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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.
Sorry, I didn't hear you. I was too busy talking to an unassuming cheese shop owner in Stormwind about assasinating a government official. Why he seems to have connections to SI:7 I'm not entirely sure, but he seems to know more than he lets on. Could it be its because he has closer ties to Edwin VanCleef than he wants to admit? Time will tell. Now if you'll excuse me I have to find some gnome named Tyrion if I want to stop the Defias Brotherhood from tearing the power structure of Stormwind, and by extension the Alliance, apart.
Above plot copyright of Blizzard Entertainment.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
And will anything you do or don't do on this quest affect the game world in any persistant way?
Even in single-player games, it's amazing how seldom your actions affect the world. Sure, there's backstory claiming it's all very epic and important, but it rarely shows up in the game at all.
With MMORPGs I've yet to see a game where ordinary quests by ordinary player had any persistant effect on the game world at all. Occasionally you'll see an "event" with two possible outcomes in which the entire server population participates, but that's not really the same.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
And eve online has some upcoming faction wars.
And will anything you do or don't do on this quest affect the game world in any persistant way?
Actually, in WoW, you do affect the world in persistant ways sometimes. How? By instancing.
Play a human cleric, and one of your newbie missions will be to find a wounded knight and heal him. Do so, and he returns home. There is no longer a wounded knight resting against that tree for you.
When some other cleric gets that quest, there will be a wounded knight there waiting for him, but there will never again be one there for you to deal with.
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.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
So when I read a choose-your-own-adventure book, it doesn't have a plot because I can go back and the first parts are still the same? Just because your actions don't regularly remove/add content for other people doesn't make thier effects invalid.
Guild Wars is doing a persistent outcome in their expansion, which is supposed to come out sometime between now and the end of June.
According to what they are saying, on the new continent, there are 3 "factions". The local continental population "Cantha", and then two extreme right and left wing factions. They control various parts of the continent, and your guild chooses a side to fight for. Through guild battles, and other pvp/pve type (quests, battles, whatever), you can add towns to one faction or another. Apparently if one faction manages to take over the whole continent, something special will happen. There hasn't been enough information released yet to find out if that's all, or if there is more to it than that.
Anyways, it's at least some type of persistent effect on the world even if it isn't exactly like you're describing.
While some don't consider GuildWars an MMORPG, I think this idea is pretty cool. The Arena.net folks (developers for GuildWars) have shown a great willingess to try new things.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm happy that the new patch is including things that will please almost ALL players...namely, weather effects and an upgrade to the blue sets which casuals can obtain. I don't play anymore, but when I did I was a priest, so I hope that whatever changes they make to the class are decent enough to make me want to come back to the game. However, Naxxramas is stupid and a waste of resources. I am so sick of the 40 man raid content. There are now 3 zones for the hardcores, which are maybe 5-10% of the server population. 5 man stuff is absolutely the most fun for me...the 10 man places are OK, but anything more than that quickly becomes a pain in the ass. I know SOME people like the huge raids, but I would have thought the current content would have placated that crowd for a long time. Give us more 5 man dungeons!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
umm, the parent comment is strictly in regards to the grandparents comment on plot.
Your logic implies that no book (except those choose your own adventure books), movies or tv shows have plot - since the viewer has no say on outcome or cannot make a persistant change to the Universe.
A plot does not in any way indicate that the user has the ability to change the story.
Now, maybe you weren't replying at all about plot. In that case you probably should have started a new discussion, or made it clear that "ok sure, they do have a plot, but I don't want just a plot, I want to make a permanent, measurable change in the story's arc - unlike almost any other genre of entertainment. I'll hold this MMORPG to a higher level of standard then any other entertainment medium I have - and then complain about it!"
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
Is pretty damn obvious to anyone who has had a priest for a long time.
