f13.net forums - Creating Useful NPCs

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April 20, 2024, 05:52:22 AM

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The MMO genre needs to push NPCs forward in terms of interaction and realism.

We're considering having 3 types of NPC characters:

Static NPCs - the boring ones in every MMO
Background NPCs - kind of like CoH city walkers that fill in the world, however we'd have them congregate for certain reasons and follow a bit more detailed schedule
Pseudo-life NPCs - the key characters who help hand out quests and tell the story of the game

Pseudo-life npcs need to live out lives on a schedule. Not that there cant be deviations..but again..that comes from a dynamic world.

I finally got the thought process of these guys down onto paper - tied into goals and missions themselves to accomplish their goals.

I. Are my needs at an acceptable state?

A. Physical (the most basic requirements)
1. Safety - If Im being attacked I will forget hunger and sleep
2. Food - If I am hungry, I may not be able to sleep
3. Sleep - If I am tired, I cannot meet other goals
4. Shelter - I need a place to sleep, avoid distraction, collect things
5. Freedom - The above conditions can be met without freedom (prisoner/slave)

B. Psychological (Is my personal identity acceptable?)
1. To like myself (Do I like who I am?)
a. My status
i. personal
ii. professional
b. My plans to manage my status (Do I like where Im going in life?)

2. For others to like me
a. My status (Do others like my identity as it is now?)
i. personal
ii. professional
b. My actions to manage my status (Do others like the direction my life is headed in?)

II. If not, who do I decide which need is most important / to be done first?
A. Character traits
1. Nature - what behavior is innate (who was I at birth or what cant I change about myself)
2. Nurture - what behavior has been shaped (adaptive response to physical or mental environmental changes over time)

B. Physical changes
1. Environment = danger?
2. Environment = incorrect for activity?
3. Environment = incorrect for schedule?

C. Social changes
1. Direct personal contact (NPC or Player)
2. Indirect social contact (Video, audio, or written information)
3. Internal emotional change (conscious change, not adaptive change like traits)

III. How do I return needs to an acceptable state?
A. Where do I do it?
B. What is needed to do it?
C. When am I to do it?
D. How do I do it?
E. Whom do I interact with to do it?

So..for example, lets imagine you meet one of these special NPCs who is a Captain in the Megalith Military Corporation. Depending on where he is in his schedule...or what his dynamic goals are for the moment...he might have personal or profession needs that arent met.

2. For others to like me
a. My status (Do others like my identity as it is now?)
i. personal
ii. professional
b. My actions to manage my status (Do others like the direction my life is headed in?)

Using this as our expostion & problem to be addressed by the player, he might not be happy with his professional life and want to advance to general. The resulting quest would generate how you could help him do that.

Or perhaps his career is going according to plan, but his wife thinks that he should have been a general by now. The resulting quest could have something to do with convincing her to change her mind or helping her change her husband's rank.

Those arent the greatest examples but hopefully you get the drift. NPCs with their own dynamically shifing goals would create a game where you arent doing the same bloody "take these rat tails to the hobgoblin."

There are a bazillion crux-points in that outline that could be chosen to set off all kinds of quests, change faction, develop character arc. Mix that with one of those internet lists of "37 basic plots" or "1001 master plot arcs" in an automated by dynamic system..and boom you have it.

His wife cannot think "he should have been a general by now", because if she is an NPC like him, you've only defined behavior patterns and rules for personal needs i.e. no NPC thinks about any other NPC, and only follow their own internal programming.

I know it's only for the purpose of giving examples, but I think you're using needs and thought processes that these NPCs should have that are too human / advanced to implement. "Should have been a General"... there are so many high level concepts (ambition, an actual understanding of the social structure, etc.) that are implied / embedded in that mode of thinking that it's pretty much impossible to accomplish it without actual intelligence.

In the end, the NPC is a bot, and so there are only a few things that are possible:

1. Make him a state machine with various needs, like you describe, and let him flop from state to state. (edit:) The problem with a state machine is so far I've only seen single-state machines, whereas a RL human has multiple states he's in at the same time: well-fed, rested, not happy, not in-a-dangerous-situation, alert, at work, all of these being true at the same time).

2. Set up a life path of things to accomplish and time to accomplish them by (before death), as well as functions / methods by which he can follow this programming and accomplish these things.

3. The NPC is there only to put on a show for the human players, who are busy elsewhere most of the time, and so the illusion that the NPC is alive is sufficient and much cheaper to code than actually making the NPC be alive via a daily and life schedule.

4. It is possible (and maybe desirable) to program code for a whole town or kingdom to function properly (economy, expansion needs, defenses, amenities for players, etc) without the need to make each NPC within the kingdom function autonomously. There's no need to build a hive when you can build one entity that functions like an intelligent and self-adapting city.

Complex NPC's consume a very large chunk of programming time. I think we should get away from NPC (quest givers) and stick with environmental NPCs where the only network traffic they create are positional updates. Hell, I would even have the animations run client side (locally) based off the changes between each positional update.

