I've been working on learning this whole programming business for a couple months because there's been a game I've wanted to play for years that I am satisfied does not exist. So the only way is if I make it. Hopefully someone can bear with me here as I discuss objectives and gameplay elements I'd like to create and then maybe give me some feedback about these ideas. Maybe there's some good reason why no one's done it? The central thing I'm missing, I think, is a dynamic world. There are plenty of games where there's an alien invasion or disaster of some sort and you go out to try and cope with it, but regardless of how well you perform the game either follows a set script with regard to the struggle against that antagonist in the case of single player games, or it remains perfectly static and in the exact same state forever in the case of MMOs. MMOs in particular are what really drove me up the wall with this. There are so many really compelling scenarios with these terrible villains threatening <wherever> and a desperate struggle against them that you must join to save <wherever> except that <wherever> was never really in any danger and no matter how valiantly you fight the "threat" will always remain unchanged. What I'd like to create is an RPG that's multiplayer and online and a little bit more graphical than an old school text MUD. I don't have a budget or any way to produce actually competitive graphics, but text based inflicts a steep learning curve and often makes control and exploration difficult and counter-intuitive. I'd like to go low-graphical to get away from that. And then I want to create a scenario where if some village is being raided by orcs (or whatever) and no player responds to that, villagers are going to keep getting killed or fleeing to the hills until there's no village there anymore. There would be an actual number of villagers and an actual number of orcs in the surrounding countryside and they would fight until one side or the other runs out of people. So maybe some players come along and kill all the raiders. There's still other orcs in neighboring territory, and it's only a matter of time until some of them migrate into the newly vacated lands and then grow bold enough to attack the village again. But the players who saved it are local heroes now, they could move on and wait for the situation to repeat itself, or they could use their influence to rally militias and wage a war of extermination against the orcs and buy the village a lasting peace. Or maybe no one did, and the village was destroyed. Maybe later on a player decides to reclaim some of the shrinking dominion of man and leads a crusade to reclaim the area. They lay down a forward camp where the village used to be and if their campaign is successful, it becomes a permanent settlement. I would hope this would create a situation where leveling up a character and doing quests and such isn't just a grind to get a level and gear they can brag about, but instead would happen as a result of a struggle to survive, and the power players acquire isn't just for being able to say "I'm at endgame." it's for being able to stand your ground or carve out a domain against enemy factions. So when you go into whatever-it's-called-valley (I haven't done too much setting design yet, you might notice) and kill orcs you're not just chopping down the same 12 orcs who endlessly respawn until you gain a level or two, you're battling a large but finite adversary who actually threatens the existence of whatever quest-hub you're operating out of. I would want to make it so that eventually it becomes feasible for players to create and lead their own factions, be friendly or hostile with other player or NPC factions, and actually command large armies against other large armies as a possible, and more reasonable, alternative to personally trying to slay 10,000 foes. Now obviously that's going to take a lot of balancing to prevent things from quickly going one way or the other. So that it actually takes a significant effort to achieve a significant victory but plain survival is actually so demanding it kills the fun. Now I see some problems in mixing this with the abundance of story-driving quests model that WoW came up with and everyone else copied because it was a good idea. There needs to be a world and a story and that story, and it needs to advance through quests against increasingly powerful and dramatically themed foes. Otherwise who cares who wins and loses. On the note of quests, I think I would also include repeatable "resource" quests along the lines of... monsters are attacking lumberjacks who try to venture to far into the woods, you go in and sort that out and the faction you took the quest from gains some lumber resource. Eventually I'd like to get this to the point where there are enough factions that it stops being a goodguys vs badguys thing and instead becomes a collection of loosely defined and not necessarily concrete alliances all fighting against each other, with players swearing allegiance to one faction or another improving or harming its relationship with others by their actions. For simplicity's sake, the world is probably going to just be a 2D grid with various dungeons, cities, skirmishes etc on it that the player can enter to go to another map, but different regions of the world would have different significance in terms of what a faction gets from controlling territory there, what sorts of threats it's vulnerable to, and so on. Anyway, anyone have any thoughts on that?

I'd say this is all possible and plausible :). And you've got a great idea on making it happen: avoid aiming for cutting edge graphics.