They nerfed the class entirely too hard pre-release(particularly disc and holy, shadow is fine it just falls into the same pitfalls all other casters do), and now they're hopefully rectifying it.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
The problem is making a mutable game world that can withstand the mutilations of hundreds of users. When the game designers make content, they want everyone to be able to experience it, not just the first 10 people to finish the quest. They can only really do small things. Examples:
FFXI: They had a territorial system where grinding your ass off and doing quests could change territorial control to your faction.
WoW: Although not permanent, there are two dragon bosses that when killed will have their head displayed prominently in the capital city for a time.
WoW(again): This one time, as I passed some NPC's, they started chatting with each other about my gnome, praising him and such. Although not huge, it was very uplifting.
WoW(last time): Although you seem to be against huge singleton population-wide efforts, Blizzard is currently in the middle of the one time war effort. You really get the sense that your contribution matters and that it is a huge team game of everyone working together to complete a massive quest with a long lasting impact on the world.
The best way game designers portray a sense of cause and effect is with quest chains. They have you follow a story line and refer to your previous actions as you follow the chain. I'd be intrested to hear though if any one has a solution for a mutable MMO feature that he or she thinks could work. I can't come up with anything good right now.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
"Eve and Ultima Online continue to please their players with updates and releases."
This sounds like uninformed marketroid speak to me. CCP, creators of Eve, released a patch in late December, which was pretty disastrous. Many basic elements like buddy lists, some basic agent services, and other things were broken and some still remain broken. Furthermore, lag remains very bad in central areas, often to the point of not being playable or characters getting 'stuck'. It is true that CCP has announced an upgrade to better hardware in February, but so far that is a future promise, not current reality, and the lag problems have been going on for months.
Most concerning is that significant gameplay problems continue to be ignored, making the player versus player experience very difficult (especially in the finding and pursuing) and exposing most non-expert characters to totally arbitrary destruction at blind gate ambushes (transitions between solar systems - you must 'jump' blindly through a gate and if there is a fleet on the other side in the next solar system, you just die unless a pro with properly designed ship), an issue that has never been satisfactorily dealt with. Also, there is a serious problem with the use of instant bookmarks, allowing people to jump directly to gates and avoid any fleet defending the gate, which feeds into this blind ambush problem as defenders must then go to the other side and hope for a blind ambush. The side effect of the need for bookmarks is that everyone wants to carry thousands of them for safe and shorter travel (travel times have soared with one of the patches), and this is apparently saturating servers and performance.
Finally, a most pressing problem that has the player community in an uproar is the advent of ISK (the currency of Eve) farmers, some using bots, that are mining continuously in the safe areas and in NPC corporations not subject to player attack. Many of the ISK farmers are suspected of selling their ISK for real life currencies in violation of the EULA, and many are thought to operate from Asian 'sweatshop' outfits. These players are routinely reported to CCP, who apparently does little about them since the same players are seen doing the same thing week after week, nor does CCP seem to be taking the problem seriously. In fact, groups of vigilante players started taking it upon themselves to engage in 'suicide' attacks to destroy farming ships.
CCP has furthermore somewhat legitamized the transfer of real life currency into ISK by allowing the sale of time cards, bought from CCP, for ISK. The buyer lengthens their subscription, the seller gets ISK. Since it is allowed by the EULA to sell characters for ISK, this means that anyone who wants to get a quick edge up in Eve can simply sell time cards, buy a well-trained character, and buy all the ships and equipment they want. Now, people have different opinions of whether this is a good thing or not, but it underscores the fact that CCP is exercising an inconsistent principle, on one hand claiming that ISK sales are not allowed on the principle of fairness of in-game competition, but on the other allowing out of game actions to affect in game rewards when there is a profit motive.
Eve has its good points as well, but I cannot let that uninformed platitude fly. As for what's the worst problem of all, well, all of them, but buddy lists not working and not being fixed for over a month is pretty much up there as it was broken in the December patch and its dysfunction compromises the social fabric of the game (are your friends online or not?) and player versus player fighting (are your enemies on or not?).
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.
I tried looking up Quickified. It couldn't find anything, but it suggested quizzical which seems appropiate.
