The MMOG landscape - unchanging and eternal (since 2004)

[TheCastle]

Another possible issue with dynamic systems - the world changing according to what players do - is that it can all seem pretty random to the players. This was one of the issues Raph has talked about on his blog regarding early UO design. You can have a system where if the players kill all the sheep then the dragon that was eating the sheep comes and swoops on the town to eat people instead, but for most players it just looks like a bloody great dragon has appeared from nowhere.

But maybe there's a way round that. I'd like to think so because I'd like to see that sort of game, rather than yet another game where NPCs have exclamation marks or something over their heads.

Presentation is key.
There are countless ways to counter this problem.
Most likely when it comes to a famous dragon attacking the a player for killing sheep you can do countless things.
After killing a few sheep you get a message on the screen that says "I feel as though someone is watching me."

kill some more and the screen shakes and you hear a roar. "The dragon in the nearby cave has become angry at you!"
hehe I understand that is a lame example but yes there are many many ways to present just about any situation to the player so that they understand what is happening.

Also I would like to point out that I don't believe the system described above is actually dynamic either.
Its a pre-scripted event from what I can tell. Dynamic events are things that happen with out hand created scripts. As far as I can tell nothing I mentioned is a dynamic system.

[UnSub]

It goes on and on. Someone will just take a regular game and throw in the MMO element.

Also: APB. GTA the MMO.

[Lantyssa]

I'm convinced that with a complete rethink in system development, you could make a game where every quest is dynamic off of every other quest and the state of the world all quests can change. The problem though is similar to a game fully reliant on procedurally generated geometry and textures: the industry isn't set up that way.

Yes, a rethink is necessary.

Say the game spawns this gobling with the amulet somewhere.  It already exists.  The lady, if someone talks to her, mentions it.  The goblin, if someone stumbles across it, drops the amulet.  With luck and effort, they are the same person.

Design is going to influence how exactly these things happen.  Does the lady scream and the goblin runs off while some players are near, making it easy for those in the area to track it down?  Do you track it in a quest journal?  If someone picks it up, do you delete it from their journal and/or give them some credit for participating?  Does the system rely on xp so a player can be 'penalized' for not completing a quest, or is it a more flat system where interactions with the world itself are interesting enough to be the reward?  Do you move to a more public quest system so everyone gets a little something if they contribute in some fashion?  Can you convince the goblin to hand it over, or can you steal it from his chest, instead of fighting him?

There are so many ways this could be tweaked.  As long as it's just a static (!) Kill Goblin, Return Amulet (?) Ding, nothing is going to change though.  Even a small change would be a freakin' step forward at this point.

None of this is to say dynamic content should be the only thing in existance.  Hand-crafted quests do have a sense of refinement and can help tell the story of the world.  If your dynamic system is so awesome it can handle this on its own then by all means skip it, however I doubt that is possible yet.  If it allows some permutations to enliven the world though, why not pursue it?

[Draegan]

If it's a dynamic system you find a random necklace off a goblin.  You see no immediate value for it so you either throw it away or keep it.  Eventually you might find a person looking for it.  However how did the necklace get there?  The NPC who lost it wandered out one day collecting mushrooms and dropped it.

You need a system creating all these little scenarios on its own and I doubt that's even possible.  Basically you have to create a true AI.  That's a truly dynamic system. or at least that's what I believe one is.  You can't go in and design for dragons to hunt humans when sheep are no where to be found, but the computer needs to create the scenario.  If you could create tools that allowed you to macro manage your game world (i.e. sets wars off or large story arches with hard points to drive a story) and let the rest of the game work for you.

Yea it's a pipedream just short of a holodeck.  However that's where you're aiming for I guess and what you want to attempt to mimic the most.

[UnsGub]

I don't think it's the tools as much as it's the ability to make games that look as good as $40mil+ productions. And here again, no amount of UnrealEd is going to solve that. First you gotta be able to have the talent and persistence to make a game people want to play. Then you need the time and interest to make fully realized 3D worlds. Most times that's a required group of people.

Yes tech will solve it.  It is just decades away.  The talent is out there they just do not have the tools to leverage it yet.

