EQ 'Next'

[Typhon]

Been drinking a bit heavier tonight, eh?

[Kageru]

I think you could probably design a virtual eco-system pretty easily. But having one that actually provides fun gameplay and can't be broken, exterminated or manipulated by the player base would be more challenging. Most of the time it just seems like game design wankery.

And really having a GW2 system where the area has "states" that cycle or bifurcate and change the mob population would get most of the advantage with little effort.

[shiznitz]

The most effective way to communicate "competitive survival" of NPC is just have "zones" where one or the other is dominant like EQ did. While SK had some gnolls running around, they were heavily represented in Splitpaw. The birds got the treehouse. Giants roamed that zone next to CT, etc.  This design is part of what made the original Norrath design so compelling from a lore and exploration point of view. Yes, the players kind of ruined it by camping but once was a high enough level to tour the old zones without danger, it was quite a cool experience.

UO had much fewer areas where particular monsters could reliably be found (orc in the Orc Fort, trolls in Worry), but it also had much fewer monster types in general.

[ezrast]

I think you could probably design a virtual eco-system pretty easily. But having one that actually provides fun gameplay and can't be broken, exterminated or manipulated by the player base would be more challenging. Most of the time it just seems like game design wankery.

Pretty much this. Sure, helping the kobolds take over Butterball Mountain sounds cool, but it's not really a game system unless there is some output back to the player. All the obvious reasons for why I might actually care about Butterball Mountain's ownership pretty much boil down to faction grinding, PvP, or something else I'd rather be doing in an instance. Meanwhile I can't get personally invested in anything that happens in that zone because it might not be there when I log in two days from now. Unless changes happen really slowly they make the game feel less like a persistent world.

That said, what they're doing with the class/skill system is quite neat. Your class defines a few core skills that will always be on your bar, but as you gain experience you can slot additional skills purchased from any class you have unlocked. You unlock classes by doing stuff in the world, and progression is all based on gear and ability unlocks, with no concept of "character level".

Abilities are broadly keyworded, so gear does stuff like "Martial skills do x% more damage" or "When you use an Arcane skill, your next Nature skill is free" or "All Fire skills are now Physical skills too". Thus classes that share keywords will obviously have more synergy than classes that don't, but there's still room for abusing mechanical interactions with unlikely class combos.

Approximately 40 classes planned with ~12 abilities each. Yeah, false choice/cookie cutter/required forum reading/whatever; I'm still a sucker for that level of theorycrafting and snowflakability.

Sauce is here (not new; it's from back in August) but I advise sticking with my recap unless you're pretty bored at work like I was.

[Malakili]

Meanwhile I can't get personally invested in anything that happens in that zone because it might not be there when I log in two days from now.

Playing such a game would pretty much require you to go all on in the idea that you wouldn't be controlling exactly what you are able to do every time you log in, which is one of the things people really seem to want in their MMOs these days.  I can get behind the idea of having to take a zone back for my faction.  But I have to jettison the idea that "I'm going to log in for a quick dungeon run" if part of the game is requiring that our faction owns that zone before we can do the dungeon, for example.  Instead I have to log in with the idea that I'll see what is going on, and then decide.  I actually don't mind this in practice, my years of World War 2 Online got me used to logging in and seeing what High Command needed.  But that's a pretty different type of game than your average Diku. Especially because with shorter play sessions being the norm, by the time you help take back Butterball Mountain you'll probably have to log out, so unless the act of reclaiming it is quite fun on its own people are going to balk at a game that prevents them from doing what they want when they want.

[Spiff]

It's all about the loot, never underestimate the power of a shiny.
If the real good loot is hidden in that dungeon, yeah people are gonna be pissed, but if they're able to reward any action in game with something somewhat valuable I'm sure a lot of people would love such a system.
Of course the real trick is making a 'smart' loot system that isn't either an interminable grind or easily abused.

[ezrast]

Nothing wrong with an interminable loot grind as long as the content is mildly interesting. You guys make good points though. If gremlins moving in and burning down my house while I'm logged out means I get to kill them and wear their pants later, I guess I'm all for it.

Those sentences looks sarcastic but they're really not.