P.S. Stop making so many good MMO's. My time and money are unfortunately finite values.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/town hall/karazhan.html
Some information on a 70th level instance from the WoW expansion...
Treasures of Aht Urhgan just got its worldwide April 18th release date along with the second of the new jobs being announced (Corsair, a pirate/gambler mix that uses a special gun to support and buff party members based on luck) along with the reveal that ToAU will have another "Jueno" like main city hub added that will also somehow involve enemy raids into the hub city.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
"There are no longer any technological limts preventing the shared world from constantly changing and evolving in response to player actions."
Not on a game the scale of WoW.
"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."
You're confusing an instance with world content. "Very little" my ass.
Simple solution to getting as much time and money as you need!
while (true) {
time++;
money++;
}
Zonk, it would be much easier on the eyes and brain if you broke this into several stories. I know that some people might complain about the lower content density, but 16 links in one paragraph does not entice me to see what that content is.
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.
Well as a fellow player let me give you some informed non-marketdrois speach. You call the December release disastrous. You have not been playing many mmo's then. It was a fairly pain free update compared to most of their competitors. Lag-I've never had many issues with it. its certainly not a major peice of my experience. The game is suffering some growing pains, but lag is not horrible or bad like the above poster tries ot make it sound. NO ONE in my guild of 30 has ever had a character stuck as you mention. Non-expert characters being ganked-yeah a minor issue, our guild just tells them to not go below .5 security systems. If they do-then they run the risk. Last night one of our newbs was ganked. wow....the guild bought him new equipment and spent some effort hunting for the perpetrators. It was FUN.
The ISK farmers-ccp recently made a REAL sweep of them. Notice WOW they do this, and nothing changes? I checked yesterday and the major ISK farmers were still not able to sell ISK-because they had been wiped out. ALL MMO suffer from this, but the makers of eve make some real meaningfull efforts to stop it.
You saying its a major issue in eve kind of tells me you have not played many mmorpg's. Eve is the only one I have played where they werent a issue. I have never ever had anyone I know griefed by farmers in Eve. Its FAR from a pressing problem.
The time card issue IS kinda true-you can trade time in game for ISK. CCP has made this allowed. From some GM comments it is not a popular thing, and may be reviewed.
And generally I know if my friend are online or not by simply looking at my guild chat channel.
* Priests and Paladins have been removed to keep in line with our policy about not bringing religious/political/sexual mentionings into the game. I imagine this would actually be a thing players would appreciate, since Blizzard can't balance classes anyways.
Shadowbane.
EVE Online. The players, quite literally, make the storyline. Not EVERY single player, but large player run corperations figure in prominantly into the ongoing storyline.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
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.
We have the technology, but what people don't realize is that as these games become more popular, with much larger populations, the game world needs to increase as well. That should help let them make more procedural content. The problem they keep running into is most likely that there are players who will do things just to disrupt the game. Imagine the effect of that if they could make permanent changes in the game world. Not to mention that if you killed an orc emcampment or something, and it didn't reappear....eventually it would be near impossible for anybody to start a new character, as the only things that would be left alive are things that were too tough to be killed.
So its really a sociological problem.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
All of the problems you mention can be solved by making the world bigger. How can you even get the feel of a real adventure if you can't just start running and dissapear into uncharted territory where you're unliekly too see another person untill you head back to town. From what I hear, the original Asheron's Call was like this, and it made up for many game flaws.
Of course, if automatic world generation is done well, the world can be quite large indeed. While making the world larger isn't completely free, since there's game state to maintain, most of the costs of a MMORPG world scale with the number of players, not the size of the world (especially now that storage is so cheap).
