Originally posted by Distopia In simplest terms a virtual world is essentially a simulation which is something different than an RPG. Need wood? Cut down a tree, Need metal? Get to work mining ore. RUn your own shops/businesses, build cities from resources, farm crops, make food, etc.
This is a good definition. Id also like to add that to me, a virtual world is a simulation first and a game driven mechanic second. Not to say that game mechanics are not important in a virtual world, but that its primarily a sim first and a game second. Balance could be 90/10 or 51/49 sim/game ratio. But it does need to feel more simmy than gamey for me to consider it a virtual world heh.
I'm in full agreement.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Originally posted by Distopia In simplest terms a virtual world is essentially a simulation which is something different than an RPG. Need wood? Cut down a tree, Need metal? Get to work mining ore. RUn your own shops/businesses, build cities from resources, farm crops, make food, etc.
This is a good definition. Id also like to add that to me, a virtual world is a simulation first and a game driven mechanic second. Not to say that game mechanics are not important in a virtual world, but that its primarily a sim first and a game second. Balance could be 90/10 or 51/49 sim/game ratio. But it does need to feel more simmy than gamey for me to consider it a virtual world heh.
I'm in full agreement.
I'm big on the sim aspect, too. The more it feels like elements of the world are acting and reacting to my character and other elements, the more it feels like a world to me.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Originally posted by Distopia In simplest terms a virtual world is essentially a simulation which is something different than an RPG. Need wood? Cut down a tree, Need metal? Get to work mining ore. RUn your own shops/businesses, build cities from resources, farm crops, make food, etc.
This is a good definition. Id also like to add that to me, a virtual world is a simulation first and a game driven mechanic second. Not to say that game mechanics are not important in a virtual world, but that its primarily a sim first and a game second. Balance could be 90/10 or 51/49 sim/game ratio. But it does need to feel more simmy than gamey for me to consider it a virtual world heh.
I'm in full agreement.
I'm big on the sim aspect, too. The more it feels like elements of the world are acting and reacting to my character and other elements, the more it feels like a world to me.
Yep, it's not the most important thing in gaming to me, but it does tend to influence me staying around for long periods in an MMO or SP game.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
In the mmo sphere, swg had a huge influence on what I considered a virtual world. For the sole reason that I could run into people in the same game world who were experiencing completely different aspects of the game than me.
Maybe that reflects real life, when you meet people and ask what they do for a living or what part of town they live in. When an mmo can do that, it becomes much more virtual world-like to me.
When I am playing FFXIV and I'm gathering various plantlife and 20 people run by chasing an escort fate, it makes me feel more like im in a world. Or perhaps someone is cooking and the person next to him is making a necklace and a guy with a fishing pole runs by, i like that. And soon people will be making furniture or decorating a home. In the future someone will be racing chocobos or playing a card game with some friends. And when all that stuff is happening in one game, I start to think this is a virtual world with all these different experiences occurring all over the place. And when you meet someone in that world, they can tell you a very different story about the day they had from you.
Apart from what Foom wrote, it seems to me, as years pass, that the key is to have players feel as one, that their "enemy" is the game, its systems, limitations and mechanics, even in pvp games.
What i see more often than not in mmos that lack "the feel" of the virtual world is a overblown rivalry of players, the important part is not to down a boss, the important part is be in the top 3 of dps.
And not just ingame, when did a particular bug or change became the fault of "the other side" (hardcore/casual, pve/pvp) instead of being the doing of the devs?
I vaguely remember some pvp exploit in swtor (i think), the key was that people cooperated instead of killing each other in a pvp activity. What i dont remember vaguely was the outrage of the community and partially of the makers it caused. HOW DARE masses of people to cooperate in a mmo?!?
I didn't base what I said off of my personal experience or even my own thoughts.
