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The Future of Persistent Worlds In MMOs
Zonk did an interesting interview with Ed Stark and Dave Williams, employees for an MMO developer named Red 5 (and experienced tabletop game designers). They talk about their ideas and plans to bring about the next step in MMO gaming: increased persistence in online worlds, where an objective, once completed, stays completed. Williams said, "Right now for most of these games, when the player saves the princess and he starts walking away from the tower — if he looks back he's going to see the princess at the top of the tower again." Regarding their current work, he continues:
"If you save the village, it stays saved — you saved it! But maybe now that village becomes an objective for another player; maybe something has to be done now because that village wasn't destroyed. And so on, and so on, and so on. Building those mechanisms to make it a world that reacts to a player's actions instead of existing in a static state. That's the world we're talking about."
But then there would be over 9000!!!11 ojbectives!
Such things would require a prohibitively high number of actual persons playing NPCs, and the amount of coordination between them would make this extremely buggy.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I'm not a programmer, so I don't really understand, why is it so difficult to have objectives that stay completed after you've completed them? Can someone enlighten me as to why that's a step that's still forthcoming?
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
Even with the current state of things, griefers have a field day annoying the bloody fuck out of casual gamers and serious gamers alike. I can only imagine what will happen if 10000 casual gamers sign on and see all the collection and simple rescue quests are done and what remains is an epic battle requiring 300 players to complete (LFG 299 PST). This is going to be really hard (to balance enjoyment, leveling progress and eliminate griefing) if worlds are persistent.
Not that anyone is under the illusion that actual Role Playing was ever strong in MMOs, but the fact that the world is mostly static really has always killed it for me. There's never any tension that the armies will fall, towns will be taken over, or some epic thing will happen. Even in the upcoming WotLK, surely the Lich King himself will be defeated time and time again (with no worries to the storyline) by several groups of players. How could a bard sing a song about great conquests done if everyone has done the same thing, and nothing ever changes?
Tibbon
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Bot programmer here!
This has killed many mmos and mmorpgs, do x to get xp or money. And they are usually repetitive and then a noob comes along and asks for help on one you just did. What about after x hours it rotates and isnt being handed out by that npc or once its done its done for x hours. Becuase i would think it would be very hard to make a mmo where a users interaction would affect the entire world. not only that but other players role playing as well.
With all this talk about doing away with instancing, I'm surprised they didn't mention EVE Online. EVE has *ONE* world for all the players. Granted, it can make it mighty laggy for large engagements, but most of the time it's fine. Missions are "instanced" insofar as they are randomly created when you get them, but they can be discovered by other players using scanners, so you could conceivably have complete strangers swoop into your mission and rob your loot. Annoying, yes, but it adds tremendously to the feeling that you're part of a larger world.
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Don't get me wrong, I've been playing video games since Nintendo Power was giving away Dragon Warrior I for free with the purchase of an anual subscription to the magizine, but games seem to be mimicking real life a little too closely.
I played games because they were simple and allowed me to get away from the difficulty of the real world. I liked it because if I did something wrong I could just try again without the conssequences & I could do the same things over and over again because I liked doing them.
The direction games seem to be heading, I might as well just do these things in real life.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
This sounds great but sounds too good to be true. The number of people playing each objective would be tremendous, new events and triggers would encourage griefers to stay in the same spot, advancing the storyline for their own amusement (and probably killing all the lowbies that wandered in if they can).
This already exists to an extent in many popular MMORPGs such as the farming of materials and whatever else was needed to open the gate to the new WoW expansion. It's also already exploited by high-level clans who strong-arm, bribe, etc their way into being most likely to receive any unique quest awards; I've seen this first-hand on Everquest II.
It's great if they increase these events or whatever, but most MMORPGs seem to want people to pay for new content in well-defined (and long-awaited and delayed) chunks. Initiating something like this sounds like something that would be so expensive and bug-causing that the company would eventually decide all the effort wasn't worth it (when the option of not doing it might result in no real change to the subscriber base).
On the whole, this sounds like something Peter Molyneux would say to drum up interest in his latest game, with buzzwords liberally thrown in with exaggerations and perhaps even an outright lie or two ;)
Sorry for AC post, I don't usually have anything to say.
I would actually fall into this category.
I have no desire to create yet another PC to level up through the ruthless grind. 'Way back I played a sort of NPC consultant in the background of other people's story arcs.
I found it relaxing to toss out some InCharacter lines every hour while working on projects.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It's hard to make this work in a way that doesn't allow the world to deteriorate. How does all the stuff that players destroy get repaired? Probably by a huge number of NPCs working very hard around the clock. The NPC AI's need persistent state, too. They need to learn from experience, so they will rebuild better defenses. Walls are built stronger. Weak points are plugged. Overlapping fields of fire are set up. Obstacles to slow up assaults go in place. Towers are built to be mutually supporting. Checkpoints where players must disarm are put in place. NPC guards discover flanking tactics.
The day will come when the NPC AIs get smart enough to realize that the players are ruining their world and band together to exterminate the players.
This concept isn't new, I assume the breakthrough they are trying to make is to automate the process.
I know a few MMOs which have persistent worlds but they also have a team of developers and moderators working with and observing the players action and activities using aggregate statistics and other data collection. Mind you none of these MMOs are huge maybe 1000 players give or take a few hundred but that's the problem, resources.
If automated then it would be a hit wouldn't it?
Wurm Online is a 100% persistent HUGE world where you can feel your actions change the world, and collaborative player effort can change it into something entirely different it is. Apart from that its indie, dirt-cheap (5 euro/mo), cross-platform, with beautiful sceneries, and very immersive. All you need is Java and a little patience. Wurm Online Wikipedia Entry
Come on, we had this back in the time of adventure games!!
Virtual Theater, remember???
Download ScummVM and go back to Lure of the Temptress. We already passed this phase of evolution in 1992 ... MMORPGs clearly are adventure games + Role Playing ... They are supposed to be an evolution of adventure games, not an involution.
Less graphics, more gameplay.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I like the idea of persistence in virtual worlds, and I think the idea should be expanded further to a player's character as well. Why should your character suddenly vanish when you log out and stop playing? I'd love a game where you could write scripts to automate your character's behavior so that when you log out it can continue to do things like buy and sell items, perform mundane upkeep tasks, and even interact with other PCs in some meaningful way, like taking messages for you or automatically delivering messages to your friends when they log on.
Design a full background for the world then add in the usual suspects and then let things go (tweak things as needed)
You have a King with a Kingdom and Queen there will be a princess therefore some group with enough evil will make a grab for said princess. You have a town with $rare_resource somebody is going to try to grab it. Add in $epic-class beast (with lair/loot) and you have most of your quest stuff just rolling along.
Programming and balancing this is left as an exercise to the reader
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Persistent worlds? Who cares! How about being able to play with your friends! The mainstream MMOs have no way for you to play with your friends once they've chosen the wrong server.
