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Guild Wars 2: Dynamic Content
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In MMORPG.com's latest Guild Wars 2 column, Managing Editor Jon Wood takes a look at Dynamic Content. Dynamic content, as Jon suggests, is content that should make the game world feel alive, that the actions players participate in make a difference in the way the world looks and feels. Check out Jon's thoughts and then let us know what you think about dynamic content on the forums.
To me, dynamic content should speak to game elements that actually make the persistent world feel “alive”. In today’s “traditional” MMORPG , it isn’t the world that the developers try to make feel alive so much as it is your particular character. Somewhere along the line, someone at some point decided that MMOs needed to make each and every character feel like they were the star of the show, the only one capable of growing strong enough to defeat the big what’s-it-called-of-great-EVIL, often multiple times, grinding for one particular piece of uber loot... but I digress. The bottom line is that most MMORPGs are designed so that, while the character’s (and by extension the player’s) experiences change as they progress through the game, the world itself remains static.
Read more here.
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Comments
It must be tough to Jon to make up articles with so much few new info hehe
You are doing a good jog in recycling the info tho
"It has potential"
-Second most used phrase on existence
"It sucks"
-Most used phrase on existence
Ok one thing and it's a small thing but GW1 was not an mmo, just so we have the straight.
The rest i do agree, story is good but players do want to be a part of the game world and not just a participant in it. From what Arenanet has stated so far sounds like they are the inovative ones this time. The amount of game footage they have shown us is understandable about the hype.
Think this is the first step in mmo history that players can truely effect there world and be proud that they are making a story of their own.
Nive atricle and i totaly agree that the quest encounter system is very dynamic. Oddly enough, about one month ago we had someone agruing that Gw2's content was not dynamic at all.
This kind of living world is a step in the right direction for sure.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
Not really with this system. The stuff resets / reloops. You don't build citys or own then for long periods. There have been many games where "Think this is the first step in mmo history that players can truely effect there world and be proud that they are making a story of their own."
That statement is true for a few mmos, but Gw2 is not one of them.
Now there will be a varity in leveling , questign experience, because of this system.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
I think he was talking about the "Personal Story" part of GW2
Seems odd your not really effecting a world then. maybe your house.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
The idea is great, but the implementation is another story
Played some MMORPGs which advertised as "non-linear" "player-defined storyline" , a few first hours of playing that game showed some hope of the advertisement proven true, but ended up on the same grind-based game
Personally I think it is because dynamic world in MMOs are not possible because the amount of ppl playing it. I saw in a GW2 trailer the dev telling that the quest will be given to players through real-time wolrd event ( they showcased some centaurs chasing civilian downhill ) with thousands of player, how can you afford to make them all experience this?
Just my worrying head though. I am anticipating GW2 myself and I do hope that the GW2 devs already thought abt this when they promised that feature in the trailer, delivering the game just as it is promised...
GW1 did a great job of pulling players into the setting. People were really immersed with their character actually showing up in the in-game cutscenes. The feeling that your character was really having some kind of impact on the world was very strong. Let's hope they continue this in GW 2.
To me it appears as though GW2 is aiming to offer the best of both a theme park world and a player-made world, and I think that's a great thing.
Anyone expecting pure player freedom either needs to get their expectations in check or go and play Darkfall. I personally believe games like that can be created but are doomed to fail because of the players themselves. Thankfully for me, GW2 ain't gonna be like this.
Aryas
Playing: Ableton Live 8
~ ragequitcancelsubdeletegamesmashcomputerkillself ~
Pretty much captured how I feel about story in mmorpgs in this post. Setting > Story.
I think the fact that GW2 is using their own engine is good sign that they can pull this off. Most MMOs used premade engines (maybe modified, but still old and used by others many times).
When the game launhes, it will be crazy and most likely over crowded, but after a while things will balance out. There may not even be problems if they have multiple worlds/districts like in GW1 or if theres enough content spread out so people arent all doing the same events.
Fun>Persistant Story>everything else. Dynamic events will be lots of fun. But even they will loop, so even if you affect surroundings. It will only be temporarily. I am still waiting on an mmo to deliver a game where your choices or actions have an everlasting effect on the game world. I'm no game developer so I don't know how it can be pulled off. But with the big budgets games have now. I don't see that as being impossible sometime in the near future.