[Draegan]

According to people I talked to that's how Rift was before Hartsman came in. They did some focus group testing and determined people didn't like how the game was random. The y said people logging in because their friend said something cool happened and then not finding it hurt the game.

So we got Rift Events instead. Boring.

[Malakili]

Well that's the problem we were discussing in the other thread.  People love that stuff if they get to experience it, but people want to experience content on their own time at their own pace and schedule, which seems fundamentally opposed to a lot of these ideas for dynamic content/zones, etc. 

[shiznitz]

I think most gear players use should be crafted, fungible and wear out, e.g UO economy.

The cool gear should be completely randomly distributed.  Kill any mob, complete any quest and there is a z% chance of getting a magic item. Howewer, each player should be limited to a few magic items at any time. You can sell/trade the pieces you don't want to open up a slot. The meta game of which to keep and for how long would fill gigabytes of message board munchkinism.

Lastly, the random loot will only last X hours of play before it vanishes again for someone else to get.

Now, add in monsters that are incredibly hard to beat unless someone in the party has HIJ magic item and whoever has that item at any time instantly has 1,000 friends and  known server wide.  Randomize the loot and add random notoriety!

[Lantyssa]

The cool gear should be completely randomly distributed.  Kill any mob, complete any quest and there is a z% chance of getting a magic item. Howewer, each player should be limited to a few magic items at any time. You can sell/trade the pieces you don't want to open up a slot. The meta game of which to keep and for how long would fill gigabytes of message board munchkinism.

Basically the [RARE] of DIKU.  You can even have classes with differing numbers of slots in return for different mechanics.

[shiznitz]

I don't know what [RARE] is.

[Lantyssa]

Some MUDs let you keep items when you logged off.  (Yes, some didn't let you store a thing.)  But they had a limit to how many of these RARE items you could log out with.  So it became a balancing act about which items to keep and whether you could find non-rares to fill your needs.  In our case, the monk classes had much reduced numbers they could store, but their innate abilities made up for some of that trade-off.

[Khaldun]

I think you guys are too pessimistic about two basic ideas: 1) a dynamic world where things are happening that are persistent changes while you're not logged in, some of them because of ongoing simulation and AI-driven action and 2) ecosystems/exhaustible resources.

1) we're all skeptical about because we know what the halfway implementations look like, and they all suck as games AND worlds. But I think it's wrong to say that players will resent not being there for a cool thing if there are cool things happening all the time and if there are really vigorous systems that record and recount events every day.

2) we're skeptical about because gameworlds with dynamic ecosystems/finite resources are way, way too small and their populations are way way too big. Essentially if you want to try this, you need to have: city/population hubs connected by fast travel, MASSIVE hinterlands around each hub that can only be travelled directly, and relatively small player populations per instance. The fast travel is needed so that small player populations can still get together for adventures and shared activities, but otherwise players should feel overwhelmed by the scale of the world--never really ever able to see all or most of it. The land version of Elite: Dangerous in that sense, procedurally generated with small sprinklings of hand-designed sites and objects of interest. Landmark or anything else we've seen doesn't come close to the necessary scale.

[KallDrexx]

I think the dynamic world criticisms are a valid point. 

If I log in and someone tells me about a cool event that happened an hour ago or so, my imagination is going to make it sound much cooler than it probably really was and compare it to what I'm doing now, which is probably nothing exciting since you just logged in.  I'm automatically going to feel like I missed out on cool stuff and had bad timing (even if it wasn't that cool in reality, you won't know since you weren't there).

Then there's the fact that I just logged on and have only a couple hours to game.  Where do I go to maximize my fun in that period of time?  Well the game is dynamic which means I have to put a lot of effort into finding the content.  Having to find the content is fine in a static game, where if I can explore and find the entrance to a new dungeon but if I have to go I can log back on in a few days and attempt the dungeon.  The way they have described the game that dungeon could very well not be there in a few days and I'll lose my chance, having to log back on and spend more time searching for content.

It also means content expires.  People went up in arms in GW2 because they couldn't experience the live story content due to their schedules.  This is like a whole game based around the same idea.

