I want to make a difference!

[Glazius]

Scene-setting intro.

I didn't know about this interesting feature of City of Heroes until somebody I was grouping with was very surprised to have clicked on NPCs to pass the time and found out one of them commented on his recovery of the Jewel of Hera (early newbie mission).

NPCs say various things visible to only you on your screen. From the informative (The time is XX:XX - and by the way on Halloween with Paragon City trapped in eternal night they were all saying 'midnight'.) to the small-talky ("Last year I thought my air conditioning had gone out, but it turns out the Clockwork had taken the whole thing!") to the ridiculous ("Stop poking me!") to a one-time report on some mission you've undertaken ("Hey, there's the hero who saved Lou, my mechanic!"). Or, if you were part of a task force group, some mission your task force undertook. ("If you ask me, Task Force Dusk is being framed!")

Call me crazy, but every time I unearth something like that I get a little rush. Even though it's just a one-time text string, it provides that little extra bit of closure - the kids I saved from a DE virus drew pictures of me in school, the AI I broke out of Crey's network is now a respected blogger, the general I saved put me in his memoir, the footage of me going all Men In Black on the Rikti gave people the courage to go back to their jobs.

The ideas I have to improve City of Heroes center around making contacts more 'affected' by what you do - basically unlocking a for-rent temporary power based around that contact's specialty by doing them a particular favor. The ideas I had to improve Saga of Ryzom centered around getting yourself some NPC recognition instead of milling the same quests over and over again, and I hear that EQ2 was planning to implement this (NPCs recognize you as the orc slayer and run up to ask for help) though I haven't heard about it from the betaers.

I know we've talked about one person or even one group being able to affect the world in meaningful ways. Heck, even allowing the entire playerbase to affect the world in meaningful ways, to change the outcome of storylines.

I wonder if that's necessary, considering how much I get out of just affecting 'my world' in CoH - what the NPCs say when I click on them.

I forget where it was aired originally, but somebody had the idea of just changing the textures on a per-player basis to reflect individual achievements. Let's say a painter in Generic Fantasy Medieval City has lost his inspiration, because his paintbrush was stolen or his sister kidnapped by goblins or whatever. Actually, let's work with that last one.

When you go after the painter's sister, you do so in an instanced dungeon, and when you free her and head back to the painter's house, everything has changed. The stacks of discarded canvas now bear images, the draped dropcloths have been replaced with an easel, and the painter's sister is standing there beside him. Changing textures (in the latter case from 'nothing at all') could easily account for all of this. You see the painter happy, and a level 60 who's never paid attention to him will still see the same drab, fallapart studio.

Heck, if the option is there for the painter's sister to die instead of being rescued - either by friendly fire or by goblins whacking her as she flees for the exit - then you could come back to a despondent studio, with cobwebbed walls and dusty cloths, and no painter in sight.

But that begs the question - is something like this a) possible and b) feasible? Storing quest information and the successes and failures are certainly possible with the modern database, but how much work on each end is going to go into choosing a texture to display based on this quest information?

Conceptually it sounds easy, but I know many people are going to prove me wrong.

--GF

[Falagon]

Cool idea... gotta say, I love NPCs that respond and a world that is more than a matte painting you walk around.

Just a couple of questions...

In your suggestion, the player who completes that quest is the only one who sees the changes to the world. For other players, the world hasn't changed at all. So, is this, then, really  "changing the world"?  And if it happens enough, so that each player has their own "shade" of the world, wouldn't that really be a single player game with the ability to chat to other people? Is that a bad/good idea?

Also, in your suggestion.. how do you handle the fact that in one group of players, they may be seeing the world in two different ways? Some see a drab place, some see a nice place. So, if two players in the group have done the art quest and two players haven't ... and they enter the place... what happens? Does that break immersion? Is that OK there?

[Glazius]

Cool idea... gotta say, I love NPCs that respond and a world that is more than a matte painting you walk around.

Just a couple of questions...

In your suggestion, the player who completes that quest is the only one who sees the changes to the world. For other players, the world hasn't changed at all. So, is this, then, really  "changing the world"?  And if it happens enough, so that each player has their own "shade" of the world, wouldn't that really be a single player game with the ability to chat to other people? Is that a bad/good idea?

