I didn't read all the posts since the OP, but I've always thought a good experiment to try would be have a game world with a clear story-based objective for all characters. Each time the objective was reached the game world would reset.

Example being a MMORPG based on the Tolkien universe.

You'd set up the whole ring saga at an accelerated pace. All of the main plot characters would be AI/DM controlled like Frodo, Sauron, and so on. However most everyone else would be a player character.

The objective, if you play as "good" then its to hold off the forces of evil and give frodo a chance to destroy the ring. If you play as "evil", then its to capture the ring and use it to destroy everything. If you died, then you would take control of another one of your characters or one of the minions of either side.

Perhaps every month or so the story would come to an end, with either good or evil "winning". The world would either be safe or destroyed.

At the conclusion of the cycle, honors would be given to important characters on both sides. Rewards in the form of experience, weapons, armor, and items would be awarded to help in the next cycle, all of which would be based on your performance and how you aided (or hindered depending) the progress of the Ring. The world would be reset to its starting point, a peaceful world before anything happened.

However, character stats and inventory would not reset by the time shift. Players could/would be rewarded for heroic deed and honorable self sacrifice, which might help ease the blow of perm-death. Any characters that died during that cycle would be revived and allowed to reenter the game world.

The DMs could even decide to have frodo fail his quest, and the ring could fall into the hands of a player-character. And then they would basically have the fate of world in their hands. The ultimate decision of trying to get the ring to Mt. Doom to destroy it, or use the ring to rule the world and unleash its awesome power.

There would be lots of combat, a huge world to explore, but most of it would be backed by a story. A story that would repeat itself, but would evolve and end differently each time.

I don't know. It always seemed like a good, yet complex and expensive, idea to me.

Kyrat,

Your idea is somewhat similiar to the "gaming seasons" concept that I mentioned earlier. Although the idea of switching characters mid-game if your avatar dies is a new perspective on MMO gameplay. It might make the pace of the game more enticing but I don't know if hardcore RPG and MMORPG fans would like it because half the game is character building, which would be nullified by this gameplay element.

In general though, I think it would be interesting to strive for a final outcome in the game world during each gaming season that unifies and brings closure to the story. As I mentioned, a gaming season can be a couple weeks, a few months, or even a year. I also think that character building for this type of MMO approach could be approached in two ways. The first approach would allow the players to maintain there stats and inventory between seasons. This would likely require that the story changes between each season though. The second approach would reset all player stats and inventory after each season. This would be more ideal for replayed seasons. In this case the development of "real skills" and strategies would be more important than the acquisition of "in-game skills" and inventory. Players who already played through a season once could play through the same season again, but with a different character and a different agenda. The advantage that veterans will have over other players won't be their tediously obtained inventory or in-game skills but their knowledge of how the season's story usually progresses, familiarity with the game world, and an understanding of pivotal battles, encounters, alliances etc.

Personally, I believe that players should be rewarded for their "real skills", wits, and strategy, not their ability to endure tedious tasks for hours on end to develop in-game skills and inventory. By real skills, I mean the player's ability to master the game mechanics and battle system of the game as opposed to in-game skills, which are skills that the character acquires.

I think this "gaming seasons" concept might have some good potential so I might start a thread just on this subject.

Too many assumptions of what an MMORPG "is."

So, lets use this context. A game where you play with lots of other players, and you play a role.

That is all.

In this context, nothing has to be done a certain way. The fact that certain games do do things a certain way is irrelevant. How should things be done?

There is no MMORPG that has what I envision. None. Providing examples of MMO's that have "tried" and failed is a fallacy - I've checked them out. They aren't doing what I'm talking about.

This, for example (Too lazy to quote):

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
It doesnt mean you cant have an overall plot -- developement of the worldstate, a storyline to give the players some sense of 'WORLD' instaed of just a bunch of locations to do things and advance the character/gain more stuff.



Most MMORPGs do have exactly that. It just tends to get disregarded because nobody cares.

I wasn't the anonymous poster, but this is what I'm talking about. I doubt that if an MMORPG gave the players a sense of "WORLD" it would get disregarded. They do give a bunch of locations and things to do. Obviously, it's foolish to state that most MMORPG's give the player a sense of world and no one cares, since it's evident that the AP wasn't posting about a run of the mill feature. Obviously, the AP isn't talking about the same feature - his/her statement implies that giving a sense of 'WORLD' is not done by MMORPG's - therein, something that is done by RPG's isn't a valid example.

To that end, I do have some topical things to say.

I've been brainstorming ideas, and I'm figuring out ways that a game can meet my ideals. Depending on whether or not I'm lazy, I might post some stuff here.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster 1)Yes it would impress people more than the 24/7 mannekins that most NPCs are these days. Especially with the ability to make the NPC vary in appearance as the players do (they can be made to fit the role, and then when they are no longer relevant or their presence would be odd [HEY I KILLED HIM LAST WEEK!!!]) There is also only so much real estate in towns and having a magnitude more 'quests' would soon make for quite a crowd of 'prop' NPCs standing around.