You just have to make it clear where new players need to go. You can have an ever-expanding civilized area, with no monsters at all, and just spawn new players at villages on the border. You can also stage server events which contract the civilized areas dramatically, if you like destructive events (and I've never seen a GM who doesn't).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I've got a 60 priest with full tier 1 gear, half of tier 2, plus some nice pvp gear from the battlegrounds, and I can tell you that I can give most any other player a run for their money. Hell, I can beat a rogue even if he gets first strike and they're DESIGNED to beat down casters. Mostly specced for disc too, with only 11 points in shadow, so I don't think they were nerfed too hard at all. If you recall the beta, pretty much every class got nerfed down across the board.
I used to be full holy spec while I was still running instances, and believe me when I say that the holy tree helps a LOT more than you think as opposed to speccing shadow or disc then being a main healer.
The issue is that priests aren't FUN where they're most needed. Everyone wants you to group with them, but they expect you to just healbot all day and you end up watching health meters the whole time. If something goes wrong, the first thing a lot of people say is "where were my heals" when the fact is that the group was simply outmatched or unprepared. I don't even run instances or raids anymore, it's all about the battlegrounds. In the chaos of AV no one gets upset at one person if they die. I'll heal if I notice you're low, I'll nuke if I see a half dead horde trying to run away and I'll dot, fear, and dispel liberally. It's so much more enjoyable than keeping noobs alive, and I can't see how a talent review will change that.
That's part of the problem, though. At least as I see it.
Don't assassinate him. Yet the Defias never seem to overrun Stormwind anyway. Or kill him, but then try to roleplay with someone else who killed him. Yeah.
Not to mention the massive spoilers that particular game puts out itself. I remember my young, fresh-faced, bright eyed level 5 rogue, coming into Stormwind with a few measly silver to his name to learn a trade.
Next thing I know? There's a frelling dragon screaming all through the city.
I'm not surprised that there is no mention of the PvP addition to EQ2, but it is definately the most interesting of all of these announcements.
You have hit the nail on the head. That's the problem with 99.5% of RPGs and space shooters out there. Both single and multi player. Your actions don't really influence the world. I wish someone at long last would combine Civilisation/Master of Magic global strategy engine + RPG, so that you are one man in a world that develops by itself. Make it so that if you sack a town it remains poor/broken/slaughtered, but eventually gets slowly rebuilt of abandoned. Make it so that if there is an unattended wilderness, various beasts start breeding there and expanding into adjacent areas and overruning/harrasing nearby towns. Make groups of monsters moving around the world with purpose (raiding other towns and expanding their own lairs). Add multiplayer capabilites to that world, and you have a massive hit.
Also, it is possible, and maybe easier to make a space shooter along similar lines. Master of orion/Space empires world (galaxy) development combined with something like Privateer space shooter. Such a game would make a killer hit.
This would require some game AI development, and lots of balancing, but creating such a game is mangeable with 1/20 of the budget Blizzard has. I'm still curiuos what is it that none of the game developers tried to make such a game, when the capabilites were there for that last 5 years or so...
I once wanted to make a similar free game myself, but then i got a job, way too much work, and the project got abandoned...
--Coder
I'm not really a gamer, but I think that I'd play your game, but only because I like role playing. I never realized that MMORPGs worked the way that you say that they currently do. It sounds idiotic, and why would I want to play in a world where nothing ever really changes. Up to this point, I haven't played them because they just don't look any fun.
... :P^\| ) just won't make it there. ;)
So I say "code it," if you can, and not in some flippant, "If you want feature, then add it" way. I mean really. If it's within your ability, I think that it would be great. Make it so that when the cleric opens a rift in the ground to swallow some eveil city, not only is the city gone, but the plate tectonics change. When a horde of locusts is called in, the crops are ruined, the locusts spead to other areas, there's massive famile, and the characters can't buy food. When a tornado is called down by a mage, the weather pattern over the whole continent shifts a little. Make hurricanes and tidal waves to destroy the ships and harbors.The possibilities are endless.
