Ultima Online, Warhammer, Plane Shift, Dungeon Siege, Neverwinter Nights etc.. More specifically online games, online worlds. All games for D&D gamers or hardcore 120+ hour game players. Games that require you to build up armor and weapons and partake on quests in online gaming worlds or journeys via LAN/tcp parties. Enter the casual gamer...Quake III, RTCW, Unreal Tournament, Unreal XMP, Battlefield 1942, Countrestrike All pick-up and go killing sprees where the gamer shoots anyone not on their team or anyone at all. Sounds like the wild creatures in the RPGs. Why not make a simpler client designed to host casual players as the wild beasts/creatures in a game? The simple AI for them couldn''t compare to a human controller. Strip the Client of the complex GUI and gut the inventory to bind simple weapons to the numeric pad. When the client connects to a server, it would spawn the lower classes instead of joining in the game/world. Casual players would simply log on, respawn as a current beast (that just died) superceding the AI (infact, respawn using the abstract factory pattern). Do you think this would create the ultimate game? James

quote: Original post by NatasDM
Do you think this would create the ultimate game?

No. There is no ultimate game . But the idea has some appeal, I think Planetside follows a similar train of thought (of uniting FPS and MMO). Tribes did something roughly alike and was quite successful.

I''m not sure if the animal idea will work that well. For me the most interesting part of massive online shooters is the team aspect or following some greater strategic goal. As an animal there would usually not be such a thing, and the gameplay might become dull very fast. There needs to be a goal and a motivation to play these creatures, or no one will do it.


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There are only 10 kinds of people: those that understand binary and those that don''t.

Hahaha, what an awesome idea. Farm out bored people to replace your AI... I love it. A couple of thoughts on it:

Uno

People wouldn't (at least, I wouldn't) want to pay a monthly charge to be the fodder for real characters. If you didn't charge them monthly, this may have a negative effect on the server bandwidth / network performance, without a corresponding influx of money to provide for better hardware. Then again, a lot of these MMORPGs are probably making bank anyway and could cover the cost regardless.

Dos

What methods could be used to prevent fodder players from straying too far from the desired bounds of their controlled NPC. In other words, what's your suggestions for stopping all of the players controlling the wolves from running out of the forest and taking off somewhere? Maybe this is something that shouldn't be prevented. It would be interesting to have a more unpredictable hunted populace.

One idea for controlling the hunted characters is something like what controls them in the real world - make the boundries more dangerous to them. Maybe wolves would need to find other small animals to eat within the forest every so often to stay alive, and if they strayed from the forest, their food supply would be gone and they would die naturally.

Tres

What (besides the obvious appeal of beating down people who have spent hours building their character) is offered to the fodder players to keep them coming back?

Something that comes to mind is a scoreboard of sorts that keeps track of how well a fodder-player is doing at killing other characters during his current session. The better he does, the more choices he has for the respawn. A character who has been doing really well against other players might graduate to playing the giant or dragon that the higher level players fight against. The scoreboard could be cleared on logout or on some other short interval allow other fodder-players a chance and getting the higher level ones, too.

Edit @grbrg:

quote: But the idea has some appeal, I think Planetside follows a similar train of thought (of uniting FPS and MMO).

True, but this is a little bit different... this would be like having the traditional MMORPG element alongside the normal Planetside players.

quote: For me the most interesting part of massive online shooters is the team aspect or following some greater strategic goal. As an animal there would usually not be such a thing, and the gameplay might become dull very fast. There needs to be a goal and a motivation to play these creatures, or no one will do it.

I agree about the motivation - but who's to say that there won't be a teamplay element present? You could group certain animals in a common area together on a team automatically and give them some sort of an appropriate goal to keep them occupied when there aren't other players around. This is a little bit tougher, though, when you get into the fact that they're ANIMALS, as you don't want their behavior to seem unrealistic to the other players.

You could setup certain goals between the breeds of fodder players, though. It would be neat to walk in as a regular player character to do some hunting and see a group of wolves trying to catch a deer.