But that's just me...

Also, a lot of these states are difficult to detect in a dynamic world. An NPC will react to being attacked by a dragon, for example, because it goes against his "safety" need, but he won't think twice about marching into the dragon's cave (or something similar), because he doesn't have any way to know that it's going to be dangerous beforehand. Or they'll march into the middle of the desert with no food, notice they're hungry a day later, and then starve to death before they can get back to town. Your NPCs in this setup can't predict the future, they can only react to the present, so they are still going to come across as extremely stupid unless you blanket the game world with hard-coded triggers for all these states, and that's going to be a ton of work. Even then, you run into problems with the other players, whom you can't script reactions for, because you (as a dev) can't predict how they'll act (unless you do something very limiting, like World of Warcraft, where you can do nothing but attack members of the opposite faction, and are prohibited from attacking members of your own).

Also, using them to generate quests doesn't seem like it would be as simple a matter as it sounds like you're making it out to be. You're talking about making a fairly robust AI system and then tacking an extremely fluid quest generator on top of that. Even getting stock NPCs (without all this AI work) to toss out decent internally generated quests that work in the game world is more work than most game studios can handle, and then you're going to have to tie all this environmental consideration in to it somehow.

Though I would dearly love to see some better NPC social AI someday...

I dunno. The great thing about MMOGs is that we've got all these players. The sooner we can convince them to play all of the NPCs, the better. Players playing monsters. Players acting as merchants. Players giving quests and doling out rewards. In some cases where manipulation would be too easy, you can have the players acting at levels of abstraction from what they're actually doing:

Operating a merchant might be done by playing some stock-market game.
Controlling the wandering monsters in a section of forest might be a Real Time Strategy type setup.
Offer a lobby where players can play boss monsters as they become necessary... but without the choice of which they get to play, and without the ability to distinguish the names and characteristics of the players they kill.

Want to do something different? Try playing a town guard for half an hour.

So long as there are in-game rewards for progression within these tasks (or bonuses available to your "real character" for interacting with them) I think players could be convinced to do just about anything. If it was fun, too, they'd even enjoy it.

I think a little RTS in these games is an interesting way to add different types of gameplay. But I'm thinking "RTS" more like what Majesty had, which is actually more like a sim. But I don't know what to call it, so I'll just babble.

First example that pops into my head is something that would appeal to an explorer type. Give players access to 'beacons'. One type of beacon would attract 'townsfolk'. If a beacon is set down in an area that is conducive to a town/village, it will (over time) attract townsfolk, who will then have enough raw materials to create a town (which will result in fewer trees in the area, houses popping up, etc).

As a reward (more are possible) to the player, the beacon become a monument (size depending on the size of the town) to the player that placed it. But it's the monument that actually has the processing associated with it, not each individual npc that is generated.

In the big game in my head, there are higher-level entities (can call them gods, although they can simply be forces in the game: life, nature, war, etc) that pursue an agenda. "life" for instance, wants as many of the "town builder" beacons placed as possible. "nature" is a partial counter to "life", as is "war". Each entity wants to maximize it's objectives, players are rewarded by entities when they further that entities goals (planting the beacon, and nurturing the town till it grows).

Course, that's probably way more then you want to do. Still, I think it's a decent sort of middle ground between full-on RTS, full-on AI programming (and the performance drag that brings), and player-as-npc (which I think is only an interesting diversion in PvE-focused games, not a component to build your game around)

Edit: "attack 'townsfolk'" is substantially different then "attract 'townsfolk'", I meant the latter

Some interesting comments here.

1. Our GM interface will be an RTS-type interface where GMs can play groups of mobs at a time and attack players and groups of players with mobs - going for the medics, flanking around geographic formations etc. If you do the math about paying people to play characters it gets astronomical (assuming that you dont write it into your business plan and find a way to pay for it - I could write a whole thread on this plan).

The idea is going to reward veteran players and guilds established in other games. Yes there are headaches in terms of cheating, exploiting, and staying to the lore. But it can be done.

2. Sims-like/RTS play. I agree with the idea that MMOs will eventually have Sims like play. Darkfall is allowing people to control hordes of skeletal minions and set up sim-ish npc healers and crafters. We're already doing semi-RTS stuff with buildings having certain benefits and purposes along with resource gathering. I't would be great if those who liked to do RTS stuff built businesses inside the world that rose and fell after gathering materials, hiring workers and producing them. This would play into the politics and economics of the world at a grander level, while people who wanted to be on the ground fighting things out (say with the police or gangs) could make a decent dent into the same economics as well.

3. Need states - We agree that there need to be realistic, non-abstract need states that affect the game world.

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His wife cannot think "he should have been a general by now", because if she is an NPC like him, you've only defined behavior patterns and rules for personal needs i.e. no NPC thinks about any other NPC, and only follow their own internal programming.