Tool improvements have made all of the following possible:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Dynamite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blair_Witch_Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_(music)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_comics

Group of people is hard but that has been solved for centuries by governements, businesses, sports, military and recently the open source movement.

[Jerrith]

Another IP that would work well with this is Zelazny's "Amber" series.

Yes, I'd really enjoy playing a game based off of Amber. :) The one difficulty you'd have to work around, at least at the start, is how do you deal with "the good guys" (or at least, the most interesting ones) being the royal family of Amber?  Unless you advance a number of generations, you're going to have way more people who want to be one of their children than is really reasonable...

The whole infinite realities to travel through concept is great though. :)

[DraconianOne]

Tool improvements have made all of the following possible:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Dynamite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blair_Witch_Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_(music)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_comics

Group of people is hard but that has been solved for centuries by governements, businesses, sports, military and recently the open source movement.

What?

[K9]

Tool improvements have made all of the following possible:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Dynamite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blair_Witch_Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_(music)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_comics

Group of people is hard but that has been solved for centuries by governements, businesses, sports, military and recently the open source movement.

What?

I concur

[palmer_eldritch]

Another possible issue with dynamic systems - the world changing according to what players do - is that it can all seem pretty random to the players. This was one of the issues Raph has talked about on his blog regarding early UO design. You can have a system where if the players kill all the sheep then the dragon that was eating the sheep comes and swoops on the town to eat people instead, but for most players it just looks like a bloody great dragon has appeared from nowhere.

But maybe there's a way round that. I'd like to think so because I'd like to see that sort of game, rather than yet another game where NPCs have exclamation marks or something over their heads.

Presentation is key.
There are countless ways to counter this problem.
Most likely when it comes to a famous dragon attacking the a player for killing sheep you can do countless things.
After killing a few sheep you get a message on the screen that says "I feel as though someone is watching me."

kill some more and the screen shakes and you hear a roar. "The dragon in the nearby cave has become angry at you!"
hehe I understand that is a lame example but yes there are many many ways to present just about any situation to the player so that they understand what is happening.

Also I would like to point out that I don't believe the system described above is actually dynamic either.
Its a pre-scripted event from what I can tell. Dynamic events are things that happen with out hand created scripts. As far as I can tell nothing I mentioned is a dynamic system.

Go browse through Raph's site - he explains it better than I could.

But basically, dragons seek out meat. Sheep have the quality "meat". If the sheep go, the dragon seeks out something else with the quality "meat", such as humans. It's not scripted in the way you describe.

All sorts of objects are tied into this system. Blacksmith wants "ore", etc. A section of mountains has the "ore" quality (which means it creates ore items in your backpack if you stand on it and use your pickaxe item). Maybe something else wants "ore" too, such as goblins.

You couldn't send a message to players as you suggest, as the players which have been cutting down on the sheep population for the past two months may not be around when the dragon attacks the town.

Trying to keep track of which players triggered which consequences would also turn the system from a fairly simple one to a hugely complex one. The server couldn't have known, when you killed a sheep, that you were contributing to a dragon attack a few weeks later. But I'm sure you're right - there's probably a way to make it work.

Raph etc seem to have done a fair bit of design work on this when developing UO, although the fact that it was abandoned probably says something. But it's worth checking out if you're interested in game design.

[JWIV]

Another IP that would work well with this is Zelazny's "Amber" series.

Yes, I'd really enjoy playing a game based off of Amber. :) The one difficulty you'd have to work around, at least at the start, is how do you deal with "the good guys" (or at least, the most interesting ones) being the royal family of Amber?  Unless you advance a number of generations, you're going to have way more people who want to be one of their children than is really reasonable...

The whole infinite realities to travel through concept is great though. :)

Most of the MUSHes that cropped up regarding Amber also open up Chaos and the Golden Circle as it frees up a ton of slots as opposed to simply those pesky Patternwalkers.

[Slyfeind]

Yes, I'd really enjoy playing a game based off of Amber. :) The one difficulty you'd have to work around, at least at the start, is how do you deal with "the good guys" (or at least, the most interesting ones) being the royal family of Amber?  Unless you advance a number of generations, you're going to have way more people who want to be one of their children than is really reasonable...