How does this really think this would help 'purpose in RPGs'? Don't just say "it would impress people" because that isn't really relevant here. There are 101 ways to impress players but that's not the same as reducing the aimlessness that the original poster talked about.

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2)Think of the possible permutations of just 20 NPC factors (binary option to simplify this example) -- that would be over a million combinations. And Im not talking about some half-assed script system here, the scripts for each factor would have different behaviors depending on other factor present (a system of scripts building the NPCs behavior script dynamicly would eliminate running the validation/configuration logic every time). Hardly a tiny increase of variation.

That's very vague. 'Permutations of factors'? If you've got some great ideas for how this would work, can you share them?

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1) Its the game companies who dont care (its costs them $$$ and their systems werent designed to facilitate such things). It gets disreguarded by the players currently because of the limitations of the existing games (camping, endless harvesting, grind patterns, static maps/spawns/quests).

You're drifting off the point. You first implied that games didn't have these things, but they do, so now you're saying that players disregard them due to the other limitations. Can you explain your logic here? Surely if plot is more interesting than (for example) endless harvesting, why do players ignore plot to focus on harvesting? What you call a limitation, others call reusable content. And players lap it up. They could buy several new games and enjoy different plots and stories instead of paying a fee each month, but instead they choose to harvest and grind. Maybe it's not as boring for most people as it is for you.

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2) Constant staged events would help. Some 'significant' mass quest that if solved moves the plot one way and if failed may be repeated (with some differences). Remember the system I am talking about allows alot of things to be changed/placed/removed/adjusted on a daily basis (and pretested to prevent screwups).

The 'system' you have talked about is vague and means little without concrete detail. It's all very well saying what you'd like to see in a game but more often than not it's impractical given financial and time resources. Constant staged events for example require some significant degree of supervision. Pretesting events as well as executing them doubles the amount of effort involved.

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3) Playing part in a 'assault' on the evil mages castle that was threatening X and trashing the place and killing the evil one (and getting unique items/loot as proof of their involvement/exploits). The world changes and they played their part. The GMs then come up with another sequence (something completely different) that threatens the world (or parts of it).

So, you want GMs to come up with this sort of thing daily? 365 castles or something similar erected and conquered each year? And yet people are still to think that this really gives them a purpose in the game?

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Its sad that you think that WW2 consisted of a bunch of conscripts herded into machinegunfire.

Are you suggesting this didn't happen?

due to its market culture ,MMORPGs should be designed based on endless-history fact.
but the major problem with current MMORPGs is the lack of interesting history.
in my oponion the age of haveing-history-in-hand-then-build-the-game is over!
future MMORPGs should be designed the way that the players themselves make histories of the game.

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Original post by Nytehauq This starts off with a tangent about combat - but it gets where it's going :) A thought has just occured to me. In the PS2 game Devil May Cry 3, you level up different fighting styles by acquiring style points. You get style points for defeating enemies. The more complex and daring the moves you perform, the more style points you gain. The more mundane and repetetive your moves are, the less you gain overall. Duh! Why not make the experience gains in RPG's (Online and/or otherwise) tied to the player's performance? Not neccesarily in a 'style' based way, but in some way or form? That would greately add to the satisfaction factor. If you were rewarded for performing better in fights, this would create a motive to suffer through hours of repetetive grinding. But wait...why even suffer through hours of grinding? How many MMORPG's force you to grind to level? When you enter the game world, what is your purpose? Why are you just killing things for days? Why are you even going on quests? (This ties together, bear with me)

In level-based games (they are flooding the RPG market (online and/or otherwise), the ONLY indicator of your in game achievement is your LEVEL while the way you leveling up is to hack'n slash. "style" is to add anther way to achieve your LEVEL, but still LEVEL is the only indicator of your in game achievement.

In a skill-based game, every single skill (and/or a set of skills) can be an indicator your in game success.

In a level-based game, char comparison (of in game achievement) is plain and simple, your LEVEL, that's it. In a skill-based game, it's hard to compare who's more successful even when you take out 2 mages of the same sort, one with 98 magic skill another 100 skill, as what matters CAN be a good combination of skills instead of any single skill.

So if the *achievement* is not strictly defined and is rather abstract, players might spare themselves sometime to do something else than grinding, which in turn will gain the in game experience other than killing mobs and grinding.

But...it seems that teh profit of a level-based game is somehow guaranteed while noone knows how to make a good skill-based game. :(

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Original post by Anonymous Poster OK I guess I have to spell it out for you.

Yes, that is what design is about, not vague hand-waving.