I disagree. It's a question of definitions within definitions and plot writing. Ambition as a function of comparing where someone is now with where they thought they should be could be done perhaps like this: An NPC is created at whatever rank in whatever organization they are in. A certain advancement path is predetermined and checked against every so often. How would an NPC advance? Since this is a game it would come from how many successful battles vs. NPCs / PCs he's had. Basically a win/loss ratio over X for Y period = advancement. Now in the real world there are limits to how many people can advance and how often they can. We can be a lot more flexible with that.

Of course this is going really deep, but if the right amount of time is put into working up plot arcs that can translate into decent gameplay/drama/conflict/economics - it would be 10 million times better than static quest givers.

...and take ten million times longer to code. :p

Definitely. A paradigm shift for the better is going to cost more to produce. The question is, will investors and customers pay for the experience?

I have to be blunt. Everything you've talked about in the different threads on this forum reeks of an overambitious indie shitpile that would require a mass-market budget to pull off competently, but which would attract only a niche-market audience of virtual world kooks. I have a strong streak of virtual world kook in me myself, but unless you have a budget in the tens of millions and don't care if you ever make a profit, you need to pick just one of these big ideas of yours to run with.

Come on. You can insult better than that when you run out of things to say. This thread is about spitballing and theorizing. It's not necessarily about the game we're making per se. Notice I used the word considering?It's going to take millions? OMZG! I never would have figured that out! We're talking pie-in-the-sky? Wowzers! you're educating me.

Seriously though, Im just here to theorize and pass some time with people that are fairly up-to-date on MMOs. If you're going to start swigging hateraide, I can just ignore your posts. I havent been hype-minded. I havent made any claims about our game being anything superior or hell if it's even ever going to get done.

Ok, thats all the defensive I've got in me today. I really dont care that much other than I have to respond to defend the honor of the project that other hard working people are spending their free time on.

Darksign, meet WUA. The f-13 honeymoon is over bro, sorry to break it to ya ;)

Glad it lasted as long as it did ;) I've heard all the naysayers and naysayings for a long time now. I dont take it personally, it's just annoying as an impediment to talking about the real, fun issues.

Quote from: DarkSign on July 07, 2007, 12:16:23 PM

Those discussion have been had. Some opinions are already wrong. Some are right, but they're not profitable so they're never going to be made and you're never going to play them so who cares? There are lots of places for talking about stuff that might be fun if anybody was ever going to make it but nobody will but wouldn't it be awesome?!?!!!

F13 is not that place.

Quote from: pxib on July 07, 2007, 04:46:05 PM

There are lots of places for talking about stuff that might be fun if anybody was ever going to make it but nobody will but wouldn't it be awesome?!?!!!

F13 is not that place.

Isn't it? I thought that was kind of the purpose of this sub-forum. Talking about stuff people have already done seems like it would be more for the "MMOG Discussion" forum.

I think there was a little "tone" in his post. Meaning he's making it seem like we're talking about entirely superflous fluff as opposed to something real - i.e. the superiority dance.

But yeah, you'd think that MMO lovers would enjoying discussing game desin in a game design subforum.

Quote from: DarkSign on July 07, 2007, 07:27:37 PM

It's not superfluous fluff, it's one of the holy grails of artificial intelligencel. If designers could construct living, breathing, entertaining and adapting NPCs who acted and reacted in realistic ways while simultaneously creating interesting and dynamic storylines and entertaining, nuanced dialogue I'd be thrilled. You've outlined one of the holy grails of artificial intelligence research. I imagine anybody who came up with NPCs like this could make a small fortune.

Except nobody has. Nowhere is this working in single-player games where the rules are considerably less complicated than those MMOGs have to struggle with. I've yet to see it work properly in goofy, experimental non-game projects designed completely around the adventures of those computer-controlled characters. It's one of those things like natural-language processing that seems intuitively easy to our human brains that computer brains choke to death on.

What I said earlier was that we've already got human brains available. They're called players. If we want exciting plots and interactions we're probably going to have to use those ones. NPCs suck.

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There are a bazillion crux-points in that outline that could be chosen to set off all kinds of quests, change faction, develop character arc. Mix that with one of those internet lists of "37 basic plots" or "1001 master plot arcs" in an automated by dynamic system..and boom you have it.

Boom. Also I'd like a hundred thousand background NPCs involved in a functioning economy, the ability to construct my own buildings brick by brick, and a functioning environmental system where players can change the world by cutting down trees, laying roads, and drawing maps in the dust at their feet for their seiges of the cities their enemies have constructed. And a pony. I want a pony.

No experience with this stuff on my part, but as far as theorizing, yeah, sure, I'd like to do it. However, if you don't keep track of what's possible (processing power, and cost/profitability) it gets into the realm of science fiction, making the discussion kinda pointless (and yeah, that's been done to death too, 100 years from now we'll all be interacting with virtual reality and AI so advanced it'll seem alive, and we'll have robots in every house too).

