It really sounds to me like you've simply renamed "quests" and made the goals and rewards random. I foresee any "incentives" that come about will be essentially planned by the designers. Only, instead of writing scripts, they'll tweak the inputs to the random number generators; the sorts of quests and their rewards are still predetermined. I'll also bet that an NPC giving another NPC a quest will be more annoying than anything else because we know that, in the end, they're the same entity. By him requiring that they give quests to PC's only you've culled some noise and increased your signal (Like photon-mapping algorithms that only shoot photons where they'll probably impact the final render).
I haven't played a MMORPG since Asheron's Call I, but you mentioned several things that I already did in that game. I already didn't take quests that weren't worth the reward. If it had good vs. evil like WoW, I'd have also not taken quests that went against my character. I already found meaning outside of quests (my main character was a low level crafter who would run, often for his life (due to his low level), around the world looking for different ingredients. My secondary character was an unarmed/unarmored warrior who ended up spending more time chatting in town than questing).
I wouldn't complain with a bit more randomness (e.g. randomly placing a few bandits around, or whatever), but I honestly think simulating a world is unnecessary and possibly distracting.
Quote:
Original post by Dr Default it's the limitations, not the freedom
You, sir or madam, are a genius. [smile]
Like the OP said, I have freedom up the wazoo in real life. If I want freedom on a computer, I know where to find C++.
Im working on a simulation project (not a MMORPG) that has many of these aspects as a goal.
One problem is the extent of the AI to give the player reasonably intelligent NPCs to deal with. Planners for the goal oriented mechanism, world representation tracking to maintain context for each object, script based 'solutions' to act toward satifying goals, (a cluster architecture to get enuf CPU to do all this), a system to evaluate relative worth of actions and consequences and via different approaches/strategies (ie- NPC is conservative vs a risk taker), an abstracting system to simplify the AI for the majority of the world which the players are not in (and conversion to a 'realized' mode with the details fleshed out when the player wanders near), high level entities that drive the macro (world) plot -- within what the game theme allows...
Another problem is that even with 'random' based infinite world mechanisms you still have to hand build templates and a seed patterns for your world to have cohesion/consistancy (try making something as simple as a geography generator without having an overal pre existing pattern and building terrain piecemeal). An awful lot still has to be hand crafted to match your desired game theme and game mechanics. Smart scripts to set up assemblages of related objects (props, people, terrain mods, flavor details) and fit them into locations.
If you want anything larger than a small world (at the level of detail you are talking about), I doubt you could have it 'grow' itself into shape (from chaos) with less than a supercomputer (and even then the behavior rules would have to be written to coalesce chaos into a working (stable) world).
You could do hand crafting but at a finer level and try to create general building blocks that then might be semi-randomly combined (and part of their logic would be self adjusting to match their situation). You would have to make the objects behaviors pretty flexible in any case because in a dynamic system you have greater combinations of situations to deal with than in a static pre-built world.
Simulating self stabalization will not be easy.
--------------------------------------------[size="1"]Ratings are Opinion, not Fact
Sounds like a great idea to me at least someone is extolling the virtues of doing things a different way. I know of one game which is a bit like what you mention its called Sentient and it was on the playstation one. Your on a space station which is falling into the sun and its your job to stop it from doing so and discover other certain mysteries along the way. The way you do this is entirely up to you, your not told how to solve anything or where to go (unless certain NPCs request things of you). The converations are formed by you putting together words from lists to say pretty much anything you want which is within context. Everything happens within real time in it, NPCs go about their routines and things happen wether your there or not. Its a pretty good game as a concept its just a bit clunky and difficult to play through for some of the reasons above and its not very player friendly.
I'd love to see a new game like this although there would be many problems to make it more palatable for instance keeping it player centric.
Randomness is a great thing, and procedural content is a huge step in the right direction. Having said that, I'm a firm believer that these should be tools used to create more immersive content, but not the content itself. People need to have something to process. Could be a new ability that the player needs to learn how to use, or a great storyline that engages the player to wonder whats lies ahead, even something as simple as "I wonder whats on the other side of those hills." The hard part is pacing so the player is overwhelmed or bored in between engaging parts of the game, also the logic behind the why of the games elements. Sure you have two peasants talking about some burnt out farm on the outskirts of town, but so many games lack the why...
-Why are these peasants caring about this farm -Why should the player care about it -Why would my character, who is on an epic quest to save the world/his wife/his dog/etc care enough about some gossip to put down what he/she is doing and investigate
Not many people think about game situations with that much depth but without at least some level of creative input, you end up with the ever so popular...
"Your quest is to take this book to my sister...ho is so close to me that I could throw it at her..."
People go thru the motions but rarely care or even remember what the whole quest was about, and why should they? This is my concern about games with more of an open ended sandbox feel, add on the randomness of catering the game to the players whim and it could go both ways, but that depends on the player. Of course in the end content would have to be made by the designers, but if it was distributed by these AI "deities" it would become hard to track and assign a good enough pacing.
My opinion is that we aren't at a point yet where a program can create or assign premade content well enough to engage a players thought process enough to keep them intensely involved in a game. maybe some would be satisfied, but most would be left wondering why.