What's the *first thing* you ask someone when you learn they play wow?
"What server?"
How often has the answer been disappointing? So far, 100% for me.
Depending upon the complexity of it all it would be be done easily with quest chains that loop.
You have two villages.
Village 1 is in disrepair, they give you quests to go gather wood to help them repair the building after enough wood is gathered and some time has passed the village is no longer run down.
Village 2 and Village 1 are in conflict.
Village 2 offers you quest to go kill players around village 1 and then to take their wood and burn it.
Village 2 also offers quests to go destroy village 1 if Village 1 is in good shape.
If Village 1 never gets the wood it needs it eventually gets destroyed, then after a random amount of time has passed a new species or a player guild moves in and claims said spot and starts to build a village complete with the quest to gather wood to help build the buildings.
Village 1 and 2 would both offer the same quests under different conditions though and with different stipulations and rewards.
Of course you could just make things immensely more complex by making this back and forth chain into a AI mapping component. Where you have X number of NPC's who give quests to attack Y faction or support Z faction, if these quests get done then the world changes towns switch control, new resources become available to Z faction and Y faction loses resources. Then because Z faction has more territory they have more borders and thus more enemies, now they give quests to go attack Y, K, J, and L faction. This doesn't even take into account some of the large PVE content but I suppose if a certain faction get's big enough they gain the ability to summon large creatures, which if you wanted to kill would require large number of people working in coordination. Players would act as mercenaries if they didn't have a guild and would work for whatever faction would take them with different benefits for different factions, while guilds could form their own factions by taking over small territories and spreading outward their cities would give out quests of their own, but they could also set a small number of custom quests, to gather resources they need or to kill someone they are not particularly fond of.
Needless to say I've been looking forward to this type of content for a while, although I had hoped it would come from a well known MMO company, I suppose a relatively new company in the MMO world will have to do for now, until other companies start to realize how much this can make a player feel like they are making a difference in a virtual world.
EVE has basically no PVE content worth speaking of. The missions are boring mini-games and certainly don't make the player feel like a hero. All the persistent (but changeable) content is player-generated/-owned and while it does make the game interesting, it's not an achievement because anyone could choose to do that in an MMO (just throw buildable content at players and let them sort it out). It's basically a bigger / more complex WoW outdoor PVP map - you take a flag and it stays yours until the enemy takes it. It would be nothing without the player personalities and interactions.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Who says that EVERYONE has to appear the same to EVERYONE else?
Your quest (team Z) is to kill 5 orcs in village A then 10 orcs in village B then 20 orcs in village C.
The other players (team Y) have a quest to save village A from invading orcs. etc.
So team Z appear as orcs to team Y and team Y appear as orcs to team Z.
The same with the inhabitants of the villages.
There, cyclic quest problem AND AI problem solved all at once.
And the orcs have decent treasure on them for once.
To do a persistent world properly, and make it worth playing in, means making it dynamic - i.e. it reacts to what the player(s) is/(are) doing.
There are two ways to make a world dynamic:
Either you:
a) rely on player and player interactions to add the dynamics, (such as in Eve Online).
b) design the game world and NPC mechanics etc. to react to the players. (Have no idea if the second one has been achieved yet).
B is obviously a LOT harder to do than A, which is why it hasn't really happened yet (to my knowledge), but can have the biggest impact. The problem with A, is that it automatically means having a PvP orientated game, and making it all work properly etc. does place a lot of limits on what is possible, whereas B can be done regardless, in a PvE only game, or even one with both PvE and PvP. (Though to really get the most out of it, a PvE only system would probably work best).
'Stupidity is an often fatal disease' - R. A. Heinlein
Well, Planetside (an MMOFPS) has done this since the beginning. When you capture a base or a tower it stays captured and becomes a spawn point for your side. Then because of the lattice structure between bases, it opens up new bases that are vulnerable to attack. The lattice structure is there to cause a front line to the battles.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
It's fairly easy to make a repeating set of quests that's reasonably realistic. A player quests to save the princess from the tower, once completed another player from an opposing faction gets the quest to capture her again. Naturally it's more interesting if there are a few more stages in the quest than just that basic thing... Like a rogue quest to figure out what tower she's locked up in, a thief quest to steal the key followed by a group quest to get her out. And something similar for the opposing faction.
Ofcourse, the town SHOULD learn that their princess is not safe there, but it would be a shame to make all that work to let just one group of happy adventurers enjoy it.
Apple built a platform for their ideas, Google built one for everyone's.
With buidings being taken over by COGs, and re-taken back by toons, doesn't Toontown already have a simple version of this?
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
No pussy for YOU!
I drew up a rough design doc about related pieces of the world. Players need food so they hunt deer but they can't overhunt or the herds will thin. So you learn to cook or salt the meat to make it last longer. Wolves can eat both the deer and NPC farmers so you need to keep those under control. Villages will have NPCs you grow relationships with...bit an Orc attack undefended may kill Mary the pie maker and you no longer get cheap pies...
But then it's no longer just the adrenaline rush of hunting and killing that current games supply...it's more like life which is antithetical to a role-playing game.
I haven't tried America's Army. Do the players on one team appear different to the opposing team than they do to themselves?
I suggest that while my character appear as a normal human character TO ME that to anyone assigned to an opposing quest I appear as a regular orc.
That way, you would never know whether the monster was machine AI or human driven.
You can also extend this to larger groups. The Knights of X appear as human to each other and themselves ... but to the Heroes of Y they appear as various monsters. And the reverse is also true. Even to the various villages and castles that they occupy.
The only problem with this is that a quest to kill 5 orcs can be VERY difficult for new characters. Those "orcs" could be veteran players with years of experience (and items).
But, on the other hand, if you world is constantly filled with newer quests (either randomly generated - like in most modern economic simulators -, or with newer content written by developers) replacing the older, this make it really hard for the grinders / farmers. Instead of repeatedly killing $arch-demon until they got the all the pieces of the precious epic armor to sell on e-bay, they can only do it once. They'll have to move to another quest to get the rest.
This "always changing quests" will both make it very difficult for bots coder, and will also make it much more enjoyable for players who subsequently will be less interested in outsourcing the grinding to Koreans (they won't have to repeat the same quest all over until they get to an interesting level, but always have newer and varied adventures to experience in an universe that seems a tad more believable - where not everyone is called "the chosen one" and where you feel that every one has a small role to play in helping the overall setting advance)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
There's already problems caused in MMOs by persistence. The classic one is quest mobs. When another player's doing a quest that targets the same mobs as yours, the mobs he's killed aren't there for you to kill and you can't update your quest until the mobs respawn (persistence resets). When the objective's one with a long respawn time (maximum persistence) and has some value to other players, it gets worse because people will go and farm that objective, taking or killing it as often as they can, simply for that other value, making it difficult to impossible to complete quests (at least without dedicating large amounts of time to camping the objective). Instancing in MMOs (decreased persistence) is a direct response to the fact that players don't like this situation. If you increase the amount of persistence even further, make it more and more common for players to be blocked in their quests because some other player's already taken their objective, you're going to increase player frustration big-time. And frustrated players leave your game for one that won't frustrate them as much.
