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Massively Multiplayer Games Quickified
It's the last day of the first month of 2006, and already there are plenty of new things brewing on the Massive front. World of Warcraft's community is abuzz with news of the Raid content Jeff Kaplan mentioned over the weekend, and details on the 1.10 patch, which is to feature priest updates and weather cycles. City of Villains has big changes a-coming as well, with content for levels 40 to 50 going in, as well as new zones and a new mission type. The Mayhem missions sound like they're finally living up to the promise of 'being a villain'. The EQ2 server combines are the least of the changes occurring at SOE. Chris Kramer did an interview with GamerGod about some of the sweeping changes inc, touching on the free Planetside scheme and mentioning the Sony Station blog, which so far just has an intro from John Smedley. More romantically, FFXI is rolling out information on its Valentine's Day event. Valentione's day is the chocolate and hearts holiday as only Moogles could imagine it. It's fun to play for love, but also fun to play to crush. Guild War's world championships are taking place in about two weeks, with the first place purse weighing in at $50,000. Vanguard's own brand of hardcore lost a little bit of mystery this week with the release of a features list. Finally. Even though you can't win big bucks for playing them, Eve and Ultima Online continue to please their players with updates and releases. Eve's Creative Director spoke with OGaming about plans for outer space in 2006, and UO will see a new player tour and seasonal spring items. It's a good spring for Massive gaming. Update: 01/31 20:30 GMT by Z : I knew I would miss one. A reader wrote in to mention that Anarchy Online is gearing up for some great new stuff in the 16.2 patch, as well as in the upcoming expansion Lost Eden.
It's not quite the same thing as being able to chop down a tree and have the whole game world see that you did it, but that kind of permeranent change would require almost as many devs and players.
This gets repeated often on game design forums, but it's simply not true. Many MMORPGs now have fully automated mission generation: a simple premise and an instanced adventure area are randomly genererated (from templates). Instant quest.
Everyone is just scared to put the same automatic world generation logic into play in the shared areas, or they're just so used to very small worlds they can't imagine it otherwise.
There are no longer any technological limts preventing the shared world from constantly changing and evolving in response to player actions. If I don't like that orc encampment outside of town, I should be able to take a party and kill all the orcs and torch their campp and build a lemonade stand where it used to be. The game can create a new orc encampment somewhere no one is looking at right now. As time passes in the game, large areas my become "civilized" in this fashion, but that's just a matter of either making the world big, or occasionally setting up an orc invasion (or if your artists have had a few months to add a new creature type, an invasion of new content).
If you can randomely generate an instanced dungeon, you can randomely generate a shared dungeon which is discovered somewhere and lasts until someone figures out how to make it go away. Very little development work required.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Automatically generate world content from templates.
See, that wasn't so hard. Choose the theme for a new area from a list of the kinds of areas you have templates made for. Bandit camp, visiting caravan, newly discovered underground area, whatever. Choose the race of bad guys who live there. Populate the area based on the spawn table for that race.
The plotline in current MMORPGs are drawn from a small pool of ideas, so just make a list of plot elements for the game genre, and have nearby NPCs generate random quests for that area, for basic content to get started with. This will gove adventurers an in-character reason to explore the new area.
Then choose a goal for the bad guys from a list for that kind of new area. Sacking a town, finding the Dingus of Great Power, whatever. Set a time limit. If some adventurer discovers what's going on in time to stop it, and defeats the enemy leaders, the world changes and the area goes away, becomes ruins, whatever's appropriate. If no one discovers the plot in time, the bad guys *succeed* and the nearby town is destroyed, the Dingus of Great Power is used to summon a demon that ravages the landscape, whatever. There are only 20 or so fantasy adventure plots anyhow, it's easy enough to automate.
Because it's all auto-generated from templates, you can make your world big enough that you don't have thousands of adventurers sumbling across every square inch of landscape every day, so you can have enough content that new areas last a while. Also, when it's trivial to add randomly generated world content, it's pretty easy to turn a writer's ideas into world content. No more "3 days to write a good idea, 3 months for world design and artwork".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
A book is not interactive. The plot involves events that happen to the author's characters. Other events may be going on in the story, but if the characters aren't involved it's just backstory, not really plot. A minimum of continuity is also required for a book - if the heros kill the Evil One chapter 3, and he's back in chapter 5, the author has some explaining to do.
An MMORPG is interactive. The plopt involves events that happen to *my* character. Other events may be narrated by NPCs, but if *my* character is not involved it's just backstory. MMORPGs seem to just through continuity out the window. If I'm following some alleged story arc and kill the Evil One, and he respawns 15 minutes later, and the same NPC is offereing me the same quest again, WTF?
So perhaps it's continuity that's lacking, if you want to define it that narrowly, but it's hard to find any immersion in a plot (in a book, movie, MMORPG, or whatever) where the characters' actions have no consequences.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You mentioned in passing a very immersive and very easy way to make your actions affect the world: have NPCs know about you. City of Heroes did this as well. Defeat a menace to a town? Have the guards salute you, and shopkeepers hold the door for you, and random NPCs point you out to passers by. For a while, anyway, until the next guy is famous.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There's a bug. I tried that code with a few modifications:
while(1) {
time++;
money++;
}
PlayMMO(time, money);
The problem is, I never got around to the PlayMMO part.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
I agree with you here - this has always bugged me. Its a single player game with friends - nothing changes. You raid the same place over, and over and over, and kill the same boss over and over. But all games have some level of this. The closest to "totaly free form" is the player vs. player side in EVE, where players wage wars against other plays to conquer territory and stations. Its what also drives the whole economy forward, since once you get blown up, your ship is no longer there (you may get an insurance payout up to a certain amount, but for the fancy Tech 2 stuff it never even gets to 50% of the value, and it never covers the modules).
EVE does have the mission and complex (dungeon) aspect too, but you generaly don't play the game soley for those.