I seem to have confused many readers in the OP. I'm not talking about user-created content - that would be, in itself, an entirely new feature in the game that every user could access. Rather, I'm drawing more of a middle ground - a balance between content designed entirely by the devs and content made by players using an inherit game system.
It's more like...
Devs design content and update game
Players find content and meet preconditions
Game world changes as a result
Those preconditions could be anything - they could involve one player's choice or even a server-wide effort. Take another example, for instance:
Let's say the developers of your standard-fare MMO decide to add two things in a latest patch: a new dungeon and a mining skill. One catch: Instead of opening the dungeon free for anyone to waltz right into after the patch, it's buried under yards of stone. If anyone wants in, the server's going to have to work together to uncover the entrance, using all sorts of tools - pickaxes, pullies, explosives - and blast their way down there to open it for everyone.
Something like this would be a one-time event, and could easily be made into a contest. Maybe it could be guild versus guild, with the few that make the most overall progress receiving awards. There could be recognition for players that did the best jobs in certain fields, such as using certain tools, and for the person or persons that finally uncover the entrance. All of this could be recorded into the game's lore through history.
And most important of all, it's a unique occurrence that lets players actually have an impact upon the world.
Originally posted by kattehus
A lot of people don't pay attention to lore anymore, because they're just going for the endgame - where all the fun starts (for whatever reason). Lore is, for some, fluff that just gets in the way.
"Roleplaying" isn't roleplaying as much anymore, and those few "true" roleplayers who are interested in lore.. Might think it's just an awesome story, but nothing game-wise, since there are so few games out there which "hide" things that are implemented in their lore.
I agree with you. In my opinion, there are two reasons why most players simply don't care about lore anymore.
It's awfully written and/or awfully boring.
It has no real impact on the game that they're playing.
The Lord of Generic Darkness may be the evil mastermind that's terrorizing the game world and the enemy of the entire population, but does anyone really care about him? Of course not. Everyone has the same quest to knock him off his throne, everyone will fight through his tower and meet him in battle at the top, and everyone will be doing this same dungeon 100 times afterwards in order to grind him for phat lootz. There's absolutely nothing special about it.
Now let's change that scenario to having the first band of parties who scale the tower fight a version that's 5x as hard, has unique attacks and tactics, and drops a full set of his sprite's armor that can't be obtained anywhere else. That event will last for 24 hours after he is successfully defeated for the first time, and the party that does so has a passage of the lore written about them - not just on the site, but in future content _inside_ the game.
And going back to my previous example detailing the mining event - let's say there's a group of players that need large shipments of ore as materials for their crafting. Who are they most likely to turn to first - random miners in town they've never heard of, or the players that pioneered the skill and became well-known thanks to the event?
I'm of the view that a truly immersive world has a much stronger chance to take route when _actual players_ are part of the lore rather than a NPC/enemy that you may not even encounter again after a quest is done. Granted, there's a very good chance that these players won't be roleplayers, but there's a big difference between fighting a storyline boss and seeing the player whose feats you just read about walk past you in town.
Originally posted by Arnstrong
In 2010 "MMO secrets" are kept for about 0.5 seconds: just in time to open the web browser.
Within 15 seconds 5% of your population knows it. After 1 hour everyone is in it.
Within 2 days everyone is bored by the secret content.
And herein lies the problem. The content doesn't necessarily _need_ to be secret, but both my examples in the OP used this quality as a means to an end. But, there's one key point missing:
What if it's beneficial to the player who discovers this secret content to keep the information to himself? Or we could take it one step further - what if the first person or group of people who discover this content are the only ones who can trigger it?
The types of occurences I'm talking about are practically designed to be one-time events, and almost certainly added in with major patches. Granted, they don't have to be - it's perfectly possible to have content that is only accessible every so often, as in an event that occurs alongside a change in a game's seasons. What it isn't about, however, is finding a secret hole that leads to Orge Boss A, who will always be there for other players to kill (which, granted, is the same as my first example, but that was a stepping stone to a greater end). Rather, it's an effort at giving players lucky enough to experience the content a real chance to shape the game world.
Think of all the changes added into your favorite MMO over the years - all the new areas, items, spells, and anything else that defines it. Now instead of having the developers simply patch them in, what if they added them in with events that allowed the first person who completed said events to unlock the content for everyone? That's the type of thing I'm getting at.
I mean, imagine it - a MMO that had the capability of completely surprising their players out of the blue with something they never would have expected. If you're playing one day and find a peaceful fortified castle settlement filled with NPCs, only to log in the next day and find it turned into a pseudo-dungeon area - a wrecked ghost town where the possessed residents become the enemies - just because a certain player happened to find an artifact that the devs hid underground... Doesn't that sound interesting? It's the type of thing that keeps people playing, because after all, who knows what could happen next?
Many people on this site like to refer to MMOs as either "themeparks" or "sandboxes"; as riding a roller coaster upon a predetermined path or forging your own through creativity and imagination. I want to set MMO-players inside said roller coaster cart, have it stop at the very top of the highest hill, and see what happens.
So are you really talking about something like the Opening of the Gates event from WoW? A group of players completed the event, opened up the new raid dungeons and the rest of the playerbase quickly forgot who it was?
Also if the trigger event is too secret or obscure then it becomes a good possibility that noone finds it or if they find it actually bothers completing it. Then the devs have to open up the content in another way.
I don't think that's a good idea. I just don't like all this secreat quest/area where only 0.1% of the populcation can do.
Well I think this is a huge problem, but one that could potentially be tackled.
Of course the act of tackling it could undermine the whole point of feeling like you influence the game world.