I think these tools and this type of content should be used more of a how then as a why. But thats just my opinion.
Here is the problem I see with this whole idea. Games are created to entertain. The player must be immersed into his/her world. Now a free roaming world with just choice is kind of .... hmmmm well boring. Though you may think that is is fun think about your player base. Who would want to play this game. Most likely hard core RPGers. Thats a small demographic. Now mabe to throw some spice into it you could have a "random dynamic world" that has multiple key storyline plots. When the character starts playing the game the world breaths into life. Now how the character plays will start to interact with the plots going on around him. Quest unlocking and locking as the game goes by.
Ex: 3 factions in a land fighting for rule. The player starts as a refugee that was brought over by a neutral island and now must try to make his due in the new areas.
The key is that the world is going to keep living. It will not totally be bent on the characters choices. Meaning if there was a quest to stop a large battle and the character was not even near it when it appeared. Once the time is up on it that battle is now emanate and the world will deal with the consequences of the battle.
But getting back to my orignal point. What demographic would such a game hit. Remember though this is what we do for fun money is a part of it. How many players will this attract. A world that has no point other than to live. Something driving the world as a whole is important. Oblivion so far has gotten the closest in creating such a world. But yes it still has a very linear story. The player cant choose to join the evil guy and kill him. The player has to be good. Look at GTA. The storylines and quests are secondary to the main game mechanics. But they are still there becuase they drive the world around the player. Small things change in the world as you do the quests. This keeps the player in your game.
I have already done this answer times and again before, but I'll just put it here once again, just to see what it triggers with newcomers...
What if we simply replaced NPC's AI by... Real Intelligence from PCs?
Let me explain further.
What if, instead of a very large game in which we had a lot of AI going on, which would take quite a lot of bandwidth and processing power/time/whatever, we merely had a cluster of "simple" games, like some browser-based games around and successful these days, which would define the surrounding world for the MMORPGers to run in?
I know of a good many e-farmers games. Let's assume that the people playing those games actually like playing farmers, for the sake of the argument. Let us also assume that, although they DO like to play the games they play the way they play them, they might still play them with an added twist, which would be that random things might happen to their farms, like a group of animals or of goblinoïds would come and wreck havock in their fields. Let's say that they have a way of making it known.
Let's say that there are people who like to play crafters, but feel that they are a little underdoing it. I know of some people who complained (rather loudly too...) about crafting mechanisms in common MMORPGs. If we assume, once again for the sake of the argument, that those people spend rather a lot of time actually doing nothing in an MMORPG while they are claiming high that they would prefer to actually be CRAFTING the objects they are about to sell, why not provide them with a Flash game in which they would actually PLAY something and CRAFT something in according results?
Let's assume (I know we have been assuming quite a lot already, but let's keep to it...) that the people playing browser-based monster-breeding games, or online equivalents of zoo-tycoon, would just as well play the same games if they had to compete in them against hunters. And that the hunters would just as much enjoy their favourite hunting games if they had to actually go LOOKING FOR preys who would prefer to remain unkilled, rather than standing there ready to get their heads chopped off.
Now that we have assumed that much, doesn't that all remind you oddly of many of the numerous threads we have seen in here advocating so-called dynamic worlds?
What you would have to get is a single database for all the games, and dynamically (yes, that's where the ominous word falls in...) modify it? Or maybe only a small part of it.
Now, let's say that every game is linked to all the others through both the database and the "dialoguing server", a sort of disembodied chat server, which you can connect to from any of the aforementionned games.
Wouldn't the quest-creation become dynamic? A farmer discovers, when he logs in, that a group of trolls is camping in his turnips-field (either a random event, or something triggered by the fact that a monster-breeder moved his lot through his turnips-field some hours earlier). He connects to the "dialoguing server" and starts looking for someone ready to rid him of those. For the sake of the argument, we'll say that the MMORPGers can only enter their equivalent of this "dialoguing server" on the towns' central squares. And that there will be a little animation showing a very agitated little man coming a-yelling for a turnip saviour. Any of the adventurers in the MMORPG realm can acome and start discuss the reason of such an agitation, and even discuss the TERMS of the quest. They can haggle over how much money they can get from the farmer to rid him of his undesired squatters.
Meanwhile, the location of spawn points would be more or less dynamically modified, since they would depend on the last moved registered by the related account of the monster-breeder.
And since the adventurers would still have to get their equipments, they would have to go to the shop-keepers (other players playing Flash games elsewhere, and potentialy not in synch with the MMORPG world) and get their stuff from them, be it weapons, armor, potions or anything. But the crafters, being locked in their small houses, wouldn't be able to collect the needed materials to perform their daily activities. They would have to either place an add on their stores, explaining how much they are prepared to buy from any particular loot, and for how much, and could only HAGGLE while online. On the other hand, they could still sell for a fixed price when offline.
So what do you say? Could this be a solution to improve the online gaming worlds? Can you find any flaw (apart from the obvious "such a common database cannot be made in our times, maybe in ten to twenty years time, when everybody is connected though Fiberoptics...")?