These guys have lots of experience in pen-and-paper and tabletop games, but those games aren't MMOs. The big difference is in one word: "massively". In a pen-and-paper or tabletop game, you have half-a-dozen, maybe a dozen at most, players affecting the world and they're all in typically one group and all have the same or closely-related objectives. In an MMO you've got several tens of thousands of people affecting the world, and they're not all in one group and they're not all synchronized with each other in terms of what they're doing at any given time. If you want to increase persistence, you'll need to read up on "farmers" and "griefers" and figure out how you're going to deal with them in your game. Spending a year or two actually playing existing MMOs to see how players actually interact with them would be good too.
Persistence is not exactly a new idea, even in MMORPGs. Here are a couple examples from WoW:
- Opening the gates of Ahn'Qiraj: A whole bunch of people on an entire server work together to unlock a massive dungeon, and then work together to defeat the massive invasion that spews forth. This happens once - once it's done, it's done forever.
- Halaa: Players from the two factions battle for control of a neutral town. Once you take control of it for your faction, it belongs to your faction until the opposing faction regains control.
But... this is a small portion of the content, and active players just don't clamor for more. Why? Because they don't want more.
Stuff like Ahn'Qiraj is really cool... for the people doing it while it is being done. But for every event made like this, you have to give up a ton of content that could be done by anyone any time (after all, developers can only do so much). In the end, people like a few epic one-time events and a ton of stuff they can do whenever they want. Racing other players for server firsts is a little too stressful to be fun for most people.
Stuff like Halaa is fun... if you like PVP. And a lot of people do like PVP, so games like WoW have a great deal of PVP content in them. But even more people like PVE, and they wouldn't touch Halaa with a ten-foot pole.
In the end, the vast majority of players would rather have to use their imagination (pretend their quest solved a problem forever) than sacrifice quests / content they can do leisurely on their own time without worrying about other players. Obviously some people feel differently, but this is why we have different genres of games. And make no mistake - the MMORPG genre is really very distinct from the classical RPG genre.
I think the answer is PvP, and we're already starting down that path.
The "princess" doesn't stay saved because another group of players from a rival faction doesn't want it to be so, and snatches her back. Of course, a princess doesn't really work here. How many times would a princess be saved and lost, before she decides the tower in the middle of the contested zone isn't a great idea? But in terms of villages, land, etc, it works.
EVE is pretty original in this as well, where essentially the players make the story to a large degree.
To do it without PvP would require there to a lot of company controlled NPCs or incredibly smart AI systems. Why not use paying intelligent people to fulfil those roles? Just make it fun.3
Right now, a well built encounter and story-arc can take dozens of hours of work to make, even using very generic 'tile-sets' and pregenerated characters.
A.I. has no capability create interesting, cohesive and *meaningful* stories even if you used dozens and dozens of super-computers. NCSoft is actually going to be doing something very interesting in this arena by allowing players to create their own missions using a mission editor in City of Heroes (maybe in as little time as a few months.)
Essentially, instead of trying to create a tool to do it on its own, empowering your players with (hopefully) well built tools and a voting system to let people's creativity be harnessed in their game.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
To me, the key challenge in setting up a "living world" (aside from the QA nightmare of all the possible interactions of events) is that without static characters/locations/quests, how do you ensure that it stays fun. You see, the fun and rewarding quests will be done quickly while the difficult, unrewarding or simply unfun ones will tend to persist. In the population of available tasks in the game, evolution takes over with it becoming "survival of the unfunest".
The solution is algorithmic in that these games should be able to support a non-entropic reality and introduce things on their own.
I know that's much easier to say than do, but perhaps the bar is set too high to do this now - particularly on a planet wide scale. Maybe it should be tried at a city or small town level first before trying to do it all at once.
If things were dynamic enough, the developers wouldn't have to plan huge expansions of meaningless quests - ideally, these quests should form on their own based on the changing social-political situation in-game. Solutions to the computer-generated quests should also be up to the players at hand. Oh no, there's a Big Magic Dragon! Should we use magic or spears to kill it, how many people will we need, etc.
One of the most disappointing things about MMO's to me is the fact that NOTHING matters. It's an empty experience but for the social interaction with the other players. Most of the quest solutions are online anyway, there doesn't seem to be much of a sense of true adventure. True adventure involves risk of the unknown and there's damned little of that in an MMO game.
I think that games like Spore will prove (at least to some extent) that this is possible now. The first company to apply Spore-like persistence and algorithmic flexibility to MMO's will do incredibly well.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Perhaps players could also give out quests?
Say a player needs a bunch of X cloth to make a new robe. The player could grind it out himself, buy it, or set up a quest from a template for another player to do it.
(kill, get) X (monsters, items, npc) for X (gold, items).
(I just woke up, my imagination coprocessor is still booting up.)
I haven't actually played it, but AFAIK, the Matrix Online is somewhere between stateless and persistent, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_Online#The_continuing_story
So they moved the characters so the most obvious ones to seperate rooms so you at least not see them constantly, but some are quest givers, how do you hide them completly without re-writing a lot of quests the player might not have done before he send the fellowship on his way?
SWG did it in an odd way, in its "theme-parks" areas from the movies with quests attached you often got a quest to kill someone, that was a spawn made for you a few clicks out in the wilderness. Your kill, didn't respawn, just a problem if there were a lot of people doing the same quest, wich of the spawns is yours.
In LOTRO a bridge has to be repaired for a quest, but obviously that bridge has already been repaired a lot of times and will have to be repaired after you are done with it.
That you claim this is already true in your single player games, that persistent worlds already exist is idiotic and shows you to be a ninny who can't think.
How many people saved the galaxy in Mass Effect? That is right, you did it, I did it, thousands of others did it. In fact long after the 360 crowd had done it, the PC crowd went and did it. For that matter, if you replay the game, you got to complete all the objectives AGAIN!
MMORPG's are currently in the same state as single player games, they remember that you done a quest, they just haven't yet managed to do it in such a way that it doesn't show the same quest giver giving the quest to someone else.
If you encounter the same NPC in Lotro he will have a line thanking you for your help, at the same time you are witnessing someone else being given the quest you just did.
Fixing that is hard, the current MMORPG's are like those movie theme-park rides, the moment the doors close behind you the scene resets for the next visitor. And just as those scenes always look a bit fake because they can't actually damage anything and it all got to be resurrected in a minute or so, so do MMORPG's feel a bit fake.
As fake as RTS where every bloody time you are facing an enemy one tech-tree above you and constantly have to build a base from scratch.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The biggest problem is, they're underestimating just how fucking fast players will progress through the content. If there are milestones like quests to be met, the players will figure out a way to pass by them at light speed. Even if you have ten thousand canned quests ready for deployment as soon as the first batch is completed, they'll be gone in a month at most.