WOW's AQ Gate event is a great example: everyone participated, but you really didn't get a huge sense of personal contribution because you were a drop in a huge bucket.
But the flip side is almost unthinkable in the content-starved world of MMORPGs. Making content exclusive means less content for everyone else. I mean exclusive content is done still, but usually when there's an incredibly compelling reason which doesn't overly fragment the audience of the quest (like Class-specific quests.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I don't think that's a good idea. I just don't like all this secreat quest/area where only 0.1% of the populcation can do.
Well I think this is a huge problem, but one that could potentially be tackled.
Of course the act of tackling it could undermine the whole point of feeling like you influence the game world.
WOW's AQ Gate event is a great example: everyone participated, but you really didn't get a huge sense of personal contribution because you were a drop in a huge bucket.
But the flip side is almost unthinkable in the content-starved world of MMORPGs. Making content exclusive means less content for everyone else. I mean exclusive content is done still, but usually when there's an incredibly compelling reason which doesn't overly fragment the audience of the quest (like Class-specific quests.)
And usually in MMO's that have user defined content, people don't do them unless they get personal benefit.
For example a city will require money to build. But very few people would use the money in their own pocket to build the city. So what supposely to be a group effort lay on the hand of a few people. Unless of course, you gain rewards personally for building the city.
I WAS going to lend some positive feedback...but after reading all of the replies and discovering that 90% of the people who replied didn't read past the title...I had to comment on the fact that you all (well those of you that didn't read beyond the title) make me absolutely ill.....
OP did NOT say USER GENERATED content...OP said USER DEFINEDcontent!!!
I'm sorry OP...sorry you have to read the responses of 6 year olds...wait...worse...30 year olds who act like 6 year olds.
I agree with you though...MMOs should have living worlds...not just big ass video game levels that can be repeated over and over and over and never change or have any alternate effect and/or outcome.
Now some of these new MMOs are coming out with this "dynamic" content...but in reality I think it is just going to be events that will simply cycle through......blah...
PLAYING: NOTHING!!! PLAYED:FFXI, LotRO, AoC, WAR, DDO, Megaten, Wurm, Rohan, Mabinogi, RoM
ya I'm kind of confused of what the title mean. In fact I still don't understand what the OP means.
So why is a hidden dungeon that very few people knows about suddenly be called user defined content? I just don't understand what it means.
But anyhow I don't like the idea of having content that only limited amount of people can do.
Why is user defined content only limited to only a small % of the population?
I think OP is using that as an example...
I think what the OP is saying is MMOs should have a "living" world...as in the characters the players make can have a substantial impact on the world, and as in real life there would be certain happenings that very few individuals would partake in...I mean most of us on this forum arent going to dig a hole in our backyards and find a chest full of diamonds...so in a "realistic living world" in an MMO not every player will slay that certain dragon, or find that chest full of diamonds.
...but there would be other events/situations...actually the majority of the events and situations would be accessible to all players, though it would have a different outcome depending how each player approaches it.
As a matter of fact I'd like it if MMOs had species of mobs that could go extinct due to over hunting...or NPCs who could get killed by players and actually NEVER return to the game world.....maybe the OP is also talking about stuff like this.
PLAYING: NOTHING!!! PLAYED:FFXI, LotRO, AoC, WAR, DDO, Megaten, Wurm, Rohan, Mabinogi, RoM
ya I'm kind of confused of what the title mean. In fact I still don't understand what the OP means.
So why is a hidden dungeon that very few people knows about suddenly be called user defined content? I just don't understand what it means.
But anyhow I don't like the idea of having content that only limited amount of people can do.
Why is user defined content only limited to only a small % of the population?
I'll type it again.
The hidden dungeon is an example, and it's not the dungeon in itself.
The example (which uses the hidden dungeon) is that only the first few groups/people to discover the dungeon can defeat/join the boss, thus changing the game world.
Say you have a game with two factions, which - according to the lore - are at war because of their differing religions (say, they worship one god each, but not the same god) and along comes some guys, who discover a tomb/temple and clear it out. Here, they encounter a third god, and have the choice to try to defeat him or "join" him.
If they join him, they become the first followers of this guy, and a third faction is born. Suddenly, this new god's minions (mobs) appear within the other two factions borders, and now, we have a 1v1v1 game, instead of just a 1v1. Other players can chose to "convert" to this third faction (this could be done in several ways), and the game now has more than just "good vs evil".
(I apologize if the above doesn't make sense, been up all night..)
In short: He wants user actions to affect the world.
Something I read into it: And he wants events that only happen a limited amount of times, so that players who trigger this event really get a feeling of having an impact on the world - while other players get the feeling that they are actually playing within a living, breathing world.
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The sheer number of people who read the title made assumptions and didn't read the post is worthy of it's own thread. While not your fault OP you can try to write tl;dr's and making your posts shorter to help this, being able to communicate as short as possible is a necessary skill for effective communication.
As for your idea I really like it, I see it in some places but not nearly enough for my taste, the serious lack of this in pve in eve (my main mmo) is one of the things I don't like about it and is probably what I'm gonna look for in my next MMO.
One of the greatest advantages of these sort of things is it is a great way to add content. Rather than just the whole world suddenly chaning over night there are events sources and player interaction.
However there are two things I think need to be done.
Dynamicaly generated
Generated by proffesional developers is much better than it being randomly generated by some algorithms, however I think dynamic has it's place too. What I would like to see is a living world where these sort of situations happen all over by themselves, this is where dynamic content fits in, devs can't afford to write this sort of content for every little village so you use dynamic for the small stuff. The big things can be handled by devs still.
I'm hoping we see some sort of system like this for guild wars II.
Choices
While some may be straight forward open this area, kill this bad guy etc. the best of this sort of content will have choices and as many as possible.
