MMO should have a live world like The Witcher 2

xmenty · May 2011

i was wondering what is stopping all the MMO from having a live world like The Witcher 2? Why can't SWTOR have this since its story driven MMO? Check out the youtube link below

Eg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBWoZUaEv50

Reklaw · May 2011

Originally posted by xmenty
i was wondering what is stopping all the MMO from having a live world like The Witcher 2? Why can't SWTOR have this since its story driven MMO? Check out the youtube link below

Eg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBWoZUaEv50

Only thing you need to know is the difference between developing a singleplayer game and a MMORPG and there is your answer.

While obviously I would like to see such worlds, instead of the mostly static worlds we get with MMORPG's, there are a few exceptions, but those exceptions never seemed something the masses wants or wanted.

And don't worry you're probebly not the last person who play's a singleplayer game and asumes it can be done in a MMORPG as obviously some thing can or will in time be done within the MMORPG worlds. There is just so much more a MMORPG needs to take into account compared to a singleplayer or normal multiplayer game.

Just check how alive singleplayer games can feel compared to MMORPG, also check how limited most multiplayer games are compared to MMORPG's, in between lies your answer.

menasure · May 2011

well i asked myself the same question once after playing the elder scrolls oblivion and the answer is probably: the sheer datasize and the cost involved.

for example i had lots of fun in oblivion when i infested a whole town as a vampire but eventually i wondered why that did not stop the npc's from walking outside during daylight: well though the number of reactions to your actions is impressive in the game maybe someone did not think about that possibility but eventually that was just one aspect/possibility in game and you still can only put so much data on a cd/dvd anyway.

now if you use an entire server to fill with just one elaborate game of course you have a a lot more potential but on the other hand: you also have a lot more players interacting with the virtual world so a lot more computations to handle. the budget... size and time of the developers involved in a project also puts limits on everything so the line has to be drawn somewhere.

that's why for rpg's usually a choice between open world with more to discover but a bit shallower interaction and more closed worlds with deeper, more focussed interactions is made. the more you want of both the more expensive the project is going to be. you want to simulate a 'real' fantasy reality? well try to convince nasa to make a game instead of sending 'stuff' to space

but i hope that one day a big developer will make a big attempt to create something in the line of a really dynamic world like you can only find in single player games like the witcher or a few others but it's probably going to have a huge price tag.

jpnole · May 2011

I've actually preordered the Witcher 2 and have it 95% downloaded and ready to go from GoG. I agree with teh OP and I am actually starting to feel the mmo burnout yet again now that I've maxed out in Rift. My origianl love in PC gaming were single player RPGs. Looking forward to giving mmos a break and getting into the world of the Witcher!

djazzy · May 2011

Another game/s that has a vibrant and alive world is the Assassin Creed series.

I imagine there are a lot of techinical difficulties in creating worlds like this for an mmo.

Castillle · May 2011

Theres really not that big of a problem if say...You added those npcs walking around and stuff in something like...WoW tbh. Why wont they do it? Development costs and will people actually use it/pay attention to it. Its fluff and fluff is always good but these are businesses were talking about. Theyre most likely going to do the minimum amount needed for something to get the most amount of profit.

All those things need a lil research and dev time. Would you be willing to wait for GW2 to release maybe half a year later just so that there are npcs going around on their own and working on their own in the cities? Also would you be willing to pay x dollars more just for that feature to pay for the dev time?

All thee things have to be taken into account. Ofc if the devs actually genuinely cared for their games and want it to grow then they would. But initial development tends to burn them out and the actual process of getting features added in the games would have to go through the long administrative process with the ppl above,etc etc and its just a huge cluster!@#$ that tends to limit innovation.

That and the devs already have their view of what the game would be like.