From Richard Garriott:
We thought it was fantastic. We'd spent an enormous amount of time and effort on it. But what happened was all the players went in and just killed everything; so fast that the game couldn't spawn them fast enough to make the simulation even begin. And so, this thing that we'd spent all this time on, literally no-one ever noticed – ever – and we eventually just ripped it out of the game, you know, with some sadness.
They never got the ecology simulation out of beta. This isn't an example of simulations failing, but an example of how hard it is to create something that simulates how a world would work when faced with the behavior of players. UO does have a simulation, but it's simplistic. It hasn't really improved much since UO's first implementation either, mostly because of the players.
EQN sounds like they are going to tackle this, and it might be great.
It's frustrating beause I have enough experience in the area of creating ecology simulations to see the breath of textures it is possible to add to worlds with them, just not quite enough to be confident I could actually put a game-ready one out on the table. But if a simulation can't keep up with what players are doing, you've doing something very wrong ( I mean, even static respawns are a simulation of population dynamics, just a really boring one ), My sense from RG's stories is that the UO devs got a little too caught up on the idea that the mobs spawned on the game map were the entire population in the game world. That level of detail in a simulation is probably never going to be practical.
I look forward to seeing what EQN comes up with, but I'm not betting all my hopes and dreams on them. There's a bit of a Spore-like smell to the hype its generating that has me waiting to see what's actually delivered.
Huh. "Virtual world" as defined in the first post isn't how I usually define it at all. What's being defined in the first post is more like "simulated world". "Virtual world" to me means a game wold that gives me the same feeling of being inside it as a good novel does. But for game the world also has to be interactable in a way which doesn't break the player's suspension of disbelief, and also doesn't seem too arbitrary, meaningless, or boring (a common problem of simulated worlds which just try to mimic the real world and don't pay attention to what readers are seeking when they read novels.)
I want to help design and develop a PvE-focused, solo-friendly, sandpark MMO which combines crafting, monster hunting, and story. So PM me if you are starting one.
Originally posted by sunandshadow Huh. "Virtual world" as defined in the first post isn't how I usually define it at all. What's being defined in the first post is more like "simulated world". "Virtual world" to me means a game wold that gives me the same feeling of being inside it as a good novel does. But for game the world also has to be interactable in a way which doesn't break the player's suspension of disbelief, and also doesn't seem too arbitrary, meaningless, or boring (a common problem of simulated worlds which just try to mimic the real world and don't pay attention to what readers are seeking when they read novels.)
I always find this perspective fascinating because my sensistivity is the complete opposite - if the game world doesn't react when I poke it, it damages my suspension of disblief. Books feel lifeless to me because I'm just helplessly following the eyes of the author with no power to poke anything.
( I'm not criticizing your comments, just finding the differences in our perspectives interesting )
Originally posted by sunandshadow Huh. "Virtual world" as defined in the first post isn't how I usually define it at all. What's being defined in the first post is more like "simulated world". "Virtual world" to me means a game wold that gives me the same feeling of being inside it as a good novel does. But for game the world also has to be interactable in a way which doesn't break the player's suspension of disbelief, and also doesn't seem too arbitrary, meaningless, or boring (a common problem of simulated worlds which just try to mimic the real world and don't pay attention to what readers are seeking when they read novels.)
I always find this perspective fascinating because my sensistivity is the complete opposite - if the game world doesn't react when I poke it, it damages my suspension of disblief. Books feel lifeless to me because I'm just helplessly following the eyes of the author with no power to poke anything.
( I'm not criticizing your comments, just finding the differences in our perspectives interesting )
Yeah, in my case I actually learned how to read when I was like 4, and I was just always a voracious reader - been reading novels since I was 8 or 9, about the same time I started playing more complex video games. And at the same time I was always playing pretend with my toy horses and blocks and the costume bin and whatever random props I found outside. So, what I want out of entertainment is to get to that waking-dream place in my head that goes equally with all 3 kind of entertainment. Reading is a somewhat passive form of play but I do still consider it a form of play; even aristotle referred to watching a theatrical play as a form of pretend play in his Poetics, which is one of the oldest surviving pieces of theory about writing and theater. I could recommend a nonfiction book about the concept of reading as play if you happen to be interested.
