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Player Influence on MMORPG back-story
Waffleton
Member Posts: 41
So far, all MMORPGs to some extent have a pre-made setting, and players merely interact with the story-line and lore to a small extent, but can't really change it. In most cases, the developers put a lot of time into explaining the story behind the game, but do little more than allow you to grind and pvp. The setting never changes. The Alliance will never defeat the Horde. Freeport and Quenos will always be at war, the rebels are locked in eternal conflict with the empire. In most context, this is to be expected. Many MMORPGs take place in franchise universes where certain settings are to remain constant.
But wouldn't it be neat to have an MMORPG where players literally make the back-story from scratch as they play? That is to say, the players are capable of creating their own history. For example, when the game is released, the players are pretty much in a stone age. As player's skills advance and new technologies are discovered, entire civilizations rise and fall. No pre-designed cities with NPC vendors etc., no pre-determined "player religions" and NPC run guilds, the entire world is driven by the influence of the players. Cities are managed and populated 100% by players; wars are raged for valuable resources, politicians keep their populace in check, armies are assembled, trained, and campaigned! Players may take many rolls from humble farmer to mercenary to army soldier to politian etc. Enough games where everyone is some sort of combat class, I would like to see an MMORPG simulate other aspects of life.
The possibilities are endless in such a scenario. Who wants to be the 70,000th person to "collect 15 wolf pelts for the dwarf king"? Boring!
I'm probably not making any sense with my ramblings, so if you have questions regarding what the hell I'm trying to convey, ask!
Comments
I like what you're saying and do agree that having greater player influence over the story-line would be a positive change. However, who really wants to play a farmer who just grinds all day? The reason I play mmorpgs is to get away from the mundane and to do something fantastical like slay dragons. I haven't tried it myself, but maybe "Second Life" would be more up your alley.
Lol, Second Life is NOT up my alley. God no.
Anyway, there really isn't much difference between a warrior who grinds all day and a farmer who grinds all day. In most games, its just a matter of pushing the "attack" button as opposed to the "farm button". It is a metter of how the feature is implemented. Farming would be an important and innovative feature in such a game proposed in the original post.
Besides, i don't think a dragon-slayer has much of a chance if he's starving to death.
Can you expand your thoughts on how this might be implemented in a game.
We are currently developing a game where we want to push the mmorpg envelope and would be interested in your ideas.
You can contact me directly at tonyhnz[at]cataclysmos[dot]org
while its a nice idea, the amount of content would have to be more then the MMORPG world has ever seen, most likely it would take 10 years to produce a game like that. only a major studio would be able to pull it off but a major studio cares not about games but on profits, thus the resource to create a game of such magnitude would not be cost effective
For all intents and purposes this is an impossibility. The logistical challenges alone are prohibitive, but the real problem lies within the experiences you will affect upon your playerbase.
Dramatic changes to a gameworld constantly threatens the stability of the game. So much effort is put into mitigating exploitation of game rules, and this would only exponentially complicate matters. Add to this the amount of ill-will you may create by the numerous quests that may be invalidated by a large change, or the once-safe-but-now-dangerous places people logged out the previous night. I can give you many examples.
Stability is king in a MMOG. If someone can find a way to generate an engine that can handle massive gameworld changes without risking new exploits, and can find a way to deal with the startling changes a player may experience when they go to bed and wake up the next day, then we might have a candidate for this kind of gameplay. But I have yet to see a system that is even remotely close to this kind of change...primarily because I have yet to see a development team with enough muscle and manpower to instantly produce the tenfold hours of content on the spot that is necessary to roll out changes fast enough to keep consumers feeling like things are actually changing and it's not just a spot event.
www.TheChippedDagger.com My 90-day 2D Java MMORPG project
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To you naysayers - i think its quite possible.
content would not have to be all that much more - pehaps even less that some existing games. The trick is to make the game like an oversized rts - players build farms towns, buildings etc.
models can be reused etc - much like existing MMO - eg WoW.
The dificulty lies in balancing and mechanics.
If you let people build houses and farms etc, they have to have a reason to build them, and they have to be able to be destroyed - otherwise the game will just get overfilled.
Take for example WoW. Imagine if instead of all those towns etc, you had a system like the old rts - where youwould build farms, town hall, blacksmith, lumber yard etc.... These building take a certain amount of resources to build and a certain time to build, and need certain PC/NPC to make it work - as an output it can make certain items, teach certain skills etc.
These buildings can be destroyed by others, so you have to build up defenses (walls, soldiers etc) to make sure the enemy doesn't come along - you also have to make alliances/guilds with other players to have enough resources to make and protect those buildings.
The system as above written would be easy to make and wouldn't need any more resources than existing MMOs.
it can get nice and in depth - cetain building are dependant on other buildings (eg, a auction hall needs a town hall to be around, etc) and make all building be "upgradeable". You can have a couple of different models/skins for buildings to represent different cultures in game etc.