[edited by - SantaClaws on February 24, 2004 4:51:10 PM]

Maybe you could give the "critter" players a tiered goalset, with "karma" rewards and preogressive reincarnation.

For instance, when you log on, you''re a rat. A rat''s objective is to find a human corpse and chew on it. If you get in ten seconds of chewing, you''ve met your goal. So you spawn in, get killed by some damn hero, rspawn, find a corpse, get eight seconds of chewing in, get killed by a wolf, respawn, and get your last two seconds of chewing done. next time you die, you get to respawn as a snake. A snake has to eat a dead rat. You manage that, and "wolf" is added to your respawn options. If you manage, as a wolf, to either kill three rats or two snakes or one human, you get to come back as a wild pig. Wild pigs have to stay alive for three minutes at a stretch, and then you get access to "bear". Bears have to kill a human - hero or NPC - to get clearance for "troll". Trolls have to kill a hero of at least level 5 to continue.

"Lower" animals would have needs that don''t necessarily involve fighting, and so they''ll run from heroes. "Higher" animals can either fight heroes or else ignore them and try to find food or whatever. "Monster" animals have got to take it to the players. Maybe player trolls would hang out together to increase their chances of killing a player that comes by. A player dragon might have to kill a character of every class before he could graduate to "giant" or "demon".

This is a really neat idea. You might even have it be something that players could do in their "spare time", or tie it to the levelling system. "I''m a level 48 Paladin with a ''Gryphon'' rating." Get a little Jekyll/Hyde in there.

This is a really neat idea!

Natas, I think the system you describe is also a very interesting idea. However, I think you could go through such a system way too quickly, and so after say a month, the player would be bored, since he got all the animals/monsters and there''s nothing left to do.

Perhaps a modification may be to give more detail to each one. For instance, give a choice of a couple small animals from which the player can choose to start. As a rat you must get to Level 20, eat so many , and several other tasks. Now that you''ve completed the rat''s goals, you gain access to the snake, as you said.

Then maybe instead of having a linear path through all the creatures, you could gain access to others by completing a small set of specific others. For instance, in order to gain access to the Ogre, you must have completed the Crocodile, Imp, and Giant. Perhaps a few special ones can only be accessed by completing a list (whether made known to the player or not) of specific, difficult tasks.

I think there are countless ways this idea of a player taking over the AI could be implemented, and in a variety of different types of games too!

I was talking about this with someone that is exactly the type of person that we're talking about. He said he liked the idea a lot and would play it if someone did it, but his comment on the rat idea is that he wouldn't want to play it because with other games that he could play let him get right into the action, and he wouldn't want to spend time running around chewing on bodies. While I'm sure there are exceptions, I think that statement would hold true for a large majority of the people something like this would target.

The thing to keep in mind is that with something like this, you're targeting the people who don't really want to or don't really have time to spend their play time doing tedious things - they just want to get into the action, and have some quick fun. I do think that it's important to make them work their way up the ladder to the better NPC's, but the key is to find a way to do it that allows them to have fun the whole way.

One thing I was thinking of was that it might be better to think of it as coming up with a bunch of different little game types that someone would have fun playing, and then figure out what animals or NPCs would work well for that. These games would be the equivalent of mini-games in other titles, or multiplayer game types in a lot of FPS games. The hard part is finding a way to fit it into the realm of what the NPCs can do. But, for the example I gave before of the wolves and the deer... if you think of this from an NPC standpoint, who the hell would ever want to play a deer? Mmm... I get to walk around nibbling grass. Exciting . But if you think of it as a game browser type of thing - the players would see something like "tag" or "hunt", and think - "Hey, that's fun." Being the deer (the character that is "it") isn't a bad thing anymore. You could determine score by who could stay alive as the deer the longest during the "game".

The problem that arises from that is how to tie something like that into continued interaction with the regular player characters (especially since that is the entire point of the system). It might be better to make it so that a fodder player is never playing a helpless animal. Even when they start off low, it could be better if they are always a predator of some sort - such as a wolf.