So that things don't get too civilized, create an unassailable "hell" or "Mordor" (however you spell it) in a part of the world where evil things keep respawning and resettling. Make it all use AI. The really powerful characters can "retire" to live in the city and do whatever they want, but who'll want to play a retired character? If your world is harsh enough to keep knocking civilization down, then it'll never get out of hand. Program the AI and let it handle the economy, the pilgimage of elves across the plains to their ancestral home once a year, and whether the inn has room for you or you need to sleep in the stable.
Make characters die often, especially the powerful ones. Becoming powerful just makes you a target, you know. Suddenly there are quests against the major players in the game. Although I don't understand the way guilds work in WoW, it sounds like it sucks, and you should find some way to avoid armies running around full time, perhaps disease or food supply or something. Make the world tough, because it's an adventure, right? Make the harshness a constant in your game, so that it can be adjusted up or down depending on how civilization is doing. Or just let the demons overrun the world, reboot the game and make everyone start over from scratch. Either way, it sounds like good role-playing, if less hack-and-slash than most people are used to. It doesn't even have to be graphically great, I think, if the "change the world" premise is sold well enough. Think of it as networked nethack with AI on a grand scale.
Finally, make sure that it has SEX, because that in and of itself will cause the game to sell. If characters can go to a brothel and pay to have sex while the player watches the action and whacks off at home, you'll be rich, and both the players and characters will be eternally poor. Of course, for that part, the graphics will have to be more than nethackish.
( |\ --> ( |/ \\o// -->
Put identity in the browser.
One more thing -- make sure that "magic points" and "Karma" or whatever you use are an economy unto themselves. Like maybe some regions are more magic-prone than others, and points recover based on an algorithm, but no more than x total point for everyone in the area per day. The points get rationed out or something. If there are 800 magicians staying in a city for a magicians convention, then, nobody is recovering anything until the convention leaves town, PLUS there's no room in the inn and you'll be sleeping in the stable again. ;)
Put identity in the browser.
Granted, it's not on the scale that people would wish it to be, but FFXI has a player-adjusted world. Every week, stats get tallied for which country gained the most conquest points in each of the world regions. The nation that gains the most gets 1st place, then 2nd place, and 3rd (obviously). This does quite a few things: - the nation's shops get better items when they're in 1st - you have more items to spend your conquest points on from the nation's guards - you can be warped from your capital to any of the outposts that your nation controls - items/equipment sometimes have stats that are based on whether or not your nation controls the territory you're in - the 1st place nation gets NPCs that will quiver your arrows/bolts - you do not collect crystals in territories your nation controls Yes, they're not OMG earth shattering or anything, but it definitely had a huge impact on the game (I haven't played in over a year, so I don't know if it still impacts as much).
I see you have detected two of my career ambitions: make an MMORPG and make an ASCII-art porn server. ;)
I'm currently working on writing a great set of RPG rules. The rules systems used in MMORPGS are about 20 years behind the latest ideas in Pencil-and-Paper RPGs, primarily because of licensing issues (and a real lack of understanding that this is important). City Of Heroes was the first MMORPG with professional game design, and it was deliberately simplistic and colorful.
A combat system that merely involves each side applying damage until one side falls just isn't that interesting, and has none of the back-and-forth feel of real melee combat.
The MMORPG will come. It may only have 100 players, and may be delayed until I'm financially independent, but it's inevitable.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There have been many people talking about persistent changes in the game world for a long time. For examples: trees grow, if you chop one down, everyone sees a stump there. A large field in this one area has a lot of travel across it, a path forms if enough players take the same path across it over time - note that different servers may have different paths across the field as their server's travel patterns may differ. etc.
:))so this will sort itselve out eventually. In any case, bandwidth ultimately takes backseat to the biggest issue which is just the massive amount of content that has to be created.
Some games have even had persistent changes (one time event for each server). EQ had Waking the Sleeper and WoW has this Slithus opening thing.
