Massively Multiplayer Games Quickified 90
It's the last day of the first month of 2006, and already there are plenty of new things brewing on the Massive front. World of Warcraft's community is abuzz with news of the Raid content Jeff Kaplan mentioned over the weekend, and details on the 1.10 patch, which is to feature priest updates and weather cycles. City of Villains has big changes a-coming as well, with content for levels 40 to 50 going in, as well as new zones and a new mission type. The Mayhem missions sound like they're finally living up to the promise of 'being a villain'. The EQ2 server combines are the least of the changes occurring at SOE. Chris Kramer did an interview with GamerGod about some of the sweeping changes inc, touching on the free Planetside scheme and mentioning the Sony Station blog, which so far just has an intro from John Smedley. More romantically, FFXI is rolling out information on its Valentine's Day event. Valentione's day is the chocolate and hearts holiday as only Moogles could imagine it. It's fun to play for love, but also fun to play to crush. Guild War's world championships are taking place in about two weeks, with the first place purse weighing in at $50,000. Vanguard's own brand of hardcore lost a little bit of mystery this week with the release of a features list. Finally. Even though you can't win big bucks for playing them, Eve and Ultima Online continue to please their players with updates and releases. Eve's Creative Director spoke with OGaming about plans for outer space in 2006, and UO will see a new player tour and seasonal spring items. It's a good spring for Massive gaming. Update: 01/31 20:30 GMT by Z : I knew I would miss one. A reader wrote in to mention that Anarchy Online is gearing up for some great new stuff in the 16.2 patch, as well as in the upcoming expansion Lost Eden.
Re:One thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Above plot copyright of Blizzard Entertainment.
Re:One thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Even in single-player games, it's amazing how seldom your actions affect the world. Sure, there's backstory claiming it's all very epic and important, but it rarely shows up in the game at all.
With MMORPGs I've yet to see a game where ordinary quests by ordinary player had any persistant effect on the game world at all. Occasionally you'll see an "event" with two possible outcomes in which the entire server population participates, but that's not really the same.
Re:One thing (Score:2)
Actually, in WoW, you do affect the world in persistant ways sometimes. How? By instancing.
Play a human cleric, and one of your newbie missions will be to find a wounded knight and heal him. Do so, and he returns home. There is no longer a wounded knight resting against that tree for you.
When some other cleric gets that quest, there will be a wounded knight there waiting for him, but there will never again be
Re:One thing (Score:4, Interesting)
This gets repeated often on game design forums, but it's simply not true. Many MMORPGs now have fully automated mission generation: a simple premise and an instanced adventure area are randomly genererated (from templates). Instant quest.
Everyone is just scared to put the same automatic world generation logic into play in the shared areas, or they're just so used to very small worlds they can't imagine it otherwise.
There are no longer any technological limts preventing the shared world from constantly changing and evolving in response to player actions. If I don't like that orc encampment outside of town, I should be able to take a party and kill all the orcs and torch their campp and build a lemonade stand where it used to be. The game can create a new orc encampment somewhere no one is looking at right now. As time passes in the game, large areas my become "civilized" in this fashion, but that's just a matter of either making the world big, or occasionally setting up an orc invasion (or if your artists have had a few months to add a new creature type, an invasion of new content).
If you can randomely generate an instanced dungeon, you can randomely generate a shared dungeon which is discovered somewhere and lasts until someone figures out how to make it go away. Very little development work required.
Re:One thing (Score:2)
Not on a game the scale of WoW.
"If I don't like that orc encampment outside of town, I should be able to take a party and kill all the orcs and torch their campp and build a lemonade stand where it used to be. The game can create a new orc encampment somewhere no one is looking at right now. As time passes in the game, large areas my become "civilized" in this fashion
Re:One thing (Score:4, Interesting)
See, that wasn't so hard. Choose the theme for a new area from a list of the kinds of areas you have templates made for. Bandit camp, visiting caravan, newly discovered underground area, whatever. Choose the race of bad guys who live there. Populate the area based on the spawn table for that race.