Most of the counter-points and criticism to your ideas are along the lines of "it's not profitable" and/or "it's not possible with the current hardware". I guess we want to discuss Game Design now, and not Game Design as it will possibly be 100 years from now.

Quote from: ajax34i on July 07, 2007, 10:20:18 PM

Most of the counter-points and criticism to your ideas are along the lines of "it's not profitable" and/or "it's not possible with the current hardware". I guess we want to discuss Game Design now, and not Game Design as it will
possibly be 100 years from now.

Can you explain to me how you would feasibly construct an NPC to react dynamically to a world when his/her reactions must be binary? If you can do that much, I'm with you. Other than that, you just have a bot with random sayings.

Puff says, "I'm just an earthbound misfit, tongue-tied and twisted."

What has been done already is not a function of what can be done...it's a function of what people with money have allowed devs to try. Publishers flock to Fallout3 not because of the game lore or the branching story plots (I wish they did of course) but because doing a franchise game reduces their risk.

To merely say "if it could be done it would have been done already" means nothing new would ever get done. If you want a pony you have to start going to the stockyard not saying it would have arrived on your doorstep already.

Quote from: DarkSign on July 08, 2007, 02:20:23 PM

What has been done already is not a function of what can be done...

Indeed, but then the discussion needs to focus on how you propose to do these things you desire, not merely on what you want. Tinkering geniuses have been tinkering over independent story agents for almost as long as there have been computers... maybe a little longer. The .COM crash was only the most recent chunk of evidence that just pouring money on a wonderful list of features does not suddenly make it bloom into business.

If you want a pony, you should start by going to the stockyard and seeing what's available and (once you discover that your pony is not currently for sale) discussing the mysteries of animal husbandry... not by breathlessly outlining the capabilities of a hypothetical super-pony.

Im not an AI programmer so yeah you've got me there. So I guess all theoretical conversations about anything other than what anyone can implement themselves is out of the question.

Hell, since no one here will be getting financing for a 25 million dollar MMO project we should all just pack up shop and talk about trading Pokemon cards.

Quote from: DarkSign on July 08, 2007, 04:34:31 PM

So I guess all theoretical conversations about anything other than what anyone can implement themselves is out of the question.

You don't have to pack up your toys and go home, but you'd be well served to look around at what is being done now and think of ways to improve it. How can we fake NPC interaction and dynamic plot creation with current tech? Can some hand-waving and clever funneling of player expectations create the illusion of choice, change, and plot variety?

...or, as I said earlier, can we trick the players into paying a subscription to do this stuff themselves by disguising the control mechanism as another game?

If you're not an AI programmer, don't ask the AI programmers to make a quantum leap. The more possible your idea sounds, the more grounded it is in accepted reality, the more likely that somebody will steal it and put it in a game. 25 million dollar MMO projects will be made out of ideas that look like they work, not by dreams that would be cool if somebody smart would just invent a way to do them.

Quote from: pxib on July 08, 2007, 04:59:34 PM

Quote from: DarkSign on July 08, 2007, 04:34:31 PM

So I guess all theoretical conversations about anything other than what anyone can implement themselves is out of the question.

That's exactly what I wasnt doing but you wanted me to do. It should go without saying that the closer you are to what is being done the more probability there is of getting it done.

The idea of getting players to do the work isnt a new one. It's worth discussing just like a discussion of refining and refining and refining NPC schedules and states to the point at which they resemble reality and choice. But when the discussion gets pounded by someone using the "wow you're a silly 13 year old (Im 35 btw)" tone, that kind of gets stifled.

By all means, tell us more about getting players to play mobs and add drama themselves.

Quote from: DarkSign on July 07, 2007, 05:58:04 AM

That wasn't an insult. Not even an attempted insult. If it were an insult, I would have said "fuck" more and thrown in a reference to fetuspults. I'm just the prick pointing out that a homebrew indie MMO is a proposition with a 99% chance of failure by definition, and that "considering" all this super-advanced "pie in the sky" stuff is not where your head should be.

You're a guy trying to break into the automobile market by building a really kickass car from scratch in your garage. That's fine, whatever, it's your dime. But you need to be way more focused on nuts-and-bolts and ways to cut corners, and much less interested in "Wouldn't it be awesome if your car was also a boat, and could fly?"

Also, you need to grow much thicker skin in a big hurry. If that insignifigant buzzing was enough to put you in "Defend honor! Rawr!" mode, you're going to have a stroke when it comes to showing anything concrete to the general public.

Quote from: WindupAtheist on July 08, 2007, 06:55:04 PM

Also, you need to grow much thicker skin in a big hurry. If that insignifigant buzzing was enough to put you in "Defend honor! Rawr!" mode, you're going to have a stroke when it comes to showing anything concrete to the general public.

Much less f13.net. Who was it that has the quote about constructive criticism mollycoddling at DeVry?