The challenge i see is the syncronising of the server and clients - this can be partially helped by making the building process take a long time (days) which lets the information circulate longer, or there is a streaming tecnique which will update the location of items/buildings as you enter each area.. (not much data would need to be streamed, as the model etc already exists, you only have to give position/damage states (much like any mob, just stationary and probably bigger)
Once you give players the ability to make their own buildings/cities/etc - and make those buildings have upkeep requirements and different footprints (how much space they take up) you immediately start to get land and resource scarcity - which leads to combat over land and resources - which will give you a neverending influx of "player made content" of alliances, betrayals, etc etc.
then putting in a series of technology trees - it becomes even more in depth without adding too much complexity...
Something like this is EASILY within current technologies. as many of the different parts i have described can be seen in existing games such as WoW, GuildWars, Second Life, Eve-online etc.
It is so not a technical problem, its only a design problem.
Most of these MMOs are taking examples from cRPGs, adventure games and First Person Shooters. They are trying to expand the single player game into a multiplayer game. What they should be doing is designing from a multiplayer perspective, and then pusing down into the single player field.
WoW and GuildWars(as an example) are deriving their design features from singleplayer games... but what designers should be looking at is starting from how they want alliances of Guilds to play the game (large player politics) and how that should look, then designing more detailed functionality at lower stages for what the single player experience will be.
Until they do that, we're going to be in the same idea space of this current crop of MMOs
As another thing - linked games..
certain players want s FPS like game - they would be playing adventurers/soldiers/explorers etc.
They is quite possible to have a PBEM type game which is about the economic side - farming, research etc - which would impact on the game - having different types of players (economy types, crafter types, fs types) all playing the same game but in different ways is another way to encourage player effects.
things like factions to which you (and npcs) can join and make is another big way of fostering player influence on the game.
As the market grows there will be more economically based games to come out. The economical games benefit groups more then individuals as the goal is to better both parties in interaction, not just to better yourself (in long term partnerships etc.). This will in turn open views on the multiplayer side and maybe someday it will on the massive side.
A game where the roleplay is given the oportunity to develop itself (i.e. through specific boards) you will see only a minority take advantage of it. This small part of the community will be able to influence the game story (present/future lines, not past), I know that from experience. It might be because of the accessibility of this part of the community, it might be that the market share for these players is still or has become too small. Fact is that these are a core type of players. You can see the interest to a certain degree, but what most are looking for is the single player competition.
Where objects are fixed, kingdom relations aren't. I agree with Ianbusi to a certain degree. The casual player will need to remember where certain things are. The world needs a certain stability. That doesn't mean your story needs it. Take a game with two nations, it's easy to implement times of peace and a casual battle where PK is turned on in the attacked kingdom. You can even introduce large scale wars. [edit] Players can rule nations if provided with the correct tools. [/edit]
In the end gamemakers will create different styles of MMOG's as there are different styles of single player games. I mean if you play a simulation, a strategy or a racing game in multiplayer mode you will realize that with a bit of work you can bring it out on a massive market.
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Most of that is in eve-online, its the game mechanics involved with combat that stop it from being the best sytem ever - in that the balance between defending/attacking player owned structures is very heavily in favour of the defender (though that could change with the release of titans), and the fact that the player structures are lacking in terms of services compared to NPC stations. The other problem is that few are bothering with alliance space wars etc. due to the profitability of instanced missions in safe space.
Note that i'm not saying eve is anywhere near perfect, just that they are trying to make their universe a player-driven one.
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PvE in general is pretty lame, if you think long and hard about it. You are spending your time beating a severely gimped AI that would lose to a well trained monkey. Best not to think too long and hard why you are wasting time playing games in general actually...
Myko i agree.
Eve does seem to be designed a little differently... and CCP have plainly stated that they wanted a "player universe" where npc's and developer created content takes a backseat to the "player created content" of politics and alliances.
The biggest problem in eve is that they "started" the game at too late a stage - IMHO the game would have been that much better if it had been based at the founding of the eve gate - so the backstory would be there but would play no real part in the ongoing game - everything would be player created.
a perfect "beta" for an upcoming game like this would be the foundation - those early players are the ones who found the first kingdoms etc, before the floodgates open to the retail players - and this beta time is when the devs/gms have the best time to influence the progression of the game.
If Eve-online got rid of the NPC empires/CONCORD etc, and everything was player run, then it would be much better (IMHO)
As i said before, its not the technical problems so much, its more the design and ideas behind the tech that is most important
(god, i could write for pages and pages on this topic....)
also to myko...
it makes sense to introduce the defensive bits first... let people build up before letting others destroy.
also matches real life to an extent (historically anyway) - they build better defenses and then came up with new weapons to detroy things... in moden days (post ww2) its more back to front with most weapons being so powerful, than defenses are more of a stopgap measure...
but in anycase - letting defensive be better at first is agood thing for gameplay. (just wait for dreadnaughts and XL weapons - hehehe)
a mmorpg that has were the players effect the story is the matrix online. my best friend is currently playing it and hes always telling me about the events that happened and how he and his other friends the machinist are gonna attack the zionist and kill morpheus and such. you cna read up on hte main page how things are going.