And to be honest, to begin with you don't even need to use graphics or much of an interfact to build a lot of the game systems here. You could have a very simple simulation system input which could be like:

Quest: Save the Lumberjacks
Options
1] Player kills monsters
2] Player killed by monsters
3] Player tells the lumberjacks to do one

Enter choice:

And just do this to see how the world will progress in such a system. If you don't want to have to manually enter it all you could write bots/fake players who'll automatically make choices (randomly, weighted-randoms, etc) and just have the program spew out a log to see how it progresses. It'd be a bit like a virtual ant farm.

I hope what I'm saying makes some sense, and is also of some use!

I think the first 1/3rd to 1/2 of your post is foreshadowing what the next gen of MMOs are going to be. Grind will be replaced with dynamic content and the static world will be replaced by one that constantly changes. The first legitimate company to do this will set the new standard.

The design question is "How to implement it?". I can see two ways to go about doing this.

1. Random spawning of factions in reasonable areas that do not like one another. If a band of Players wipe the Orcs, a random timer begins that would spawn the beginnings of a new Orc civilization down the road using conditions such as distance from villages, terrain type etc. How often this happens would be a design decision.

2. Game Masters manually change the world according to the player driven events. The scripting would handle the Orcs being eliminated, the Game Master designs the Orc Avenger that hunts for the player(s) responsible. (For Example)

I think a combination of the two would yield the best result. I would definitely advise against having unique gear being tied to the GM driven part of the process if you go that route.

I won't touch on the part where you talk about players leading forces because that is probably pretty straight forward.

Good luck with your project, MMOs have a slim completion rate. If you do complete it, you will not have much trouble finding players, no matter the graphics. Gameplay is where it is at!

Sounds like it would be challenging to balance. I mean, let's say a new player joins the game in the middle. Are there any easy enemies left to start practicing on? If monsters have been pushed far away from core territory, how is a new player supposed to find them? At the same time, a player who has played from the beginning may have reached the max level - if he makes a concerted effort, he could probably wipe out most of the monsters in the game world in a few days. He might also be frustrated to be unable to find opponents difficult enough to be interesting. Or, if the game goes on long enough, shouldn't all the monsters become extinct? Does the game end then?

With some design choices, this idea could work. I have a currently on-hold game which is basically this, except single player and with a focus on economics rather than character development. The idea of a having many individual entities working toward a common goal indirectly is the same so the overall game flow should be similar. The most important thing is that power gains cannot be permanent. In other words, a player cannot hold on to their power infinitely, it needs to fluctuate in time.

What you need is a balance between resource acquisition and monster generation. Wiping monsters and maintaining a zone under allied control needs to expend resources. At one point, it will be too costly to maintain control over a zone and it will eventually crumble, recycling that content. With less territory to cover, resources are concentrated and maintain the equilibrum until enough resources are acquired for another push.

Let's say you lose your equipment on death. Almost every piece of equipment comes from the player run economy. Crafters get their materials from gathering points(mine, forest, lakes, etc). As you conquer towns, new gathering points are unlocked with better raw materials. These allow you to craft better gear, which increases the players' power, which allow them to take on bigger enemies. When they die, they lose their gear, which means they can no longer fight the bigger enemies unless they acquire their gear again. Depending on how the fight goes, they can either conquer new lands, unlocking even better material or lose ground, causing them to take a step back in their advancement. This is how you control progression. Increasing the number of enemies or raids will put pressure on their resources, which will cause a fallback. The opposite will allow them to conquer new lands more easily. As a bonus, this will give the game a real economy.

With this control, you don't have to fear running out of enemies. As they push deeper and deeper, they face greater challenges. Since the monsters power grow more rapidly than the players power, there will be a point where the game is in a state of equilibrum. There won't be enough high level gear to keep everyone stocked, so further pushes will be difficult, let alone maintaining the new territory afterwards.

To keep the world dynamic, you can create various points of interest on different points of the world. Different resources will come from different places and players will move around to follow their guild or the current trend. This will cause a shift of resources in some area, which means a push on one side causes a regression on the other.

New players will be able to progress by exterminating vermin in already conquered areas. A weak necromancer could settle in a nearby cemetery, an orc warchief could build a camp near a mine and raid it occasionaly or there could be random patrols on the roads which do not affect the world state.

Guilds could also gain control of key points in the world. They could rule towns or gathering points. Doing so would put them in charge of their safety and also allow them to tax transactions done in the territory. That would also help fluctuations because if a guild decides to impose a draconian tax, players will migrate to another equivalent zone, leaving the town to be captured in the next push.