And yeah. You might get bitchslapped by some forum persona here, but there are many valuable thoughts and opinions to be gleaned from this forum. Note the red names. I'd probably start there. And especially pay attention to Raph's posts.

You guys need to spend more time in forums. I dont need a thicker skin. You guys are nothing compared to rpgcodex and nma when it comes to being harsh/rude/vitriolic. It's just frustrating to get ad hominem returns instead of game dev theory.

Keep up the condescention...

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You're a guy trying to break into the automobile market by building a really kickass car from scratch in your garage. That's fine, whatever, it's your dime. But you need to be way more focused on nuts-and-bolts and ways to cut corners, and much less interested in "Wouldn't it be awesome if your car was also a boat, and could fly?"

You have no idea how much Ive spent on nuts and bolts. I have an absolutely huge design document that I dont come blaring into this forum with because of the treatment Ive gotten on other forums (read rpgcodex and nma). I've spent a lot of time making spreadsheet after spreadsheet with details, writing, getting feedback from people in the industry...I was coming here thinking I'd found people who loved MMOs and would like to spitball theory and have fun in the process.

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If that insignifigant buzzing was enough to put you in "Defend honor! Rawr!" mode, you're going to have a stroke when it comes to showing anything concrete to the general public.

Translation: dont take what you say as worth listening to. Gotcha wink

When you're part of a group that has put a lot of time into something and some guy that you're trying to have a real back and forth with decides to be condescending and spew drivel directed at you...you can either try to really have a conversation or just back away from the table.

Ok. Lesson learned. Someone has to come in and kiss ass and join the click before they're received right. Np.

Quote from: DarkSign on July 08, 2007, 08:08:14 PM

How the hell are you going to insult the entire forum in the same thread that you are trying to ask us for help? Granted WUA might not be the most liked here, but there are a ton of good discussions and posts that are worth your while to rifle through. If you can't use the search command and you expect the entire forum to flock to this thread and help you in your quest, simply put, fuck off.

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Great. I might believe you, but I don't think it matters. If you come into a professional meeting wearing your pajamas, don't expect to be taken seriously. When you can't get past a pseudo-insult and your point gets derailed, why should we care about your point? I would love to discuss NPC mechanics with you, but you ignored my question. Instead, you flamed WUA. How am I supposed to help you when you want to concentrate on him and not me?

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Translation: dont take what you say as worth listening to. Gotcha wink

Actually, I got feedback on my first posts here, and I'm just a little English major down here that loves video games. I don't think you have to kiss anyone's ass to be taken seriously. Rather, I think you must not act like one.

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The MMO genre needs to push NPCs forward in terms of interaction and realism.

Why? And assuming I go in for your "why," then... How?

Seriously. The whole point of MM in MMOG is that the other players matter and the environment doesn't have to carry the whole load. I also note you used MMO - which doesn't mean anything. Massively Multiplayer Online... what again? There is no noun here, though the acronym used frequently enough. Even MMOG is incomplete, for instance we hardly classify music based on Live, Radio, CD genres. Genre typically refers to the content of the thing, the characteristics that are shared among many of the things that are said to be similar. Western, Romantic Comedy, ExplodySummerActionFlick, etc. Anyway, it would be nice to know what genre you are working in to need dynamic plot, killable vendors and useful NPCs to pull off your product successfully.

I suspect your "Why" takes you firmly into the domain of single player RPGs, meaning, your why relates to the poor experience w.r.t. NPCs driving compelling story in MMOGs as compared to single player games (or books) of similar genres. That "story of the game" bit is a big key that perhaps the MM portion of MMOG isn't exactly core to your game concept and perhaps is distracting/diluting your design and probability of success. The sense I get from your posts is that you are building, fundamentally, a single player experience that happens to support more than one player at a time. It just so happens you want to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you've really built a self-consistent world, so into the MMOG breech you go. Meh. Is it any wonder folks aren't hyped on the Next Great Vapor Project of the summer of 07?

Let's look at the How mentioned thus far: Look at your "poor" example in the head of the thread. I agree that the example is poor, but perhaps for a different reason than you do. In that example the player is doing 'work' on behalf one of the NPCs in the game. Go kill those rats in the sewer, go check my mail, go fetch my slippers, Head_Pants_Now. Even if they are different specific tasks depending on whatever "personal or professional needs that aren't met," the player sees the same thing: NPC_001 wants me to do Thing_001 for him. Even your Tier 3 NPC here functions more or less the same as your Tier 1 NPC from a player standpoint, so why bother with the overhead? The user sees your Tier 3 NPC as a Tier 1 NPC that is: Hard to find (he moves around on his own schedule), sometimes asks them to do things that cannot be done, and/or asks from a subset of N things instead of the same thing over and over again. What happens if your players attempt to kill the Agent? Maybe you let it die, but spawn an equivalent replacement, because it was a lot of work building that Agent in the first place. What happens when the players kill (or ignore) all the dynamic NPC Agents? Why do the Agents matter? Are the Agents by definition fun?