I don't think the criticism should be dismissed out of hand.

[Draegan]

Assuming you could make working dynamic environments, then as a game creator you should always be giving the player hints/clue/tips on what to do "next". You should always have a goal with your character. That could be building a house, training a skill, trying to get +1 better swords. Depends on the game you make.

The BIG point, the really really big point, is that a dynamic environment can only be successful if there are long term dynamic arcs. An orc invasion of your kingdom can't be over in the space of a single event and things get reset to Victory/Defeat in an afternoon. It needs to take place over the period of days/weeks/months. I have no idea if you can actually do that, but that is necessary.

You log in and miss a cool event. That's fine, because the general context of a war is still on the background and you just dont' log in to nothing.

[Malakili]

That's one thing I really liked about World War 2 Online.  I mean, granted, that was only PvP.  But if you logged in and heard about a battle that happened, well ok but now you've got to dive into wherever the action is now.  And the map resetting after each campaign meant that every battle was important.  Even if you were just in some some little town fighting off a small attempt to capture it, it often had important strategic significance, so you always got to feel like you were contributing to the larger campaign.

But I don't know if you can replicate that in a PvE environment very well.  I hope someone does.

[Threash]

Content that expires is always going to seem like a bad idea in a genre that's so content starved as MMOs.

[Khaldun]

A dynamic world needs to be linear rather than cyclical, yes. If it always returns to a steady-state "normal", that is precisely what leads players to disengage, to feel no sense that there are stakes involved.

As far as missing things goes, think about what it's like when you go for a trip to somewhere remote, leave all your electronics behind, don't read the newspaper--completely disconnect from the regular flow of events. Or when you spend time living somewhere far away from your usual haunts where most of the news and information you get and most of the things you do are not at all like your usual experiences. There's a kind of pleasurable disorientation to returning--"Oh! You mean that happened? And that!" And you also tend to concentrate when you come back in on the big stories, the meaningful changes--a lot of the little daily crap that we spend time talking about normally isn't important enough to relive or rehearse.

If your dynamism was sufficiently "big" in this sense, you could drop out for a little while or a long while, and as long as there were ways to find out what happened in your absence, it could be perfectly satisfying.

The key thing that has to go along with dynamism, however, is that players cannot endlessly accumulate power either via levels or items. If that happens, when you come back, after even a day or a week or a few weeks off, you won't belong any longer with any of the people you used to play with. The gameplay has to be focused on interacting with a linear-changing world rather than linear-changing your character. There can be things that are different about characters when you return (much as there are about people you knew well when you reconnect with them after having been away after a year) but if the only thing that is different is that they are more powerful in every way, then that won't work. That's what makes people feel compelled to play as if it were a job--to keep up with the Joneses.

It needs to feel more like life in that each passing year brings changes that aren't necessarily accumulative. You switch factions; your faction moves or retreats to somewhere else; there's a new faction in town; the last goblins or whatever have been wiped from the mountains near town; there's a dangerous group of nomadic bandits who've moved into the desert nearby. There's a new merchant in town selling strange artifacts; there's a rumor of a wizard in the mountains building a tower.

EVE sometimes has gotten close to this, in that you can tell a story of what's happened in the game that's meaningfully dynamic. If the underlying environment and NPC AI were also dynamic, some really interesting shit could happen that would keep people very interested for the story and the experience, not just because they're waiting for the Axe of Mighty Foozle-Slaying to drop next time you kill Foozle.

[Malakili]

Well right.  What you seem to be saying is that a suitably dynamic game won't have a story, it will have a history.

[Khaldun]

 

[Count Nerfedalot]

Well right.  What you seem to be saying is that a suitably dynamic game won't have a story, it will have a history.

Or both.

The hard part that I can't wrap my head around how to provide is some way to preserve the immersion of a character who feels like a part of the world yet allow that world's hi/story to progress for other players. Logging in and feeling like Rip Van Winkle every time I play because so much of the world changed since last time would really be jarring and immersion - breaking in all but the most narrow or contrived settings. WWII Online's form of immersion is extremely narrow and episodic for example, nothing like, say, Skyrim. I really don't think it's possible per se with a single massively shared word, but might be with a multiverse of loosely linked worlds where each progresses or not at the pace of its participant (s).