Without the technical issues resolved it is nothing more than your imagination.
Go right on ahead and keep demanding it, and go right on ahead and keep on imagining it. But gain some perspective on reality to understand that implementation is nowhere near as easy as has been suggested numerous times by advocates of these ideas.
Grossly discounting the enormous technical hurdles to overcome shows an incredible naivte and stark ignorance of what is realistically necessary to bring a successful software title to the public. Even more egregious is to discount the hordes of malicious players who would gladly exploit every opportunity to grief/harass/exploit the game and playerbase as a whole, opportunities that become epidemic when massive changes come to a MMOG that have not be thoroughly playtested.
You cannot simply wish these problems to go away. If you want to realize a challenging idea you must expend extreme amounts of energy into the effort of solving the difficult technical challenges presented. If you do not you will create a seriously flawed product which will either be badly frustrating to engage or flat-out broken. Good ideas cannot overcome shoddly implementation.
While these may excite some of you simply because they represent a dynamic world, it's going to eventually horrify you. There is absolutely no sense of continuity if you leave a place intact one hour and find that it's been destroyed the next entirely due to the malicious whim of other players. Some of you will revel in that, but it is my firm belief that a great majority of players will find it disorienting and far too frustrating to justify the monthly fee they'll be paying.
People do not react well to change, regardless of your assertions. Minor tweaking of class abilities causes uproars in player communities. Altering a single quest causes uproars in player communities. Removal of quest content, disabling quests, or making existing quests more complicated/difficult causes uproars in player communities. Change is difficult and painful for most people, and you cannot simply dismiss that.
I'm not talking about stability of content. I'm talking about the stability of the game world mechanics, the engine itself. I'm talking about the ability of the game to not crash, to remain playable and relatively bug-free. Massive changes to a game risk its stability, on many fronts. This is a realistic hurdle to overcome when designing a game capable of delivering massive amounts of dynamic content...dynamic content infers untested content, and untested content practically gaurantees bugs. Bugs are the greatest way to shatter the sense of immersion and continuity that are vital to online worlds being compelling.Ianubisi - what you are talking about si not technical problems with code - they are all problems taht have existed and peen (to a greater/lesser extent) overcome in other games.
Its the DESIGN of the game that is the challenge - not technicalisties.
the whole idea of "classes" and "levels " are problems in themselves... The whole game should be about player content - player made quests etc...
In case you have missed this and not sure if this is what you have in mind, but check this out:
http://www.ryzom-ring.com/
Us players over at the SoR forum are waiting with baited breath for Nevrax to provide more details on this at E3.
And designs must be implemented, which means technical difficulties. You simply cannot dismiss that, not at least if you actually expect to see these things come to fruition.
Ianubsi - we are seemingly defining things differently
When i am talking about technical problems, i am talking about the problems with coding something... eg - how to code 3d lighting, or how to code a system which dynamically updates a landscape every time you enter etc etc.
Everything i am talking about has been done before in other games -its been implemented in one way or another before. I amnot talking about balance of stats etc - thats done through pklay testing etc - its the methods and functionality i am more concerned with - not how many different swords or races you have - thats content and adds up to entries in a database and art. Its the underlying methods and funtionality of those items and how they can interact with players that has to be designed in detail and with an eye to multiplayer and dynamic changes.
The design is the putting it together in a cohenent way - that is NOT implementation. Once the design is done properly i am sure that the implementation can be done with the knowledge already existing in the field.
Of course, you are right in that designing something like this, with all the elements working together is probably a hard challenge - like any large project.
Design must be implemented. Design is a roadmap. Without implementation design is nothing more than a wish list. You can sit down and imagine how things might be, but unless you can translate that into actual code that resolves the problems presented by the design you are nothing more than a dreamer.
If you spent a day of your life coding software this would be as obvious to you as daylight is to day.
Yes i realise this.
but for a "player influenced game" as has been discussed in this thread, all the parts have already been implemented before in other games (not as a whole, but as parts).
This is why i am saying that the implementation is not the biggest problem - its all been done before, just not all together.
From my experiences with design and coding, a good feature requirements + technical design of a product takes over 50% of the time. actual coding another 20+%, testing the final 30+%.
I've worked over 10 years in design, code and management of very large software products (admittedly not in gaming, but...), so yes, i have coded at least 1 day in my life.
What i'm trying to say is that all the peices of a good game are already out there and the methods of implementing the various features are known - they just need to be put together.
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_______________________________________________________________________
Looking forward (cautiously) to: Age of Conan, Dark Solstice, Armada Online.
Will soon try: Guild Wars
Overall: Amazed and bewhildered at the current sad state of the artform of gaming.
Roma Victor.
_______________________________________________________________________
Looking forward (cautiously) to: Age of Conan, Dark Solstice, Armada Online.
Will soon try: Guild Wars
Overall: Amazed and bewhildered at the current sad state of the artform of gaming.