For example taking your example of finding the big 'generic lord of darkness in a cave' and then unleashing him on the world where he effects all sorts of gameplay. Go back to where you find him in a cave, what are your options there?
How bout when you find him you find some inscriptions that give details on a device that while stop/delay his coming or maybe even destroy him. You'd have to have some sort of crazy development system to be able adjust to things like this (say you don't build the content till he's released then he builds up his power [you build content] for 6 months).
Also lots of middle roads. For example when you find him you also notice he has an aura around his cage that causes all magical items to recharge (which would normally cost gold) you then find a way to profit from this building a shop potentially even an entire town right on top of the big bads prison as you make enormous profits off of this aura. Doing so however slowly causes his cell to weakon while the magical energies you've been taking have slowly been spreading his influence.
Thank you for clarifying, kattehus. That's exactly the point I was trying to get across.
Going by the responses in this thread, it seems there are two major issues with content such as this: developer time/money and a sense of inequality among the playerbase.
The first is a problem of resources, and thus, very difficult to solve. Naturally, content such as this would only fill a small minority of the game's overall updates, but it still may come to the point where other aspects of the game, such as high-end graphics, would have to be sacrificed in order to meet the budget. Obviously, a decision such as this could prove disastrous to the game's future, as everyone knows how first impressions are critical to generating hype in this genre. It's a serious issue, and I can see why many developers would never consider such an idea, as the risk involved, in many cases, outweighs the potential benefit. Despite that, I feel that the corporations developing AAA titles should not close themselves off from such radical ideas, as a period of stagnation in the genre (as we have seen) can also lead to the failure of titles.
Second, many people have stated that the idea of generating content for .1% of the playerbase is an awful idea, or that such events - when executed to give access to the entire population - defeat their own purpose in letting players impact the world.
I feel that the key to solving this problem lies in establishing a balance upon how the playerbase views the content - a point where the players feel as if they can influence the world, but do not feel left out of the content they do not trigger. Events such as this should be designed with a multi-layer schematic in mind - with each layer being a certain portion of the playerbase. I feel that my second example in the OP (the one detailed in kattehus's post above) is a good example of this. A small number of players may see one aspect of the event, but when it is put into play, it affects different groups of players in different ways.
Also, since I've never played Wow, I'm unfamiliar with the AQ Gate event several people have mentioned. That sort of event is indeed what I'm referring to.
Did this said gate-opening have a continuous impact on the game world after the event was over, or was it truly a one-time stagnant occurence? In other words... Was there a skill involved in opening these gates, crafting or otherwise, that let players display their talents and facilitate their businesses/guild reputation/combat recognition/etc. into the future? Were said people known by the playerbase at this time for their efforts? And finally, if you stepped foot into Wow today, is there any indication anywhere inside the game of who actually opened the gate? Are their names listed anywhere?
I feel that all of these things are necessary in order to make an event such at this - especially one that is run server-wide - successful in impacting the community. Otherwise, as another poster has said, people that played significant roles quickly become forgotten as time goes by.
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@ Typhado: Yeah, my posts tend to be long-winded and roundabout. One of the reasons I'll never be writing lore for MMOs. :P
I agree with both your topics. Dynamically generated content definitely lessens the workload on the devs (I believe they have this in Ryzom with monster territory trails), and choices plays an even bigger part in making a model like this successful. Letting the user impact the world won't have much effect if the only actions available to them don't agree with what they want to accomplish.
If anyone has a doubt user defined content cannot be awesome they need to play FO3. As long as it is submitted to the MMO’s game devs and passed for play I see no issues.
One of the main reasons we have not seen it is that it has not been done before in a mainstream MMO. They did it in NWN but I don’t think they incorporated user designed content into the main game, they just allowed you to set up your own worlds. Hopefully I don’t need to explain why a software company that wants you to play their MMO would not be thrilled with that.
Bare in mind legal issues though, no matter how well the hand over of code was handled they would be opening themselves to the possibility of someone suing for a fee.
Look at MMO history, in game helpers (players who had some GM powers and helped out newbies) used to be in nearly every MMO. Then Microsoft decided (I think when they were in charge of AC2?) that it could present legal problems, they binned the helper system. Loads of MMO’s followed suit. Some MMO’s still have them, but only a tiny proportion now, in the past it was the majority.
So the reasons may be legal and when it comes to legal, things are done to cover your arse not because a clear area of danger has been spotted.
i understand, that the OP asks for an open, flexible and dynamic world instead of the linear, static stuff we have today mainly.
lets take castle-siege as an example. players build a castle in the middle of nowhere with their great crafting skills. they even could hire NPC-dealers, bankers and stuff to live in this new town. you can think about lots of great features here, e.g. player driven quest NPCs: a crafter implements a quest-NPC and gives you the quest to gather 100 coal, which he does not like to grind himself. as a reward you get 1 bronze sword. of course, he has to craft the reward first and place it into the quest-NPC. it could also be a quest-board hanging at the curch, where all inhabitants may implement their grind-quests. thats a 1st approach to player driven content without harming the entire economy. these are simply features to support player-interaction.
now the big bad enemy comes along and destroys the castle. they dont simply take it over, they burn it down. at the end of the day, you will see just a few ruins rest. no players or NPC are able to live there anymore. for a few month, there was a town you could live in. if you missed this content, you missed it, go and search elsewhere. this is open. flexible and dynamic. if you where there during the fight, you propably got a great fight-experience watching armies fighting against each others.