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Factors: NPC role - blacksmith, beggar, peddler, king, guard ...... skills - (various skills of goods/services for players etc..) Loyalty - to town, to self, to evil power, to player, to nation... temperment - risktaking, cautious, fearful, benevolent... competancy - poor, good, excellent, great, bumbler, fool motivation - greed, selfgain, loyalty to group,religion,... appearance - normal, odd, desperate, rich/poor, shady, kind, official... integration - group member, loner, mob minion, family, individual/conformist needs - raw materials, information, selling, duty alignments - good,evil,neutral, chaotic, lawful,neutral, unlawful

You think nobody's thought of that sort of thing before? Few of the above are trivial to implement, especially in conjunction with the others. Loyalty is complex, as is motivation, and integration. And with many permutations of behaviour come many potential errors. Did you want a set of scripts for each? All presumably accessing the same character and world state. And think of the CPU overhead of running the AI for many of these NPCs simultaneously.

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Quest Builder scripts also use a template system and have logic to patch components together and pick amongst random options (and to evaluate the present factors to check for relevancy and best fit). The world situation can change and effect/change what quests are generated.

Again you've really avoided the question. 'The world situation can change' is not an answer to how it would actually be done, avoiding the problems I've mentioned already.

It is perfectly possible to have a GM-controlled world, and it's perfectly possible to have an organic world that evolves in response to the players and NPCs. I don't argue with that. The problem is that in the former, the GMs can't do enough to accommodate thousands of players, and in the latter, the world not only has to be genericised so that it can evolve along the lines allowed by the code, but there's also few guarantees that it will remain playable in its evolved state, and that is a public relations disaster waiting to happen. If you want a game where it's possible for the newbie starting town to be permanently overrun by greater demons, then of course you can make it, but you can't necessarily keep it playable.

In the end it really comes down to the meaning of 'purpose'. If you give someone a purpose, then either it is (a) achievable, in which case it will cease to be a purpose in the end, or (b) unachievable, in which case the players will eventually realise this and it will cease to be their purpose. Debating individual mechanics doesn't really solve this fundamental problem, that setting a task implies that it will end up completed. Infinite treadmill vs. the limited distance race.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster Quote: Original post by Kylotan The 'system' you have talked about is vague and means little without concrete detail. It's all very well saying what you'd like to see in a game but more often than not it's impractical given financial and time resources. Constant staged events for example require some significant degree of supervision. Pretesting events as well as executing them doubles the amount of effort involved. Impractical ?? By my calculation EA lost US$30 million because they cheaped out on their maintenence programing on UO (one $80000 a year programmer could have made the difference).

What makes you qualified to comment on the amount one programmer could have achieved with the UO codebase, or indeed on the financial figures you quote? I'm not interested in statistics without evidence.

Nor does your question directly address mine. Even assuming they did lose $30M due to one poor decision, does not mean that they can necessarily implement what you require. Money is not the only limited resource here - CPU power, memory and network bandwidth, database responsiveness, programmer availability, programmer knowledge, backwards compatibility with code, etc etc.

Another thing people forget when talking about UO is that it actually started off as a dynamic, evolving world, which responded to population changes and so on. They took all that stuff out because (a) it wasn't stable, and (b) it didn't add any fun. Players need stability and fun.

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Quote: So, you want GMs to come up with this sort of thing daily? 365 castles or something similar erected and conquered each year? And yet people are still to think that this really gives them a purpose in the game? Read my previous post about hierachical templates and script builder systems... Dozens of different generic quest types customized with local variations and higher level plot situational attributes to have a continuous stream of different (plot fitting) quests. (Oh and I forgot matched somewhat to the chars current abilities...)

Well, if it's that easy, let's see a prototype then. You should be able to create a decent Java applet or web page which demonstrates the underlying principles in no time. And let's stay focused here; anyone can knock up a templated quest generator, but that is not my concern - my concern is how you can do that while not only making it adapt to a supposedly progressing plot, but also to not break the game for any group of current players (newbies, oldbies, less skilled ones, etc).

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If you say yes, you know very little about WW2. 'Thousands of Heroes' IS possible to have. You have to get past trying to make a MMORPG into a single player game.

Sorry, I simply disagree with you here. I disagree with your definition of hero and I disagree that you can have thousands of them simultaneously in one context. Add permadeath into MMORPGs though, and maybe we can talk.

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Original post by Kylotan How can each player have a global effect - if every item is so important as to affect everybody, then won't such effects be so common as to be insignificant anyway? Or at the other end of the scale, won't the vast majority of people be excluded since they are unable to complete the really important quests? If some players can have global effects on the world, doesn't that have implications for the other players... probably negative, in terms of fairness and fun?

"And when everyone is special, then no one is."

Could the potential problem with MMO design be, we've been collectively beaten so far down the path of thinking it's absolutely unacceptable for just *some* people be Mr.Incredible, we keep this ability away from *everyone*, making it a boring world for *all* people involved?

Getting to interact with widely recognized heroes can be for many about as rewarding experience as getting to be a hero themselves. Celebrities often *can* get the (virtual) world moving, especially when they become celebrities due to their personal skills. Eve-Online can be a sample here, as it allows the players shape the game world to large extent ... *if* they have "what it takes".