The whole infinite realities to travel through concept is great though. :)

The only way it could be fun (and fair) is if everybody could be related to the royal family, and could walk through different dimensions and whatnot. I sure wouldn't want to play as a schmuck from the Reality of Schmucky Peons, heh.

I'd love to see a game system where your achievements are not only how many people are on your side, but also based on deception or honesty, intrigue and whatnot.

[UnsGub]

What?

Going back far enough in time all, movies, music, and comics took large groups of people to make say +50.  Even if the reason for that large group (publishers) was to just control it and take a cut from the creators.  That is from creation to in the hands of customers.  Now individuals to small groups 5-10 people can do the same in that media.  Digitial distribution is here and it scales, but the tools have not keep up for content for games.  This is limiting all game development.  It is also interesting that music is going back to before technology was around to make their money with the live show.  Recorded music is just advertising and touring is the paycheck.

[TheCastle]

Go browse through Raph's site - he explains it better than I could.

But basically, dragons seek out meat. Sheep have the quality "meat". If the sheep go, the dragon seeks out something else with the quality "meat", such as humans. It's not scripted in the way you describe.

All sorts of objects are tied into this system. Blacksmith wants "ore", etc. A section of mountains has the "ore" quality (which means it creates ore items in your backpack if you stand on it and use your pickaxe item). Maybe something else wants "ore" too, such as goblins.

You couldn't send a message to players as you suggest, as the players which have been cutting down on the sheep population for the past two months may not be around when the dragon attacks the town.

I would just use a meter that is associated with the area that fills up as you kill the sheep. Once full the meter begins to flash for all people in the area and the dragon indiscriminately agros anyone nearby... Maybe I should just go to his site and read it for myself I have a feeling I am missing something. Keep in mind that a dragon showing up and causing havoc in a isometric game is very different from a fully 3d game as well. There are many core system changes going on that would change how well a player can deal with a sudden dragon attack.

hmm I see..
I see the word dynamic being used a lot in this thread. The word Dynamic scares me personally.

For me I think a fully dynamic world as being 2 steps above the types of systems found in WoW.
The implications of a fully dynamic MMOG with 3d environments ect is pretty insane.

All NPCs being set up with behavioral AI, schedules are not dynamic so they would have to work merely on there own wants needs and urges..
You cant use static pathnodes either LOL.
Would have to be able to handle any situation a player or other NPC can throw at him/her/it.. 

Wait someone mentioned procedural geometry too? *head explodes*

We need whole new systems and tools designed to handle this concept or it would be impossible otherwise.

anyway I'm game anyone want to break down what kinds of core systems would be needed for a fully dynamic MMOG.
scratch procedural geometry idea though.. I like the world being somewhat the same at least as far as the shape of the continents haha...

[Venkman]

They employed mob rotation even back in the Shadows of Luclin expansion for EQ1. With rules, it can work. But it is generally beat to localize it to specific regions rather than force try it across the globe. We just don't know the answer to the two critical questions:

1) Can it work in a persistent world with thousands of players banging on it; and,
2) Will those players find it fun? And I don't just mean the fringe that games it.

If this is ever to happen it will come from an indie-level game. Only upon the answer of #1 can we even begin to ascertain #2.

[tazelbain]

I would just use a meter that is associated with the area that fills up as you kill the sheep. Once full the meter begins to flash for all people in the area and the dragon indiscriminately agros anyone nearby... Maybe I should just go to his site and read it for myself I have a feeling I am missing something. Keep in mind that a dragon showing up and causing havoc in a isometric game is very different from a fully 3d game as well. There are many core system changes going on that would change how well a player can deal with a sudden dragon attack.

That's just a Public Quest. Although there is lots room to run with PQs

Wait someone mentioned procedural geometry too? *head explodes*

We need whole new systems and tools designed to handle this concept or it would be impossible otherwise.

anyway I'm game anyone want to break down what kinds of core systems would be needed for a fully dynamic MMOG.
scratch procedural geometry idea though.. I like the world being somewhat the same at least as far as the shape of the continents haha...

Sounds like funs.