Also, in your suggestion.. how do you handle the fact that in one group of players, they may be seeing the world in two different ways? Some see a drab place, some see a nice place. So, if two players in the group have done the art quest and two players haven't ... and they enter the place... what happens? Does that break immersion? Is that OK there?

You see the world the leader of your group has created.

The original wrapping story to something like this was like Terranigma/Legend of Mana - something broke the world and you, an agent of a higher power, are tasked with putting the pieces back together. Seeing someone else's "different world" would be easily explainable under the current world-setting.

But even without this wrapper, is seeing a different world more or less immersion-breaking than killing Slam Bonegnaw, ork warlord, and taking his standard back to the guard captain - then grouping up with someone else to kill Slam Bonegnaw, ork warlord, so THEY can take his standard back to the guard captain?

--GF

[MrHat]

I like the idea Glazius, I feel this is the direction the industry is slowing moving towards.  No longer should one group/guild/person kill something that opens up a door that no one will ever be able to open again.

My big question is of the technical (well, sorta):

Using your example, lets say that this artist's studio is in Main City.  You mention using instances for the mission, ie. the cave where the goblins are holding his sister is an instance 'dungeon'.  What about the artists studio?  Is this also a mini-instance of a giant well lit room? Or is the entire city the instance.  Or is the data changed in a seemless area/city/room setting so that by the time group A with Leader Superballs gets to the room, the paintings have been painted and the entire place is cheery.

Just curious how much thought you put into it.  Personally I like the idea, and you could always right it off as a perception thing.

[Glazius]

Using your example, lets say that this artist's studio is in Main City.  You mention using instances for the mission, ie. the cave where the goblins are holding his sister is an instance 'dungeon'.  What about the artists studio?  Is this also a mini-instance of a giant well lit room? Or is the entire city the instance.  Or is the data changed in a seemless area/city/room setting so that by the time group A with Leader Superballs gets to the room, the paintings have been painted and the entire place is cheery.

The entire city or the entire overworld can be the instance. The game would need to figure out what textures to display anyway - this is a check for an associated variable that would tweak the textures one way or the other. It'd even be possible to do something like this client-side, despite the client being in the hands of the enemy and all, though the "display nothing" and "don't block players" would have to be exclusively server-side signals.

There'd probably be a problem with other PCs "ghosting" through NPCs or even entire terrain objects that are there for one character and not there for another.

--GF

[Shannow]

So basically what you want is a single player game with lotsa smart AI or a multiplayer game where everyone bows down before your superiority.

See to really provide enough content for each player in a mmolg game so that they can all be heroes you need such a ridicolously large amount of content that its not doable. Unless of course you instance and then its not a multiplayer game your dealing with.

[Glazius]

See to really provide enough content for each player in a mmolg game so that they can all be heroes you need such a ridicolously large amount of content that its not doable. Unless of course you instance and then its not a multiplayer game your dealing with.

So, there are no multiplayer games where everyone can be a hero?

Fair enough.

I'd rather err on the side of not being true multiplayer than leaving heroism in the hands of the ones who get there first.

In the example situation - the dungeon is instanced. How the group leader does rescuing the painter's sister reflects only on "his reality". A group of 6 can rotate leadership and try to save the girl six times, and their performances will be reflected by the persistent world state they see when they are soloing or leading. And someone who hasn't gone into the instance at all will see no change in the persistent world - unless they've grouped with someone who has.

--GF

[Xilren's Twin]

So basically what you want is a single player game with lotsa smart AI or a multiplayer game where everyone bows down before your superiority.

See to really provide enough content for each player in a mmolg game so that they can all be heroes you need such a ridicolously large amount of content that its not doable. Unless of course you instance and then its not a multiplayer game your dealing with.

Why?  What's wrong with having a shared virtual overworld and allowing players to expierence content they affect in instanced areas?  Sure, it would be minorly immersion breaking if two people in you group had already done their unique version of an instance but tag along to also do yours (assuming the group lead determines the world state), but how is that any more immersion breaking then pure static content is today?

CoH does it, WoW and EQ2 are going to do it, hell even AO did it to some degree.  Are they not multiplayer games?  All Glazius seems to being doing advocating the world be a reflection of your character's experience in it more than we already have via instancing.  To take EQ1, instaed of making a single zone Crushbone castle, you make a variety of version of it to reflect how characters dealt with it and the aftermath.  So while everyone might start with the original state, orc infested with orc emp and ambassador Dvinn alive, if you/your team kill the emp but not the abassador, maybe the next verison is now dark elf infested, version 3 might be if you kill the ambassador but not the emp, version 4 could be if you killed them both, version 5 if you failed to kill any of them, version 6 if the dwarves overan it based on a mission you did for them etc etc etc.