Someone pointed EVE Online out as a truly persistent world. I'd like to add Ultima Online to that list. Both have only the barest NPC interaction: there are mobs to hunt and kill, and merchants to deal with, both of which can be bypassed by a mature-enough player-base. The only 'quests' are specific GM-run events that are more complex than 'harvest five bear asses' or 'serenade the Princess for Cyrano'. Everything else is a sandbox. Players create their own storylines, fight their own wars, and build their own merchant empires. There's no need for a traditional dungeon master because the server is smart enough to handle simple math like combat, and the only real social interactions occur between players, not players and keyword-driven mobiles.
I perform a series of intricate quests to impress a lady, facing untold horros, performing deeds of heroism that are the stuff of legend and in the end, she refuses to actually have sex with me.
That certainly is a LOT like real life.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
PvP is AN answer but not THE answer.
The simplest problem with PvP is balance, the nature of RPG is that people evolve. How would you think counterstrike would be if it was persistent and people were free to choose their side and stick with it, 20 terrorists with nukes, you the special forces guy with a sharp stick. It is called ganking, look it up.
EVE is often held up as an example, despite the fact that is has less then 1/100th the subscribers that WoW has.
EVE works for a very small fraction of players who are willing to go into a world where you either are at the top or so much shark bait for whoever decides to get on your case. Granted, gankers don't seem to be attracted to EVE or get rooted out but it is not something you can just copy and expect to work in a large MMORPG because well, EVE tried that and nobody bought it.
There are a lot of players who want to be able to go AFK in a warzone, good luck doing that in PvP, who do not want to spend all their time online constantly checking their rear for other players sneaking up on them.
There is a REASON quite a few MMORPG's deliberately went the PvE route, it is a hard route because PvP is the easiest way to add endgame contant (congrats, you got the best armor, you done all the quests, got all the XP, now go kill each other over and over) but not every MMORPG subscriber wants it.
I like PvP, in games like Lotro and SWG but I know from experience that a lot of people just don't want it. EVE knows this, it explains why they are one of the smaller MMORPG companies.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
FTA:
GSW: When you're talking about "a shared world", to clarify, are you talking about what most MMO players think of when they think of a server? IE: a space with a few thousand players inhabiting it? Or something smaller?
Dave: We don't have any firm numbers as far as how big our servers would be, but we are definitely talking about a shared world with many, many, many players.
GSW: It's worth belaboring, because this is something that players have definitely been looking for â" for some time. It's worth clearing this up so as to avoid any vagueness here.
DW: We are not playing word games with you.
You can't say whether you're building a game world for either more than 1000 or less than 1000 players? You don't know that yet? Fail.
Continuing, on scope:
ES: We've all seen it. No matter how vast or big an MMO world is, players consume the content way faster than the design teams can get it out there.
Hmm, that's funny, we're still only about half through Black Temple 18 months after it was released. Number of folks that have really finished WoW is low. I don't have figures, but I'm not exactly seeing too many full T6 sets out there, you? Right, starting to get the impression you haven't actually played Warcraft much.
On guilds:
ES: One thing I will say, though, is that we want these small groups - two, three, four players that you'd traditionally think of as a party â" we want them to have a really fun game experience. We want them be able to go out and affect the world, even on a small level. We're also looking at what other games have done for guilds, and ... itâ(TM)s not that great. "Oh, I have a chat channel! And a tabard! Don't I feel special?"
You shouldn't. That's almost nothing. Guilds are the backbones of MMO communities; you have to give these people tools to make them feel special. There should be actual game incentives to be part of a group.
Like the ability to challenge the 10 and 25 man content that represents a huge portion of the gameplay experience? You've never tried to pug kz have you?
On grouping:
ES: Let's face it, most games have content that is "great for groups", or "great for soloing" or "great for guilds". That's not always true. We're not going to try to say we're all things to all people. You do that and you end up being the middle of the road, nothing for no one.
DW: Unfortunately, yeah, any answer we gave on that would probably sound like what everybody else says. It all starts to run together and sound kind of pathetic.
Pretty much everything you're saying already sounds pathetic--stick to tabletop gaming, a genre you understand. Look, encounters either scale with the number of people in your group (dynamic), or you must scale your group up to handle the difficulty of the encounter (static). Give details, or wait to be interviewed until you have more than a few napkin scribbles of a design.
"BeOS is a great operating system" -Doug Miller, Microsoft
I wanted to create a game similar to this, but not so much as described. My thoughts were a world where it had a lot of world events that could totally change the plot/world. For example, you would have multiple factions at war. If one faction became powerful, with the help of the players, it could take over cities of other factions. However, this isn't something you could just go do...you would have to do a lot of quests to get support, weaken moral of enemies, and weaken the enemies defenses. Once you take the city, it would open new quests to you. Of course the more land a faction is missing, the more active the NPC resistance force is.
I would like to see an MMORPG with a skill-based FPS-like combat system. Something as big as World of Warcraft, but with fast and furious battles like the Quake series. The rock-'em-sock-'em robots style of combat in most of these MMO games gets a bit tedious after a while.
I'm guessing that it's probably hard to have the fast response times and detail of a good FPS inside a massive MMO world. But at least for the battlegrounds and arenas, this would be more fun than "point and click on target and push attack".
Also, specifically speaking to World of Warcraft they really need a graphical upgrade. At least re-do the player and environment models for those of us with reasonably modern hardware.
Theres a cool MMOFPS out there (albeit 5 years old now) called Planetside, developed I believe originally by Verant who were then bought by Sony Online Entertainment. You have three empires (teams) and the main objective is to attack, and capture, bases. Each base's "state" can be seen by every player logged onto the server as the same (however, to see if there is a fight there or not, you need to look for "hotspots" which only show up if you are on the continent that said base is on). The world itself is persistent, as are the bases, and towers. Every player created object is not however; if you leave deployables alone for an hour they will deconstruct; if you get a vehicle, and leave it, say to get into another vehicle or leave the continent, it deconstructs after 15 minutes. It does this to save on lag; each team can have 133 players, and, if desired, all three teams can fight over one base (happens fairly frequently). You get massive-ass battles, and even though the graphics are a bit outdated, the sheer number of objects that can be present in one of these massive battles brings even the most modern gaming systems to its knees, even with a five year old game. That said, plenty of people play it just fine; you just need primarily to ensure that you have lots of RAM and a fast processor (graphics cards hardly make a dent in the framerate). If players leave a base alone, it will remain in its state until the end of time. One of the servers, "Werner", is so barren that some bases on there have been as they are for weeks. The main server though, no continent can go more than a few days before being untouched (sounds bad, but once you play it you understand why; under the fastest conditions, a continent can take an hour or so to take; if there is any resistance, it could take all day, or several days). I recommened anyone with an interest in fps games or MMOs to at least give it a try; I believe there is a 10 day trial going if you download the launchpad for it. No, I don't work for them, I'm just an avid fan who would like to see the game have much more population. http://www.planetside.com/
Then, you'd have an MMORTS with a persistent world. This MMO paradigm would not work-- how many MMO players that also enjoy RTS will play WoW if this style of play were implemented? If players HAD to choose between factions/racial ties in ANY MMORPG, then how much fun would you have if the developers scripted Racial Wars, caught you off guard while you were hunting the dreaded FatBack Beast, and you were surrounded by a horde of Dark Orks? All by your lonesome?