The game would be slower paced than your average MMO in the sense that you cannot barge in enemy territory and wipe them out instantly. Conquering new land might be like laying siege to a WoW-sized city full of monster respawns. It may take a few days of sieging the city before an effective push can be done. Similarly, losing a city would also take time. As long as the controlling guild has resources to reequip their guards, they can fend off invaders, but eventually, they will run out and lose unless players mount a counter-offensive. That can lead to quests with a meaning. Killing these 10 orcs will actually have a reason : their death will weaken the siege.

I like multiplayer games (sans grind) and really want to see dynamic worlds come about, but I'm not an MMO player, so this might have limited value but here's the two biggest problems I see:

1) Game or World?

You have to decide how much of the player's experience centers around a world or a game. A game, at least an RPG, is basically about reliable player progression, and as I think you already see that can run counter to the fluctuations that a dynamic world should experience in order to be credible. Moreover, a dynamic world comes with the possibility of inequity and imbalance, which might lead to the experiences s&s pointed out being dominant. Further, there's the problem of situational awareness-- you don't necessarily have medieval CNN to tell you what's happening all the time, and that can lead to a myopia where you judge the gaming experience based on local conditions. If those conditions are generally unfavorable (burned out towns, monster thickets impossible to pass) then I can see the game getting a bad rep.

If you can somehow sell it to players as a world, though, I don't think these things are as big a deal. Players will be invested in the lore created by dynamic events and there'll be less whiny "I can't get through the dark forest because of all the undead thisgamesucks!" and maybe more more "jeezus, the dark forest is crawling with undead-- let's form a militia!"

But this is provided that from level 1 players have a stake in the world and can affect it. But that leads to problem #2:

2) The Snowflake Conceit:

The fallacy that we're all unique seems heavily woven into our philosophy, at least in the West. In reality, when you reckon honestly with statistics you see that we're very much like many around us. That creates a special problem for the MMO. Because so many have their roots in RPGs they have the "you are special" baggage left over in the lore that makes up the world's backstory and its questing. But that lore crumbles in the face of statistics when you realize that you're not the hero, but just a number, someone who happens to have rescued the same princess and killed the same damn dragon as everybody else. (Of course, this was just as true in single player RPGs, we just didn't have people running past us in dragon scale armor with carbon copy princess in tow to remind us).

There's probably no way to get around "I'm special, damnit!" so it might help to create a lot of different ways to be exceptional in some small way. Maybe you stop creating Lich Kings and start creating Lich Councils so there's plenty of killin' to go around. A better approach, I think, would be to give players either multiple characters or minions they could play so that they could afford to risk being losing forces from time to time. Maybe not, though-- I've suggested this in the past but I think the need to be "The One" is so strong that many players can't imagine having fun as anything other than the hero.

If you opt more for a world then I think you should go with creating unique challenges only a small handful of players can acquire. There should be many opportunities, but when people whine that they can't have the dragon scale armor you need to tell your player base that such things happen in a dynamic world and they should just tough it out until they come across something cool.

Since I have no idea what your background in programming is, all I can do is give this basic advice: I would say figure out what you can do before you dream up concepts. Don't go with "feasible," or "possible," go with what you know exactly how to code or mechanisms that you understand well enough to figure out. Variable jumping is common as grass, but if you don't know how to program it the fact that it's 110% feasible is meaningless. And this means all the features you plan to use. If you don't, for instance, know how how sockets work or what the code for a server looks like, scrap the multiplayer portion of this game now.

Just think this way: if you don't know how to program a town oriented AI pattern that responds to player influences, forget it and plan your game around something you do know how to do. Likewise, coding player factions for an online game can get quite complicated. Be sure you can write the game logic before you worry about anything else. Many indie projects have failed because they were too ambitious with "feasible" features and wound up with things that someone might be able to do, but not them.