Im so sleepy and I forgot what I was talking about o.o *Sweatdrop*

I do agree that MMOs need to have worlds that are more alive like the witcher 2 o.o

Bladestrom · May 2011

Witcher 2 is a single player game, the world rotates around you and you have a bubble of super realism surrounding wherever you go that is maybe 50 yards square. This bubble has a dedicated PC producing that world for you on demand as you wander about. Outside of that bubble is black nothingness. Your going to need to wait for a long time for servers to get to the point where they can do that amount of processing for thousands of square miles with persistance. Most good modern MMO's will have living worlds to a certain level, and probably add as much as they can without affecting performance. There is also the issue of developing and maintaining a living world where perhaps 90% of that world is not been observed by human eyes at any one time - thats a big waste of resource while processing power is finite.

one day hopefully

Vhaln · May 2011

I think that either devs expect the world to be sufficiently populated by players, or they think all NPC behaviour needs to be controlled server side, and that would be way too much strain on the servers. Either way, seems to me like a cop-out for laziness and poor problem solving skills.

Players do nothing but break immersion 99% of the time, so if anything, I think they need more NPCs to offset player population running around, but I don't think those NPCs need to be controlled by the server. If they're coded in a way that makes them predictable, it would be fine if my PC renders them a little differently than everyone else's. No reason to overload servers, when our clients can do the job easily. Would be similar enough. Especially if the server can intermittently give those NPCs directives that would help them sync up a bit.

Sure, it would be tricky and prone to bugginess, but IMHO, that would still be much better than the lifeless MMO environments we've been getting ever since the genre began.

psyclum · May 2011

<developer_name_01> sucks, wastes time on programming useless things like nps taking a dump but dont care about players crashing to desktop every 15min's

who cares if the npc in town goes to sleep when half of your F'ing quests dont work. why am i wasting my money paying <developer_name_01> when you dont fix your effing game and instead waste time on useless crap like npc sleeping and waking up....

etc...

see why <developer_name_01> dont spend the time programming a living world?:D the fact is the reason why <developer_name_01> doesnt spend the time or money on a living world is cuz MMO players are so b17chy

lectrocuda · May 2011

at first I was having problems with the game, but steam updated it or something and it runs fine. Now my biggest problem is not getting burned by the dragon. Combat is amazing, the game seems amazing.

Bladestrom · May 2011

Originally posted by Vhaln
I think that either devs expect the world to be sufficiently populated by players, or they think all NPC behaviour needs to be controlled server side, and that would be way too much strain on the servers. Either way, seems to me like a cop-out for laziness and poor problem solving skills.

Players do nothing but break immersion 99% of the time, so if anything, I think they need more NPCs to offset player population running around, but I don't think those NPCs need to be controlled by the server. If they're coded in a way that makes them predictable, it would be fine if my PC renders them a little differently than everyone else's. No reason to overload servers, when our clients can do the job easily. Would be similar enough. Especially if the server can intermittently give those NPCs directives that would help them sync up a bit.

Sure, it would be tricky and prone to bugginess, but IMHO, that would still be much better than the lifeless MMO environments we've been getting ever since the genre began.

They already code npc's this way to the limit of current technology, they create generic npc scripts and clone to a level where it does not affect sever performance (obviously some done better than others) Rendering on your pc is not the problem, its maintaining the persistance for an entire world for every player. If you mean the rendering of the npc's on your pc, its the processing power required to persist them on a world as a simulated entity for everyone that impacts the server. To offload that processing requirement onto your pc means that you are now the server for that entity for every other player in the game. Not to mention managing when you switch off etc. Bear in mind your pc could not even maintain an entire persistant world at the way we are talking about for 1 user.

Bottom line is that everyone including expert developers who understand game theory and technology/economic limits would love to make a game that simulates a real living world. Development is a profession like any other, with the good and the bad, and its all too easy to comment 'oh they must be lazy' etc. Much more useful to examine the root causes and limitations.

wakero · May 2011

It's probably harder to implement these things in a mmo. And you don't need it much, because you have real people playing besides you. It will be a nice touch though.

shaco · May 2011

Originally posted by Vhaln
I think that either devs expect the world to be sufficiently populated by players, or they think all NPC behaviour needs to be controlled server side, and that would be way too much strain on the servers. Either way, seems to me like a cop-out for laziness and poor problem solving skills.