It'd be a trick, but if personal world view said you needed the Galactic Presidential Ring and you set forth to acquire one: campaining the Galaxy for a Galactic Year, and swearing the Galactic Code of Ethics at the Inauguration Ceremony, only to find out once you arrived in the Oval Office, that someone else got there first and acquired the ring for themselves?! I'd be so upset and angry (and other similar expressions), that I'd e-mail the developers and tell them exactly what I thought of their [fill in your favorite colorful expletives here] game, and to refund ALL of my monies that I invested in my character, *AND* to delete that character and my account!
Can these developers truly do this, and keep up with our voracious appetites for online content? I, IMHO, would believe that they would rather botnet their own servers with ads for their own sites, because it would be simpler, than to add this kind of "world memory".
Ideas... Anyone?... Anyone?...
But there should be unique items, a few of them so rare and so powerful that whoever comes to wield one of them will be like a demigod in that world. Players will form factions, armies, to steal just one of these items from whoever currently has it. (And it will take an army to get it.) Players will betray each other to get control of one of these items.
Also, it should be possible for a character to really die, and stay dead--not just respawn. Once dead, a character should become a ghost, who can roam the world, chat with other players, and contribute in minor ways to a party, perhaps as a spy. Then governments will form. Good players will unite to protect newbies and others from player killers, and a justice system will spontaneously develop.
The problem with the "everyone is a hero" mentality is that it not only makes for a wildly inconsistent and boring world, but it also fails in its objective. Seriously, can anyone out there claim that they felt like the hero after doing a quest that a thousand other people have done? Do you really feel the hero when you ask on chat how to save the princess and someone LOLs about how easy that quest was? The "you are a hero" quests are as mundane as any other quest.
Personally, I think MMORPG should realize that the MMO part is supposed to mean something greater than making a really tedious single player where other people also play. I personally think that many people would be far more interested in a changing and dynamic world than a world of dozens "you are the hero!" quests that everyone and their dog has done.
I think that the biggest problem is that MMORPG makers are afraid to have people lose. They want you to always feel like a winner, and as a result the game becomes very dull for many people. There is absolutely nowhere to go in an MMORPG but up. I am not advocating massive exp loss or anything of that nature. People hate that sort of thing because they hate to grind. What I am advocating is a world that can turn for the worse. While you are at it, maybe it is time to rethink the absurd exponential power curves that forces content segregation.
Consider:
Forget the mechanics for a moment; just imagine an MMORPG built upon the principle that all people should be able to enjoy the content. That means instead of having to make content for each 5 level slice, content is there for all. It might mean that you need to rethink "power" and âoeprogressâ in the game.
Now, you have a game where everyone can participate in content. Now imagine a threat arises that is dynamic and moving. Instead of the "threat" being a new area spawned in that you can go to and spawn camp at, imagine if it was a living and moving thing.
So, letâ(TM)s take the classic zombie horde. The threat is a zombie horde. It starts at one end of the world and moves to the other end. As it kills it grows. It moves slowly, but it clearly moves. As it moves into an area, zombies wander in slowly. When resistance is met, zombies start heading that way. Any prolonged resistance results in a horde concentrating. So, if you defend a town, you can hold it for a while, but after some time you get swamped and either need to flee or get reinforcements. Even if you do not resist, at some point the zombie population gets thick and everyone dies.
Make it so that there are no-win scenarios. You can hold a town for a time, do so damage to the horde, but in the end you WILL lose. The best you can do is do some damage and fall back.
So, the players keep fighting and falling back. Perhaps they make some valiant last stands in various popular cities, but in the end the cities are conquered one by one. If the players fall back effectively, do damage as they retreat, than at some point they might thin the horde enough to actually hold a city. Instead of being swamped in a few days, they might just find themselves in a long term siege that lasts weeks or months. Other players might try and fight supplies in, while others fight from the walls, clean up sewers, and clear out zombies that slip in. Maybe after a time the momentum is reversed, and the players are able to push back the zombies and reclaim land.
Of course, things could go the other way. The players could be pushed back and pushed back until there is nowhere to go. The world could end and the game starts anew with some different challenge facing it.
Some people will hate this type of game play. Some people want to win every time. Other people will love it. I don't know about you, but the idea that you could actually lose is thrilling. A desperate retreat fight back to the center of the empire, losing city after city sounds a shit ton more exciting than farming NPCs or doing save the princess quests. Do I g
I made much the same argument on my game news site about three weeks ago. I liken the coming revolution to the old pen-and-paper RPG campaign. In other words, the game will be about more than static, individual quests. Those individual quests will form a campaign, and the in-game world will change as a result of players' actions.
The (currently in development) indie mmo infinity online(www.infinity-universe.com) promises to do this in a sci-fi setting... They get around the "more players than content"-problem by using procedural algorithms and player created content... Looks *very* promising...
With more than 6 billion current subscribers, it seamlessly tracks the direct and indirect consequences of every player action. Cause and effect are so detailed, that it is possible to build toy MMOs within the simulation. It features total immersion with 5 or more senses that routinely covers 16 hour continuous stretches of simulation time. Longer stretches are possible, but the experience starts becoming erratic after 24 hours or so of simulation time. Administrator interventions are quite rare and well integrated when applied - to the point that many players believe there haven't been any.
The immersion is so complete, that when a players connection is temporarily interrupted, their experience in the real world is often remembered as a dream when returning to the simulation.
All player decisions are exhaustively recorded, and are reviewed and judged when their subscription is terminated.
it's based on Robert Jordan's "wheel of time" novels?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time
the whole-- small influences but the long term trends continue thing, to me, smacks of the storyline of the wheel of time books....
protaganist side always take 32 steps forward, something happens to knock them 31 steps back...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Look at Guildwars - Ricky the PVE warrior does a quest on Monday, the results of that quest are still there on Weds - because he and his party get their own instance of the world each time they leave town. Granted, there are some oddities if he joins a party who have done different quests, but in general, the world to each of my characters seems pretty persistent from the point of view of that character. It seems pretty arrogant to want to change the game world for all other players. Besides at the rate I play through games, any truly persistent-for-all game world I played in would be paved over with parking lots by the time I got there. I figure better to have a smaller set of well designed quests than try to be clever and generate 10,000 stupid ones.