[DraconianOne]

Going back far enough in time all, movies, music, and comics took large groups of people to make say +50.  Even if the reason for that large group (publishers) was to just control it and take a cut from the creators.  That is from creation to in the hands of customers.  Now individuals to small groups 5-10 people can do the same in that media.  Digitial distribution is here and it scales, but the tools have not keep up for content for games.  This is limiting all game development.  It is also interesting that music is going back to before technology was around to make their money with the live show.  Recorded music is just advertising and touring is the paycheck.

Don't confuse distribution with creation. Independent and low-budget films have been around since Edison first founded the Motion Pictures Patent Company in 1908. Artists and filmmakers have often strived to create films outside the constraints imposed by the studio system. The London Film Society was set up in 1924 by H.G.Wells and George Bernard Shaw amongst others with the sole aim of highlighting artistic merit of films and championing what would later become the precursors to independent film. Dali and Bunuel's classic "Un Chien Andalou" was made in 1929 and shot on 16mm film (the same format as used for Blair Witch Project) as an independent film for relatively little money and little to no crew.

As I understand it (and I'm sure some comic geeks will confirm or correct me on this), comics were often created by not many people and the underground comics of the 60s were the labour of love of one or two people who did the writing and the graphics and then distributed them through specialised outlets.

Digital media is now cheaper and easier to create - especially in terms of films. Any fuckwit with access to a DV camera can make a short film, upload it to YouTube and call themselves a filmmaker.  It's the next step on from VHS but with far more accessible and cheap post production tools. What this does is saturate the market with crap in which it can be difficult to unearth the diamonds. However, creating a revenue stream from this is not clear cut.  Joss Whedon experimented with this earlier on this year with his Dr Horrible Sing Along Blog.  He had the money to input enough funds into the creation of it but still relied on the cast and crew deferring any compensation until later. He still had to deal with Apple and iTunes and now a DVD producer and distrbutor to generate any sort of income to actually pay the people involved.

Even internet hits like Felicia Day's The Guild has had to get into a deal with Microsoft in order to produce the second season of the show. Yes it's still internet based but no, you can't watch Season 2 on YouTube anymore. She, her producers and her willing cast (who were also professionals working for free/deferred payment) had to beg for donations to even get Season 1 finished.  There was a good chance at one point that they couldn't afford to shoot the last few episodes.  Now they've got into bed with a sponsor and production partner and got a cash injection, they're able to put out episodes of a far better quality and actually pay the people involved.

How I can relate all this back to games, I'm not sure but you started talking about films and that's a red fucking rag to this particular bull.  You mention that tool improvements made some films/comics/music possible (which is fallacious as it's always been possible just not as cheap and easy as now) but quite frankly the tools for creating an MMO are there for you to use already - find a database solution and a coding language to work in and voila. Now all you need to do is design it, build it, test it, release it, sell it, maintain it, provide support, upgrade it, expand it and Robert is your mother's brother.


tl;dr - you're wrong.

[TheCastle]

That's just a Public Quest. Although there is lots room to run with PQs

*now with out hitting enter after every sentence haha*

I was thinking about that but really it would only seem like a public quest to the naked eye. Your hud elements will usually break things down in such a way that they appear very simplistic. Under the hood though can be fairly a complex system. The only major difference I would think would maybe be that a simple meter would not actually be a 100% accurate indication of a pissed off dragon under a truly dynamic system. But rather you would have to understand that the more full it is the more likely it will come for you but you actually don't know for sure. Also the context would be different as well. The basic idea with PQs are that you are supposed to activate the dragon and beat it however in this case people would be afraid of filling up such a meter.

Its possible that the interesting HUD elements that we see in games today would be much less accurate in a dynamic game world offering only rough estimates of actual in game results.

[Mrbloodworth]

I present eldeac's expert review of the mmog landscape, good at any time since TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING FOUR.

WoW : The mindless shiny diku mmog.
EVE : The serious business mmog.
CoH & Planetside : 2 weeks vacation twice a year.

Everything else : Shit.


Developers: it has been almost exactly FOUR FUCKING YEARS since this picture changed. Please be providing a game now. This is almost as long as we've been waiting for a wing commander clone.

Everyone else: what the fuck is going to change this picture and when? There is almost nothing with even half a chance in development, just wtf is the population of Austin doing? I know its hot down there but fuck, this is getting beyond a joke.