That's taking a mostly static area and simply rearrange the contents a half dozen ways linked to your progress in the game.  If you ever played with the NWN module builder you know this isn't that hard, it just hasn't been done much yet with areas that weren't temporary mission zones that ceased to exist when you were done with them.

Instancing is not the death of mmorpgs.  It may turn out to be the savior (and yes, I know thats highly subjective :) )

Xilren

Xilren

[Shannow]

Yes but what you have is no longer a MMORPG its a single player game being played by a lot of people at the same time.

edit: Maybe this is not a bad thing and is definately a viable game type. I personally like to explore the future of a true multiplayer game though thats all.


And no Glazius you can't all be heros in a multiplayer game, if everyone is a hero then where is the satisfaction of being a hero? (Ie better than everyone else)..

[Xilren's Twin]

Yes but what you have is no longer a MMORPG its a single player game being played by a lot of people at the same time.

edit: Maybe this is not a bad thing and is definately a viable game type. I personally like to explore the future of a true multiplayer game though thats all.

And no Glazius you can't all be heros in a multiplayer game, if everyone is a hero then where is the satisfaction of being a hero? (Ie better than everyone else)..

Personally, I think that's a good thing as the Massive part of mmorpg's is the source of tons of headaches for correspondingly little benefit, IMHO.  I don;t want to play with thousands of random chuckleheads in order to try and find like minded folk; i want to play with like minded folk from the get go.  When all is said and done, how many people do you actually inteact with in a mmorpg in a two week period?

BTW, I disagree with the notion that a Hero has to mean "better than everyone".  I would rather go with the idea of a hero has done something others find worth noting.  I think the pure fame aspects of heroism could be played up much more than they are without changing one skill/stat point on anyone.  

Xilren

[Dark Vengeance]

Personally, I think that's a good thing as the Massive part of mmorpg's is the source of tons of headaches for correspondingly little benefit, IMHO. I don;t want to play with thousands of random chuckleheads in order to try and find like minded folk; i want to play with like minded folk from the get go. When all is said and done, how many people do you actually inteact with in a mmorpg in a two week period?

You're making the argument for a subscription-based, non-massive multiplayer game with server-side hosted persistent characters and regular content updates.

There's nothing wrong with that, and I'd even agree that it could be a good idea.....but the bottom line is that if you don't want to play in a MMOG environment, you shouldn't be playing in one.

Instancing turns me off a bit, because it's basically Diablo 2 with a robust graphical battlenet chat, and some token shared content.

BTW, I disagree with the notion that a Hero has to mean "better than everyone". I would rather go with the idea of a hero has done something others find worth noting. I think the pure fame aspects of heroism could be played up much more than they are without changing one skill/stat point on anyone.

You can't have a world where the hero-to-player ratio is 100%, and still make the deeds of each one notable to others. Eventually "oh yeah, Fred's the guy that killed fluffy the rabid bunny" stops being as notable as "oh yeah, Bob's the guy that singlehandedly conquered the Troll armada, and struck down the evil mage to rescue the Princess".

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............

[Shannow]

Edit: Damnit DV stole all my thunder..well he writes better than I do anyhow.

Personally, I think that's a good thing as the Massive part of mmorpg's is the source of tons of headaches for correspondingly little benefit, IMHO.  I don;t want to play with thousands of random chuckleheads in order to try and find like minded folk; i want to play with like minded folk from the get go.  When all is said and done, how many people do you actually inteact with in a mmorpg in a two week period?

Well ok but thats only because its deemed as to hard to design a game that actually involves player interaction. It would appear with mmorpg design that we are moving more and more away from player interaction (instancing , soloing etc). I think you get more random chuckleheads when the only thing driving them is individual goals..place them in a 'team' environment where there is benefit to be gained from working together in some form. (Yes Im big on the whole team/faction/empire thingy). The problem there is keeping a balance between nation vs nation play vs heroic fantasy sort of stuff.

BTW, I disagree with the notion that a Hero has to mean "better than everyone".  I would rather go with the idea of a hero has done something others find worth noting.  I think the pure fame aspects of heroism could be played up much more than they are without changing one skill/stat point on anyone.  