Persistence is fine, as long as you don't let NPC's die. I predict that the world will be emptied within a week.
Some years ago I heard of an effort to create a massively multiplayer game based on WWII combat, where there would be ground, naval, and air components that would affect things on a "global" game scale.
Did anything ever come of this?
I think it would be very cool to be, for example, a fighter pilot in a WWII simulated world.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
This has been done for a long time, notably with Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2. PWs even create tools and options for their players which were unthought of by the developers, because someone missed doing something. Take for example Avlis.org (NWN1 and 2), which have their own crafting system, magic, races, classes... And the resuslts of a quest 5 years ago can still be found. Bards still sing about those heroic, and unique, moments long ago
Avlis might be the most famous, but others like Hala and ALFA are also fairly popular worlds. There's a great focus on RP and IC-behaviour in these worlds.
What has been seen, though, is that it's the community that is built around the game that really matters when it comes to the longevity of these worlds, not just content.
Those who want to learn about how to run PWs, what works or not, and how to keep them alive, can do worse than having a look at the NWN ones.
Non-persistence is one of the major things that has kept me out of MMOGs. The only MMOG I have played was Tribal Wars, which is persistent. Realism (of which persistence is an important part) in games is what makes the game good for me. By which I mean, fantasy-realism or sci-fi realism or whatever.
Persistence in MMOs (in the sense the article talks about) is a stupid idea, mainly because the addicts are going to finish off every new quest or what have you before normal people have a chance to, and that leaves normal people nothing to do but sit around and grind. If it bothers you that the Demon King of Evil is going to pop right up again after you defeat him, then you're thinking about the game the wrong way; treat it as a story for your character, not for the entire world.
In quantum physics, all outcomes are possible. Even the one where you get to go on the same mission, twice.
I suppose the physics education is a worthy goal for all that time that's otherwise wasted....
This is good fodder for science fiction, but in hindsight, I'm surprised it took this long to implement, given the overlap of the communities.
For a discussion of the quantum physics link, read the Many Worlds interpretation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_many-worlds_interpretation
Alright, I'm late in the discussion but hear me out.
If the game is based around a war it wouldn't be that difficult to do. Just look at the campains in Falcon 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_4.0:_Allied_Force
Basically it is a combat flight simulator where you pilot a F-16 but whatever you do affects the war. If you destroy a bridge, the ennemy troops will have to find a new path. If you destroy an airport, planes will have to land somewhere else. If you destroy a factory, tanks, or whatever it was producing, will have to come from another place. Destroy a diplomatic building and you bring a bit of chaos to the land.
Now, apply that to a MMOG and let the players be grunts that can go solo or in teams. It's not complicated and it makes your actions count.
You can always add permanent quests to the mix of course...
Persistence is what turns an online grindfest/hack n slash in to an actual roleplaying game. With your choices and actions have little to no effect on the world the role you play is fairly meaningless and takes the whole "roleplaying" aspect right out of it. They latch on to the term causing ti to further lose meaning.
The problem is most games aren't made to be persistent. It starts with a fundamental shift in the game design. Trying to apply persistence to existing games just doesn't work because they weren't made for it. The first thing to realize is that persistent games need to be huge. The worlds need to be massive. People need to be able to do more than just kill a few monsters, get some loot, craft some mittens.
It means you have to design a big world that makes sense, not a string of interesting locations tacked together with loading zones. It should literally take you weeks or more to walk across this place. It can also be generated to an extent, in its initial creation. If we can set up rules for games like diablo to generate levels, areas of this game could be autogenerated (if the world is really this huge, I don't think anyone would fault them for not spending the millions of hours necessary to hand craft each blade of grass..).
Certain things should be handcrafted like main starting cities, and by those I mean not glorified villages with a few huts. People should be allowed to take many jobs, adventurers, soldiers, clothiers, miners, etc, and be able to make a go at it. Treasure should be realistic...hmmm...why did this badger drop a suit of armor..
there should also be a heavy social aspect to the game with entertainment. The problem with a lot of "mmorpgs" is that yes you can chat and do a few animations..but really for all the visual greatness, the only thing to really "do" is to go out and kill some stuff.
there should be functioning economies. People should need to start with base ingredients to make larger ones, which means someone can make a living as a miner, but it requires they do it full time. An armor smith shouldn't be able to go out himself and get all the metal he needs for the day in 20 minutes. Becoming good at it means that it should take time. There should be trade between city. Not every city will have an iron mine conveniently located within 5 minutes walking distance right beside the unending forest..
Some people are going to whine.. "that's boring" maybe to you, but maybe not to someone else. Someone else might thoroughly enjoy being a miner. They work hard, make some money and they can spend their free time partaking in social activities, house building, etc they might spend it in "sports". why couldn't an mmorpg have a function sports engine or two built in to it to generate activity and entertainment for people? It doesn't have to have the depth of FIFA2009, but it could certainly provide an outlet for non adventuring tasks. People could watch matches, cities could make teams and play against each other, etc
The key to persistent worlds is making activities which can be done repeatedly, realistically, and are fun. These activities also need to have various outlets (crafting, farming, adventuring, social, etc) This also needs to take time. This can't be a "quick fix" game. Anything that is a quick fix can be seriously unbalanced by someone willing to spend 20 hours a day in it.
That isn't to say casual players should be on the same footing as hard core players. They need some reward. For example players going in to the military, those hardcore players will rise through the ranks and be squad leaders, generals, etc. Casual players might be grunts, lieutenants, etc
It is an ambitious plan for sure... but properly done a game like this could have far more appeal than a game like WoW, and be a lot more interesting play.
It also wouldn't require that they put the game in the hands of people playing NPCs to move it forward (like Wish was going to...)
Dragonrealms and other Play.net games have always been constantly changing. The problem seems most easily solved by an in-game portal that leads to an area where the quest is undertaken and can be dynamically rendered to each player.
Most designers only see each additional player as additional $$ and they will only ban griefers from games in the most extreme circumstance, because it's taking money out of their pockets to exclude griefers.
That's going to have to change. There will have to much more serious attempts to get the griefers off the game servers.
"EVE Online Scandal [February 07, 2007, 3:04 pm ET]
This EVE Online Forum Thread, currently at 621 posts and rising, details a brewing brouhaha in CCP's outer-space MMORPG that centers around alleged improprieties by CCP staff. The original post by EVE Online community manager kieron mentions that the identities of CCP employees participating in the game have become public, and that the compromised accounts have been deleted, and goes on to refer to the possibility that information about a coming story arc had been leaked by employee/players. They describe a tightening of the audit measures whereby accounts of employees are monitored for malfeasance to protect against employee misconduct. The fuel for the thread's rapid growth are allegations that the scandal runs deeper than what is being addressed, and that employees of CCP have been able to steer valuable in-game items to the groups in which they participate, with many expressing the opinion that allowing employees to play the game represents a conflict of interest. Here's a bit from the originating post:
Last summer, CCP implemented stricter monitoring procedures and audits on all CCP employeesâ(TM) EVE accounts. We are confident that our rigid procedures and protocol will prevent any misconduct or, at least, allow us to quickly discover it, should such an unfortunate scenario arise.