Predictions please, name a future mmog you are even slightly interested in.

That's very small minority you are even considering. It seems that what ever list you started with to come up with that they are only the mainstream big development house titles (AAA if you will). AKA: Only considered = SOE, Blizzard, Turbine, NCsoft and CCP or equivalents.

However there are many many MMO's out there that are quite diffrent, and still have the same level of production value applied. I guess my point is, your world perspective is quite narrowed, thats fine if that all you care about i guess, everyone has a handful of only "to be considered" games, but it should not be treated as an absolute, such as your thread title and point with in.

Its not really "The industry's" fault that your not paying attention to but only a small subset of the whole, is it?

/Devil's Advocate

[UnsGub]

You mention that tool improvements made some films/comics/music possible (which is fallacious as it's always been possible just not as cheap and easy as now) but quite frankly the tools for creating an MMO are there for you to use already - find a database solution and a coding language to work in and voila. Now all you need to do is design it, build it, test it, release it, sell it, maintain it, provide support, upgrade it, expand it and Robert is your mother's brother.

Its the cheap and easy that to make MMO that has not occurred and is limiting the industry.

At least there are tools to build, test, release, and support software that were not around a decade ago.  Upgrade and expansion is just part of the design as everything should just be how easy it is to add onto the prototype map and UI.

Maybe when one person can make an MMO like one person can make a film/comic/music within a few year period we will know the tools have evolved enough.  There are not many choices in MMO to play, but there are lots of choices and for some to many choices (solved well enough by search\word of mouth) for film/comic/music to consume because of the tools reducing the cost to make them.

[TheCastle]

You need a system creating all these little scenarios on its own and I doubt that's even possible.  Basically you have to create a true AI.  That's a truly dynamic system. or at least that's what I believe one is.  You can't go in and design for dragons to hunt humans when sheep are no where to be found, but the computer needs to create the scenario.  If you could create tools that allowed you to macro manage your game world (i.e. sets wars off or large story arches with hard points to drive a story) and let the rest of the game work for you.

Yea it's a pipedream just short of a holodeck.  However that's where you're aiming for I guess and what you want to attempt to mimic the most.

It is not a terribly alien concept to some newer games. Have you ever read about dynamic difficulty and thought about how that can be extrapolated to a dynamic story telling system of sorts? Really all it would require is more energy placed into a more advanced dynamic difficulty system. To be honest however, I think you can aim a lot lower than a fully dynamic world and still make a very ground breaking experience. However a dynamic difficulty or dynamic story telling system would play an integral roll in a fully dynamic MMOG. One really trippy thing that would be possible in a fully dynamic MMOG would actually be the ability to choose a difficulty setting.. You would actually be able to ask the world to go harder or easier on you depending on your personal preferences.

Its certainly not impossible but you would be really working out of the box. I think that you would make your over arching story be very large scale in nature where one person wont be able to make a really big difference however you use your dynamic story telling system to do smaller stuff where you give the player different smaller scale problems they can solve on their own. The basic inner workings of a dynamic story telling system is fairly simple. You keep track of everything the player does then depending on these actions add hooks that can potentially occur depending on his/her surroundings. So a story telling device would be one potentially important system for a game of this nature.

[DraconianOne]

Maybe when one person can make an MMO like one person can make a film/comic/music.

You're living in Cloudcuckooland if you think that one person will ever be able to make an MMO.

[Ratman_tf]

Maybe when one person can make an MMO like one person can make a film/comic/music.

You're living in Cloudcuckooland if you think that one person will ever be able to make an MMO.

How many people were on the team when ATITD launched? I don't think a one person MMO would be very good, but I think it could be doable. Shit, some people were hoping NWN would provide the toolset to do just that.

[tazelbain]

2 people + they contracted out a bunch of art.

[TheCastle]

I have a question

In the case of a fully dynamic world would the AI really need to be sentient to be truly dynamic? My initial feelings on the matter are that the answer would be no. Simply because you can put together a simple weight based system into your AI and it would be passable. However for the course of this discussion we are discussing a fully dynamic structure. It would be a very basic concept but would it actually be dynamic? I think you would need to have a dynamic and fairly complex system on top of your weight system to actually properly give priorities with out the need for human intervention. How in the world would you break a system like that down in simple bite sized chunks?

edit: its possible I am over thinking about this and the answer is fairly simple.