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This wide a spread will look pretty random to the user. Why not make it literally random (or assign a correlated probability for the quests to prevent absurd sequences of quests) and save a bundle on your Agent AI? 1% of the cost for 85% of the functionality, woohoo? Gives you time to go back to making World of Fruit Vendors Online the best sim-shopping expererience ever.

Here is another question for you. How many playable races are in your game? See, a 50 page design doc with spreadsheets, concept art, world maps, etc. gets you to the door. Just assume everyone here has done that work too. Once everyone here has already done their own version it should be pretty clear that we cannot be bothered with everyone's fluff doc. We need a 1pager before we can talk sensibly about your game. So far, we've seen three threads that cannot be summed up in one page each - but together don't tell us anything about your game. If you want to step through you'll have to pull an Eisenhower. Recast your game into a single race single class version and see if it is compelling and fun. Do the minimum implementation and make sure the game works as a game before blowing time on unsolved problems in computer science. If your game relies on the complexity of Agent NPCs, player frustratable services, or story generation then you don't actually have a game at all. What good is an intricately crafted, but empty, world? Build a single player game with one race and one class and your game to demonstrate the fun inherent in your system while: limiting risk and providing a track record of success on which to negotiate a publishing and ops contract when you do finally create the next big thing MMOG. See, win-win! You get to build your game on the cheap and we get to see if you can make it go in the simplest form before you ask us to buy into your super(MMOG) scale dreams.

This is something Shadowbane should have done, in case anyone cares, and watching Wolfpack not do it caused me to shelve my own design docs and spreadsheets. Their race-profession-discipline matrix was awesomely ambitious, but represented too much complexity on top of an already complex system when it came time to actually finish a solid product and ship it to eager users. It doesn't matter how filled with awesome your doc has become, when you finally have a deadline to work towards you can't possibly do most of that spec justice. Any of their Siegecraft or chargen/progression or lore would have been enough to hold down a great game had it been done well. In attempting everything they ensured that none would be done well.

I could actually see using an Agent NPC in a multi-player setting in a "Reverse Populous" game. That would literally swap the player-NPC axis from the original single player game, thus limiting the Agent NPCs to a few in the world. Each Agent would represent the "Godhead" of each faction as those factions fight each other. Player persistance and advancement could be handled by allowing players to 'start' as an increasing variety of 'units' but those units can only enter the game if the faction is doing 'well enough' to support them. Bringing in high level units means your Agent NPC can't be doing anything particularly interesting to the opposition(s)' players or Agent, however. A little self limiting there, to allow the player's self interest to reign in their own 'winning' effort. I don't find the idea of Agent NPCs to be bad on their own, but making NPCs into Agents for the wrong reasons is just... wasteful.

Quote from: cmlancas on July 08, 2007, 08:40:13 PM

Quote from: DarkSign on July 08, 2007, 08:08:14 PM

Simply put, I didnt insult the entire forum. I said that this forum wasnt as good at insults. Get the meaning there? Did I say "you guys know nothing about MMOs"? No. Did I say "You fuckers have no clue about game design mechanics"? Not in the least. I think there's a lot of wisdom to be gained here. I just said that I've had rougher treatment elsewhere. Learn to read.

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I didnt come in wearing pajamas. I thought to myself, hey here are some guys that I can finally let my hair down with. They love MMOs a lot more than any other forum board and they'd love to have some abstract discussions. Instead the majority of the response is the usual "dont you know how much these things cost?" "you realize this hasnt been done before and probably cant be" "you're pushing ahead too far." If I missed your really interesting post, forgive me - I was taking everyone else seriously which apparently was a bad move. Mea culpa.

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Translation: dont take what you say as worth listening to. Gotcha wink

Perhaps you dont. Im not sure why I got the response Ive gotten here. Again, Ive gotten worse but Ive damn sure gotten better. The abstract and pie-in-the-sky conversation was handled much better at GameDev.net where there are arguably more programmers and gamemakers who could have slammed me with more force, seeing as how they have more technical expertise.

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The MMO genre needs to push NPCs forward in terms of interaction and realism.

Why? And assuming I go in for your "why," then... How?

Why? Because static NPC dumb-terminals and worlds that dont respond to players in any sort of meaningful or consequential way are outdated. How's that?

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Seriously. The whole point of MM in MMOG is that the other players matter and the environment doesn't have to carry the whole load.

You're partially right. Community is one of the defining elements of an MMO and perhaps the most important. However the fact that increasing numbers of people play solo because they hate the fuckers that they have to group is also a valid consideration.
One of the main problems with Shadowbane, die hard player that I was, was that player politics/drama alone wasnt enough. There should have been more content, period. So while there may be some option for players to fulfill roles of mobs, at some point you've gone full circle to merely making it PvP again with players playing other players which wasnt enough in the long haul. Read the other posts where people keep telling me that "no one wants to be like an NPC guard and man a station all day." Surely there is some common ground, but if you're going to try to do it without making NPCs better, you're really losing out on part of your game that could be better.