I want to help design and develop a PvE-focused, solo-friendly, sandpark MMO which combines crafting, monster hunting, and story. So PM me if you are starting one.
In the mmo sphere, swg had a huge influence on what I considered a virtual world. For the sole reason that I could run into people in the same game world who were experiencing completely different aspects of the game than me.
Maybe that reflects real life, when you meet people and ask what they do for a living or what part of town they live in. When an mmo can do that, it becomes much more virtual world-like to me.
When I am playing FFXIV and I'm gathering various plantlife and 20 people run by chasing an escort fate, it makes me feel more like im in a world. Or perhaps someone is cooking and the person next to him is making a necklace and a guy with a fishing pole runs by, i like that. And soon people will be making furniture or decorating a home. In the future someone will be racing chocobos or playing a card game with some friends. And when all that stuff is happening in one game, I start to think this is a virtual world with all these different experiences occurring all over the place. And when you meet someone in that world, they can tell you a very different story about the day they had from you.
Thats the dragon I chase in this genre.
that's really something I've never considered. I tend to not pay much attention to other people and just focus on what I and my friends are doing. In an ideal mmo that is something I'd want to have that many of the more focused ones are missing. The whole what are you going to do today option would make it feel more "real"
Raiding and gathering or dungeons is all fine but it sort of puts everyone on the same track. In a virtual world people should be doing lots of different things.
Originally posted by Distopia In simplest terms a virtual world is essentially a simulation which is something different than an RPG. Need wood? Cut down a tree, Need metal? Get to work mining ore. RUn your own shops/businesses, build cities from resources, farm crops, make food, etc.
Pretty much. People expressing that complaint aren't looking for a virtual world. They're all virtual worlds. They are looking for ones that feel more like a virtual world to them than like a game. For example, I enjoy EQ2 and Ageof Conan but they feel more like games to me. UO, EVE and even Puzzle Pirates feel more like worlds to me. They're all virtual worlds, but everyone has different things they are looking to get from the virtual world, and the more a game hits on those points, the more it has a world feel to it.
Lizardbones, it's probably easier to understand when you replace World with the aspect that individual is looking for. It's most often Simulation, Society, Struggle or a combination of them all.
I guess I was confused by it as well. To me WoW had a virtual world I could run around in. Had towns that where a real distance from one an other...that whole thing. But it didn't really have farming or building ...or crafting :P of any kind. Yet I'd always see that argument come up that games don't have virtual worlds anymore.
It almost sounds like virtual world is just another word for sandbox.
"Virtual World" to me is about being an open world vs. being closed world strictly built for content. Compare WoW to Neverwinter. EQ, WoW, UO, AC, etc have "Virtual Worlds" IMO. Many MMORPG worlds are more like sets to do quest in vs. somewhere you can actually explore and journey through.
I don't think there is any one specific ruleset that makes up a virtual world. It's more about existing. A world is a place where things exist, and when things exist, they affect each other. The quality of virtuality in a game world depends upon how much and how cohesively the things that make up that world affect each other. It doesn't matter if it's realistic or not, but that the relationship of cause and effect has some bearing on the world itself, whatever its theme or direction of gameplay.
When the things that make up a world exist in modular microcosms dedicated to game system direction, the virtuality of a world is diminished.
I want to be able to pve, pvp, craft, gather, run a shop/vendor, have a non-instanced house, and open world dungeons among other things.
I am not a huge instance fan in a mmo, some I get, but I think their is too much.
I want to decide what I want to do, and not 'gimp' myself by not being a slave to a daily list of quests/dungeons or tasks that you can do everyday and have timers to start all over again. I do not want a defined path, I want to decide what I wish to do that day, and to decide what makes the best sense to me to do. I know that can be a fine line, hope it makes sense.
