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What's the future of "Player Made Content " in the MMORPG genre?
MMOExposed
Member RarePosts: 7,400
I personally believe that Player Made Content has the potential to be a major part in improving the MMO genre going forward, especially when it comes to addressing content droughts.
But the tools for such a feature need to be advanced and polish of course for players to make gameplay content that others can enjoy during content droughts in developer content.
But what is the future of this type of game design? How can such a thing be done in a MMO with 1000s of players all playing together and wanting to make content. Some of it will be bad some good
Some people will troll some wont. How will these be factored in when designing a Player Made Content tool?
But the tools for such a feature need to be advanced and polish of course for players to make gameplay content that others can enjoy during content droughts in developer content.
But what is the future of this type of game design? How can such a thing be done in a MMO with 1000s of players all playing together and wanting to make content. Some of it will be bad some good
Some people will troll some wont. How will these be factored in when designing a Player Made Content tool?
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Also maybe there could be a "dungeon creator", where you can make your own dungeon and populate it with mobs and bosses, giving each of them specific traits and attacks and stuff for others to try and overcome.
But this can become incredibly complex and is probably way far off into the future. Still, games like Super Mario Maker show that people enjoy creating content for others.
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Building the tools to enable that is a costly exercise.
But the greatest cost is the need to employ humans to monitor and approve all that player-made content. No game can risk not thoroughly vetting all contributions from players.
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Also Mankind Reborn is not really remake of face of mankind and FoM is long gone, but it is a new mmo that is coming which is made by people who loved FoM and want it to return basically, it has differences but basically it is the same as FoM. It has open world pvp and stuff so no need to look into it i suppose
New player content will be killing each other honestly. Kingdom building maybe.
You have Ashes of Creation which seems to be quasi themepark and sandbox. Players are supposed to be able to make orders to further their node growth.
Camelot and Crowfall are kingdom building games.
Chronicles of Elyria likely will never come out.
Think the rest are EQ clones?
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Then there is of course Second Life. But that could be called a "Chat Room" as opposed to real MMO, but in any case, the content is there.
I hear there are other MMO's coming out, like Boundless, that I think if going to have PGC, but it might just have a fully destructible/buildable persistent world. Not 100% sure.
I think you can go as far as allowing world building like most survival games, but it would be heavily encouraged to have limitations on where you can build due to the number of players in your world at any time. The reason it works to be 100% anywhere in a survival game is that 1) Few people in the game at a time and 2) it's the only thing you do in the game. MMOs, specifically MMORPG's typically have more than 1type of content, or at least should be, and cluttering the world with player made structures without some kind of limitation impedes on the other activities.
When it comes to something like quests it gets sticky because players can easily break others immersion with completely out of context texts. Anything beyond a simple task like collecting timber for a gold reward (just a reverse market...) would require heavy developer involvement even if all the mechanics were in place just to ensure it was actually part of the game and not some kid making a joke.
In short, unless you as a developer are prepared to be heavily involved in ensuring the content fits the game or you don't care and let players do whatever, it's not very ideal to allow for player created content in the manner that the OP is discussing.
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For the other stuff there are already mechanics in place in some games and they're not really a new concept. You can ransom people in Eve, the only difference is returning the item in question which I don't think would add much. Everything else, including "tasks" are in different form through trading. "WTB 100x timber" - someone collects it and sells it to you. It's the same thing.
The phase we are at right now is basically seen in survival games,building "with limits" and creating mods from some dev kit.
The next phase will be allowing all players to upload directly into the games files.This pretty much needs to be done by separating the world into shards,players can run their own shard but is connected to the entire world via downloading/zoning.
So two things about the next phase.
1 If you use already in game assets/textures/sounds/music etc etc,it is a simple zoning process,all that gets loaded would be any new mesh's models but all using stuff in the game files.Unless a massive ton of work was done this could simply mean 5-10 seconds of zoning time,no big deal.
2 Custom content and private shards is just too much for the entire scope of the idea.I just can't see it working properly or even well.
So imo This needs to remain similar to what we already have>>private servers using their own setup/scripts/mods.
We have already seen the idea of inside server designs with the Dungeons and dragons game and although in the beginning many liked it,i never did because i knew what it was doing.Rearranging the EXACT same assets does not give me a new feeling,maybe for women erri mean people ! who like to rearrange the furniture every month it does but not for me.I need to see DIFFERENT ideas/assets.
Instead of moving the couch from east to west , i want to see a new couch know what i mean Vern?
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The posts above me all seem to be backward looking; how to tweak what already exists to bolt on something. I don't see why reputation and flag systems cant be used to score content for family friendly, lore friendly, immersion friendly etc. You'd need some way of filtering the content to what you want intrinsic to the game engine. Some content could be baked into the game if it passes muster while the rest is hidden in some way. Notice I didn't use terms like shard or instance because people on this site seem to always imprison themselves in the baggage of what they have already played.