However, there are two major issues with having one-time content on a large scale. The first is technical... bandwidth. To broadcast all the persistent changes in a world (remember, these happen almost constantly) requires a lot of bandwidth. Game communication still has to cater to modem speeds because a significant portion of gamers still use dial-up - enough so that you don't want to eliminate them from your potential market. Some compromises can be made, however. "Canned" changes, like those mentioned above, are possible because they require just a server-side setting and only maybe a small change be sent out over the network once to tell the client which graphics file(s) to load (of course, you have to send all the sets of graphics out in patches ahead of time). The downside of this is that the changes have the feel of being canned. They are either one change or they are a small set of changes that get cycled as world events dictate. Those type, the small set, lose the illusion after a while. This will change over time as more of the world gets connected via broadband (and faster in the future - fiber to the home
The *biggest* problem to overcome doesn't deal with graphics like "put a stump here" or "put a path here" but just the consumable content. Some games may make this an illusion by having different quests to the same instance flagging certain characteristics - the first quest you go in and beat the prince so the second quest reflects that the prince is dead in the instance. This is pretty flexible but it isn't "world" in that you can still see other people wanting help to go kill the prince that you've already killed. It's usually a nice compromise but it still isn't world persistent. For world persistent events, the one-time nature of it presents a HUGE burden on the game content developers. It may take months for the developers to design an encounter around a king in some distant castle only to have that king killed the first night it is put onto a server. First, this type of content means that only a very tiny subset of the players will ever see it so it is a lot of work for just 40 people to do in one night. Second, most game players want to experience "everything" in the game and the vast majority of content will not be seen by the vast majority of players in this type system. So, it becomes a massive amount of work to provide that type content to a few hundred players (out of several millions, for example in WoW). The logical alternative is to fall back to canned encounters that randomly spawn every so often but with minor changes... the boss has different colored robes, maybe a different class (for rpgs), and the like. However, this illusion is quickly seen through and isn't much different (if at all) from the instancing quests and the like.
So, basically people want to have the single-person game experience where all their actions have an effect on the world but they also want to play the game with 100s (1000s, 10000s, millions) of players. There's no easy solution that doesn't feel canned (which removes much of the excitement and entertainment of it).
There are many other issues as well... for example you mention the two outcome scenarios... that's, in effect, creating two games and a
While better than nothing, theonly players who *personally* affect their world in this way are players that lead massive alliances that can affect the server's balance of power. I did that once, in DAoC, and it was really more hassle than fun. Plus next week it shifts the other way and it's just like nothing ever happened.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The most unique part of the game was the "Bug of the Week" feature combined with the "God class of the Week" feature. The bug of the week feature made gaming lively... what would be the exploit this week? I can die everything (even game things like lamp posts and even other players against their will) my favorite color. Every week something would be introduced to the game that made another/different combination of skills god-like so you would rework all your skills to match that (or just let the bot macros do it for you). Basically these features added together made the game more like Quake where everyone avoids everyone else at all costs for fear of PK or being subjected to the latest bug (get died from head to toe in bright lime green just for standing next to another player for 1 second and it cost you in-game money to redie all your equipment back to the colors you had) instead of an MMORPG type like the EQ series or WoW where you sought out other players to help you accomplish things.
I played a bunch of the single-player Ultima games. I've never been so disappointed in a game in my life than in Ultima Online.
You make some good points.
:))so this will sort itselve out eventually.
"Canned" changes, like those mentioned above, are possible because they require just a server-side setting and only maybe a small change be sent out over the network once to tell the client which graphics file(s) to load (of course, you have to send all the sets of graphics out in patches ahead of time). The downside of this is that the changes have the feel of being canned. They are either one change or they are a small set of changes that get cycled as world events dictate. Those type, the small set, lose the illusion after a while. This will change over time as more of the world gets connected via broadband (and faster in the future - fiber to the home
While you're right that this is limiting, it's the low-hanging fruit. It would be a giat step forward just to have the canned changes. Small changes, like a blastable world, can be fun, but they're not really important to plot. Blastable instances wouls let people have fun just destroying the countryside without having to deal with the bandwidth or griefers.