In a FPS, moba, rts or whatever, I play for fun, hack and slash, whatever you wish to say is action packed and fun. I get that not all people like to craft, run a shop, have a house, and such....But I approach a mmo as a world, and have to want to spend time doing multiple things in it and view the time I use as being worth it. If a mmo is 'shallow' and a lobby mmo, I don't usually consider it worth my time, and I would just rather do the moba, rts, or FPS as I think they are not trying to be something they are not, and I know what I am going to get.
When I play a mmo and in one gaming session I max my crafting, you would think, "great, that is done, I did it!", No, I think, "Well, that was too easy and whats the point"...As many crafting systems are not worth doing and just add ons to say they have it.
Now, I don't need everything perfect to love a mmo, and I have never played a mmo that had it 100% right to what I was looking for. So I am not trying to say it has to be perfect. For instance, I liked SWG and it is my #5 all time mmo, but it needed some balancing/adjustments, more content in their style, systems to declutter, and many bugs/broken content fixed, but not the NGE imo. I do not have a perfect picture of it, even though it is in my top 5.
Money does not enter into my enjoyment, as I would prefer to play a p2p without a cash shop, even if it meant $30 a month, and on the same note, if something is f2p, but I don't see the point in playing it anymore, it being free isn't going to matter to me, I am gone.
I don't think there is any one specific ruleset that makes up a virtual world. It's more about existing. A world is a place where things exist, and when things exist, they affect each other. The quality of virtuality in a game world depends upon how much and how cohesively the things that make up that world affect each other. It doesn't matter if it's realistic or not, but that the relationship of cause and effect has some bearing on the world itself, whatever its theme or direction of gameplay.
When the things that make up a world exist in modular microcosms dedicated to game system direction, the virtuality of a world is diminished.
I think there are a few basic properties we can agree on, actually:
A virtual world convinces players that it is alive and has verisimilitude and logical consistency - that's what makes it a world.
It must be presented visually; an interactive fiction isn't a virtual world. A non-graphical MUD isn't a virtual world. (Ideally it would be presented to all our senses, but the technology isn't there yet.)
It must be interactable; a movie isn't a virtual world, and failures of interactivity break players' suspension of disbelief about the verisimilitude of the world.
It must give the impression that other people are in it (whether they are actually other players or NPCs), doing various activities. This is what makes the world feel populated - a world empty of people isn't really alive, because culture is included in the concept "world" and socialization is included in a world's
It must be presented visually; an interactive fiction isn't a virtual world.
The player must be able to enter the world via an avatar (or multiple avatars, whether humanoid or non-humanoid). A virtual fish tank isn't a virtual world if we can't swim in it.
I want to help design and develop a PvE-focused, solo-friendly, sandpark MMO which combines crafting, monster hunting, and story. So PM me if you are starting one.
I don't think there is any one specific ruleset that makes up a virtual world. It's more about existing. A world is a place where things exist, and when things exist, they affect each other. The quality of virtuality in a game world depends upon how much and how cohesively the things that make up that world affect each other. It doesn't matter if it's realistic or not, but that the relationship of cause and effect has some bearing on the world itself, whatever its theme or direction of gameplay.
When the things that make up a world exist in modular microcosms dedicated to game system direction, the virtuality of a world is diminished.
I think there are a few basic properties we can agree on, actually:
A virtual world convinces players that it is alive and has verisimilitude and logical consistency - that's what makes it a world.
It must be presented visually; an interactive fiction isn't a virtual world. A non-graphical MUD isn't a virtual world. (Ideally it would be presented to all our senses, but the technology isn't there yet.)
It must be interactable; a movie isn't a virtual world, and failures of interactivity break players' suspension of disbelief about the verisimilitude of the world.