so a player-driven economy is one key for a dynamic world. if they can build everything nearly everywhere, this world will start breathing. give these genious crafters a terraforming skillset and they will change the world even further. one new idea i saw discussed on forums is genetics. in some scifi-mmos players ask for DNA-modifying to bring up new species. even in a fantasy setting, this would be possible, you dont need DNA-modifying to change animals and plants over time. it just works slower. this could be also a feature, think about a minigame similar to the generator in the game Spore. just a smaller version. this could be your DNA-crafting UI. and the devs would be able to control the feature and the possible output.
now how could this work with pure PVE content? first the AI should be superior. i saw some interesting behaviour, when i once in a game tried to kill goblins: these goblins did see me. there was no predefined aggorange. they had workers beeing busy and guards watching the surrounding area. if such a guard looks in your direction he alerts either the entire tribe or he tries to kill you solo. i prefer, if he decides for soloing me
but if the goblin becomes aware, that he will die, he runs back and alerts the tribe. so you need a good finishing blow to avoid this. if not, these damn goblins will start acting like a damn pvp-team. the shaman starts buffing, healing and attacking you with spells. the warriors will run to your healer standing behind you and the rangers will start firing. dont try to catch these rangers. if yo do this, they fly and come back or try to kite you until a warrior comes to help. same with this shaman. you really need a brain in order to kill this tribe. it needs a lot of tactics and time to do so.
a second feature would be dynamic content as announced by Arenanet lately. this could help, but just if very long events. long means long in time and a long chain of content and several action happening during such an event. take this example of the centaurs attacking a town. you see it and you start helping the human NPCs to defend their city.afterwards you chase the centaurs. up in the hills you find their home-dungeon and kill them all including their boss. however, some will survive, and start rebuilding the tribe slowly. this could become a great thing, if done right. but why cant i help the centaurs? as an elf i hate humans anyways. Arenanet says, they dont like that players fight indirectly against players and destroy their success. i guess thats wrong. what does success mean? if you are rewarded indepentently if you win or loose, that doesnt matter. just reward players for engagement. and if the centaurs win and block some human quest NPCs they captured, simply let other NPCs take over these quests or tell the player, that he has 1st to get rid of these centaurs or wait until others do it..
i stop my long writing here. i hope you got an impression, what my dream of an open, dynamic world looks like.
the best start would be, if devs try to get rid of quests first. replace them all with something open and dynamic. perhaps a just a tutorial-quest and one epic-questsline with a high sophisticated story full of riddles and such. maybe also a class quests. but more is not needed. tons of quests, as they are implemented today, are the number one killer of dynamics, immersion and community. but thats another story ....
I was thinking about how the game communicates with you. The game server and the exchange of parcels of info. Packets you know the lag and other aspects. I am not very clear on how that works but latency and the time it takes for information to exchange.
Now some games the exchange is almost instant and you can feel it you hit an attack and it works immediately one of the top reasons I quit Warhammer was that horrible warp in between. What I am getting at about your idea is how is the game going to communicate each change to every member of the encounter. What if it is in the hundreds. Already one atatck can get mired in a game like Warhammer how will it be when you are talking whole cutscenes that change or scenarios that change depending on what you do. An engine to handle that in an MMO must be powerful and expensive. I can see it happen in a single player game but MMO.....may be in the future. I think it is way too expensive now.
Mind you it has to be a significant event so a lot of information has to be exchanged. So it is not just one attack but a series of packets passing in between and already the problems with large encounters are complicated with lag and sheer numbers on the screen. How will you add to that with a different scenario for each individual player. It boggles my mind and it has to be significant or else why bother.
Also, since I've never played Wow, I'm unfamiliar with the AQ Gate event several people have mentioned. That sort of event is indeed what I'm referring to.
Did this said gate-opening have a continuous impact on the game world after the event was over, or was it truly a one-time stagnant occurence? In other words... Was there a skill involved in opening these gates, crafting or otherwise, that let players display their talents and facilitate their businesses/guild reputation/combat recognition/etc. into the future? Were said people known by the playerbase at this time for their efforts? And finally, if you stepped foot into Wow today, is there any indication anywhere inside the game of who actually opened the gate? Are their names listed anywhere?
The Gats of AQ event in WoW made the two AQ raid dungeons open to the players. The impact was pretty much that there were two more raids for players to do. For the non-raiders or the raiders not far enough in raid progression it did not really affect anything.
The actual event consisted of a few phases where in phase one the entire population contributed items to 'war effort' NPCs. The other phases involved a long quest chain that required the completion of tier 2 raid encounters so only a few of the more progressed guilds on the server participated. The final opening event pretty much lagged out the zone and crashed a lot of servers. Of course any player who was not online at the time missed it.
Fact is that most players did not really care about the event since it would not open any content they would have access to. Furthermore Blizzard would have opened up the content in some way even if the playerbase did not finish it since they would not waste all that content.
I think you are severly overestimated the 'fame' players would get for completing such one-of events. Players would care about the content but not who opened it up. There just is not that 'hero worship' culture for it to matter.
Dunno if I'd say that. The "gathering supplies" part of the event showered people with tons of cheap magic items (and some good ones), involved tons of weird world spawns that were fun to fight solo, and really transformed the feel of certain capital cities while they were going on (huge amounts of supplies dynamically being added, based on your faction's contributions.)
Sure it wasn't HUGE for those players, but it's not like it was completely without gameplay. It's really exactly what the OP was talking about: multiple tiers of user interaction with the game world, from a single true "dude who opened the gate" to huge amounts of faction-wide collaboration to make it happen.
It wasn't exactly a spectacular success though, which is probably why they didn't really do anything like it again.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It sounds like a one time thing and only good for the very small percentage of players lucky enough or well geared enough to experience them. New players to the game would have no chance in participating in it as well as the majority of the other players. The players who managed to complete the events would be well known to the population at the time until either those players quit (due to boredom of having completed everything at the time already) or the rest of the population turns over (all the other older players quit because they know that they missed out).