The thing to note is that not everyone will be able to experience everything - at least not at the same time. ArenaNet is willing to sacrifice "all content available to everyone, always" for the effect and impact of truly dynamic content. No, that town will not always be overrun with centaurs. No, that cave will not always have bandits in it.
Yes, you might be able to find bandits in it later (when the event has cycled around to that part of the content), but if your friends beat the bandits last night and you were not there, you're not guaranteed to be able to beat the bandits tonight, or every night.
Setting > Story, good way of putting it in the article. Dynamic Events look to be a step up, especially if they can achieve a sorta "critical mass" with the number, combinations and overall variations of all the features mixed and combined, then they will be replayable. That's perhaps the most stringent test for dynamic content, maybe?
As the article highlights because there are so many players, a persistent world is limited to how much changeable content can be made (10,000 devs?). I'd suggest there is a solutiion and that would be to create a persistent world that can be changed significantly and permanently by players.... but there is a time limit to reset or at least the world would go to such a crazy state it would effectively be won (ordered to the nth degree) or lost (complete mess!!) and then... reset for a renewed setting/story to be told over the course of a month or two? That would be the trade off perhaps? But it would be a very interesting design.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
I can sure imagine how great it could be having these dynamic events, but I also know that I had better be ready to be disappointed. It's a great idea, and I'm sure that they will do everything they can to make it as great of an implimentation as possible, but it's never going to be able to end up being non-repetative. Like the previous poster, I would like to see this ever-changing, non-repetative, dynamic world. That is definately what I would like to see.
Guild wars 2 isn't going to be that, but I'm still looking forward to it. And hopefully, GW2 leads the way into a new era of MMO's that utilize a strategy that does make the player part of a unique and dynamic "setting" instead of just one of a lineup of heroes living the exact same story.
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
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With all of these editorials/opinion pieces on GW2, you guys must be as starved for new information as we are.
Disagreement Heirarchy
far as I understood it the game will evolve around you personally
So while someone lvl 1 starting out will see the exact same thing you just saw you probably won't experience the EXACT same thing twice
Anyone expecting Guild Wars or any other game coming out in, I don't know, the next five to ten years or so, to have truly dynamic, always new, non-repeating content is fooling themselves. The amount of time, effort and money it would take to continually create new content on such a regular and constant basis is something that not even a company like Blizzard would dream of trying right now.
I knew from the outset that GW2's dynamic content would eventually repeat, and I'm ok with that. It will still be a whole lot more interesting then "Go kill 10 goblins wandering aimlessly in that field over there" or what have you.
I really think they give the setting "and" story or at the very least that's their stated goal. Dynamic content isn't just for the personal story the world does change and not for just a tiny amount of time either. This is why I'm excited the game is going to offer so much to so many people in new and exciting ways.
In all honesty I truly doubt there ever will be "non repeatable" regular content in a game. At least until they figure out a way to make reliable cheap ai's that can self generate/implement content on a daily basis. Thinking and asking for that is fine. I mean look at some of the books made in the 80s about some vr fantasy game with thousands of players on at the same time. We're pretty close to that... in some ways surpassing the ideas of that time but beating on GW2 for having looping content(that can loop in different ways depending on outcomes of both the previous section and other secions that relate to it) is very nit picky.
I really think that in general this game is pretty safe to have high expectations. Just do your research. I honestly didn't beleave that they could do half of this for a pay to play game but they've put a lot of info out in their blog about how things work. As well as whole presentations you can watch online about how this system actually operates. It's lightyears ahead of anything else atm. Yes it's still just a game and anyone expecting a game to be the second coming needs to back off but this looks like an awful lot of fun and that's all you can really ask for.
if this works... it will be the greatest thing to be done in MMOs in years.. Cant wait.
I can see an extension of the GW2 system that is fairly essentially non-repeatable. You have DE points all over a zone. You have some basic RTS-/TBS-like AIs for the various factions in a zone (centaurs, militia, necromancers, farmers, etc, and so forth). You then have them each act in a normal way through the DE points. Toss in some procederal content that spontaneously appears around each node to spice things up (and interacts with whatever else is going on), and you are good to go.