[DraconianOne]

How many people were on the team when ATITD launched? I don't think a one person MMO would be very good, but I think it could be doable. Shit, some people were hoping NWN would provide the toolset to do just that.

I wrote and rewrote that previous post several times and ended up with something that was just to general to be constructive.  In terms of tools, there is already Multiverse which could, feasibly, allow one person to create a 3D world MMO.  But it's that "wouldn't be very good" thing.  As I said before - a DVCam and YouTube just means there's an awful lot of shit out there.  As for ATITD - well yeah, in terms of what an MMO is then browser based MMOs like Urban Dead or that Lovecraft inspired one that I can't recall the name of - sure, one person could create that. Just like one person could make a film - but it probably wouldn't be a marketable film.  One person = one actor and that's not going to be interesting.

[Ratman_tf]

edit: its possible I am over thinking about this and the answer is fairly simple.

I think it is. I think the lesson from UO's AI monsters is that the illusion of dynamic content is more appealing to players than the actual existance of true dynamic content.

Although that shouldn't discourage experimentation. Just keep in mind "Does this make fun for the players?"

[Ingmar]

There are a few places where all this dynamic content breaks down for me, sort of.

- Oblivion Conversation Syndrome. This gets annoying in a single player RPG; how much more annoying would it be in an open ended MMO?

- NPC Character Development. Non-dynamic games like WoW tend to have polished, entertaining characters with distinct personalities, voice acting, etc., even to an extent for throwaway mid-dungeon bosses like Mr. Smite in Deadmines. How can you make a totally dynamic game without sacrificing that? I will say right up front that for that reason alone I will pick a polished Diku over an Eve-style sandbox every time, and I suspect that a large segment of the market feels like I do. If Eve had any kind of soul at all it might be different, but it doesn't, and the lack of NPC personalities is a huge chunk of that.

- PVP/griefing. You can't really achieve a truly immersive world with PVP flags, but if you have open PVP, even with harsh social consequences, you are shutting out a huge chunk of your potential market. I won't play games like that anymore, not as my Single Main MMO of Choice anyway. Call it the "No Slayeriks Clause".

These are all things that have to be solved one way or another for a game like this to see success on a really large scale.

[Lantyssa]

I think a mixture would work best.  Even though it's my ideal in an ideal world, I don't think leaving everything up to random number generators is the solution.

Having a mixture of handcrafted with the random to expand the possibilities would work to me though.  It's not as if every mob and quest placed by hand is fulfilling.  Some are great, some aren't.  Designing a system with content generation allows for more.

It's one reason the AI Director in Left 4 Dead interests me.  Some of it is random yet it does adjust itself based on player behavior to avoid whacky extremes happening too frequently.  It is a perfect early step in seeing how such a system can function.

[Draegan]

I have a question

In the case of a fully dynamic world would the AI really need to be sentient to be truly dynamic? My initial feelings on the matter are that the answer would be no. Simply because you can put together a simple weight based system into your AI and it would be passable. However for the course of this discussion we are discussing a fully dynamic structure. It would be a very basic concept but would it actually be dynamic? I think you would need to have a dynamic and fairly complex system on top of your weight system to actually properly give priorities with out the need for human intervention. How in the world would you break a system like that down in simple bite sized chunks?

edit: its possible I am over thinking about this and the answer is fairly simple.

Not sentient, but behavioral.  Does that make sense?

[Ratman_tf]

I think a mixture would work best.  Even though it's my ideal in an ideal world, I don't think leaving everything up to random number generators is the solution.

Having a mixture of handcrafted with the random to expand the possibilities would work to me though.  It's not as if every mob and quest placed by hand is fulfilling.  Some are great, some aren't.  Designing a system with content generation allows for more.

It's one reason the AI Director in Left 4 Dead interests me.  Some of it is random yet it does adjust itself based on player behavior to avoid whacky extremes happening too frequently.  It is a perfect early step in seeing how such a system can function.

In WoW you've got like, I think 6 or 8 possible quest types. (Kill these mobs, get these drops, escort this NPC) Maybe 10 now with Wrath's vehicle type mechanics in place.