"User-Defined Content - Why isn't it present in modern MMOs?"
Simple. It's harder to pull off than leading a player by the nose with Main Quests.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
I played AC at the time but came into it rather late, but it was the real deal in so many ways. Players just thought that any new MMO has to be like that, they have to take the best bits as they make new ones. But unlike solo games MMO's do not take the best bits, there slavish devotion to WoW's template has lead us to this impass.
User defined content on the scale you're(OP) talking about(content that happens only once and for a handful of people) is simply not feasable from a lagistics standpoint. Why would a company spend hundreds of hours developing content that only 1 to a raid's worth of people will ever see on one server? When they could spend that hundreds of hours developing content that everyone can see? Much higher effort to view ratio with the latter.
Now I could go for the weekly random timed GM event, or user content like building cities and having to defend them from other players, etc. But I just can't see working my butt off for a month just so 5 people can see it.
Never trust the gaming community to make their own stuff and shove it into an MMO. Never. You can't trust those guys. But for better involvement, letting the players choose what they want out of a list of options is always a viable choice.
What we're looking for is exploration and the wiki-age to kinda die off, not the ability to shove what we want in a game enjoyed by a lot of people.
Forums: The best real-time interactive MMORPG you'll ever be in.
I WAS going to lend some positive feedback...but after reading all of the replies and discovering that 90% of the people who replied didn't read past the title...I had to comment on the fact that you all (well those of you that didn't read beyond the title) make me absolutely ill.....
OP did NOT say USER GENERATED content...OP said USER DEFINEDcontent!!!
I'm sorry OP...sorry you have to read the responses of 6 year olds...wait...worse...30 year olds who act like 6 year olds.
I agree with you though...MMOs should have living worlds...not just big ass video game levels that can be repeated over and over and over and never change or have any alternate effect and/or outcome.
Now some of these new MMOs are coming out with this "dynamic" content...but in reality I think it is just going to be events that will simply cycle through......blah...
However you slice it and whoever you call an idiot...
Whether user generated or user defined, my point sticks for either.
Aside from the sacrifice in game world stability in coding something so open...
If you give players that kind of power over the gaming world, sooner or later, some group of D-bags is gonna come along and blow the enjoyment of the game for everyone else. Sooner or later, they find the magic combination of exploits which allows them to grief the whole server.
Remember the old SWG housing trap? The many deaths of Lord British? The WoW zombie invasion?
That's nuthin'.
The world the OP dreams of is the world that would be heaven... for about 2 weeks. Developers know better than to cede control of content, or the face of the gaming world to the masses. And those that don't, find themselves in a world of hurt.
It would be the first question I'd ask as an investor: " What things about the world can the players control?" Anything more than Eve wouldn't see a dime of my money.
I agree with Kattehus regarding the assessment of OP's post, and to answer the question- to be honest it's about money. Something like what you're talking about would be more time consuming/costly then turning out the same run-of-the-mill content we already see in MMOs. On top of that, having "secret" content takes away from continual hype from patches which (having so many players these days that will go from happy to OMG there's nothing to do I need new content on a day to day basis) wouldn't appease the dumber, oblivious players.
Basically, it's easier, faster, and cheaper to give us dumbed down content, so they do and the players accept it.
What's the point of "secret" content anyhow? Once someone finds it, it's going to end up on the game's wiki anyhow and everyone will know about it. The secret is only going to last until the first person finds it, then it'll be common knowledge.
I dont care for user define content that would change the world for everyone.. What happens if 2 groups are questing in different parts of the world. Group A has a quest that ends up destroying Group Bs quest area.. Group A finishes their quests causing Group B not not be able to finish what they are doing.
Comments
So are you really talking about something like the Opening of the Gates event from WoW? A group of players completed the event, opened up the new raid dungeons and the rest of the playerbase quickly forgot who it was?
Also if the trigger event is too secret or obscure then it becomes a good possibility that noone finds it or if they find it actually bothers completing it. Then the devs have to open up the content in another way.
Well I think this is a huge problem, but one that could potentially be tackled.
Of course the act of tackling it could undermine the whole point of feeling like you influence the game world.
WOW's AQ Gate event is a great example: everyone participated, but you really didn't get a huge sense of personal contribution because you were a drop in a huge bucket.
But the flip side is almost unthinkable in the content-starved world of MMORPGs. Making content exclusive means less content for everyone else. I mean exclusive content is done still, but usually when there's an incredibly compelling reason which doesn't overly fragment the audience of the quest (like Class-specific quests.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
And usually in MMO's that have user defined content, people don't do them unless they get personal benefit.
For example a city will require money to build. But very few people would use the money in their own pocket to build the city. So what supposely to be a group effort lay on the hand of a few people. Unless of course, you gain rewards personally for building the city.
There's plenty of mmos that utilize user generated content....
OH MY GOD, IDIOTS!!!!!!!!!
I WAS going to lend some positive feedback...but after reading all of the replies and discovering that 90% of the people who replied didn't read past the title...I had to comment on the fact that you all (well those of you that didn't read beyond the title) make me absolutely ill.....
OP did NOT say USER GENERATED content...OP said USER DEFINED content!!!
I'm sorry OP...sorry you have to read the responses of 6 year olds...wait...worse...30 year olds who act like 6 year olds.
I agree with you though...MMOs should have living worlds...not just big ass video game levels that can be repeated over and over and over and never change or have any alternate effect and/or outcome.
Now some of these new MMOs are coming out with this "dynamic" content...but in reality I think it is just going to be events that will simply cycle through......blah...