It must give the impression that other people are in it (whether they are actually other players or NPCs), doing various activities. This is what makes the world feel populated - a world empty of people isn't really alive, because culture is included in the concept "world" and socialization is included in a world's
It must be presented visually; an interactive fiction isn't a virtual world.
The player must be able to enter the world via an avatar (or multiple avatars, whether humanoid or non-humanoid). A virtual fish tank isn't a virtual world if we can't swim in it.
For the most part, and certainly for the purposes of the MMO medium, I agree. Though the inclusion of "other people" could perhaps be expanded to include the possibilities of "other sentient presences," depending on the theme. The world itself doesn't even have to be a planet. Just a setting. Could be an alien database, or an unending ethereal matter stream, etc.
But yes, the properties you listed are indeed important to establishing the logical cohesiveness and interactivity needed for a functioning virtual world. I think. :P
Originally posted by Distopia In simplest terms a virtual world is essentially a simulation which is something different than an RPG. Need wood? Cut down a tree, Need metal? Get to work mining ore. RUn your own shops/businesses, build cities from resources, farm crops, make food, etc.
I agree. I would still classify the simulation as being a role playing environment. After all, playing the role of the character in the simulation is the primary activity for the player. I hesitate going as far as calling it an RPG, mostly because the "G" gives some the impression that activity must be developer provided / directed.
I might add that in my perspective I don't see Virtual World as being contradictory with NPC population, where the NPC population coexists with player characters in the simulation. The way I see it, the function of NPCs should be to do things that are too boring to be player character activity.
For example, I'd like a village to have a stable where I can rent a horse for a trip. I don't expect a player character to stand there 24x7 functioning as Hertz Rent-A-Horse. This would be, in my opinion, an acceptable job for an NPC.
Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security. I don't Forum PVP. If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident. When I don't understand, I ask. Such is not intended as criticism.
Honestly I don't really get the confusion. Isn't a virtual world simply a game that attempts to emulate the fictional world they're trying to create? As in if that fictional game world came to life, would it function the same as it did as a game? The extent to which this is the case seems to be the extent to which the game is a virtual world. That's why things like scripted content are kind of anti-virtual world.
Honestly I don't really get the confusion. Isn't a virtual world simply a game that attempts to emulate the fictional world they're trying to create? As in if that fictional game world came to life, would it function the same as it did as a game? The extent to which this is the case seems to be the extent to which the game is a virtual world. That's why things like scripted content are kind of anti-virtual world.
What if the kind of fictional world you want to instantiate is a fictional world with theater-quality scripted experiences? Or the other way around, I think a lot of people on the more sim side of things don't envision a fictional spirit for their world before trying to make the mechanics of it.
I want to help design and develop a PvE-focused, solo-friendly, sandpark MMO which combines crafting, monster hunting, and story. So PM me if you are starting one.
Honestly I don't really get the confusion. Isn't a virtual world simply a game that attempts to emulate the fictional world they're trying to create? As in if that fictional game world came to life, would it function the same as it did as a game? The extent to which this is the case seems to be the extent to which the game is a virtual world. That's why things like scripted content are kind of anti-virtual world.
What if the kind of fictional world you want to instantiate is a fictional world with theater-quality scripted experiences? Or the other way around, I think a lot of people on the more sim side of things don't envision a fictional spirit for their world before trying to make the mechanics of it.
If the devs are trying to create a world with animatronic NPCs and mobs then yes, scripted content would contribute to making a virtual world. However, that's not what they're trying to make, so it's a moot point.
It must be presented visually; an interactive fiction isn't a virtual world.
For me, this isn't a rigid requirement. All I need is get that information about the state of the world from the server to my head - visiual information definitely does that efficiently, but a spawl of matrix code could work as well as long as my imagination understood how to interpret what I was looking at.
Honestly I don't really get the confusion. Isn't a virtual world simply a game that attempts to emulate the fictional world they're trying to create? As in if that fictional game world came to life, would it function the same as it did as a game? The extent to which this is the case seems to be the extent to which the game is a virtual world. That's why things like scripted content are kind of anti-virtual world.
