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Will DDO ever see player made content?
Enkmar
Member Posts: 46
So here's my line of thinking...
The latest addition to City of Heroes/Villains brings the ability to create your own missions. I'm sure everyone's heard about this. Also worth mentioning is the fact that the two games are somewhat similiar in their basic design - of course there's a bajillion differences, but ultimately each game is an MMO where you enter an instanced mission or quest to reach your goals.
And then you factor in the old Turbine interview. I have no idea where it is to link it, as I read it maybe 6-10 months ago? Anyways, if I recall correctly the interview was about, and I'm paraphrasing here, a company that had just invested a great sum of money in Turbine, and how did Turbine plan to use this money. I recall the interview because I liked what they had to say about how they feel the future of MMOs is in player made content.
So with all that in mind, has DDO said anything about taking their game in this direction? Anyone think it's a possibility?
Comments
It has been mentioned quite a bit, although the devs have dropped not the slightest clue if it is has even been considered. Personally I think it is the only thing that could move DDO from a niche to something bigger. Taking NWN as an example it would have been a pretty mediocre game without the builder tool.
The great sum of money is believed to be going towards a new MMO.
The main problem between CoH and DDO is that the mission to quest instances are worlds apart in complexity and that can't be overlooked as they are basically the same concept. CoH is basically a selection of very limited map layouts populated with spawns (where the xp is tied up) , clickies and some dialogue to complete, the fact they use to be able to build missions through a spreadsheet shows how limited it was. That design lends itself towards a builder.
DDO quests appear to be built surface by surface, which is the first major issue. Although a starting point using pre-built map selection and/or large chunks would be sensible.
You can probably work through the rest of the differences.
The next point is that CoH builder is generating very little quality and huge quantity. The question is what do you put in place to allow the actual content of DDO to leverage the user input in to the real content while still giving the users their own quaranteed area for developing and playing their own content. Probably put simply how do you turn it from a gimmick to something that actually becomes a community MMO development accepting that 95% of what people produce would be crud.
It did strike me that wouldn't it be nice if they could release a standalone tool to build the look and animations for mobs so that talented players with some dev tweaking could fill out the breadth of mobs to fight. Sort of similar to what CoH did when they released their animation tool.
"Will DDO ever see player made content? "
I hope not; not only do I dislike sorting through thousands of cheesy, half-done quests for a quality adventure, I wouldn't trust Turbine to implement a build-your-own-sandcastle program on a beach.
Good responses.
Dr. Rock, I think you're right about the complexity and I hadn't really considered that. I do think it could still be done, though I agree, it wouldn't be anything like NWN quality. Maybe something where they offer 50 maps for you to choose from, and you add the story, enemies, and traps. One thing I see debated most strongly on the DDO forums is that DDO is such a loot based game, and it'd cheese that. I think even that could be handled, maybe with everything you add (enemies, traps, size/duration of the dungeon) awarding points that will be calculated into some randomly generated treasure. The only thing you couldn't work around there is a DM making a dungeon, difficult, and telling his guys/running it himself for loot, but when you think about it, everyone already knows all the DDO dungeons by the back of their hand anyways.
Codejack, I actually don't think the dungeons and quests made would be that bad, given the player community. Not to bash WoW, but were something like this added to WoW, then sure, the majority would suck because you've got a huge community there and a lot of them don't take much seriously. The DDO community is a different entity, I think of which the majority of players are tabletop fans as well. My meaning of course being that I think tabletop players, and the DDO community as a whole, would whip up some pretty decent dungeons.
You could even incorporate some kind of feedback system perhaps, where the author is rated on his dungeons, or the dungeon itself is rated. I think that's how CoH is doing theirs? Not sure on that.
All in all, informative and a good discussion. Thanks for the replies.
My understanding through previous comments from Turbine and general observation while "zerging" throug the content is it's all hand made. What I mean is, someone actually sits at a computer and sculps the module, places doo-dads (many of them are frequently visiable) and tailors the setting to the general experiance of the theme of the quest. If Turbine were to make a Quest Queueing type of thing were players interfaced with NPC dialogue that dictated the different elements, encounters, and themes, that would be present I could imagine how it would be an attractive feature.
I really don't think we'll see it. DDO hasn't been too successful even though it's a great game when it's not being plagued by the fucking lag we've been experiancing. If there's been any one reason to not play the game it's due to the recent lag which has not been resolved. Turbine would not only have to design an entirely new tech to their game engine but then would have to compensate for the real technical issues we'd experiance when more people began focusing on a particular feature.
I believe we'll see the game go to a reduced subscription model and supported by micro transactions before we see user generated, or user queued, content. If we don't see DDO get an "Item Mall" by the end of 2009 I'll be extremely surprised.
I resubscribed to CoX for two months, and was able to try the Mission Archetect when it went to public beta on the test server. The biggest problem with City of Heroes/Villains, as far as I'm concerned, is that it has a huge number of generic, simple, repetitive quests which get old (as opposed to DDO's problem, which is that it has a small number of unique, complex quests which you have to repeat, which gets old). And now all the CoX players with cliched, long-winded character bios have access to a system which allows them to keep making more of the same simple, repetitive quests.
In order for DDO to have player-made content that comes up to the standards of even its weakest quests, they would need a system far more detailed than the one CoX has. It would need either the ability to create unique maps, or some kind of random map generator. Otherwise the player-made quests would all be along the lines of Waterworks -- but with pirates instead of kobolds, and more spelling and grammar errors. They would also need to quality check each player-made quest before exposing it to the public. By the end of the first weekend of open beta for the Mission Archetect, there were over two thousand quests up. DDO is about quality questing. The game would be ruined by an influx of tossed-off player-made crap. I've seen people say that the DDO playerbase is somehow different; but come on, I've been a player in more than a few lame, derivative PnP campaigns.
I generally think people sound ignorant when they whine, "I wish devs wouldn't waste their time on X. They should focus it on Y." But in this case, after seeing the Mission Archetect, which seems to have taken more than a year to make. . . I think Turbine should focus on making more content themselves.
I don't think you would have to.
all they would have to do is to give the players the tools and have access to everything. Sort of like the Oblivion or Neverwinter nights toolset.
Allow people to create user made adventures.
However, all loot and xp gotten in the adventure would be adventure or campagin specific.
So, you might even have to make a new character or copy over your character to another player's campagin. This way you are only taking advantage of that campaign with regards to your character. Thus, if "uber loot" or easy xp is gained it doesn't pollute the main game or other player's campaigns.
then allow a rating system. You already find this with oblivion mods.
The campaigns that are continually rated high by a greater amount of users would be the campaigns you might want to check out.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Well the players have made signficantly more missions in 1 week than the developers made in 4 years in City of Heroes.
Not sure if that is a real measure of success but DDO with that much content would be pretty wild.
It's a measure of how weak and dashed off the player made-quests are. I've played some of them.