I understand the logical necessity to have quests that move towards a goal, but that goal is never actually achieved. (i.e. Help eradicate the Gnolls! But the gnolls never leave.) So, this basic immutability of the gameworld throws off the immersion for me somewhat.
Why not have some actual, time-driven, could-win could-lose content? Say, a plague of this monster or that monster is going to descend on a particular town and screw everything up, unless the players do something about it?
WoW, with its ultra-low death penalty is ideal for this sort of thing. After all, if you get nailed in a town, the graveyard is just 100 yards to the east, so there really isn’t any penalty at all.
It seems if you give the community ample warning, a few days of NPCs discussing rumors, and then drop the bomb, it would add a lot to the immersion. Like kiting Stitches to Goldshire, it’s something that exists only in a particular instant, and can be shared only by those who are present. You could give out campaign badges to characters to denote participation in a particular event. You could change the monster distribution in an area to reflect the success or failure of an event.
In an ideal world, all the content would change over time, so you could go back to Elwynn Forest, say, and read a notice about how the gnolls and Hogger are gone. Of course, they would have been replaced with similar quests for Defias, or whatever, but I understand the overhead that would put on the devs. That’s why I think small, one-off events would add a needed dimension, without being that tough to pull off.
Go play one of the free shards for UO. Some of them do what you are asking for. Some NWN Persistent Worlds do that too, although in either case, I’m not sure having a playerbase of around 50 qualifies them as MMORPGs.
Everquest had something like this; the Sleeper quest in the Velious expansion. It could be triggered once, and then the server was set to never trigger it again. The changes in the game world once triggered were fairly radical (high level weapons that were farmed nearby could not after the quest completed, as I recall)
Good:
It’s epic. People like to change the world. People tell stories about “the guys who woke the Sleeper”
Bad:
It’s difficult to implement. You’re basically designing “one-shot content” which means you don’t get the usual hundreds of thousands of people hammering at it finding problems.
People resent not being able to do it because someone else did it first.
People resent time being spent on content that not everyone can enjoy.
People resent the world changing. When Ultima Online ran an epic-storyline quest that resulted in a popular city being overrun with hordes of monsters, people complained loudly that their game was being interfered with. They didn’t want the world to change.
Even simple stuff? “Help, please find my lost kitty in the Deep Dark Cave!” First one to find the kitty gets a prize…
I did dozens of these on Legends of Kesmai and they never got old.
People resent not being able to do it because someone else did it first.
Screw em. You can’t make everybody happy and they’ll resent something else anyway.
People resent time being spent on content that not everyone can enjoy.
Screw em. You can’t make everybody happy and they’ll resent something else anyway.
People resent the world changing. When Ultima Online ran an epic-storyline quest that resulted in a popular city being overrun with hordes of monsters, people complained loudly that their game was being interfered with. They didn’t want the world to change.
Do it only in certain areas and make sure it’s very clearly spelled out that “something bad may happen here”. Like “Contested Zones” in WoW, just call em “Dynamic Zones”, enter at your own risk, foo’!
Where there’s a will (and time, resources, and money!) there’s a way.
I dunno, I’m thinking of very, very small things, like say forty lev. 12 monsters sent to Goldshire (lev. 6-12 area) in waves, programmed to gank the NPCs unless the players stop them. Nothing more than that, really. Just something to break the monotony of standing around town. I can’t think that would be too hard, in the grand scheme of things.
I will only agree with two of Lums points:
2) People resent not being able to do it because someone else did it first.
3) People resent time being spent on content that not everyone can enjoy.
Really if you could somehow solve the problem of chaning the world but not losing content, you would change the MMOG world, and hopefully get hired and become very rich.
For example, if you go the orcs in the east common lands and eradicate the orc menace, then what? What does everyone else do? You could have rotating mobs types such as after the orcs are cleared out, gnolls move in, then dervishes, then orcs again… You still do not get the sense of achivement that you have ‘saved’ freeport from the orcs, because you just end up with the same villans with differant faces.