Think about the keel seex snow moose quest. You could write up a page of intro for every mob type in the zone, and then generate a RN from X to Y for the number of mobs to kill.

Looking at it from a single quest perspective, it's extra code and mechanics for one type of quest. But think about how many kill tasks exist in WoW. Any amount of automation frees up quest designers for other work. They could have had a quarter or half of the quests in Northrend done by automation, if they had laid the foundation for RN quests during original and BC.

[shiznitz]

I would like a Planetside type game with various skins. The player picks the skins he/she sees. The maps would change fequently (say every 3 months) and weapons would come and go. Vehicles in PS were a blast and I wish that could go to the next level. There would also be random NPC hostiles to throw combats into total chaos. There would be no monthly fee or expansion packs, but every content update would cost $19.99 and be mandatory. 

[TheCastle]

Sorry this post is huge ><.. I just got into trouble for making a huge post too ....

Not sentient, but behavioral.  Does that make sense?

Absolutely! I think I found an answer for my own question as well and it coincides with this very statement. I can confer that sentient AI is not at all necessary for a dynamic environment. Behavioral AI is the key. At risk of making a giant block of text ill try my best to explain my idea.

You have a set list of weights for all sets of NPCs in the world. You use weight templates to determine the initial structure. In fact you would need a considerable number of initial templates. Initial templates because its possible the only alternative is literally creating a world and leaving it running for a simulated 800 years or so hoping that by then your npcs have decided what they want to do.. egads.. yeah... So lets just go with templates instead.. So your designers create these npcs and assign special templates to the npcs from personality to weights to ownership/belongings.

Depending on events that happen around the character you can either modify weights directly or by applying other templates as modifiers. For example you can have a blacksmith in a town. He is a blacksmith because designers have applied corresponding templates. If a player burns his house down the engine automatically applies a homeless template as a modifier to his already existing weights and personality. So the weighted system becomes dynamic simply because its controlled by dynamic events. Immediately his demeanor and priorities are modified.

Although that shouldn't discourage experimentation. Just keep in mind "Does this make fun for the players?"

At this point simply have no idea if it would be fun. If pre scripted events are designed to create the illusion of dynamic events it might be said dynamic events could be just as fun prescripted events. Its entirely possible that at this stage the one fun thing about the idea could have been left out because it seemed too crazy hehe.. Your guess is as good as mine!

I think a mixture would work best.  Even though it's my ideal in an ideal world, I don't think leaving everything up to random number generators is the solution.

I completely agree with this.
Especially in the case of placing hooks for a dynamic story telling it would be great to have the option to fall back on hand scripted events. However when it comes to a world comprised of dynamic events I might suggest a potential risk of conflicts between hand scripted events and a fully dynamic world. Where do you think this problem would appear most often if at all?

- Oblivion Conversation Syndrome. This gets annoying in a single player RPG; how much more annoying would it be in an open ended MMO?

How would you be able to communicate with NPCs in a dynamic manor? maybe a mini game or voice recognition or advanced text to speech. Speaking through my character to NPCs and other players and having NPCs react as well. It seems to me as though you would barely even be able to predict all of the types of things that can happen if the game was completely text based let alone voice acted. This poses all kinds of crazy problems.. hmmm

I am not sure what would happen but I think that we would need a new way to communicate with npcs in a dynamic game. Do you agree?

Sorry about this large post I just had a lot of things to say in response.

[Ingmar]

I am not sure what would happen but I think that we would need a new way to communicate with npcs in a dynamic game. Do you agree?

I was actually talking about the NPCs in Oblivion talking to each other, not to the player, but yeah definitely NPC/player interaction is going to be a big, big technical hurdle.

[Aez]

I'm looking forward for Raph's project on Meatspace.   It might rides the fine line between indie innovation and professional production.

Also : Green Monster Games?

[SnakeCharmer]

I'm looking forward for Raph's project on Meatspace.   It might rides the fine line between indie innovation and professional production.

Also : Green Monster Games?

I thought Raph cancelled his MMO and instead focusing everything on the Meatspace user generated stuff?

Is there really any doubt as to what GMG is going to make?