A game that comes to mind when I think about this is True Crime (or GTA3 to a lesser extent). While you had a primary goal of getting from one place to another to complete your missions, there were also side things you could do along the way - stop a crime in progress, go to the shooting range, etc. If you made sure the fodder player always had something fun to do (such as the things you mentioned, like fighting other fodder characters or killing a certain number of creatures within a certain amount of time) for points, then you could just make it so that fighting a player would give them a significant enough amount of points or other reward to make it worth their while to stop and attack the player instead.

You could treat this something like the interface for a lot of the racing games out there... there are different types of races and beating them gives you points to purchase additional vehicles, and beating certain sections of or all of the challenges in a group allows you to progress on to harder challenges within that group. You could do the same thing with this, and divide the different NPCs into different types of games that are tied to the type of creature they are. So things like rats and such would be classified in the stealth/collection groups of game, where the games involve trying to get a certain number of something or avoid being detected by things, etc. Passing challenges there would allow them to use better creatures of a similar class, whereas passing challenges in the predator group would allow them to progress to better predators. This way you don't force people to do things they're not enjoying, but you don't stop people who want to from doing it.

Which brings up another question - who wins in a situation like this? It's not fun for either person to die. In most RPGs, the creatures the player fights don't beat them very much... I don't think that making it so the player dies a lot more is moving ahead, but I don't think that it would be fun for a fodder player to die constantly, unless there was another gain they got out of it. Maybe something like the longer they could survive and make it harder for the normal player, the more points they would get from the fight.

[edited by - SantaClaws on February 24, 2004 6:10:53 PM]

Al excellent observations, Santa. Your parallel between critter tasks and FPS play types is expecially elucidating. How about this:

When you log on in "critter mode" you are taken to a "lounge" of sorts. Here, you can chat with other "critters", and decide what to do. If you want to just sign in as one of the monsters you''ve unlocked and start trouble for the players, then go for it, but there are a number of "playtypes" that you can choose from for multiplayer fun. Scores are kept both for individual games (for competitive purposes) and associated with players'' profiles (these scores determine which critters you can inhabit in-game).

You could play "deer tag", where one player is the deer and all the others are wolves. The wolves work together to catch the deer, and the deer runs like hell from the wolves. The deer gets points based on how long he stays alive, and the wolf that actually brings him down gets to be the deer. variations for more advanced players might include "fox tag", "troll tag", or "dragon tag", or whatever.

Some straight-up deathmatch systems, maybe as belligerent orcs or territorial tigers, could be arranged. A "capture the flag" system with rats trying to steal food from one another would be feasible. Maybe a race among scavenging jackals to reach a dead ogre first, or a one-on-one duel between two vicious kung-fu chimpanzees.

With some thought, I''m sure you can come up with scores of mini-games. It would be like Mario Party. The big trick, though, would be to manage to have these "mini-games" take place in the actual game world. Your kung-fu chimps might be distracted from their kumate by an XP-farming ranger, and have to team up to whip his bow-plucking ass. Maybe the deer would run away from the wolves and find himself face to face with an archer, or stumble onto a group of hungry jackals that were too slow to get a meal after the race. Players could go looking for orc battles so they could wade in and rack up some good experience (killing PC orcs would obviously be more profitable than chopping their robotic brethren).

It might be better to keep most or all of these mini-games out of the gameworld, and just have "rampage mode" involve interaction with role-players. That''s the sort of decision an individual designer would have to make for himself.

Great ideas, Iron Chef. I never thought of the possibility of the players going out to look for the groups of orcs in battle to take them out... that could become a really cool situation. The example of the deer running into the hungry jackals leftover from the last race would be great to see, as well.

The side effect of drawing in more people into these games is you'd end up seeing a much more realistic world as a regular player character. Taking the first example of your post, you could be walking along in a dungeon and see several (non-threatening) rats fighting over a piece of food in the corner and then see them scatter when they notice you nearby.