If you know how to do it, then the question of feasibility becomes moot (unless it's a hardware concern like processing power, speed of execution, or memory management). This doesn't mean don't try anything new. Just don't set out to do something you have no idea how to make. If you want to create some great feature, start by planning out the game logic. That does not end at "so when there's no orcs left, the town is safe" but rather goes all the way down to "so this function checks the number of orcs via this process, then signals this set of data via this other function which does..." If you can figure it out, then translate that to a simple demo program and see if it's what you actually envisioned (ie, check for level of fun, duration of enjoyment, and any unforeseen but inherent flaws). Finally you can translate that into a feature your game will use. If you can't figure it out or find a tutorial, then you've saved yourself hours of work or worse the embarrassment of canceling a project.

If you try to slap it together without planning like this (which is how I made failed to make games for a long time) the end result will either fail completely, or be far less well made than it could be.

You're right to say that a game like that hasn't been made yet, but you might be surprised to know that games like that are currently being made. I have two favorite examples.

One is prominent on this board, it's being done by Wavinator, who posted earlier in this thread. Browse through some of the threads he's started and you'll see that a project so ambitious will be a gauntlet of hard questions and design challenges for which few precedents, if any, can be found.

The other is in a playable (by the brave) state, although it's far from complete, and that's Dwarf Fortress. It's single-player, but so much of what you said here resonates with me as being "just like DF". Last week I was playing, and I kept getting goblin raids and human caravans at the same time. Three years in a row, the goblins wiped out the humans that had been sent to trade with me. I eventually killed off so many of the goblins that they stopped raiding, but the next year the humans went to war with me, since all they knew was that they were sending wagonloads of goods to me, and nobody ever came home.

These projects have a lot in common. They touch on a lot of the features you described in your post, they're being made by independent development "teams" that consist of one or two guys, and they've been in development for years, true craft production of truly novel and ground-breaking ideas. Another thing that they share is that they might never be "done", and will almost certainly not end up where the designers thought they were going when they first sat down to work on them. I remember early Wavinator threads that described the game as a simulation of crew psychology on a spaceship, and there's a thread up now about how best to use procedurally generated templates to populate hundreds of thousands of planets with thriving ecosystems. DF started out as an after-action review tool for a roguelike adventure game.

So go for it, but make sure you have a day job, or a community of fans willing to support your work-in-progress with cash donations, because there's a good reason mainstream development firms don't tackle these problems.

Now for a little pessimism: Are you sure you can trust players to not screw up a multiplayer game like this? You seem to know a bit about MMOs. Within a month of a WoW expansion, the players have unlocked all the content, documented it online and found the most efficient ways to exploit it for maximum profit. Additionally, are you sure you trust players to enjoy a game like you're designing? I can't tell you how many of my expeditions in DF ended after fifteen seconds, with my entire force dead beside their wagon and giant eagles tearing their pack animals to bits. If I had to work for a month with dozens of my buddies to form a team to retake that little orc-demolished town, and all I got for my trouble was a sound ass-kicking and fifty fewer humans in the world population, I'd be tempted to call that bad game design, even if it's exactly what you had in mind.

[Edited by - Iron Chef Carnage on January 31, 2010 2:26:20 AM]

ArenaNet is going to implement a similar system to yours in Guild Wars 2.

Quote:

if a player happens to be inside a garrison when a scouting party returns, they may overhear the scouts warning of an approaching column of centaurs, intent on destroying the garrison. The players can then participate in defending the garrison from the attacking centaurs. If the players are successful, the garrison may ask them to participate in a counterattack. If they are not successful, or if they weren't at the garrison in time to save the garrison, they may join other soldiers from a nearby town attempting to recapture the garrison.

so if kill enough centaurs they will never threaten your city, but as soon as you stop killing them, they will organize raids and capture your cities and you have to recapture them. I wonder how will they pull it off.

Dwarf Fortress looks cool, thought a bit depressing.

I wanted to do a very similar idea, going text since it would be to complicated to show as 2d/3d but well to play that game you would have to do some fairly heavy research, about the only thing i could work out without reading anything was how to light fires..so there is now no point doing my idea since i dont think the text works..

Overall the ideas arn't new with the dynamic quests/(dynamic world)) i know Ive got records talking about them since 05.. thats 5 years ago now

there has been numerous mmos that have said they would implement them too, and have just turned into vapor ware.

I think it could be done for a single player game.. but then that feels kinda wasted the resournces you put into it and its hard to expand, eventually the games still feels the same way., but an mmo the players multiply to much and cause to much havoc

the solution im looking at for an mmo is.. make the players really weak, the only way for them to gather strength is using npc's, then put the restrictions on the npc level