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I also note you used MMO - which doesn't mean anything. Massively Multiplayer Online... what again? There is no noun here, though the acronym used frequently enough. Even MMOG is incomplete, for instance we hardly classify music based on Live, Radio, CD genres. Genre typically refers to the content of the thing, the characteristics that are shared among many of the things that are said to be similar. Western, Romantic Comedy, ExplodySummerActionFlick, etc. Anyway, it would be nice to know what genre you are working in to need dynamic plot, killable vendors and useful NPCs to pull off your product successfully.

Wow. My mother was an English professor and even she wasnt that picky. In my other posts I've used the term MMORPG. My apologies if I didnt follow through. Truth be told I think you're just looking for something to nitpick, but ok. MMORPGRTSFPS would be the best term, based in a a mix of pa and cyberpunk settings.

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I suspect your "Why" takes you firmly into the domain of single player RPGs, meaning, your why relates to the poor experience w.r.t. NPCs driving compelling story in MMOGs as compared to single player games (or books) of similar genres. That "story of the game" bit is a big key that perhaps the MM portion of MMOG isn't exactly core to your game concept and perhaps is distracting/diluting your design and probability of success. The sense I get from your posts is that you are building, fundamentally, a single player experience that happens to support more than one player at a time. It just so happens you want to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you've really built a self-consistent world, so into the MMOG breech you go. Meh. Is it any wonder folks aren't hyped on the Next Great Vapor Project of the summer of 07?

Yep. We're vapor. So then why all the hatred? NPCs that have a full economy, sophisticated politics, and affect the power struggle of the entire world are DEFINITELY critical to our game. Our lead content developer has a Ph.D in International Affairs and is putting his knowledge of politics/econ to work making something that will be deep enough for players to really sink their teeth into.

And lets get this straight. It's not a fundamentally single-player game in the least. It's a territorial domination game on one level. On another level its about groups and individuals navigating the politics and economies of scale against other large scale powers (which is interlinked with the territorial domination) and furthermore one of the main devices of the game is for groups to get the world to certain states, advancing down certain plot lines, so bring the server to a conclusion. Think of the last part like a spiderweb with knots at the intersection. Around the circumference you have certain endings (race A and race B work together to stop race C from X,Y,Z - that's a bit simplistic atm but perhaps you'll understand). This can only be done by groups who push the world status to the various knots - backward, forward, over two rows, back one.

But here we are. I avoided coming onto this forum board and spamming about our game. What happened? You still begin to criticize because you know nothing about what we're trying to do in the least. So you've taught me that there's no right way to try to discuss MMOs on a forum board with people unless you keep it really really on rails with whatever they are already talking about. Or perhaps I'd need to just pick a forum name that someone cant google down and then judge me based on what they find. I was merely trying to have a fun conversation about possibilities that have promise, but it gets to be about me and the project not the actual ideas. Lesson learned, finally.

Let's look at the How mentioned thus far: Look at your "poor" example in the head of the thread. I agree that the example is poor, but perhaps for a different reason than you do. In that example the player is doing 'work' on behalf one of the NPCs in the game. Go kill those rats in the sewer, go check my mail, go fetch my slippers, Head_Pants_Now. Even if they are different specific tasks depending on whatever "personal or professional needs that aren't met," the player sees the same thing: NPC_001 wants me to do Thing_001 for him. Even your Tier 3 NPC here functions more or less the same as your Tier 1 NPC from a player standpoint, so why bother with the overhead? The user sees your Tier 3 NPC as a Tier 1 NPC that is: Hard to find (he moves around on his own schedule), sometimes asks them to do things that cannot be done, and/or asks from a subset of N things instead of the same thing over and over again. What happens if your players attempt to kill the Agent? Maybe you let it die, but spawn an equivalent replacement, because it was a lot of work building that Agent in the first place. What happens when the players kill (or ignore) all the dynamic NPC Agents? Why do the Agents matter? Are the Agents by definition fun?

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Here is another question for you. How many playable races are in your game?

3 actually, but since this has become a total dissection of our game and not constructive criticism, I really dont feel like going into it.

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See, a 50 page design doc with spreadsheets, concept art, world maps, etc. gets you to the door.

Wow. More condescention. More like 300 pages actually. There's a 1 page executive summary, A technical specs document, and a lot of other parts. You really think you're taking me to school, dont you? Wow. That's cute.

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Just assume everyone here has done that work too. Once everyone here has already done their own version it should be pretty clear that we cannot be bothered with everyone's fluff doc.

Well if you dont want to "suffer through" talking game design...dont come into the game design sub-forum. Hell, whoever it was who googled me and the project was smart enough to find our website and probably many other posts about the game. I was attempting not to spam/hype/push our game. What kind of reward do I get for that? Absolutely none. Instead you decide to turn the whole thing into chicken pecking order situation.

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We need a 1pager before we can talk sensibly about your game. So far, we've seen three threads that cannot be summed up in one page each - but together don't tell us anything about your game. If you want to step through you'll have to pull an Eisenhower. Recast your game into a single race single class version and see if it is compelling and fun.

You speak for everyone? You think you need to dissect our game before you can talk game theory? Wow. Interesting.

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Do the minimum implementation and make sure the game works as a game before blowing time on unsolved problems in computer science.

Read: Get something made before you talk theory. Well we have something made but that wasnt a prerequisite for spending a day talking theory on a forum board.

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If your game relies on the complexity of Agent NPCs, player frustratable services, or story generation then you don't actually have a game at all. What good is an intricately crafted, but empty, world? Build a single player game with one race and one class and your game to demonstrate the fun inherent in your system while: limiting risk and providing a track record of success on which to negotiate a publishing and ops contract when you do finally create the next big thing MMOG. See, win-win! You get to build your game on the cheap and we get to see if you can make it go in the simplest form before you ask us to buy into your super(MMOG) scale dreams.

You've already proven that you know nothing about our design, our abilities, and our implementation so the down-talk is more ironic than anything else.

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This is something Shadowbane should have done, in case anyone cares, and watching Wolfpack not do it caused me to shelve my own design docs and spreadsheets. Their race-profession-discipline matrix was awesomely ambitious, but represented too much complexity on top of an already complex system when it came time to actually finish a solid product and ship it to eager users. It doesn't matter how filled with awesome your doc has become, when you finally have a deadline to work towards you can't possibly do most of that spec justice. Any of their Siegecraft or chargen/progression or lore would have been enough to hold down a great game had it been done well. In attempting everything they ensured that none would be done well.

You might have a point about the complexity if the programming of it took away from stopping sb.exes. Otherwise it wasnt awesomely ambitious. There are tons of us that didnt find it complex at all. Generic point #234234 about doing the simple stuff first. You keep losing sight that I came here to speak abstractly and not to do a blog about our design/progress.

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I don't find the idea of Agent NPCs to be bad on their own, but making NPCs into Agents for the wrong reasons is just... wasteful.

At least we can agree on that. You should see from the original post that I dont want all NPCs to be third-order. And the purpose is to create a changing environment/quest bank. When a non-responsive/dull/static quest world is one of players' biggest complaints, yeah I'd say it was worth doing.

Steven, you've done some peacemaking in the other threads which I applaud you for. There is definitely lots of wisdom in these forums to be gleaned. Im not sure how to finish this post so I'll sign off.

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I'm not going to go into the "flame" aspect of the thread (although I did warn ya man), but I'm going to point the Big Red Name(tm) at the quote above, and say something very hard to accept, and extremely important:

Take that 300 page design doc and place it in the trashcan on your desktop. It's holding you back, and is not going to get you to your goal. Instead, do some research on agile/iterative development, and/or SCRUM development, and get ready to get some work done.

Now, take the next six months, and start up a series of 6 iterative development cycles, starting with core mechanics and spiraling out to slightly larger design goals as you go. Make sure at the end of each sprint (each month most probably), the current iteration of the game is:

--fun, or still has a very strong and obvious potential to become fun (careful there)
--actually works, and has a structure that can be expanded
--demonstrates at the fundamental level your underlying design

Now, if you've been following a standard agile/scrum model, you'll have some form of design doc (not nearly as complex or detailed as the one you had of course), and it will actually describe your game, instead of your dream. At this point, you can begin being more formal in your systems, and address more complex implementations, but don't get caught up in over-design--that's the worst thing you can do when you are working on innovation and pushing the envelope in any genre.

Will do. Im going to research agile/iterative development, and/or SCRUM development at your suggestion.
I earnestly appreciate the help.

Like I said in my earlier post, check out the posts from the red names. :)

Don't let them get you down, and for god sake don't rise to the bait. Remember why you are here: to vet out some ideas against people who largely don't have a fucking clue as to what they are talking about (such as myself) from a game design perspective (red names mostly excluded), but who play alot of games and have vague thoughts and strong opinions about what they like. Rising to the bait does nothing for you. Let me repeat that: rising to the bait does nothing for you.

Kicking back with folks who like to talk MMO theory will only come about once everyone who wants to try out their "mmo-jaded-with-attitude" act on you get tired and move on.

We, well, hmph. I've been here awhile (a year or two in the WaterThread, which was a forum prior to this one) but I'm not sure I've been here long enough, or post enough, to count as "we".

Ok, f13 isn't a meritocracy. You have to put in your time, and put up with attitude before you can just have discussions. I'd say that Zepp would say it's worth it. I think Lum might be off f13 for a bit due to the Politics forum.

STAY AWAY FROM POLITICS.