Yes but no one is going to find it worth noting if everyone has done it. 'ooo there goes Iam2l33t who just slayed the horned dragon' 'Um yeah so what? I did that a week ago'...otherwise you just give the player fame amongst NPCs which brings us back to the whole point of single player games..

[sidereal]

You can't have a world where the hero-to-player ratio is 100%, and still make the deeds of each one notable to others.

Actually, you can, but it requires a high npc-to-player ratio, reasonably responsive AI, and very large virtual geography.  Consider an environment where each player is given a town on the frontier that they alone or in a small group are responsible for defending.  Within that town, NPC reactions will be highly dependent on the player's actions, and can easily give the appropriate heroic good feelings (consider the results of NPC reactions in Fable and CoH).  Once you head back to a main hub like a capitol city, you blend in with all of the other heroes, but in your town, you're the man.  As you get buffer, your town grows, and grand heroes are responsible for cities.  Geographic remoteness makes it very easy to zone each one off into a cheap linux box.

Incidentally, this might be a better version of instancing.  The benefit of instancing is that you can let large numbers of people explore content by themselves without designing an enormous amount of content.  An alternative would be designing the content once, replicating it many times in different places on the same world (rather than making it multiple dimensions in the same place in one world), and then let each instance persist and evolve independently.

[Shannow]

I like the idea of having a town to defend and a territory to explore and pacify.

Howabout instead of the same continents replicated several times in the same world you have smaller player populations in each world.
Maybe this is not workable right now financially but why not a limit be placed on the population of each server so that the max number of players logged on at any one time for one server is like 300-400 instead of 1 to 2 thousand? This way there is more content for everyone, most likely less repeatable content, the chance to stand out more in the best traditions of 'heroic fantasy'.
The next thing would be to make continents with their own unique content (and really to make this workable you still going to need a buttload of it..most likely more than any current game has right now) but as that content is done it remains done (well say after a certain amount of times) and the player moves onto a new area..however in the mean time the area that they had previously pacified is overrun again by monsters etc allowing for contining unique content AND a viable 'story' for the player to identify and keep track of. 'Oh look here is the cavern that myself and Bob the Black cleared of the foul orcs in the year 600 but it has now been infested with a necromancer and his zombie orcs and is terrorizing the local village again'.

[Xilren's Twin]

You're making the argument for a subscription-based, non-massive multiplayer game with server-side hosted persistent characters and regular content updates.

There's nothing wrong with that, and I'd even agree that it could be a good idea.....but the bottom line is that if you don't want to play in a MMOG environment, you shouldn't be playing in one.

Yes.  Yes am I. :)  Problem is, there aren't any of those to speak of.  The closest thing from the "one step above single player games" side was NWN, which while I consider a step in the right direction, is purely dependant on players making decent modules (though Bioware has hinted about doing their own module you would pay for).  So, I'm left to choose from among the current crop of mmropg's one which most closely gives me what I want.  As of today, it's CoH and GW.

One last comment on the Hero thing, which again ties back to a small group vs massive focus.  I like the idea of the geographic regions being distinct to allow for unique content leveraging.  But it's worth noting, would players be satisfied being a "local" hero, in other words being famous and powerful just within the confines of that area and the limited number of players in it?  Or would that not be sufficent to most?

Xilren

Xilren

[sidereal]

But it's worth noting, would players be satisfied being a "local" hero, in other words being famous and powerful just within the confines of that area and the limited number of players in it?  Or would that not be sufficent to most?

I don't think you can rely on PCs to give you your heroic due and respect.  They just  won't.  They want to be the heroes, too.  Even within tight guilds, nobody is venerating anyone else.  Also because you're in competition with the other players for the most part.  Other than the occasional drive-by good samaritan who helps you when you're getting your ass kicked, other players nearly never do anything to benefit you, so how could you see them as heroes?  (Note, this might be different in realm-based PvP).

I think you need to rely on NPCs to play the role of the adoring schlubs that heroes need to be heroic.

That's one way in which the MMORPG direction went down the wrong path early and never got back on track.  The assumption was that since players were populating the world, you didn't need NPCs.  This is a misread of the roles that NPCs play.  They aren't just the quest-vendors and merchants.  They're the population that needs heroes.