As the community knows well, we at CCP enjoy not only playing EVE Online, but improving EVE and interacting with our playerbase. We feel EVE benefits from the developers playing EVE as any other members of the community do, and to impose artificial limitations -- such as no access to Tranquility or special flagging on a developerâ(TM)s player character -- would greatly hinder the development of EVE.
CCP is very passionate about EVE Online and is committed to its continued growth. We hope that this statement will put this issue behind us once and for all and allow us to continue moving forward with the support of our community.
This reply from a user (Borgholio) sums up some of the outcry that follows:
The concern being talked about by the vast majority of players is not the identity of certain Dev or GM players, nor is it an in-game event that occured many months ago. The concern is that Band of Brothers (and possibly other large alliances) have received ill-gotten assistance from the Developers or GMs in the form of blueprints, ships, etc. That was the biggest concern, and you made absolutely no mention of it at all. Nobody really cares about the identity of CCP players in player alliances. Nobody really cares about an event that took place months ago. People care about rampant cheating by those whose job it is to STOP cheating. By conveniently ignoring this issue, you are only reinforcing the belief that CCP has something to hide.
Were you to come out and say "Yes, some of our Devs and GMs were cheating. We cannot release their names for privacy reasons, but we can tell you that they've been fired, and all ill-gotten assets have been removed from the game.", then the community would be happy. It would suck that CCP employees have (yet again) been caught cheating, but at least we would know that you're doing something about it. Or you could have said "In regards to the cheating issue, we can't find any evidence of this whatsoever.". That wouldn't make people as happy, but at least you would acknowledge it. Instead, you whitewash it. You really screwed up, CCP. We want clear, straightforward answers, and we want them now...."
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=75215
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Why not put the players in the world, give them tools and let them make quests of their own?
And yes, this is per user - you can walk around the same area, with another pc, and both have a different view of the world where not all objects are rendered for all users (and/or interact is turned off)
this is limited in some ways, but seems to work well.
-=DaveHowe=-
There isn't any particularly good reason for all players in a game to be seeing the same things. Each player can evolve a "version" of reality, where things stay done, from their perspective. Groups can be formed from players with compatible "realities".
I'm working on just what you are describing for a game mod I am creating. I describe my mod as a cross between a War Sim, Zelda, and the Sims 2. You can read about it here:
CSI-Sahrani
This is just a data structure problem. The way I am thinking of implementing it is to just have a vector of objects describing the currently available "quests". The quest objects contain metadata describing who/where this quest is available, "counter quests", the objectives, and content.
For example:
{Cop Quest} {Level 2} {Counter Quests: Terrorist Lvl 2, Mafia Lvl 2} {Objectives/Content/FSM: somescript.cpp}
When this quest is started, it makes available the counter-quests. A Terrorist character is then able to start a "Level 2" quest and its object gets added to the list of currently running quests.
This is a simplified explanation, and it's all pretty complicated regarding balance issues, and other issues such as: What if no other players decide to take the counter-quest?
On a related note, this mod/game I am working on, I like to think, is a new genera of video games. It is what I call a Multiplayer Online Semi-Persistent Role Playing Game. That is, unlike FPS games that last 5-20 minutes, and MMORPGS that never reset, this world is designed to reset ever 24hours or so. So, you can play all day and reach an advanced level, but the next day, you have to start over, and different quest options will be available, prompting you to play a new persona.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Good post!
I've thought about this myself and came to exactly the same conclusion. I'd put the matter only a little differently: The question is: When will we write AI that can do all the work of a competent human game content developer? I expect it will take a while, but not forever.
Surely, there will initially be some cheating. So maybe when you kill an orc, it will indeed stay dead, but another orc will spawn elsewhere in the forest, waiting to be found by another adventurer. I would love it if we tried to simulate an actual ecosystem that simulated (among other things) the conception, birth, feeding, etc. of orcs, but that would have three problems. One: It's just asking too much of the AI. Two: It would reveal how ecologically incoherent most of the classic "dungeons" in rpg's really are (even by standards of fictional ecology, orcs must consume so many calories each day, shit somewhere, etc. They're not going to be having lives in some single room in a dungeon.) Three: Such a system, even if it were relatively stable without PC interference, could easily be corrupted hopelessly by the actions of some powerful player characters. Destroying is much better suited to the activity of a PC in a CRPG than is building. Destroying is faster. Cutting down a tree is much easier than making one grow.
All current and future CRPGs must find a way to set back up the knocked-down bowling pins, or set up different bowling pins instead. If a group is bent on deforestation or depopulation of a country, and the game must replace what is killed in a natural way, there will soon be no more trees nor NPC humans.
Of course, systems could be introduced that prevent such actions. Repairer druids might magically regrow lost forests, but who will generate replacement villagers?
What's attractive about "adventure settings" is that they are in a context of very weak central institutions (so they leave space for adventure) with potentially powerful individuals. There are no "adventurers" in Singapore, because there, even spitting on the CCTV-watched street gets you in trouble. That's one way to prevent chaotic rampagers, but the four classic role-playing world types (middle-age w. spells, western, war & post-apocalyptic) are not chosen by accident. They're settings where individuals are not under the yoke of a central authority. For fans of Firefly: The protagonist adventure-group does their work on the outer planets exactly because central control doesn't extend that far.
My point is that it wouldn't be an adventure game if it were in a setting that prevented individuals from devastating rampaging. This means that such settings are inherently unstable. (Usually, strong governments elbow in and stamp out the "adventure space" - for the most part.)
So even a perfect AI would not be able to impose stability on an inherently unstable, fully simulated situation. Adventure settings are paradigmatically not in equilibrium.
I usually don't post that as a title, but the parent post should be modded up. I'm also a professional MMO developer, not posting as an AC. The whole "players want 'entertainment'" bit is something I'm filing away to explain to other people.
The poster is also exactly right about the whole "hero" thing. Most people have a tremendous capacity for self-delusion. Even if I have to stand in line behind all my friends to release Sharpbeak, the game is still rewarding me for a specific "heroic" action. Or, think of it this way: if you rescued a little girl from a burning building, would everyone say, "Big deal, thousands of people have saved thousands of victims from burning buildings before." The fact that the world goes back to a steady state in an MMO doesn't mean your actions are any less heroic. They're just not unique, and people are fine with that. And, especially with things like instancing, you don't even have to compete with other groups to accomplish your heroic goals.
From the grandparent post:
"MMORPG are afraid to have people lose."
The parent poster is right, this is because people hate to lose. There's a thread about permadeath in another part of this discussion. Know why permadeath is never done? Because it's the *players* that scream loudest when this is brought up. They don't want to contemplate the thought of losing their hard-earned character, even if the game isn't designed like that. Most games are designed to have people invest a lot into a character. If someone tries to go against that particular bit of groupthink, then they're accused of "hating the players" or "caring more about experiments than fun".
The real reason why we see people clone DIKU MUDs/EQ/WoW is because the players are demanding that we make more of the same. There are some interesting alternative games out there, including Meridian 59 which I own, but people pass them by. M59 is a brutal PvP-focused game where you can lose just about everything you've worked for, and then some. And, because of that, it has a lot of trouble attracting and retaining players. The reality is that nobody is going to drop even $10 million (let alone the $50 million WoW cost) to build a game if nobody will play the game that cost a few hundred thousand to build. So, we keep seeing the same games that don't take risks and don't let players lose all they've worked for.
Anyone willing to invest in something different can contact me through my blog at http://www.psychochild.org/. I won't hold my breath. ;)
Some insight from another MMO developer,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
I've been playing Warhammer online Age of Reckoning, and the persistance in that is pretty good, the mechanics behind it work well. This is an example. In a zone, there is an area which is an RvR battlefield. In that battlefield are a number of warcamps, smaller objectives with few gaurds, and one major objective, a Keep. You own the keep if you go in with a stack of people, ransack the gaurds, beat down any enemy players trying to PvP you, break down the Keep door, and kill the Master of the Keep. Once you've done this, your own Keep Lord appears, and you have the opportunity to defend him. There's a 15 minute timer on flipping Keeps too, but other then that, you will own a Keep until it is taken back. The status of all the Keeps in the game world affect your Major Capital cities status, and eventually, you can sack Capitals as well. I havn't seen that yet, but I can imagine it would be cool. Persistence isnt a technical issue, so much as a gameplay one for me. Is it going to make the game more fun in-and-of itself? I don't think so. You need more then just one mechanic working for you in order to create a fun MMO.
There is at least one larger MMO that has people lose: EvE Online.
While they don't go as far as imposing permadeath (1), you can lose your current ship with all its equipment. Which can be the equivalent of a few weeks' grinding NPCs.
With roughly 250k subscribers, EvE is not one of the largest MMORPGs but certainly economically viable.
Personally, I think drastic item losses have advantages and disadvantages: ;-)
-pro: it makes the feeling of danger more intense
-con: when you lose, you have to do some annoying grinding to get your stuff back. Unless the game design makes grinding NPCs fun, but I don't think anyone has managed to do that yet
(1) If you don't have an up to date medical clone, you can lose most of your skillpoints. But that is easily avoided with a bit of thinking, so it does not count as serious risk.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Unless I'm missing something, Red 5 and most of the commenters here are living in fantasy land. EVE may be a persistent MMO but it's only got a few thousand players, really, when compared to something like WOW. Image WOW with ALL 4 million US players on ONE persistent server. Currently impossible, and that's only from a pure AVAILABLE real estate stand point. Can you imagine Goldshire with LITERALLY 2000 people standing around waiting to save that one town? And if someone did, you now have 1999 other people standing around waiting for the NEXT dynamically created quest to occur. This will NOT happen anytime soon. Unless these guys at Red 5 really have something in their heads so RADICALLY different from what ANYONE else is thinking. Just take WOW a bit further with this idea. 1. Increase the real estate by oh, 100 fold. Im just saying that since there are about 100 US servers. 1.1 Now, travel between towns / realms has to be factored in because no one wants to LITERALLY spend days walking from one town to the next. (weee! town portals for everyone! and if you have town portals, then all that LAND you created in between is WASTED dev time. 2. Once a guild becames powerful enough (ala EVE online) the rest of us would be left with the table scraps of whatever meager content they deemed unimportant enough to conquer first. Even with dynamically created content, this would not work. Using the example of the SAVED TOWN, so UBER guild "Uber Guild" saves the town, and rescues the princess. Great. You think they are going to simply walk away and let the next player pick up the story? No, they will be just as starved for new content as the next guy. So, they hang around, wait for the server to go Bing! and proceed to mash through that new quest before any lesser guilds/people even have time to react. 3. I could go on and on, but it boils down to this.... no matter how grandeous a developers plans are to make things "bigger, better and RIGHT" you still have SO many other gameplay issues that come with regards to an MMO. Most of which, is the players. Again, I refer to WOW since it is the biggest and best[SIC] out there now. Starting town. Quest 1. Kill 10 kobalds. Sweet! Easy. Oh wait....those 20 people that were here already killed them, and 10 more are waiting around with me to do the same. So what did Blizzard do? Reduce the spawn timers on the mobs. Technically, or should I say, gameplay-wise, the problem is solved. But from a "persistent" or "lore" standpoint? It's a disaster. Where are all these Kobalds coming from and why are they appearing out of thin air? We killed all the women and children. How can there be more. Especially in 60 seconds. I hope I made my point here. True persistence is a VERY noble goal. I would love to see it myself. But there are currently far too many other considerations to account for to make the game "playable". Land size, lore, number of players and griefers are just very minor considerations. 100 people on a server? Great. Easy. Do-able. 10,000? Not so much. Which is WHY the current solution is to instance not only dungeons but entire realms. You simply cannot create content that fast. Thanks if you read this far and I would LOVE if someone could provide insight to how I am completely wrong here. -BN
The real problem with this MMO is that the death penalty is too harsh.
Why? Other MMOs terminate their subscribers for any reason. In this one, terminations are always a consequence of game events. Even the rare administrative terminations are carried out via "random" events (lightning, earthquake, volcano, etc) or the actions of other players.
Here is another idea:
After you mastered the game (have at least one high level character, that has been given the title of Hero or Noble) you can apply for a GM account, and after a small interview you are a level 1 GM.
A level 1 GM has very restricted power, can only summon basic creatures, impersonate low level NPCs and create quests with low rewards (in a living economy, the NPC quest giver must have the resources to give as the prize).
This way he would only be operating in newbie areas, running low level quests. All PCs participating in the quest can vote on the quest quality after its done.
If the GM runs good quests he will get GM experience and learn to control and summon more advanced creatures/NPCs/items.
Also, for every summon, or to create anything that would ruin the economy the DM has to consume energy/mana, that would determine the world changing effects that GM can produce. GMs could perhaps combine their energies to produce interesting coordinated stories. Of course a higer level GM can monitor or even veto/ban any irregular activity of lower level GMs in a truly colaborative world creation process.
Using the same engine, a high level player that has attained Noble or Hero status, and rules some land, can also post quests specific to the land they rule, by hiring npcs and setting up their quests much like the GMs, but in a more limited way (no GM energy)
So, the hero saves the princess and takes over the town.
Hire the gold farmers to play the NPC army to retake the town, recapture the princess, and set everything right again.
Problem solved!
(luckily I like playing evil characters who kill the princess, making this a quandry for the next guy)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --