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.

Comments

Re:One thing

[lgw]

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.

Re:One thing

[lgw]

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".