For example in WoW, if you had an event where the Horde took over the world somehow, say that all Horde characters were then able to advance to level 100 but the Alliance could not, you'd expect almost all your Alliance players to want to leave that world and transfer to another (or just quit the game).
Well, PvP realm balance is a whole different world of hurt. But I'm focused on PvE content here, and overall player-vs-monster world balance can be sovled by fiat by the GMs - in fact, that's what I would expect all the non-automated content to be built around. The same smart world and quest designers working to acknowledge sweeping changes that playes have made, and introduce new challenges (and never just put the world back the way is was) in a way that makes sense in-character.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm sorry 99.999% of WoW players feel that way. Did they realize what they were buying when they started drafting $14.95 a month to Blizzard? Plot is not mutable by definition, and suspending your disbelief with other players is required to enjoy the plot that's written. Someone else mentioned it in this thread, but the plot in books isn't any different.
;)
And to the 0.001% of WoW players that can read, man great game, right?
And hey, it's not the end of the world if you stop playing after a year! Just ask yourself if it was $229.40 well spent.
You and the other people in this thread that claim to have this all figured out stand to make boatloads of money if you were to get out there and do it as opposed to complaining about how others haven't.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
How about I come close to your larynx and you promise to swallow? Or do you only suck IN THE GAME?
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm in full agreement with you, and highly interested in the MMOG - or a true MMORPG and have similar ideas of my own, though perhaps more socially-minded.
And for some reason I want to say that your link above may be a copy of the original Evil Overlord list, though I don't know how often they update even though they say they're still taking submissions. I think the other lists aggregated on the sff page have homes elsewhere too, but I'm too lazy to substantiate that claim right now.
8-PP
Uh the sex thing is a little out there...and the reason that it being hard wouldn't work is becasue many people don't play for the challenge or anything close to an actually adventure, they do it to get the best stuff and the most gold/stuff/lvls so they wouldn't like to get "punnished" for being powerful
Mr. T carries a postage stamp in his wallet at all times on the back is a list of all the fools he doesn't pity
They have some Bliz. N. folks working there don't they?
Mr. T carries a postage stamp in his wallet at all times on the back is a list of all the fools he doesn't pity
And within that civilized area you could have PvP and player run factions that conflict in non violent/econimic ways...IE Merchants and Govt.
Mr. T carries a postage stamp in his wallet at all times on the back is a list of all the fools he doesn't pity
Also an announcement that "Lord Recluse" no longer works on City of Villains was sneaked in in the last day or two.
NCSoft subtle announcement that Zeb Cook no longer works for Cryptic and they wish him well in future endeavors. Still we're all wondering what those'll be?
Writing is the only socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. (E. L. Doctorow)
Sex was a joke, included for Slashdotters' benefit. The other ideas are serious, though.
Put identity in the browser.
Only in the sense that woman at home in the UK during WW2 could sense the contribution of their frying pans helped keep the spitfires flying (which was actually bollocks but helped keep up morale).
The current "war" is simply the latest in a long line of "let's drain stuff from the economy by getting the players to give away vast quantities of metal/cloth/herbs/whatever". Zero imagination on Blizzard's part leading up to, surprise, surprise, yet another 40 man raid dungeon 95% of the players will never see inside.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
DYE! The word is DYE! Perhaps if you spent more time in class and less playing games you'd know that?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
40 man raid dungeon, 20 man raid dungeon, as well as solo and 5-man quest content. AQ is not just for raiders.
Your points are valid, but these are problems any good PnP RPG gameworld designer learns to solve. There's no reason to design content that's never seen. If you are trying to write for branches upon branches uon brnches, only one of which will be picked, you're just doing it wrong. The point is to make the world automatically adapt to whatever branch a given party takes on a given quest.
When the results of hundereds of quests add up to take the game world in a direction you didn't expect - then you have some work to do, but only for the direction the server actually went. You don't try to script all possibilitis because a RPG is not about following a script. Playing "guess what the designer intended me to do" is a very lame game indeed.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.