The only feasable thing I can think of requires PvP to some degree. Imagine you had a village/forest/cave with some group of NPCs in them. This group would have to be allied with one player faction and at war with other player factions and an NPC faction. The war would have to be balanced between two NPC factiosn or at the very least given a defenders advantage. Then players of either faction can help win the war and the town ends up in the winning hands sides with winning npcs habitating it.
To make it meaningful the town would have to provide some service to the player factions such as a forward base in unfrendly terrirtory or supplying rare tradeskill items, for example.
Still this is not as epic some save the realm from doom quest, but at least its recyclable content that has some meaning.
It seems to me the only result to having exclusive events that only a relatively few number of people get to experience is, pissing everyone else off.
Here’s a similar thing: all the people who are suffering from “crippling” connectivity problems with WoW, probably don’t enjoy hearing from everyone else saying, “I can play just fine! It’s great! The problems are minor!”
Hmm, I played PS for a year or so and never saw an event. Must have happened after I quit or when I wasn’t around because i’d have been there in a heartbeat. :(
I dunno, I’m thinking of very, very small things, like say forty lev. 12 monsters sent to Goldshire (lev. 6-12 area) in waves, programmed to gank the NPCs unless the players stop them. Nothing more than that, really. Just something to break the monotony of standing around town. I can’t think that would be too hard, in the grand scheme of things.
H.[/quote]
You mean like when Stitches rampages down the road towards Darkshire? Or when the assassins attack Southshore? WoW has the exact sort of thing you are describing. Perhaps you mean that it should be more of a one time event? In that case the answer is of course its worth more bang for the development buck to design an encounter that will entertain many people over and over than one that will entertain only a hadfull once. Of course you could probably build a game world and tools that would facilitate this sort of thing and really own it and make it your “thing” however I am guessing you’d have to charge more per month for something like that to cover additional staffing costs and dev time. It’d be an interesting experiement.
Wouldn’t this be solved if the events were “reset” every couple weeks? For example, on the first of every month, a dragon attacks a town for about 2 real world hours. If a group kills the dragon in that time, then the town thrives for the next month and produces some rare items at the trader or something. If not, the town is in ruins and NPCs spend the next month rebuilding the town. Items are rare, the economy sucks.
What I’m trying to get at is that the events could be reoccurring, and world changing. People who missed out on the first dragon attack can log on the following month for their chance at it, and people who are upset that the world has changed have hope that things will be different after the next encounter. If you could schedule 2-3 events every day, it could go a long ways to adding life to the world asside from the daily grind.
I dunno, maybe there’s a huge hole in that plan, I’m not a game designer for a reason. :)
Im sort of suprised that none of the MMORPG cognescenti have mentioned yet, but as I understood it, this was precisely what Wish was trying to deliver. Maybe I understand wrong, because I only played it for 2 hours before they pulled the plug, but the whole approach was a single world primarily dirven by live content continually being generated by GMs…
Maybe the fate of Wish says sometyhing about the overall feasability of this concept…
I remember playing Shadowbane when they had some GM run events.
They were horrible, with people:
clamouring over all the chat channels, trying to get summonses over to the events
confused by the presence of the GMs and what they were trying to accomplish
pissed that they’d missed the event because they didn’t see the system messages that hinted at the event/location, or weren’t online
lagging the crap out of everything
Unless you can afford to do GM events constantly, giving everyone equal chance to participate at one point or another, then don’t do them at all.
That being said, I’m really liking the idea of world-changing content that is both noticeable (e.g. has a semi long term effect) and cyclical. It sounds interesting and like something that would help increase the immersion factor considerably.
I remember DAoC having some quests ALMOST like this in Shrouded Isles (there were a couple of forts, the details are hazy) but the thing reset itself much too often for you to ever be sure of your ‘impact’. Plus, unless you were aware of the quest and its ramifications you never really got the fact that things were different…