Players do nothing but break immersion 99% of the time, so if anything, I think they need more NPCs to offset player population running around, but I don't think those NPCs need to be controlled by the server. If they're coded in a way that makes them predictable, it would be fine if my PC renders them a little differently than everyone else's. No reason to overload servers, when our clients can do the job easily. Would be similar enough. Especially if the server can intermittently give those NPCs directives that would help them sync up a bit.

Sure, it would be tricky and prone to bugginess, but IMHO, that would still be much better than the lifeless MMO environments we've been getting ever since the genre began.

+1

fivoroth · May 2011

1. High Cost

2. System Requirements

3. Not worth the cost

jpnz · May 2011

Imagine 10 of your friends playing in the same game instance like 'The Witcher2' or Elder Scrolls series with you.

How fun would that be? pretty good right?

Now imagine 100 of your friends.

Hmm. Why is this NPC dead? Why is this village burned to the ground?

Now imagine 1000 people from all around the world.

Get it now?

Vhaln · May 2011

Originally posted by Bladestrom

Originally posted by Vhaln

I think that either devs expect the world to be sufficiently populated by players, or they think all NPC behaviour needs to be controlled server side, and that would be way too much strain on the servers. Either way, seems to me like a cop-out for laziness and poor problem solving skills.

Players do nothing but break immersion 99% of the time, so if anything, I think they need more NPCs to offset player population running around, but I don't think those NPCs need to be controlled by the server. If they're coded in a way that makes them predictable, it would be fine if my PC renders them a little differently than everyone else's. No reason to overload servers, when our clients can do the job easily. Would be similar enough. Especially if the server can intermittently give those NPCs directives that would help them sync up a bit.

Sure, it would be tricky and prone to bugginess, but IMHO, that would still be much better than the lifeless MMO environments we've been getting ever since the genre began.

They already code npc's this way to the limit of current technology, they create generic npc scripts and clone to a level where it does not affect sever performance (obviously some done better than others) Rendering on your pc is not the problem, its maintaining the persistance for an entire world for every player. If you mean the rendering of the npc's on your pc, its the processing power required to persist them on a world as a simulated entity for everyone that impacts the server. To offload that processing requirement onto your pc means that you are now the server for that entity for every other player in the game. Not to mention managing when you switch off etc. Bear in mind your pc could not even maintain an entire persistant world at the way we are talking about for 1 user.

You seem to be misunderstanding me. What I'm talking about would be more like client side prediction. Done extensively to NPCs which serve the primarily aesthetic purpose of making the gameworld seem more lifelike.

Bladestrom · May 2011

Ah i see. Im no expert but is client side prediction not more about providing a smooth performance/Lag? There is desynchronisation issues which is manageable where you are mainly synching other players movement, but I suspect there could be a limits when dealing with the synching complicated interactive worlds, which would introduce a different immersion-breaking issue. The fact kind of speak for themselves, no development team has managed to build such a living world, so there must be technical issues. Logical extension of this would be to push more and more onto the client - which leads you to instancing at the other end of the spectrum.

GroovyFlower · May 2011

A mmo world should be like Darkfall but DX11 realistic with total freedom no loadscreens or instance.

The Witcher 2 world as so many worlds these days ingame are very limited and with alot of invisble barriers.

The Witcher world looks ok for DX9 world but its not that awesome looking its good thats all.

And dont compare it to Elder scroll world becouse Witcher world is very limited compare to Elder scroll world.

BadSpock · May 2011

A MMO like a single player RPG would have one path to level up in, one story, and once you hit max level, the game would be over and you'd either have to re-roll to play the same story again as the same character, or wait for the newest DLC.

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