But even ignoring the Rip Van Winkle effect, providing enough content fast enough to keep a story going indefinitely is going to absolutely require procedural generation of some sort, especially when multiplied by wanting to support multiple independent players in the same space.  That or PvP which many of us don't want in our immersive play worlds.

[Sky]

The reality is to create an actual closed self-balancing ecosystem is basically to create life. Forget AI. You want a system that works, you're creating an entire ecology.

Except life isn't self-balancing. We're just in a slow mid-game. Ask the neanderthals about player justice. The end game is total extinction. If the universe hasn't figured it out (or insert your diety of choice if needed), why would a couple of man-children game devs? Oh, right. Never mind.

[palmer_eldritch]

Hi, this is still going despite SOE's sale to Columbus Nova, and I think the way they are using Landmark players to help them build it is interesting (yeah it involves Landmark but this is about EQ Next).

The latest example is Qeynos, which is traditionally one of the major cities in Everquest games. In the past they have done similar stuff for races rather than specific places (eg "ogre city").

First they gave a presentation about Qeynos - what it is, who lives there (in this version of EQ it is a multi-racial civilisation called the Combine). This includes some talk about the types of materials available locally to build with; what type of construction methods are used (eg magical or standard medieval construction techniques); what colours they tend to use, what types of doors and windows they have etc. They also show the players concept art.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v50YzxCkaQs

Then the players go off and build stuff. And the devs do presentations looking at what the players have come up with and pointing out what they have got right and what they have got wrong (eg if they've used the wrong style of door or window etc). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydlVRudWvJo

Then they have a formal competition to see who can come up with the best designs. But to win, the design both has to be cool and to fit in with the style set down by the devs. So they announced the Qeynos winners here - I'm not sure what winners actually get except the possibility of seeing their design used in the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuenwzHoUFA

Supposedly the devs are now going to use these designs to build a test Qeynos on the Landmark server. Eventually some of them will be used in the "real" Qeynos on the EQ Next server (if it ever gets made).

One thing they said that was interesting to me was that designs should have an internal structure too - eg wooden beams beneath the actual roof - so that it can look cool if it gets destroyed in combat.

Here are some of the winning Qeynos designs:






Next, they are beginning work on designs for elves, which seems to mean "high elves" as opposed to wood elves or dark elves/Teir'Dal.

[Chimpy]

FYI, the Combine are the "bad guys" in the most recent expansion of EQ.

[palmer_eldritch]

Yeah, the lore in EQ Next is only loosely based on existing EQ lore.

[Lantyssa]

They're still the bad guys.

[Surlyboi]

Technically, in EQ, they sort of founded a lot of civilization and then went poof. They came back centuries later as the bad guys trying to reclaim their shit.

At least, that's the way I remember it.

[palmer_eldritch]

Technically, in EQ, they sort of founded a lot of civilization and then went poof. They came back centuries later as the bad guys trying to reclaim their shit.

At least, that's the way I remember it.

Yeah they have a similar story this time but it's written in a way which makes them sound like good guys.

The Combine is dreamt up by people who are pissed off that elves rule the world and dominate everyone. It's designed to be a civilisation where all the races (including elves if they like) can be equal.

They're a big success, but then dragons come and blow up their cities, so they travel across dimensions or something to the world of Kunark.

Sadly in Kunark they are enslaved by lizard people. But they manage to rebel against their masters and get free.

Then something unspecified happens and they return to Antonica. But the people now living in Antonica are a bit upset about these strange people turning up. One thing that freaks them out is that the Combine have become a fully integrated society where ogres, dwarves, humans, elves etc are all "Combine" people rather than sticking to their own racial groups, which people in Antonica aren't used to at all. But I'm pretty sure this is meant to signify to modern gamers that the Combine are cool people. Also, the fact that they build themselves a city and it's called Qeynos suggests this (in the previous EQ lore as I understand it Qeynos was a city built by humans - and in EQ2 it admitted refugees from other races - but it's always been the "good" or lawful city).