that's not fun.
Creating models either through creativity or direction takes time, you have to model, bone, creature texture, creature UVs, create material for texture (or choose the best fitting material) try it in game then make adjustments. It is a time consuming process which is why you see repeated artwork in MMOs already. And that's on a longer time frame with less quests to do.
I really think you do not grasp the amount of time it takes to design, create, test, fix, test the fixes, fix, release. To do it on a scale that is 100 to 1000 times faster and larger then current games already do takes surprisingly 100 to 1000 times more work and more people. It's not like the game companies are paying all these workers to not maximize their time, they already are.
Too many forum users say "It should be easy just do _____", and they're saying that with no concept of how much work actually goes into these games already.
Unless I'm really misreading things, which is possible, this game doesn't yet exist. It is very easy to talk about what a game "will" do. Until I can log in and see it working in, at the least, a truly open beta with hundreds of concurrent players, then, it's vaporware.
Even if it works in tests -- even if it works in a nicely controlled staged world with a dozen alpha testers running around -- the level of complexity caused by having tens of thousands of people "changing" the world all the time is mind-numbing. Just thinking of some of the concurrency issues gives me a headache. (For example, let's say I'm on a quest to kill some orcs. Someone else does a quest which kills the orc king and throws the orcs into chaos. What happens to my orcs? What happens if I spend 10 hours doing something for a quest, and then that quest-giver vanishes, forever, due to someone else's actions? Etc, etc, etc. Thinking about possibilities of database corruption and just general sync/timing errors is almost overwhelming. I mean, something as static as WoW still gets glitchy when, for example, I'm doing part 2 of a quest turn-in and someone else comes and does part 1 while I'm talking to the guy. Suddenly, he stops what he's doing with me and goes and does his little song and dance for the other person. I have to re-initiate the conversation when he's done. Multiply this by the entire world... it's a nightmare.)
EVE pretty much has a randomly generated universe and equally random "PVE" content which spawns on demand -- if I'm sent to go kill pirates in System X, the pirates appear when I do. No other player can wipe out all the pirates, there will always be more. Because player and world content is separate, a lot of the issues I mention above don't really matter -- if one corporation builds a space station, and another blows it up, that's that. Sucks if you had ships docked there, but that's part of the game. If you want a more traditional style of quest/level up MMORPG, though, that's not viable. The parts of EVE that are ever-changing are all marked off in a separate zone (granted, it's most of the map). To the best of my knowledge, there's very little game-engine-mediated interaction between player and NPC corporations -- that is, you won't see an NPC faction form a permanent alliance with a player corp, and then attack the enemies of that player corporation. If Corp "A" and Corp "B" hate each other, the various NPC factions don't care. Players can't elminate, or even seriously hinder, any of the games NPC factions. (All of this is as of my last time playing EVE several years ago; I apologize if the game has changed a lot since then.)
Wow.
There's so much wrong with this, I don't know where to start...
I hereby offer a simple challenge to anyone who thinks this sort of things is easy.
Get the Neverwinter design tools.
Build a simple world -- a town, a small dungeon, a couple of starting monster lairs -- and put in all the dynamic, self-modifying, scripts you want. You can do all the things you want to do -- add/delete NPCs, change the terrain, alter quests, all dynamically script driven.
Do that in a way that can sustain, let us say, a mere 16 concurrent players for a week or more of play, without manually going in to fix/change/enhance things. Write the scripts that can keep modifying themselves to provide a constantly changing world that remains consistent and logical to the players. (That is, each change in the world can be traced to a player action that would logically cause that change.) Be sure to allow for the creation and deletion of characters during the course of play, and correctly handle/respond to abandoned/dead storylines.
You don't need to create assets or game rules or any of the other hard work of game design. All you have to do is show how you'd write the algorithms. It's simple, right?
Let us know when it's done, then challenge us to break it -- because real players WILL try to break it, they won't "play nice", they won't "do the right thing", they will try to break it just to break it, because that's what players do. If you can make it unbreakable ANY dynamic, if we can't find anything we can do to cause paradoxes (i.e, one NPC tells us to kill someone who a player has already killed, etc), if we can't find easy exploits or end up running your engine into a dead end (it will keep generating new content no matter what we do, and it won't be constantly repeating content with just the type of monsters and the number of them varied), you will probably have something well worth showing to investors as a proof of concept.
It's so easy to design these systems? Show me.
Wow.
There's so much wrong with this, I don't know where to start...
I hereby offer a simple challenge to anyone who thinks this sort of things is easy.
Get the Neverwinter design tools.
Build a simple world -- a town, a small dungeon, a couple of starting monster lairs -- and put in all the dynamic, self-modifying, scripts you want. You can do all the things you want to do -- add/delete NPCs, change the terrain, alter quests, all dynamically script driven.
Do that in a way that can sustain, let us say, a mere 16 concurrent players for a week or more of play, without manually going in to fix/change/enhance things. Write the scripts that can keep modifying themselves to provide a constantly changing world that remains consistent and logical to the players. (That is, each change in the world can be traced to a player action that would logically cause that change.) Be sure to allow for the creation and deletion of characters during the course of play, and correctly handle/respond to abandoned/dead storylines.
You don't need to create assets or game rules or any of the other hard work of game design. All you have to do is show how you'd write the algorithms. It's simple, right?
Let us know when it's done, then challenge us to break it -- because real players WILL try to break it, they won't "play nice", they won't "do the right thing", they will try to break it just to break it, because that's what players do. If you can make it unbreakable ANY dynamic, if we can't find anything we can do to cause paradoxes (i.e, one NPC tells us to kill someone who a player has already killed, etc), if we can't find easy exploits or end up running your engine into a dead end (it will keep generating new content no matter what we do, and it won't be constantly repeating content with just the type of monsters and the number of them varied), you will probably have something well worth showing to investors as a proof of concept.
It's so easy to design these systems? Show me.
The NWN toolset is not designed to properly handle such content, that's the main issue. There has yet to be an MMO with the proper design to facilitate enhanced script driven dynamic alterations to the game world. Once the core framework exists however, it is as simple as creating logic rules and then generating the 'default' world.