PLAYING: NOTHING!!!
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WAITING FOR: Dust 514
ya I'm kind of confused of what the title mean. In fact I still don't understand what the OP means.
So why is a hidden dungeon that very few people knows about suddenly be called user defined content? I just don't understand what it means.
But anyhow I don't like the idea of having content that only limited amount of people can do.
Why is user defined content only limited to only a small % of the population?
I think OP is using that as an example...
I think what the OP is saying is MMOs should have a "living" world...as in the characters the players make can have a substantial impact on the world, and as in real life there would be certain happenings that very few individuals would partake in...I mean most of us on this forum arent going to dig a hole in our backyards and find a chest full of diamonds...so in a "realistic living world" in an MMO not every player will slay that certain dragon, or find that chest full of diamonds.
...but there would be other events/situations...actually the majority of the events and situations would be accessible to all players, though it would have a different outcome depending how each player approaches it.
As a matter of fact I'd like it if MMOs had species of mobs that could go extinct due to over hunting...or NPCs who could get killed by players and actually NEVER return to the game world.....maybe the OP is also talking about stuff like this.
PLAYING: NOTHING!!!
PLAYED:FFXI, LotRO, AoC, WAR, DDO, Megaten, Wurm, Rohan, Mabinogi, RoM
WAITING FOR: Dust 514
I'll type it again.
The hidden dungeon is an example, and it's not the dungeon in itself.
The example (which uses the hidden dungeon) is that only the first few groups/people to discover the dungeon can defeat/join the boss, thus changing the game world.
Say you have a game with two factions, which - according to the lore - are at war because of their differing religions (say, they worship one god each, but not the same god) and along comes some guys, who discover a tomb/temple and clear it out. Here, they encounter a third god, and have the choice to try to defeat him or "join" him.
If they join him, they become the first followers of this guy, and a third faction is born. Suddenly, this new god's minions (mobs) appear within the other two factions borders, and now, we have a 1v1v1 game, instead of just a 1v1. Other players can chose to "convert" to this third faction (this could be done in several ways), and the game now has more than just "good vs evil".
(I apologize if the above doesn't make sense, been up all night..)
In short: He wants user actions to affect the world.
Something I read into it: And he wants events that only happen a limited amount of times, so that players who trigger this event really get a feeling of having an impact on the world - while other players get the feeling that they are actually playing within a living, breathing world.
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The sheer number of people who read the title made assumptions and didn't read the post is worthy of it's own thread. While not your fault OP you can try to write tl;dr's and making your posts shorter to help this, being able to communicate as short as possible is a necessary skill for effective communication.
As for your idea I really like it, I see it in some places but not nearly enough for my taste, the serious lack of this in pve in eve (my main mmo) is one of the things I don't like about it and is probably what I'm gonna look for in my next MMO.
One of the greatest advantages of these sort of things is it is a great way to add content. Rather than just the whole world suddenly chaning over night there are events sources and player interaction.
However there are two things I think need to be done.
Dynamicaly generated
Generated by proffesional developers is much better than it being randomly generated by some algorithms, however I think dynamic has it's place too. What I would like to see is a living world where these sort of situations happen all over by themselves, this is where dynamic content fits in, devs can't afford to write this sort of content for every little village so you use dynamic for the small stuff. The big things can be handled by devs still.
I'm hoping we see some sort of system like this for guild wars II.
Choices
While some may be straight forward open this area, kill this bad guy etc. the best of this sort of content will have choices and as many as possible.
For example taking your example of finding the big 'generic lord of darkness in a cave' and then unleashing him on the world where he effects all sorts of gameplay. Go back to where you find him in a cave, what are your options there?
How bout when you find him you find some inscriptions that give details on a device that while stop/delay his coming or maybe even destroy him. You'd have to have some sort of crazy development system to be able adjust to things like this (say you don't build the content till he's released then he builds up his power [you build content] for 6 months).
Also lots of middle roads. For example when you find him you also notice he has an aura around his cage that causes all magical items to recharge (which would normally cost gold) you then find a way to profit from this building a shop potentially even an entire town right on top of the big bads prison as you make enormous profits off of this aura. Doing so however slowly causes his cell to weakon while the magical energies you've been taking have slowly been spreading his influence.
Into the breach meatbags
Bingo.
Thank you for clarifying, kattehus. That's exactly the point I was trying to get across.
Going by the responses in this thread, it seems there are two major issues with content such as this: developer time/money and a sense of inequality among the playerbase.
The first is a problem of resources, and thus, very difficult to solve. Naturally, content such as this would only fill a small minority of the game's overall updates, but it still may come to the point where other aspects of the game, such as high-end graphics, would have to be sacrificed in order to meet the budget. Obviously, a decision such as this could prove disastrous to the game's future, as everyone knows how first impressions are critical to generating hype in this genre. It's a serious issue, and I can see why many developers would never consider such an idea, as the risk involved, in many cases, outweighs the potential benefit. Despite that, I feel that the corporations developing AAA titles should not close themselves off from such radical ideas, as a period of stagnation in the genre (as we have seen) can also lead to the failure of titles.
Second, many people have stated that the idea of generating content for .1% of the playerbase is an awful idea, or that such events - when executed to give access to the entire population - defeat their own purpose in letting players impact the world.
I feel that the key to solving this problem lies in establishing a balance upon how the playerbase views the content - a point where the players feel as if they can influence the world, but do not feel left out of the content they do not trigger. Events such as this should be designed with a multi-layer schematic in mind - with each layer being a certain portion of the playerbase. I feel that my second example in the OP (the one detailed in kattehus's post above) is a good example of this. A small number of players may see one aspect of the event, but when it is put into play, it affects different groups of players in different ways.