What if the kind of fictional world you want to instantiate is a fictional world with theater-quality scripted experiences? Or the other way around, I think a lot of people on the more sim side of things don't envision a fictional spirit for their world before trying to make the mechanics of it.
If the devs are trying to create a world with animatronic NPCs and mobs then yes, scripted content would contribute to making a virtual world. However, that's not what they're trying to make, so it's a moot point.
I think I have to disagree with that point. Me personally, I want to create a world which gives the player an experience like being the main character of a book, not like being someone just living their life in a world. Real life doesn't have good dramatic tension, pacing, thematic messages, or other things that make reading a story or watching a movie more satisfying than just living life.
I want to help design and develop a PvE-focused, solo-friendly, sandpark MMO which combines crafting, monster hunting, and story. So PM me if you are starting one.
Some company needs to take the world amd mechanics of original SWG (not the NGE crap) and build on it from there.
That game had the most different options for play styles of any game released since, and that was a couple steps up from UO in terms of playability. Plus a working economy, non-instanced everything, and real player interdependency: you could not do everything for yourself.
Instead, MMOs have taken 50 steps back from that, largely due to the success of WoW.
Almost all of what the OP wanted was in SWG and mostly in original UO (just not quite as refined).
i'd say you are describing aspects of what i would consider a virtual world. fundamentally, it has to contribute to the suspension of disbelief by feeling that this world exists without me.
Skyrim and Oblivion do this well.
it doesn't need to be a sandbox necessarily, but some of those aspects that add to believability in both terms might very well crossover.
"There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play." Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
Comments
I guess it was also Friday all of the other times we ever started to have a conversation.
I'm in full agreement.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I'm big on the sim aspect, too. The more it feels like elements of the world are acting and reacting to my character and other elements, the more it feels like a world to me.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Yep, it's not the most important thing in gaming to me, but it does tend to influence me staying around for long periods in an MMO or SP game.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
In the mmo sphere, swg had a huge influence on what I considered a virtual world. For the sole reason that I could run into people in the same game world who were experiencing completely different aspects of the game than me.
Maybe that reflects real life, when you meet people and ask what they do for a living or what part of town they live in. When an mmo can do that, it becomes much more virtual world-like to me.
When I am playing FFXIV and I'm gathering various plantlife and 20 people run by chasing an escort fate, it makes me feel more like im in a world. Or perhaps someone is cooking and the person next to him is making a necklace and a guy with a fishing pole runs by, i like that. And soon people will be making furniture or decorating a home. In the future someone will be racing chocobos or playing a card game with some friends. And when all that stuff is happening in one game, I start to think this is a virtual world with all these different experiences occurring all over the place. And when you meet someone in that world, they can tell you a very different story about the day they had from you.
Thats the dragon I chase in this genre.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Apart from what Foom wrote, it seems to me, as years pass, that the key is to have players feel as one, that their "enemy" is the game, its systems, limitations and mechanics, even in pvp games.
What i see more often than not in mmos that lack "the feel" of the virtual world is a overblown rivalry of players, the important part is not to down a boss, the important part is be in the top 3 of dps.
And not just ingame, when did a particular bug or change became the fault of "the other side" (hardcore/casual, pve/pvp) instead of being the doing of the devs?
I vaguely remember some pvp exploit in swtor (i think), the key was that people cooperated instead of killing each other in a pvp activity. What i dont remember vaguely was the outrage of the community and partially of the makers it caused. HOW DARE masses of people to cooperate in a mmo?!?
Just saying.
Flame on!
