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."

Comments

Programmers, help me out here....

[rockout]

I never got into these games personally (I liked the RTS and first-person-shooters when I was gaming a lot), but part of me always assumed that kind of stuff, the persistent memory, if you will, was already implemented. I had no idea that was something that hadn't been developed already.

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?

Re:Programmers, help me out here....

[Negatyfus]

It's difficult, because there are thousands of players with you in the same world. So you achieve an objective. Is that objective also achieved for another player? If so, then he can't do that particular quest anymore. You'd have to present different perspectives of the world to each player, where when player A does something it is done for him, but player B still sees it as unfinished. That's not really a persistent world, I'd say. The hard thing to do is allowing the player to be an epic hero among thousands of other players. Everybody wants to be a hero, right? So how many princesses are there that need rescuing? Another hurdle is content creation. A lot of the repetitive nature of MMO's is because of the fact that players consume more content than the developers can make it, and MMO's never end. So what if everything that needed saving is finally saved? Game over? Wait for the next content update? That's not how a developer wants an MMO to work, and so the quests and boss fights are repeatable. If you have an elegant solution for these problems, the MMO world would thank you.

Re:Programmers, help me out here....

[Terwin]

I figured you would have multiple sides and while a given group can protect a town or village from attack by a different group on another team, this is really just PVP with the outcome recorded by the state of the game world. Presumably conquering larger towns or towns farther in to enemy territory would harder because of more NPC defenders of greater power.

An alternative would be a series of generally similar quests for making a given town more or less friendly to one side or another. Team A can make the town favor their side, then team B can come around and do a similar quest to get the town to favor their side instead. (possibly giving the town more or fewer defenders for the next attack on that town by one side or another)

Just because the changes to the game world persist, does not mean that they can not be reversed by the actions of other players.

Also, if one side or another starts getting more and more powerful compared to the other sides, just give some nifty artifacts or other toys out to the sides being trounced to either encourage more players to play that side, or to beef up the players already there. (presumably these would need to be server and team specific)

Just set up a large map with three or more teams starting at opposite sides and having a lot of territory in the middle that can be conquered in small, medium, or large chunks as you work your way towards the strongholds of the other teams.

Even if you don't have any other sorts of quests, you automatically get 'resupply isolated outpost' type stuff by just having reasonable resource consumption, which also gives you supply trains to attack or defend in 'friendly' territory, etc.
(every 100 citizens need 1 box of resources/week and produces X taxes/week to pay for them based on the tax rate, etc)

And if you are worried about one side winning everything, just change the scale. After all, what is that saying about a land war in Asia?

Re:Programmers, help me out here....

[vertinox]

Everybody wants to be a hero, right?

I think that's the problem with MMOGs is right there. That's what developers think everyone wants to be.

First objection to this, in truth there is a large amount of the gaming community that loves to be "the faceless storm troopers" or the lowly grunt because they can relate better to them than the hero. And its not like most people role play a hero in MMOGs anyways, but just some random dude looking for loot and XP.

Secondly, its not truly feasible in the current state of MMOG so that everyone feels like their the hero because even now it still doesn't feel like it.

"Gee... I just killed the boss of the whole game but it really doesn't feel that important because he's coming right back for the next guy in line"

See, no mater how you look at it, you will never feel like a hero if everyone can do what you do or that the fate of the world really doesn't hang in the balance.

The solution, IMO would involve a pretty complex system of quest generation that are one off quests and scenarios that affect the world in someway slightly.

Re:Programmers, help me out here....

[Original Replica]

If you take your idea of resource consumption and expanding faction territory, and keep the number of resource sources static within any given faction, then you have a self balancing mechanism for faction strength. A faction with twice the territory would have half the resource density. You could add a static number of wandering defense NPCs to each territory to also have this effect. A faction that lost half it's territory would have twice the density of NPC defenders. Ever time a defender is killed a new one quickly spanes somewhere in the faction territory, as that territory shrinks the likelihood of the spawn being close by increases, eventually a Faction territory that was reduced all the way down to just the Keep in the capital city would have an effectively infinite number of NPC defenders. So even a heavy faction imbalance in a server could be contained.

Re:Programmers, help me out here....

[vidarh]

Instead of making the quest "chop down the tree on the hill" you make the quest "chop down the tree at location [foo]" and the location and the tree is dynamically generated determined for each player. Assuming you populate the world with enough trees, and/or eventually slowly replace the trees, the world will appear persistent and the amount of extra work is very limited.

The same principle can be applied to most things: Put N evil kings in the game world, and M princesses and other desirable hostages, and let the N evil kings constantly pick from a list of X plots involving kidnapping princesses or others, assassinating people (including players who have been given quests to fight them or to carry out quests for other kings) etc., and then hand out quests to aid or prevent those plots. Add a handful of twists and turns and wary the number and level of players given each quest and you'll have endless variations. Once a princess is kidnapped, you have the reverse quest of freeing her. Once she's free she'll eventually be targeted for kidnapping again, probably by another king, via another method with other players involved in the kidnapping and in protecting/saving her.

So yes, as you say you make things flip-flop. But you can introduce variations, delays etc.. You can keep a torn down castle in ruins for a while, before an upstart king decides to make it his stronghold and hires players to rebuild it again, possibly in a completely different style, and quite possibly his alliances will be different, so the conflicts he's involving players in and the plots he hatches are different.

Keep in mind that the real world flip-flops like that a lot: Countries have taken and lost land many times throughout history. Castles have been taken and retaken, burned down and rebuilt. Royal families have been ousted and retaken power.

Just don't make things go back to exactly the same it was, and don't make it happen immediately.

Re:Programmers, help me out here....

[shdowhawk]

As a person playing RPG's for 18+ years.. and MMO's for about 12+ years, I can confidently say that this would fail. It's nice on paper, but would fail badly if set into motion when 20,000+ people are playing. Here is an example:

1. World of Warcraft. Horde vs Alliance. Alliance in some servers when i last played was almost 2 to 1. With double the alliance, the alliance would get bored because there would be a line to "destroy the town" (or insert any other 2 sided quest here) because it would take so long for a Horde group to finish all of the stuff to "rebuild" it.

2. Give the Horde (one specific side) better equipment? Let me re-introduce to you the bane of all MMORPG's ... The NERF-STICK of +480328423. Suddenly, in PVP, Horde is better than Alliance since equipment is better. OR because equipment works better with certain stats.. Or because (insert one of many of reasons why nerfing happens). Sadly, PvP and PvE don't work well together, and things get horribly nerfed because of it, so this negates giving better equipment to one side.

3. The next problem that is added in (which partly relates to my #1) is what you mention about sides taking control of maps = organized raids. Organized raids = time. Time = complaining that "Oh but I have a job in real life, I don't want to work in a game", or "I don't have 6 hours to play" or "My class isn't needed for this raid?? WTF? LFG!! (Looking For Group)" ... Basically, now you have all the casual gamers complaining that only 13 year olds are doing this since only 13 year olds (or rich spoiled kids, or fat slobs in their underwear in their parents basement) have the time, unless it's the weekend, in which case the "teams" will be HUGE and lag will kill things. =/

4. Server Populations. The other problem is that as server populations change, or as the game has been out a while.. slowly the average level changes. A System that involves needing others to effect things suddenly creates issues if there is no one going to that town anymore (new towns from expansions? Level 10 town out of 80 levels when the game has been out for 2+ years?). Suddenly no one does those quests any more since it takes forever for the "other side" to do their part.

Please understand, I LIKE the ideas and LIKE how you are thinking about it, the problem here is that too many people are going to complain about this or that.

Here is MY answer to the problem:

a. Make a PvE game ONLY.
b. Make a Grinding game ONLY.
c. Make a PvP Game ONLY. (Already done, Play Eve-Online (http://www.eve-online.com/ Warning: You will have to "work" to do anything in game. Little to no free-be's.
d. Make an Instance game ONLY where it's really easy and no one has to play the "Massive Multi-Player"... with any other players (hmm.. weird eh?)

The end result is that you can't have a fully persistant world, have PvE and PvP, have Full economies etc etc. all in one game since it's almost the same as putting 5 holy men of different religions into a room and asking them to decide which is better. All will agree that there is something bigger than them, but none will agree on the "perfect method" to find / get to / understand that greater being. (sorry for the religious reference, it was just an easy example to stress how many different sides there are). In the end, making smaller games to individually target those groups I listed above (instead of making ONE game.. most likely badly ... with all aspects in there) would fix a lot of issues. After that we can work on trying to make things persistent. (Like EVE which has some good persistent aspects already!)

Re:Programmers, help me out here....

[bishiraver]

If you look through my comment history, you might find some novel ideas on how to implement permadeath whilst keeping it "fun." Unfortunately, I'm not a subscriber and can't view my own full comment history. The gist of it:

1) why do players dislike permanent death?
1a) Because they lose hard work.
1b) Because their character might have been famous, and now they have to start all over again.

2) what can be done to rectify this?
2a) incorporate death somehow into the character development process, so it's a GOOD thing. Sometimes.
2b) their friends (and enemies) will still know who the player is behind the toon, because the bloodline's surname is the same.

Proposal:

You create not a character, but a bloodline. This bloodline has an abode (probably starting as a hovel with upgrade possibilities). Said bloodline can have several characters in it. Bloodline possessions are handed from one character to another.

The circumstances of a character's (permanent) death influence starting character attributes (if it were fallout, I'd call em perks). Say one of your characters dies fighting a dragon? Now you have the ability to create a character with the Dragonslayer perk (+ to damage against dragons, perhaps), to better avenge his forefather. This also can kick off dynamically generated quests.

Example: forefather that died fighting dragon had a pretty cool sword. A few months down the road, your current character gets wind of where his sword might be, and sets off on a quest to get it. The strength of his forefather's spirit/character imbued the sword with even more magic, etc.

Having a haven/home for your bloodline also allows you to more easily create different styles of characters and play subsequent characters easily.

Example:
You build up your character to a coveted level of skill in swordmastery. Unfortunately, he dies. Your subsequent characters, if they so choose, can be built with a "Swordmaster Heritage" perk, for example, which makes getting up to a decent skill level in swordmastery a bit easier/faster.

See what I mean? Permanent death need not be an annoyance to be complained about. It can be integrated into the play workflow nicely.

This problem has killed Roleplaying imho

[TibbonZero]

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?

Re:This problem has killed Roleplaying imho

[Yvanhoe]

How could a bard sing a song about great conquests done if everyone has done the same thing, and nothing ever changes?

One name : Lerooooooooy Jenkins

EVE Online is persistent, kind of

[Jogar the Barbarian]

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.

Re:EVE Online is persistent, kind of

[tnk1]

Don't forget Player Owned Stations and Player Outposts. Eve player Alliances can declare sovereignty over whole constellations in 0.0 space (non-Empire) and maintain it with persistent stations and construct their own Jump bridges and all of that as long as they control the needed number of POS'es in systems.

Players as enthropy

[Animats]

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.

A persistent world? Done.

[Dreen]

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

Re:Too real

[Anonymous Coward]

Join the SWAT team. You can't tell me some of the drug addicts those guys take down don't look like freaking Orcs !

Plus, the busts have no permanent effect on the world, and next week the site will spawn new orcs to be busted by another team! Just like an MMO!

Algorithmic, dynamic worlds should be the goal..

[Chordonblue]

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.