Also, since I've never played Wow, I'm unfamiliar with the AQ Gate event several people have mentioned. That sort of event is indeed what I'm referring to.
Did this said gate-opening have a continuous impact on the game world after the event was over, or was it truly a one-time stagnant occurence? In other words... Was there a skill involved in opening these gates, crafting or otherwise, that let players display their talents and facilitate their businesses/guild reputation/combat recognition/etc. into the future? Were said people known by the playerbase at this time for their efforts? And finally, if you stepped foot into Wow today, is there any indication anywhere inside the game of who actually opened the gate? Are their names listed anywhere?
I feel that all of these things are necessary in order to make an event such at this - especially one that is run server-wide - successful in impacting the community. Otherwise, as another poster has said, people that played significant roles quickly become forgotten as time goes by.
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@ Typhado: Yeah, my posts tend to be long-winded and roundabout. One of the reasons I'll never be writing lore for MMOs. :P
I agree with both your topics. Dynamically generated content definitely lessens the workload on the devs (I believe they have this in Ryzom with monster territory trails), and choices plays an even bigger part in making a model like this successful. Letting the user impact the world won't have much effect if the only actions available to them don't agree with what they want to accomplish.
If anyone has a doubt user defined content cannot be awesome they need to play FO3. As long as it is submitted to the MMO’s game devs and passed for play I see no issues.
One of the main reasons we have not seen it is that it has not been done before in a mainstream MMO. They did it in NWN but I don’t think they incorporated user designed content into the main game, they just allowed you to set up your own worlds. Hopefully I don’t need to explain why a software company that wants you to play their MMO would not be thrilled with that.
Bare in mind legal issues though, no matter how well the hand over of code was handled they would be opening themselves to the possibility of someone suing for a fee.
Look at MMO history, in game helpers (players who had some GM powers and helped out newbies) used to be in nearly every MMO. Then Microsoft decided (I think when they were in charge of AC2?) that it could present legal problems, they binned the helper system. Loads of MMO’s followed suit. Some MMO’s still have them, but only a tiny proportion now, in the past it was the majority.
So the reasons may be legal and when it comes to legal, things are done to cover your arse not because a clear area of danger has been spotted.
i understand, that the OP asks for an open, flexible and dynamic world instead of the linear, static stuff we have today mainly.
lets take castle-siege as an example. players build a castle in the middle of nowhere with their great crafting skills. they even could hire NPC-dealers, bankers and stuff to live in this new town. you can think about lots of great features here, e.g. player driven quest NPCs: a crafter implements a quest-NPC and gives you the quest to gather 100 coal, which he does not like to grind himself. as a reward you get 1 bronze sword. of course, he has to craft the reward first and place it into the quest-NPC. it could also be a quest-board hanging at the curch, where all inhabitants may implement their grind-quests. thats a 1st approach to player driven content without harming the entire economy. these are simply features to support player-interaction.
now the big bad enemy comes along and destroys the castle. they dont simply take it over, they burn it down. at the end of the day, you will see just a few ruins rest. no players or NPC are able to live there anymore. for a few month, there was a town you could live in. if you missed this content, you missed it, go and search elsewhere. this is open. flexible and dynamic. if you where there during the fight, you propably got a great fight-experience watching armies fighting against each others.
so a player-driven economy is one key for a dynamic world. if they can build everything nearly everywhere, this world will start breathing. give these genious crafters a terraforming skillset and they will change the world even further. one new idea i saw discussed on forums is genetics. in some scifi-mmos players ask for DNA-modifying to bring up new species. even in a fantasy setting, this would be possible, you dont need DNA-modifying to change animals and plants over time. it just works slower. this could be also a feature, think about a minigame similar to the generator in the game Spore. just a smaller version. this could be your DNA-crafting UI. and the devs would be able to control the feature and the possible output.
now how could this work with pure PVE content? first the AI should be superior. i saw some interesting behaviour, when i once in a game tried to kill goblins: these goblins did see me. there was no predefined aggorange. they had workers beeing busy and guards watching the surrounding area. if such a guard looks in your direction he alerts either the entire tribe or he tries to kill you solo. i prefer, if he decides for soloing me
but if the goblin becomes aware, that he will die, he runs back and alerts the tribe. so you need a good finishing blow to avoid this. if not, these damn goblins will start acting like a damn pvp-team. the shaman starts buffing, healing and attacking you with spells. the warriors will run to your healer standing behind you and the rangers will start firing. dont try to catch these rangers. if yo do this, they fly and come back or try to kite you until a warrior comes to help. same with this shaman. you really need a brain in order to kill this tribe. it needs a lot of tactics and time to do so.
a second feature would be dynamic content as announced by Arenanet lately. this could help, but just if very long events. long means long in time and a long chain of content and several action happening during such an event. take this example of the centaurs attacking a town. you see it and you start helping the human NPCs to defend their city.afterwards you chase the centaurs. up in the hills you find their home-dungeon and kill them all including their boss. however, some will survive, and start rebuilding the tribe slowly. this could become a great thing, if done right. but why cant i help the centaurs? as an elf i hate humans anyways. Arenanet says, they dont like that players fight indirectly against players and destroy their success. i guess thats wrong. what does success mean? if you are rewarded indepentently if you win or loose, that doesnt matter. just reward players for engagement. and if the centaurs win and block some human quest NPCs they captured, simply let other NPCs take over these quests or tell the player, that he has 1st to get rid of these centaurs or wait until others do it..
i stop my long writing here. i hope you got an impression, what my dream of an open, dynamic world looks like.
the best start would be, if devs try to get rid of quests first. replace them all with something open and dynamic. perhaps a just a tutorial-quest and one epic-questsline with a high sophisticated story full of riddles and such. maybe also a class quests. but more is not needed. tons of quests, as they are implemented today, are the number one killer of dynamics, immersion and community. but thats another story ....
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To the OP, Second Life is for you.
It's free to play but if you want to make content, you have to subscribe.
I was thinking about how the game communicates with you. The game server and the exchange of parcels of info. Packets you know the lag and other aspects. I am not very clear on how that works but latency and the time it takes for information to exchange.
Now some games the exchange is almost instant and you can feel it you hit an attack and it works immediately one of the top reasons I quit Warhammer was that horrible warp in between. What I am getting at about your idea is how is the game going to communicate each change to every member of the encounter. What if it is in the hundreds. Already one atatck can get mired in a game like Warhammer how will it be when you are talking whole cutscenes that change or scenarios that change depending on what you do. An engine to handle that in an MMO must be powerful and expensive. I can see it happen in a single player game but MMO.....may be in the future. I think it is way too expensive now.
Mind you it has to be a significant event so a lot of information has to be exchanged. So it is not just one attack but a series of packets passing in between and already the problems with large encounters are complicated with lag and sheer numbers on the screen. How will you add to that with a different scenario for each individual player. It boggles my mind and it has to be significant or else why bother.
The Gats of AQ event in WoW made the two AQ raid dungeons open to the players. The impact was pretty much that there were two more raids for players to do. For the non-raiders or the raiders not far enough in raid progression it did not really affect anything.
The actual event consisted of a few phases where in phase one the entire population contributed items to 'war effort' NPCs. The other phases involved a long quest chain that required the completion of tier 2 raid encounters so only a few of the more progressed guilds on the server participated. The final opening event pretty much lagged out the zone and crashed a lot of servers. Of course any player who was not online at the time missed it.
Fact is that most players did not really care about the event since it would not open any content they would have access to. Furthermore Blizzard would have opened up the content in some way even if the playerbase did not finish it since they would not waste all that content.
I think you are severly overestimated the 'fame' players would get for completing such one-of events. Players would care about the content but not who opened it up. There just is not that 'hero worship' culture for it to matter.
Dunno if I'd say that. The "gathering supplies" part of the event showered people with tons of cheap magic items (and some good ones), involved tons of weird world spawns that were fun to fight solo, and really transformed the feel of certain capital cities while they were going on (huge amounts of supplies dynamically being added, based on your faction's contributions.)
Sure it wasn't HUGE for those players, but it's not like it was completely without gameplay. It's really exactly what the OP was talking about: multiple tiers of user interaction with the game world, from a single true "dude who opened the gate" to huge amounts of faction-wide collaboration to make it happen.
It wasn't exactly a spectacular success though, which is probably why they didn't really do anything like it again.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It sounds like a one time thing and only good for the very small percentage of players lucky enough or well geared enough to experience them. New players to the game would have no chance in participating in it as well as the majority of the other players. The players who managed to complete the events would be well known to the population at the time until either those players quit (due to boredom of having completed everything at the time already) or the rest of the population turns over (all the other older players quit because they know that they missed out).
The OP amuses me. The game he wants is what Asheron's Call was from 1999 to around 2004. Read about it here: http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Azure
"User-Defined Content - Why isn't it present in modern MMOs?"
Simple. It's harder to pull off than leading a player by the nose with Main Quests.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
I played AC at the time but came into it rather late, but it was the real deal in so many ways. Players just thought that any new MMO has to be like that, they have to take the best bits as they make new ones. But unlike solo games MMO's do not take the best bits, there slavish devotion to WoW's template has lead us to this impass.
User defined content on the scale you're(OP) talking about(content that happens only once and for a handful of people) is simply not feasable from a lagistics standpoint. Why would a company spend hundreds of hours developing content that only 1 to a raid's worth of people will ever see on one server? When they could spend that hundreds of hours developing content that everyone can see? Much higher effort to view ratio with the latter.
Now I could go for the weekly random timed GM event, or user content like building cities and having to defend them from other players, etc. But I just can't see working my butt off for a month just so 5 people can see it.
Never trust the gaming community to make their own stuff and shove it into an MMO. Never. You can't trust those guys. But for better involvement, letting the players choose what they want out of a list of options is always a viable choice.
What we're looking for is exploration and the wiki-age to kinda die off, not the ability to shove what we want in a game enjoyed by a lot of people.
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However you slice it and whoever you call an idiot...
Whether user generated or user defined, my point sticks for either.
Aside from the sacrifice in game world stability in coding something so open...
If you give players that kind of power over the gaming world, sooner or later, some group of D-bags is gonna come along and blow the enjoyment of the game for everyone else. Sooner or later, they find the magic combination of exploits which allows them to grief the whole server.
Remember the old SWG housing trap? The many deaths of Lord British? The WoW zombie invasion?
That's nuthin'.
The world the OP dreams of is the world that would be heaven... for about 2 weeks. Developers know better than to cede control of content, or the face of the gaming world to the masses. And those that don't, find themselves in a world of hurt.
It would be the first question I'd ask as an investor: " What things about the world can the players control?" Anything more than Eve wouldn't see a dime of my money.
What's the point of "secret" content anyhow? Once someone finds it, it's going to end up on the game's wiki anyhow and everyone will know about it. The secret is only going to last until the first person finds it, then it'll be common knowledge.
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I dont care for user define content that would change the world for everyone.. What happens if 2 groups are questing in different parts of the world. Group A has a quest that ends up destroying Group Bs quest area.. Group A finishes their quests causing Group B not not be able to finish what they are doing.
No thanks.