It's frustrating beause I have enough experience in the area of creating ecology simulations to see the breath of textures it is possible to add to worlds with them, just not quite enough to be confident I could actually put a game-ready one out on the table. But if a simulation can't keep up with what players are doing, you've doing something very wrong ( I mean, even static respawns are a simulation of population dynamics, just a really boring one ), My sense from RG's stories is that the UO devs got a little too caught up on the idea that the mobs spawned on the game map were the entire population in the game world. That level of detail in a simulation is probably never going to be practical.
I look forward to seeing what EQN comes up with, but I'm not betting all my hopes and dreams on them. There's a bit of a Spore-like smell to the hype its generating that has me waiting to see what's actually delivered.
I always find this perspective fascinating because my sensistivity is the complete opposite - if the game world doesn't react when I poke it, it damages my suspension of disblief. Books feel lifeless to me because I'm just helplessly following the eyes of the author with no power to poke anything.
( I'm not criticizing your comments, just finding the differences in our perspectives interesting )
I always find this perspective fascinating because my sensistivity is the complete opposite - if the game world doesn't react when I poke it, it damages my suspension of disblief. Books feel lifeless to me because I'm just helplessly following the eyes of the author with no power to poke anything.
( I'm not criticizing your comments, just finding the differences in our perspectives interesting )
Yeah, in my case I actually learned how to read when I was like 4, and I was just always a voracious reader - been reading novels since I was 8 or 9, about the same time I started playing more complex video games. And at the same time I was always playing pretend with my toy horses and blocks and the costume bin and whatever random props I found outside. So, what I want out of entertainment is to get to that waking-dream place in my head that goes equally with all 3 kind of entertainment. Reading is a somewhat passive form of play but I do still consider it a form of play; even aristotle referred to watching a theatrical play as a form of pretend play in his Poetics, which is one of the oldest surviving pieces of theory about writing and theater. I could recommend a nonfiction book about the concept of reading as play if you happen to be interested.that's really something I've never considered. I tend to not pay much attention to other people and just focus on what I and my friends are doing. In an ideal mmo that is something I'd want to have that many of the more focused ones are missing. The whole what are you going to do today option would make it feel more "real"
Raiding and gathering or dungeons is all fine but it sort of puts everyone on the same track. In a virtual world people should be doing lots of different things.
"Virtual World" to me is about being an open world vs. being closed world strictly built for content. Compare WoW to Neverwinter. EQ, WoW, UO, AC, etc have "Virtual Worlds" IMO. Many MMORPG worlds are more like sets to do quest in vs. somewhere you can actually explore and journey through.
I don't think there is any one specific ruleset that makes up a virtual world. It's more about existing. A world is a place where things exist, and when things exist, they affect each other. The quality of virtuality in a game world depends upon how much and how cohesively the things that make up that world affect each other. It doesn't matter if it's realistic or not, but that the relationship of cause and effect has some bearing on the world itself, whatever its theme or direction of gameplay.
When the things that make up a world exist in modular microcosms dedicated to game system direction, the virtuality of a world is diminished.
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/PerfArt
I like to have a variety of things to do.
I want to be able to pve, pvp, craft, gather, run a shop/vendor, have a non-instanced house, and open world dungeons among other things.
I am not a huge instance fan in a mmo, some I get, but I think their is too much.
I want to decide what I want to do, and not 'gimp' myself by not being a slave to a daily list of quests/dungeons or tasks that you can do everyday and have timers to start all over again. I do not want a defined path, I want to decide what I wish to do that day, and to decide what makes the best sense to me to do. I know that can be a fine line, hope it makes sense.
In a FPS, moba, rts or whatever, I play for fun, hack and slash, whatever you wish to say is action packed and fun. I get that not all people like to craft, run a shop, have a house, and such....But I approach a mmo as a world, and have to want to spend time doing multiple things in it and view the time I use as being worth it. If a mmo is 'shallow' and a lobby mmo, I don't usually consider it worth my time, and I would just rather do the moba, rts, or FPS as I think they are not trying to be something they are not, and I know what I am going to get.