The idea of the games happening in the world is the best idea, I think... as long as you designed the games to appear like they're something happening naturally in the world, as opposed to people playing games. I think it's very important to make the fact that there are players controlling the NPCs as undetectable as possible, so even though they may know which are players by some other means (or by having played as them themselves), it's not readily obvious by a hard difference in the game world.

On the topic of giving players more experience for killing player-controlled Orcs: a good way to inform the player of this without breaking the immersiveness would be to make sure that the fodder players control versions of the creatures that would naturally give more experience in an RPG world. A dire wolf instead of a normal wolf, for instance, or a stronger tribe of orcs, or a dragon instead of a wyrm. Hmm, making dragons player controlled only would also offer the side effect of making dragons more rare, legendary, and threatening than a normal automatically respawning NPC dragon.

I think it would also be nice to have a system so that the fodder players are in the world as much as possible between "mini-games", so as to give more of an opportunity for a player character to come across them. Drawing again from the example of True Crime, maybe the fodder players would have to go to certain locations in the world to play the mini-games. So a player might decide to spawn in as a wolf, and then would lope along to the area of the forest where the deer tag mini-game is located, at which point they would be moved into a "lobby" type system. The areas would only be reachable by fodder players, so a normal player character would never see a creature just disappear from view or spawn out of nowhere.

The more I think about this the more I like this idea. I think a game like this would be really fun to play even independent of the MMORPG integration aspect of it.

[edited by - SantaClaws on February 24, 2004 7:11:08 PM]

quote: Original post by SantaClaws The more I think about this the more I like this idea. I think a game like this would be really fun to play even independent of the MMORPG integration aspect of it.

The ideas sound really better and better to me. I really like the different game modes merged into one game world. But my concern is for the integration into an MMORPG. To give the "normal" players the impression of a wild life the animal players would have to play along the rules of the race they currently inhabit. But I really doubt that all (or even the majority) of the players would do that.

What I fear is a group of rat-players teaming up and hunting a wolf or other things like that. Animals usually do not behave like that, and the normal player might observe such a weird behavior and be confused by it. If this concept is for people who usually play FPSs I fear they would not like to play a "role" of an animal and stay in that role. Don''t you have similar concerns?

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There are only 10 kinds of people: those that understand binary and those that don''t.

Those are very reasonable concerns, but I think clever game design might be able to thwart the non-role-playing interests of casual players.

Just use the scoring system to "train" players into certain modes of behavior. After all, every FPS player wants to rack up maximum points so that they can type "PWN3D!!!11" into the "chat" line. So, make it impossible for rats to hurt wolves in any meaningful way, and give them points for avoiding them. They''ll run from wolves, which will keep them in character, and they''ll get points, which will keep them happy and motivated. Wolves get points for killing rats, and they also get points for spending time with other wolves, so you get hunting and flocking behavior, and if you give them points for killing people, and a group of ten wolves is out looking for rats and foxes together when they come upon a hero, they might get up the nerve to attack him, which would earn them points all around and seriously inconvenience the player, but all within the rules of role-playing.

If you''re willing to go nuts with the math, then you can probably work out fairly sophisticated behaviors. Let wolves in a pack gain points at the rate of n per second, where n is the number of wolves in the pack, but if n>10, then they gain points at the rate of 100/n per second. So no more than ten points per second can be given out per wolf, and that peaks at ten wolves. They''ll be inclined to stay in groups of ten or so, and if the group gets too big, it''ll be more beneficial for them to split into smaller groups, so it''ll be rare for a wolfpack to be bigger than ten or twelve wolves.

I think that math might actually be a little off, since I think a group of fifteen would be more beneficial than a group of five, and so bigger groups would stay viable longer, but a group of twenty would definitely be better off as two groups of ten. You get the drift. It''s just an example.

If you use systems like this to govern the scoring and benefit of PC critters, then everyone is faced with a unique challenge and competing interests, which will contribute to gameplay and to roleplay alike.