Obviously that would take a lot of work to refine and make sure it was fun, but I think it is quite doable within the next 5-10 years as a logical extension of the GW2 system.
Having played the demo for hours, I am the last person to tell you GW2 was not worth its money. For the price you have to pay and what you get in return, it is a no-brainer to buy and play GW2.
But I cannot subscribe to the enthusiasm about the dynamic events. If you return to the starting area months after release, you will still see the same things going on, the same distress situations still happening to the same people. The world of GW might not be as static as others, but if you really take a look, the pieces of the puzzle still do not change. All the game allows itself, is being a glutton with content, sending the player off to the next step of his journey before all 1342 quests in one area are done.
Which is the thing other MMOs do, they require you to grind an area until you hate it, before allowing you into the next one. Those MMOs are designed to keep you paying per month so they will not allow you to skip anything. GW2 does not do this, which means the game frees itself to pushing you onwards across the continent at a faster pace. GW2 can arrange content in a convoluted way forcing you to miss many things on the first play through. Other games don't do that for a lack of innovative thoughts, they arrange everything in one chronological giant chain of events for the sake of dragging it out.
MMOs notoriously withhold the feeling of being done from the player. GW2 does not do that, they push you forward while you still know that there is stuff going on that you are skipping right now. This mixture of being told "you're done here" combined with "yes we know there WOULD be stuff to do" is what makes the world come truly alive. The quests are still quests, you know them, you played them all before, you will still not read the sad story of farmer Eric in a popup box, if you had the chance. Dynamic, schmymanic, just because quests overlap and happen at the same time, does not give you a better feeling.
Personally, that's all I was hoping for an MMO. Let's see how this will work in practice, because in theory is very beautiful.
I accept your point about setting, but I think you just skated past the fact that what the GW2 dynamic content system does is integrate setting with story.
Story, in a single player RPG, is what keeps you loading the game, because you are curious to find out what happens next. EQ style MMO plotlines are something you have to imagine, because the world has to remain static for the next person coming through the area who needs XP for leveling. The GW2 world promises to deliver a world where the story of each individual setting continuously unfolds, thus prompting you to not just log in, but peek over the next hill, cross that new river, to see what's actually unfolding on the other side.
Here's an example that I've seen in several of the videos of demo gameplay. Somewhere in the Charr area of the demo, there's an outpost. While watching multiple different pieces of gameplay footage of this outpost (as people are variously checking out the player interface, looking at their gear, randomly activating skills, or just looking for a place to go fight monsters) I have noticed a Charr npc walking past with a serious limp. One or two players have actually targetted the guy with the limp, and you can see in the interface that he actually has the Crippled condition. ... How did the guy get crippled? Is he looking for a remedy for the condition, or perhaps revenge on the thing that caused it? In any case, when I get a character to that outpost, I am going to find out. Just to find out and see where it leads. In this case, he is just another part of the scenery, but I suspect he will lead to story.
I think GW2 will be like this from one end to the other (and back).
Charr: Outta my way.
Human: What's your problem?
Charr: Your thin skin.
This would be interesting to see, but very difficult to pull off in a fun way for the masses.
It could be a cyclical world content design. The constant struggle between good and evil on a large scale. The dynamic events would have to be spread out over months to make it feel permanent for players. There could be towns and cities that are in different stages of events. So you the player could be a part of each town or city by joining the milita or crafting gear to fight off the evil or become a highwayman and prey on those who are working for the town or city. Then when the event happens with an attack or whatever they have. You are a part of the community and fight to protect what you have. If you lose, all is destroyed and you have to rebuild or move. If you win, you have to try to seek out the attackers where ever they went before they regroup and try again here or somewhere else.
So all the players would be a part of the game world. There could be a number of different factions that are enemies most of the time, but may need to work together from time to time or be destroyed. Most of the time would be inbetween when events happen. Just smaller encounters that would be your quests as you try to protect an area. A living breathing dynamic game world where content builds to an event, then fades away only to rebuild to another event.
But the smaller version in GW2 is at least a good start to a more dynamic game world. It will be fun to be on the ground floor of a feature that may grow to something grand in the future.
How many people long for that "past, simpler, and better world," I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?
R.A.Salvatore