When I play a mmo and in one gaming session I max my crafting, you would think, "great, that is done, I did it!", No, I think, "Well, that was too easy and whats the point"...As many crafting systems are not worth doing and just add ons to say they have it.
Now, I don't need everything perfect to love a mmo, and I have never played a mmo that had it 100% right to what I was looking for. So I am not trying to say it has to be perfect. For instance, I liked SWG and it is my #5 all time mmo, but it needed some balancing/adjustments, more content in their style, systems to declutter, and many bugs/broken content fixed, but not the NGE imo. I do not have a perfect picture of it, even though it is in my top 5.
Money does not enter into my enjoyment, as I would prefer to play a p2p without a cash shop, even if it meant $30 a month, and on the same note, if something is f2p, but I don't see the point in playing it anymore, it being free isn't going to matter to me, I am gone.
I think there are a few basic properties we can agree on, actually:
For the most part, and certainly for the purposes of the MMO medium, I agree. Though the inclusion of "other people" could perhaps be expanded to include the possibilities of "other sentient presences," depending on the theme. The world itself doesn't even have to be a planet. Just a setting. Could be an alien database, or an unending ethereal matter stream, etc.
But yes, the properties you listed are indeed important to establishing the logical cohesiveness and interactivity needed for a functioning virtual world. I think. :P
Wordswordswords
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/PerfArt
I agree. I would still classify the simulation as being a role playing environment. After all, playing the role of the character in the simulation is the primary activity for the player. I hesitate going as far as calling it an RPG, mostly because the "G" gives some the impression that activity must be developer provided / directed.
I might add that in my perspective I don't see Virtual World as being contradictory with NPC population, where the NPC population coexists with player characters in the simulation. The way I see it, the function of NPCs should be to do things that are too boring to be player character activity.
For example, I'd like a village to have a stable where I can rent a horse for a trip. I don't expect a player character to stand there 24x7 functioning as Hertz Rent-A-Horse. This would be, in my opinion, an acceptable job for an NPC.
Honestly I don't really get the confusion. Isn't a virtual world simply a game that attempts to emulate the fictional world they're trying to create? As in if that fictional game world came to life, would it function the same as it did as a game? The extent to which this is the case seems to be the extent to which the game is a virtual world. That's why things like scripted content are kind of anti-virtual world.
What if the kind of fictional world you want to instantiate is a fictional world with theater-quality scripted experiences? Or the other way around, I think a lot of people on the more sim side of things don't envision a fictional spirit for their world before trying to make the mechanics of it.
If the devs are trying to create a world with animatronic NPCs and mobs then yes, scripted content would contribute to making a virtual world. However, that's not what they're trying to make, so it's a moot point.
For me, this isn't a rigid requirement. All I need is get that information about the state of the world from the server to my head - visiual information definitely does that efficiently, but a spawl of matrix code could work as well as long as my imagination understood how to interpret what I was looking at.
I think I have to disagree with that point. Me personally, I want to create a world which gives the player an experience like being the main character of a book, not like being someone just living their life in a world. Real life doesn't have good dramatic tension, pacing, thematic messages, or other things that make reading a story or watching a movie more satisfying than just living life.
Some company needs to take the world amd mechanics of original SWG (not the NGE crap) and build on it from there.
That game had the most different options for play styles of any game released since, and that was a couple steps up from UO in terms of playability. Plus a working economy, non-instanced everything, and real player interdependency: you could not do everything for yourself.
Instead, MMOs have taken 50 steps back from that, largely due to the success of WoW.
Almost all of what the OP wanted was in SWG and mostly in original UO (just not quite as refined).
Since then, nothing.
lizardbones
i'd say you are describing aspects of what i would consider a virtual world. fundamentally, it has to contribute to the suspension of disbelief by feeling that this world exists without me.
Skyrim and Oblivion do this well.
it doesn't need to be a sandbox necessarily, but some of those aspects that add to believability in both terms might very well crossover.
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse