"Well, one of the great things about solo player games is that you get to be the hero that saves the world. Every door you unlock, every feature you see, you experience it special as if you’re the first and only person who’s ever seen it…because you’re blissfully unaware of your next-door neighbor who’s playing the same game. The wonderful thing about an MMP is that you don’t have to go alone. You can actually go with your friends, which everyone has always wanted to do. The problem is that you can never get rid of everybody. Everybody is with you all the time, and so you go into a dungeon and people are qued up to kill the troll king and you just wait your turn."
You don't have to. That is what instances are for. No waiting. It is as-if you are alone (with your group).
Yeah, pretty much in the next sentence he describes instancing as a way to deal with that.
For the most part I choose to live with or ignore the absurdity, and accept that when I leave the instance after killing the troll king the game world will still be infested with trolls who will carry on like nothing has changed.
Stupid find the ring quests will always exist and with set dialogue options the format really becomes static. However, I agree, I don't want my character going on political rants and dropping knowledge I have yet to aquire. It makes me feel like I'm possesing someone, not being them. If a system like that needs to be in place, there should be more choice in the personality and behavior of your character. I still think you can do the simple yes or no format though and just work in different dialogue options, similar to an Elder Scrolls game or an older Bioware title. That's always been the best system. If you're going to do voice acted cut scenes that give the player no control at least make interesting characters...that's how the FF series always got away with it.
A NPC has lost her ring... even though 1,000,000 players before me had found and returned it. Is she that stupid?
Now my own character talks for me? This doesn't feel like "me" anymore; it feels like I'm turning the pages of a fricken' book.
Quests should not be personalized. Any answer to a quest giver should be a simple YES or NO.
Sorry it bothers you. Perhaps you should choose games that did not descend from RPGs, instead.
It's not because the games descend from RPGs. It's because some developers (the WoW clone devs mostly) don't understand the strengths of an MMO..
Since you felt compelled to correct him, could you share what you are basing that on?
Hopefully it's not some weak "just look around" crap and that there's actual meat to your reply. It would be great to hear from an industry insider like you rather than from some armchair developer that talks out his ass on topics he doesn't know a damn thing about.
in WoW game tells to player that he should be happy now.
... because the alternative is thus far pretty much impossible to program and maintain.
The answer is NOT 100% player to player interaction with zero NPC's or developer crafted anything because 75% of players are morons and the game would end up like Second Life.
The answer is ridiculously complex multi-layered AI but the complexities of the sytem neccessary to make it work in a MMO is.. staggering to even try and explain on this forum.
... because the alternative is thus far pretty much impossible to program and maintain.
The answer is NOT 100% player to player interaction with zero NPC's or developer crafted anything because 75% of players are morons and the game would end up like Second Life.
The answer is ridiculously complex multi-layered AI but the complexities of the sytem neccessary to make it work in a MMO is.. staggering to even try and explain on this forum.
Im just playing this unnamed game,theres lots of sand in the box and theres lots of quests also and i mean like alot,anyways,Im feeling quite heroic there,since im not killig that girl because she was so good looking,i didnt kill that grand father because i felt that his wife would be sad,i didnt kill that dog because it felt wrong etc..
i didnt care about rewards ,i just did what i felt is right.
... because the alternative is thus far pretty much impossible to program and maintain.
The answer is NOT 100% player to player interaction with zero NPC's or developer crafted anything because 75% of players are morons and the game would end up like Second Life.
The answer is ridiculously complex multi-layered AI but the complexities of the sytem neccessary to make it work in a MMO is.. staggering to even try and explain on this forum.
Im just playing this unnamed game,theres lots of sand in the box and theres lots of quests also and i mean like alot,anyways,Im feeling quite heroic there,since im not killig that girl because she was so good looking,i didnt kill that grand father because i felt that his wife would be sad,i didnt kill that dog because it felt wrong etc..
i didnt care about rewards ,i just did what i felt is right.
Originally posted by maplestone Originally posted by lizardbonesYour second example is an unrealistic expectation. You can't scale that kind of interactivity to hundreds of thousands of people. Even thousands of people would be pretty impossible. Nobody could afford to pay the number of people it would take to keep updating the world's content to keep up.
With respect, I disagree. Creating dynamic plotlines and accumulated history is a matter of having good simulations and good database designs. No, it's not easy, but neither is the complexity of animation that games have today - but iternation by iteration we've gotten more and more dancing avatars. I feel that when it comes to making better plot, ecology and event generation, MMOs haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible.
If anything, I think we're reached a point where it's impossible for devs to keep up with the stories they want to see unfold. Take WoW for example: there's a war breaking out between the Horde and the Alliance. How much of that do you actually see in the world? It took them months to create a single scenario around a single battle. The rest of the world is completely unchanged. There simply isn't enough time and money to manually update the world around every plotline in progress. Because the stories they want to tell are not a part of the mechanics of the game they have created, every single event has to be manually redrawn. It's horribly inefficient.
As an experiment, try designing some dynamic plot lines on paper. Completely ignore the technical details of how it would happen and focus on what would actually happen for the player. Create a pool of resources for the system to pull from, and then walk through the scenarios. Do a story board kind of thing. The number of options you have to have available will escalate quickly because the system will not be intelligent enough to create those options on the fly like a person would. Once you've done that, think about scaling the process up for an entire game. The source options for a small town are not going to be the same source options for a large city and they won't work for the bandit camp either.
I do not write game software, but I do write business software, and one of the things I've done is simulations. One thing simulators have going for them is that they tend to simplify the processes involved, and the things they simulate are repetitive. That's the advantage of using them, instead of waiting for thousands of calls to come in, you can model it using SimPy and have an idea of what those thousands of calls are going to do in a couple seconds. If the behaviors are not repetitive, the simulation doesn't work. You have to write a new set of rules for each stage of the simulation. I can see how this might be possible in a game environment, but I can also see how easy it would be to bork the whole thing with a player doing something unexpected. I can see how much work that would be in a game because the behaviors being modeled are more complex than what usually get modeled too. The desirable process is a simple model that yields complex results. In a game, you would have a complex model that would yield complex results. You might have a complex model that yields simple results...who knows. I don't think anyone is doing this so it's hard to say. Anyway, I think the systems required would be an order of magnitude harder to produce than a quest engine, and you'd still have to produce at least the same amount of content to feed into the engine so that it can feed the content to the players.
Even a "Choose Your Own Adventure" style system escalates quickly. I thought this would have been awesome for SWToR, but after I worked out some possible story branches, I realized how much additional work it would be to give each class two options at a couple different points in the story line. It was both ridiculous and disappointing. If the story lines didn't merge back together quickly, you went from doubling the amount of content to have eight or ten times the content after a few choices.
It comes down to the scale of what you're doing and whether it relates to quest type story content. If you don't have the story dependency, it becomes a lot more possible. Players might come across a town that is being attacked by zombies. The zombies seem to be organized and they're coming from a cave, so the players can go to the cave and realize the source of the zombies is an intelligent zombie that once killed, makes the rest of the zombies easy to kill. While the town is free of the zombies, prices in the town go down, more resources become available for sale, the town prospers. If the players move on, eventually the zombies return because they like the cave and eventually the town is back to its original sad state. This whole thing is dynamic, depending on the players, but it's also repetitive (cyclical), making it possible. It's a far cry from actually being truly dynamic or a simulation though. For one, it's one, tiny part of a game world. All of the rules for that one town won't work in the next town, or the city across the continent. Every scenario would have its own rules and its own scripts. It's probably exponentially easier to make a bunch of cr@ppy quests, sell 2 million copies of your game and then write another one.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I don't not need to be a hero or chosen one in a MMO. SWTOR clearly overdid this, because just being a simple Creature Handler or Dancer in SWG was just as fun.
However, I want my quests, if anything, more personalized even. I really have enough of generic quests. Sure some part of the quests can be generic. Maybe half of it. But I certainly want some sort of personal recognition. SWTOR did this WAAAY too less in my book, because whatever you do or decide, almost nothing of it ever came back to you (contrary to what Bioware promised!).
I do not need to be a hero, but I want the game to react to me and my doings. I want choices and consequences that come back to me in the game and make some different in my experience.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
A NPC has lost her ring... even though 1,000,000 players before me had found and returned it. Is she that stupid?
Now my own character talks for me? This doesn't feel like "me" anymore; it feels like I'm turning the pages of a fricken' book.
Quests should not be personalized. Any answer to a quest giver should be a simple YES or NO.
Sorry it bothers you. Perhaps you should choose games that did not descend from RPGs, instead.
It's not because the games descend from RPGs. It's because some developers (the WoW clone devs mostly) don't understand the strengths of an MMO..
Since you felt compelled to correct him, could you share what you are basing that on?
Hopefully it's not some weak "just look around" crap and that there's actual meat to your reply. It would be great to hear from an industry insider like you rather than from some armchair developer that talks out his ass on topics he doesn't know a damn thing about.
I already did, but you cleverly left it out of your quote.
MMOs will never be good singleplayer games. The strength of an MMO comes from the story generated by the players.
I am mostly with you. I would like more open worlds that felt like worlds not themeparks just minus any ffa pvp. Aside from the botters and multiboxers DAoC to me was a wonderful game until Atlantis. Even the Original EQ was decent until Scars of Velious.
The main issue I see with storyline gameplay in MMORPGs is that the world is completely static. Nothing stays dead. No achievement stays achieved, tasks all reset. It's difficult to be the "hero" when what you did doesn't change anything.
The problem is that if permanent changes were possible, the first players woul get to do them and everyone after would be stuck standing around with nothing to do.
Time doesn't move. It's like the grounhog day movie with the same events happenening over and over.
As much as I dislike phasing, it seems to be the means to an end where time does move forward allowing storyline to progress and changes to be seen as permanent from the character's perspective.
So the good side is that technology exists to offer storyline mode. The drawback is that it chops up a full world into time slivers making the world feel disconnected and discouraging grouping for players who are not in the same phase of a given area.
Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security. I don't Forum PVP. If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident. When I don't understand, I ask. Such is not intended as criticism.
My favorite is when I get called a Hero endlessly and cheered by everyone around me like I'm some kind of god.
Looking back at the history of MMOs, they really have become pathetic these days.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
Originally posted by XAPGames The main issue I see with storyline gameplay in MMORPGs is that the world is completely static. Nothing stays dead. No achievement stays achieved, tasks all reset. It's difficult to be the "hero" when what you did doesn't change anything.The problem is that if permanent changes were possible, the first players woul get to do them and everyone after would be stuck standing around with nothing to do.Time doesn't move. It's like the grounhog day movie with the same events happenening over and over.As much as I dislike phasing, it seems to be the means to an end where time does move forward allowing storyline to progress and changes to be seen as permanent from the character's perspective.So the good side is that technology exists to offer storyline mode. The drawback is that it chops up a full world into time slivers making the world feel disconnected and discouraging grouping for players who are not in the same phase of a given area.
I've often wondered if a game where players progress through theme park story content first, and then live in the sandbox world at end game would work. Players could 'retire' as farmers, or they could continue fighting the good fight in PvE or PvP content, just without the tightly scripted quest content.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I don't not need to be a hero or chosen one in a MMO. SWTOR clearly overdid this, because just being a simple Creature Handler or Dancer in SWG was just as fun.
However, I want my quests, if anything, more personalized even. I really have enough of generic quests. Sure some part of the quests can be generic. Maybe half of it. But I certainly want some sort of personal recognition. SWTOR did this WAAAY too less in my book, because whatever you do or decide, almost nothing of it ever came back to you (contrary to what Bioware promised!).
I do not need to be a hero, but I want the game to react to me and my doings. I want choices and consequences that come back to me in the game and make some different in my experience.
Oh I agree with that, but it would be easy to make quests or bit of a story for not-hero. Even easier than for hero imo.
I would say the tendency to be the hero/heroine constantly (ie, the special snowflake) in games is a trend that follows the tabletop genre almost perfectly. You could practically graph them out and lay them atop one another with virtually no distinction, starting with the sandboxes/OD&D all the way to SWTOR and the rise of the storygame while long-lived games like WoW match more up with modern D&D (including its evolution of simplifying character interactions/choices and D&DNext).
A NPC has lost her ring... even though 1,000,000 players before me had found and returned it. Is she that stupid?
Now my own character talks for me? This doesn't feel like "me" anymore; it feels like I'm turning the pages of a fricken' book.
Quests should not be personalized. Any answer to a quest giver should be a simple YES or NO.
I kind of get what you are saying here. Although i dont' see it the exact same way, i too am a little tired of being the savior of every game.
It is nice to be insignifigant, at least until the end of the leveling process, because i want to feel as if we are all forging our own legends in the game. If you are already a legend at level 1, then there's really no room for growth. Rand al'Thor was an insignifigant backwoods ant before discovering that he was the Dragon Reborn in the Wheel of Time series. He wasn't a world burner until like book 5.
I like a slow build with an epic finish. That's just me though. Others may feel differently.
... because the alternative is thus far pretty much impossible to program and maintain.
The answer is NOT 100% player to player interaction with zero NPC's or developer crafted anything because 75% of players are morons and the game would end up like Second Life.
The answer is ridiculously complex multi-layered AI but the complexities of the sytem neccessary to make it work in a MMO is.. staggering to even try and explain on this forum.
Some of it would be hard and other things would just be a different way of developing... some are even being done as we speak.
If a complex system is programmed really, really well at the beginning it should mean less work later. Notice in the quotes below the concept of "Dens"... pretty well what I described in one of my posts above except these "orcs" don't travel as far... they do however behave in a more organic non-respawning way... or in GW2 speak, actually "dynamic"
(from Game Features - Nations)
Growing a city will cause NPCs start to appear in the city, and as players open shops other NPCs will appear to run those shops. Since the mission system we offer is dynamic, it will be able to make use of the NPCs in the cities and the surrounding wilderness area for job offerings. Another important part of the wilderness is spawning areas we refer to as dens. Dens are a physical object that can be destroyed and that will stop critters from spawning out into the world. If the dens go unchecked, the area will start to crawl with critters and eventually they will start to grow in size as well as numbers. Critters offer economical value for crafting, like many other games. They provide all sorts of needed components that can be extracted once they are dead. The critters and dens can also be targeted during missions offering PvE elements from the cities and additional resources for crafters and adventurers both.
...
(from Game Features - Missions)
The generated mission system works on the concept of templates and roles. Missions are created from templates which can specify a variety of criteria. Each of our NPCs has a variety of settings that make them eligible or ineligible for certain generated mission types. This includes a mix of static and changing traits. Their Profession and Personality for example are static traits. While their Mood and Dilemma are mutating traits. Mutating traits can be altered by yourself or other players completing missions. For example, if you double cross an NPC with a Vindictive personality, they may seek revenge. Each Dilemma has a cause, and that cause can be either a player or an NPC
These guys are trying to do The Repopulation as a "sandbox done right" (AKA "hybrid".) I wish them all the success because they have some great ideas:
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
... because the alternative is thus far pretty much impossible to program and maintain.
The answer is NOT 100% player to player interaction with zero NPC's or developer crafted anything because 75% of players are morons and the game would end up like Second Life.
The answer is ridiculously complex multi-layered AI but the complexities of the sytem neccessary to make it work in a MMO is.. staggering to even try and explain on this forum.
Some of it would be hard and other things would just be a different way of developing... some are even being done as we speak.
If a complex system is programmed really, really well at the beginning it should mean less work later. Notice in the quotes below the concept of "Dens"... pretty well what I described in one of my posts above except these "orcs" don't travel as far... they do however behave in a more organic non-respawning way... or in GW2 speak, actually "dynamic"
(from Game Features - Nations)
Growing a city will cause NPCs start to appear in the city, and as players open shops other NPCs will appear to run those shops. Since the mission system we offer is dynamic, it will be able to make use of the NPCs in the cities and the surrounding wilderness area for job offerings. Another important part of the wilderness is spawning areas we refer to as dens. Dens are a physical object that can be destroyed and that will stop critters from spawning out into the world. If the dens go unchecked, the area will start to crawl with critters and eventually they will start to grow in size as well as numbers. Critters offer economical value for crafting, like many other games. They provide all sorts of needed components that can be extracted once they are dead. The critters and dens can also be targeted during missions offering PvE elements from the cities and additional resources for crafters and adventurers both.
...
(from Game Features - Missions)
The generated mission system works on the concept of templates and roles. Missions are created from templates which can specify a variety of criteria. Each of our NPCs has a variety of settings that make them eligible or ineligible for certain generated mission types. This includes a mix of static and changing traits. Their Profession and Personality for example are static traits. While their Mood and Dilemma are mutating traits. Mutating traits can be altered by yourself or other players completing missions. For example, if you double cross an NPC with a Vindictive personality, they may seek revenge. Each Dilemma has a cause, and that cause can be either a player or an NPC
These guys are trying to do The Repopulation as a "sandbox done right" (AKA "hybrid".) I wish them all the success because they have some great ideas:
What happens IRL though in that system is that Player A doesn't follow their carefully laid plans, and farms out/kills every single Den within a days walk from the town. And now, all of a sudden, there are no enemies to fight near the town and players stop coming to the town and the NPC's stop spawning and populating and you get yet another failed ghost town.
The Repopulation devs need to do some research into the history of UO and specifically their whole dynamic ecology system.
I appluad them for trying something new, but systems only work - no matter how complex or how simple - if players follow the rules.
... because the alternative is thus far pretty much impossible to program and maintain.
The answer is NOT 100% player to player interaction with zero NPC's or developer crafted anything because 75% of players are morons and the game would end up like Second Life.
The answer is ridiculously complex multi-layered AI but the complexities of the sytem neccessary to make it work in a MMO is.. staggering to even try and explain on this forum.
Some of it would be hard and other things would just be a different way of developing... some are even being done as we speak.
If a complex system is programmed really, really well at the beginning it should mean less work later. Notice in the quotes below the concept of "Dens"... pretty well what I described in one of my posts above except these "orcs" don't travel as far... they do however behave in a more organic non-respawning way... or in GW2 speak, actually "dynamic"
(from Game Features - Nations)
Growing a city will cause NPCs start to appear in the city, and as players open shops other NPCs will appear to run those shops. Since the mission system we offer is dynamic, it will be able to make use of the NPCs in the cities and the surrounding wilderness area for job offerings. Another important part of the wilderness is spawning areas we refer to as dens. Dens are a physical object that can be destroyed and that will stop critters from spawning out into the world. If the dens go unchecked, the area will start to crawl with critters and eventually they will start to grow in size as well as numbers. Critters offer economical value for crafting, like many other games. They provide all sorts of needed components that can be extracted once they are dead. The critters and dens can also be targeted during missions offering PvE elements from the cities and additional resources for crafters and adventurers both.
...
(from Game Features - Missions)
The generated mission system works on the concept of templates and roles. Missions are created from templates which can specify a variety of criteria. Each of our NPCs has a variety of settings that make them eligible or ineligible for certain generated mission types. This includes a mix of static and changing traits. Their Profession and Personality for example are static traits. While their Mood and Dilemma are mutating traits. Mutating traits can be altered by yourself or other players completing missions. For example, if you double cross an NPC with a Vindictive personality, they may seek revenge. Each Dilemma has a cause, and that cause can be either a player or an NPC
These guys are trying to do The Repopulation as a "sandbox done right" (AKA "hybrid".) I wish them all the success because they have some great ideas:
What happens IRL though in that system is that Player A doesn't follow their carefully laid plans, and farms out/kills every single Den within a days walk from the town. And now, all of a sudden, there are no enemies to fight near the town and players stop coming to the town and the NPC's stop spawning and populating and you get yet another failed ghost town.
The Repopulation devs need to do some research into the history of UO and specifically their whole dynamic ecology system.
I appluad them for trying something new, but systems only work - no matter how complex or how simple - if players follow the rules.
I hear you but let me point out two things: these are player created towns with shops, houses etc. owned by players and once they reach a certain size, neutral structures such as cloning facilities (player respawns) etc. And many resources are not mob-dependent. Those will stil be there.
Also, dens themselves spawn producing different mobs (semi random types) in other nearby locations. They'll be re-spawning dens for game play purposes instead of individual mobs. How they manage it will be the key in maintaining a replenishing interesting ecology balanced against the types of artificial game mechanics most MMOs use now.
I think these guys have indeed done their homework.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
What happens IRL though in that system is that Player A doesn't follow their carefully laid plans, and farms out/kills every single Den within a days walk from the town. And now, all of a sudden, there are no enemies to fight near the town and players stop coming to the town and the NPC's stop spawning and populating and you get yet another failed ghost town.
The Repopulation devs need to do some research into the history of UO and specifically their whole dynamic ecology system.
I appluad them for trying something new, but systems only work - no matter how complex or how simple - if players follow the rules.
Well actually UO ecology system was not even tried to be saved, at least not for long anyway. Unless my memory fails me, ecology system failed very fast (no animals, mobs especially weaker ones because players slaughtered them way too fast than anticipated) and because it needed to be "fixed" fast. It was replaced with standard spawn system.
Now wonder 'what if' someone would try to adjust and change this system knowing how players behave?
It was one try and scrapped fast. Imho not enough to know that idea is impossible to implement.
My favorite is when I get called a Hero endlessly and cheered by everyone around me like I'm some kind of god.
Looking back at the history of MMOs, they really have become pathetic these days.
i fell like this more and more lately. Is it because we now have ribbons and trophys for just showing up to stuff that i feel like this? could be my age showing.
i dont like the way things are heading but i dont have 300 mil bucks to do anything about it. so ill just have to wait in the shadows till someone with 300 mil and some fucking balls shows up and makes that dare to be great mmo.
... because the alternative is thus far pretty much impossible to program and maintain.
The answer is NOT 100% player to player interaction with zero NPC's or developer crafted anything because 75% of players are morons and the game would end up like Second Life.
The answer is ridiculously complex multi-layered AI but the complexities of the sytem neccessary to make it work in a MMO is.. staggering to even try and explain on this forum.
Some of it would be hard and other things would just be a different way of developing... some are even being done as we speak.
If a complex system is programmed really, really well at the beginning it should mean less work later. Notice in the quotes below the concept of "Dens"... pretty well what I described in one of my posts above except these "orcs" don't travel as far... they do however behave in a more organic non-respawning way... or in GW2 speak, actually "dynamic"
(from Game Features - Nations)
Growing a city will cause NPCs start to appear in the city, and as players open shops other NPCs will appear to run those shops. Since the mission system we offer is dynamic, it will be able to make use of the NPCs in the cities and the surrounding wilderness area for job offerings. Another important part of the wilderness is spawning areas we refer to as dens. Dens are a physical object that can be destroyed and that will stop critters from spawning out into the world. If the dens go unchecked, the area will start to crawl with critters and eventually they will start to grow in size as well as numbers. Critters offer economical value for crafting, like many other games. They provide all sorts of needed components that can be extracted once they are dead. The critters and dens can also be targeted during missions offering PvE elements from the cities and additional resources for crafters and adventurers both.
...
(from Game Features - Missions)
The generated mission system works on the concept of templates and roles. Missions are created from templates which can specify a variety of criteria. Each of our NPCs has a variety of settings that make them eligible or ineligible for certain generated mission types. This includes a mix of static and changing traits. Their Profession and Personality for example are static traits. While their Mood and Dilemma are mutating traits. Mutating traits can be altered by yourself or other players completing missions. For example, if you double cross an NPC with a Vindictive personality, they may seek revenge. Each Dilemma has a cause, and that cause can be either a player or an NPC
These guys are trying to do The Repopulation as a "sandbox done right" (AKA "hybrid".) I wish them all the success because they have some great ideas:
What happens IRL though in that system is that Player A doesn't follow their carefully laid plans, and farms out/kills every single Den within a days walk from the town. And now, all of a sudden, there are no enemies to fight near the town and players stop coming to the town and the NPC's stop spawning and populating and you get yet another failed ghost town.
The Repopulation devs need to do some research into the history of UO and specifically their whole dynamic ecology system.
I appluad them for trying something new, but systems only work - no matter how complex or how simple - if players follow the rules.
And if they dont follow the rules then they will get punished, that is how systems work. Any type of system. Positive and negative feedback system.
Comments
Yeah, pretty much in the next sentence he describes instancing as a way to deal with that.
For the most part I choose to live with or ignore the absurdity, and accept that when I leave the instance after killing the troll king the game world will still be infested with trolls who will carry on like nothing has changed.
http://thewordiz.wordpress.com/
in WoW game tells to player that he should be happy now.
in RPG your own decisions makes you feel happy.
Let's internet
... because the alternative is thus far pretty much impossible to program and maintain.
The answer is NOT 100% player to player interaction with zero NPC's or developer crafted anything because 75% of players are morons and the game would end up like Second Life.
The answer is ridiculously complex multi-layered AI but the complexities of the sytem neccessary to make it work in a MMO is.. staggering to even try and explain on this forum.
It was never "you" or you're doing something wrong.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Im just playing this unnamed game,theres lots of sand in the box and theres lots of quests also and i mean like alot,anyways,Im feeling quite heroic there,since im not killig that girl because she was so good looking,i didnt kill that grand father because i felt that his wife would be sad,i didnt kill that dog because it felt wrong etc..
i didnt care about rewards ,i just did what i felt is right.
Theres plenty of ways.
Let's internet
What game would that be?
If anything, I think we're reached a point where it's impossible for devs to keep up with the stories they want to see unfold. Take WoW for example: there's a war breaking out between the Horde and the Alliance. How much of that do you actually see in the world? It took them months to create a single scenario around a single battle. The rest of the world is completely unchanged. There simply isn't enough time and money to manually update the world around every plotline in progress. Because the stories they want to tell are not a part of the mechanics of the game they have created, every single event has to be manually redrawn. It's horribly inefficient.
As an experiment, try designing some dynamic plot lines on paper. Completely ignore the technical details of how it would happen and focus on what would actually happen for the player. Create a pool of resources for the system to pull from, and then walk through the scenarios. Do a story board kind of thing. The number of options you have to have available will escalate quickly because the system will not be intelligent enough to create those options on the fly like a person would. Once you've done that, think about scaling the process up for an entire game. The source options for a small town are not going to be the same source options for a large city and they won't work for the bandit camp either.
I do not write game software, but I do write business software, and one of the things I've done is simulations. One thing simulators have going for them is that they tend to simplify the processes involved, and the things they simulate are repetitive. That's the advantage of using them, instead of waiting for thousands of calls to come in, you can model it using SimPy and have an idea of what those thousands of calls are going to do in a couple seconds. If the behaviors are not repetitive, the simulation doesn't work. You have to write a new set of rules for each stage of the simulation. I can see how this might be possible in a game environment, but I can also see how easy it would be to bork the whole thing with a player doing something unexpected. I can see how much work that would be in a game because the behaviors being modeled are more complex than what usually get modeled too. The desirable process is a simple model that yields complex results. In a game, you would have a complex model that would yield complex results. You might have a complex model that yields simple results...who knows. I don't think anyone is doing this so it's hard to say. Anyway, I think the systems required would be an order of magnitude harder to produce than a quest engine, and you'd still have to produce at least the same amount of content to feed into the engine so that it can feed the content to the players.
Even a "Choose Your Own Adventure" style system escalates quickly. I thought this would have been awesome for SWToR, but after I worked out some possible story branches, I realized how much additional work it would be to give each class two options at a couple different points in the story line. It was both ridiculous and disappointing. If the story lines didn't merge back together quickly, you went from doubling the amount of content to have eight or ten times the content after a few choices.
It comes down to the scale of what you're doing and whether it relates to quest type story content. If you don't have the story dependency, it becomes a lot more possible. Players might come across a town that is being attacked by zombies. The zombies seem to be organized and they're coming from a cave, so the players can go to the cave and realize the source of the zombies is an intelligent zombie that once killed, makes the rest of the zombies easy to kill. While the town is free of the zombies, prices in the town go down, more resources become available for sale, the town prospers. If the players move on, eventually the zombies return because they like the cave and eventually the town is back to its original sad state. This whole thing is dynamic, depending on the players, but it's also repetitive (cyclical), making it possible. It's a far cry from actually being truly dynamic or a simulation though. For one, it's one, tiny part of a game world. All of the rules for that one town won't work in the next town, or the city across the continent. Every scenario would have its own rules and its own scripts. It's probably exponentially easier to make a bunch of cr@ppy quests, sell 2 million copies of your game and then write another one.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Haha, you know you are talking about RPGs, right? Quests have ALWAYS been personalized, back to the pencil and paper versions of these games. *sigh*
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
Half yes half no.
I don't not need to be a hero or chosen one in a MMO. SWTOR clearly overdid this, because just being a simple Creature Handler or Dancer in SWG was just as fun.
However, I want my quests, if anything, more personalized even. I really have enough of generic quests. Sure some part of the quests can be generic. Maybe half of it. But I certainly want some sort of personal recognition. SWTOR did this WAAAY too less in my book, because whatever you do or decide, almost nothing of it ever came back to you (contrary to what Bioware promised!).
I do not need to be a hero, but I want the game to react to me and my doings. I want choices and consequences that come back to me in the game and make some different in my experience.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I already did, but you cleverly left it out of your quote.
MMOs will never be good singleplayer games. The strength of an MMO comes from the story generated by the players.
The main issue I see with storyline gameplay in MMORPGs is that the world is completely static. Nothing stays dead. No achievement stays achieved, tasks all reset. It's difficult to be the "hero" when what you did doesn't change anything.
The problem is that if permanent changes were possible, the first players woul get to do them and everyone after would be stuck standing around with nothing to do.
Time doesn't move. It's like the grounhog day movie with the same events happenening over and over.
As much as I dislike phasing, it seems to be the means to an end where time does move forward allowing storyline to progress and changes to be seen as permanent from the character's perspective.
So the good side is that technology exists to offer storyline mode. The drawback is that it chops up a full world into time slivers making the world feel disconnected and discouraging grouping for players who are not in the same phase of a given area.
My favorite is when I get called a Hero endlessly and cheered by everyone around me like I'm some kind of god.
Looking back at the history of MMOs, they really have become pathetic these days.
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." - Noam Chomsky
I've often wondered if a game where players progress through theme park story content first, and then live in the sandbox world at end game would work. Players could 'retire' as farmers, or they could continue fighting the good fight in PvE or PvP content, just without the tightly scripted quest content.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Oh I agree with that, but it would be easy to make quests or bit of a story for not-hero. Even easier than for hero imo.
I would say the tendency to be the hero/heroine constantly (ie, the special snowflake) in games is a trend that follows the tabletop genre almost perfectly. You could practically graph them out and lay them atop one another with virtually no distinction, starting with the sandboxes/OD&D all the way to SWTOR and the rise of the storygame while long-lived games like WoW match more up with modern D&D (including its evolution of simplifying character interactions/choices and D&DNext).
I wouldn't find any of this surprising, really.
I kind of get what you are saying here. Although i dont' see it the exact same way, i too am a little tired of being the savior of every game.
It is nice to be insignifigant, at least until the end of the leveling process, because i want to feel as if we are all forging our own legends in the game. If you are already a legend at level 1, then there's really no room for growth. Rand al'Thor was an insignifigant backwoods ant before discovering that he was the Dragon Reborn in the Wheel of Time series. He wasn't a world burner until like book 5.
I like a slow build with an epic finish. That's just me though. Others may feel differently.
Some of it would be hard and other things would just be a different way of developing... some are even being done as we speak.
If a complex system is programmed really, really well at the beginning it should mean less work later. Notice in the quotes below the concept of "Dens"... pretty well what I described in one of my posts above except these "orcs" don't travel as far... they do however behave in a more organic non-respawning way... or in GW2 speak, actually "dynamic"
(from Game Features - Nations)
Growing a city will cause NPCs start to appear in the city, and as players open shops other NPCs will appear to run those shops. Since the mission system we offer is dynamic, it will be able to make use of the NPCs in the cities and the surrounding wilderness area for job offerings. Another important part of the wilderness is spawning areas we refer to as dens. Dens are a physical object that can be destroyed and that will stop critters from spawning out into the world. If the dens go unchecked, the area will start to crawl with critters and eventually they will start to grow in size as well as numbers. Critters offer economical value for crafting, like many other games. They provide all sorts of needed components that can be extracted once they are dead. The critters and dens can also be targeted during missions offering PvE elements from the cities and additional resources for crafters and adventurers both.
...
(from Game Features - Missions)
The generated mission system works on the concept of templates and roles. Missions are created from templates which can specify a variety of criteria. Each of our NPCs has a variety of settings that make them eligible or ineligible for certain generated mission types. This includes a mix of static and changing traits. Their Profession and Personality for example are static traits. While their Mood and Dilemma are mutating traits. Mutating traits can be altered by yourself or other players completing missions. For example, if you double cross an NPC with a Vindictive personality, they may seek revenge. Each Dilemma has a cause, and that cause can be either a player or an NPC
These guys are trying to do The Repopulation as a "sandbox done right" (AKA "hybrid".) I wish them all the success because they have some great ideas:
http://www.therepopulation.com/index.php
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
What happens IRL though in that system is that Player A doesn't follow their carefully laid plans, and farms out/kills every single Den within a days walk from the town. And now, all of a sudden, there are no enemies to fight near the town and players stop coming to the town and the NPC's stop spawning and populating and you get yet another failed ghost town.
The Repopulation devs need to do some research into the history of UO and specifically their whole dynamic ecology system.
I appluad them for trying something new, but systems only work - no matter how complex or how simple - if players follow the rules.
I hear you but let me point out two things: these are player created towns with shops, houses etc. owned by players and once they reach a certain size, neutral structures such as cloning facilities (player respawns) etc. And many resources are not mob-dependent. Those will stil be there.
Also, dens themselves spawn producing different mobs (semi random types) in other nearby locations. They'll be re-spawning dens for game play purposes instead of individual mobs. How they manage it will be the key in maintaining a replenishing interesting ecology balanced against the types of artificial game mechanics most MMOs use now.
I think these guys have indeed done their homework.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Well actually UO ecology system was not even tried to be saved, at least not for long anyway. Unless my memory fails me, ecology system failed very fast (no animals, mobs especially weaker ones because players slaughtered them way too fast than anticipated) and because it needed to be "fixed" fast. It was replaced with standard spawn system.
Now wonder 'what if' someone would try to adjust and change this system knowing how players behave?
It was one try and scrapped fast. Imho not enough to know that idea is impossible to implement.
I agree with you OP and that is why I have a hard time getting immersed in quest driven, story based MMORPGs.
So you want me to kill this bad ass NPC, even though I know he has been killed by a thousands of other players before me in the same "world"?
Sorry but no. Single player quests in MMORPGs is a big fail.
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i fell like this more and more lately. Is it because we now have ribbons and trophys for just showing up to stuff that i feel like this? could be my age showing.
i dont like the way things are heading but i dont have 300 mil bucks to do anything about it. so ill just have to wait in the shadows till someone with 300 mil and some fucking balls shows up and makes that dare to be great mmo.
And if they dont follow the rules then they will get punished, that is how systems work. Any type of system. Positive and negative feedback system.
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