The plotline in current MMORPGs are drawn from a small pool of ideas, so just make a list of plot elements [sff.net] for the game genre, and have nearby NPCs generate random quests for that area, for basic content to get started with. This will gove adventurers an in-character reason to explore the new area.
Then choose a goal for the bad guys from a list for that kind of new area. Sacking a town, finding the Dingus of Great Power, whatever. Set a time limit. If some adventurer discovers what's going on in time to stop it, and defeats the enemy leaders, the world changes and the area goes away, becomes ruins, whatever's appropriate. If no one discovers the plot in time, the bad guys *succeed* and the nearby town is destroyed, the Dingus of Great Power is used to summon a demon that ravages the landscape, whatever. There are only 20 or so fantasy adventure plots anyhow, it's easy enough to automate.
Because it's all auto-generated from templates, you can make your world big enough that you don't have thousands of adventurers sumbling across every square inch of landscape every day, so you can have enough content that new areas last a while. Also, when it's trivial to add randomly generated world content, it's pretty easy to turn a writer's ideas into world content. No more "3 days to write a good idea, 3 months for world design and artwork".
Re:One thing (Score:1)
So I say "code it," if you can, and not in some flippant, "If you want feature, then add it" way. I mean really. If it's within your ability, I think that it
Re:One thing (Score:2)
I'm currently working on writing a great set of RPG rules. The rules systems used in MMORPGS are about 20 years behind the latest ideas in Pencil-and-Paper RPGs, primarily because of licensing issues (and a real lack of understanding that this is important). City Of Heroes was the first MMORPG with professional game design, and it was deliberately simplistic and colorful.
A combat system that merely invo
Re:One thing (Score:1)
Re:One thing (Score:1)
Re:One thing (Score:1)
Re:One thing (Score:1)
And for some reason I want to say that your link above may be a copy of the original Evil Overlord list [eviloverlord.com], though I don't know how often they update even though they say they're still taking submissions. I think the other lists aggregated on the sff page have homes elsewhere too, but I'm too lazy to substantiate that claim right now.
8-PP
Re:One thing (Score:1)
Re:One thing (Score:2)
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Re:One thing (Score:2)
According to what they are saying, on the new continent, there are 3 "factions". The local continental population "Cantha", and then two extreme right and left wing factions. They control various parts of the continent, and your guild chooses a side to fight for. Through guild battles, and other pvp/pve type (quests, battles, whatever), you can add towns to one faction or anoth
Re:One thing (Score:2)
Re:One thing (Score:1)
Re:One thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Your logic implies that no book (except those choose your own adventure books), movies or tv shows have plot - since the viewer has no say on outcome or cannot make a persistant change to the Universe.
A plot does not in any way indicate that the user has the ability to change the story.
Now, maybe you weren't replying at all about plot. In that case you probably should have started a new discussion, or made it clear that "ok s
Re:One thing (Score:3, Interesting)
An MMORPG is interactive. The plopt involves events that happen to *my* character. Other events may be narrated by NPCs, but if *my* ch
Re:One thing (Score:2, Insightful)
FFXI: They had a territorial system where grinding your ass off and doing quests could change territorial control to your faction.
WoW: Although not permanent, there are two dragon bosses that when killed will have their head d
Re:One thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:One thing (Score:2)
Only in the sense that woman at home in the UK during WW2 could sense the contribution of their frying pans helped keep the spitfires flying (which was actually bollocks
Re:One thing (Score:2)
Re:One thing (Score:1)
Re:One thing (Score:2)
Re:One thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:One thing (Score:2)
We have the technology, but what people don't realize is that as these games become more popular, with much larger populations, the game world needs to increase as well. That should help let them make more procedural content. The problem they keep running into is most likely that there are players who will do things just to disrupt the game. Imagine the effect of that if they could make permanent changes in the game world.
Re:One thing (Score:2)
Of course, if automatic world generation is done well, the world can be quite large indeed. While making the world larger isn't completely free
Re:One thing (Score:1)
Nail on the head! (Score:1)
Re:One thing (Score:1)
Some games have even had persistent changes (one time event for each server). EQ h
Re:One thing (Score:2)
"Canned" changes, like those mentioned above, are possible because they require just a server-side setting and only maybe a small change be sent out over the network once to tell the client which graphics file(s) to load (of course, you have to send all the sets of graphics out in patches ahead of time). The downside of this is that the changes have the feel of being canned. They are either one change or they are a small set of changes that get cycled as world events dictate. Those
Re:One thing (Score:2)
I'm still trying to figure out how this is insightful. Yes it sounds great in theory, but can you imagine the nightmare of actually making such a beast? It's ugly enough making enough content to keep people busy for months in a static enviroment. Now if every player could effect some lasting impact on the game world, you need to make more content for each possible version of the game world. The more branching trees in
Re:One thing (Score:2)
When the results of hundereds of quests add up to take the game world in a direction you didn't expect - then you have
Re:One thing (Score:2)
And to the 0.001% of WoW players that can read, man great game, right?
And hey, it's not the end of the world if you stop playing after a year! Just ask y
Re:One thing (Score:2)
Don't assassinate him. Yet the Defias never seem to overrun Stormwind anyway. Or kill him, but then try to roleplay with someone else who killed him. Yeah.
Not to mention the massive spoilers that particular game puts out itself. I remember my young, fresh-faced, bright eyed level 5 rogue, coming into Stormwind with a few measly silver to his name to learn a trade.
Next thing I know? There's a frelling dragon screaming all through the city.
eve online (Score:1)
Finally Some Casual Content (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Finally Some Casual Content (Score:2)
Re:Finally Some Casual Content (Score:2)
The problem is "the raiders" aka "no-life dweebs" have been getting it all and it's time Blizzard re-focused and concentrated on the majority of their paying customers instead. Let's face it, "the raiders" happilly run through a dungeon that consisted of a single straight corridor for years if the boss at the end had a) sufficently
Re:Finally Some Casual Content (Score:2)
Re:Finally Some Casual Content (Score:1)
If your arguement is size constraints - join a large guild. The best things in WoW will require the efforts of many people.
If your arguement is that there aren't solo alternatives - What are craftable epics? I admit they need to work on improving craftables, but you can make epic level gear, get high end enchants on items
Why the priest is being reviewed (Score:2, Insightful)
They nerfed the class entirely too hard pre-release(particularly disc and holy, shadow is fine it just falls into the same pitfalls all other casters do), and now they're hopefully rectifying it.
Priests are tougher than you think (Score:2)
I used to be full holy spec whil
Eve Updates Do Not Please (Score:5, Informative)
This sounds like uninformed marketroid speak to me. CCP, creators of Eve, released a patch in late December, which was pretty disastrous. Many basic elements like buddy lists, some basic agent services, and other things were broken and some still remain broken. Furthermore, lag remains very bad in central areas, often to the point of not being playable or characters getting 'stuck'. It is true that CCP has announced an upgrade to better hardware in February, but so far that is a future promise, not current reality, and the lag problems have been going on for months.
Most concerning is that significant gameplay problems continue to be ignored, making the player versus player experience very difficult (especially in the finding and pursuing) and exposing most non-expert characters to totally arbitrary destruction at blind gate ambushes (transitions between solar systems - you must 'jump' blindly through a gate and if there is a fleet on the other side in the next solar system, you just die unless a pro with properly designed ship), an issue that has never been satisfactorily dealt with. Also, there is a serious problem with the use of instant bookmarks, allowing people to jump directly to gates and avoid any fleet defending the gate, which feeds into this blind ambush problem as defenders must then go to the other side and hope for a blind ambush. The side effect of the need for bookmarks is that everyone wants to carry thousands of them for safe and shorter travel (travel times have soared with one of the patches), and this is apparently saturating servers and performance.
Finally, a most pressing problem that has the player community in an uproar is the advent of ISK (the currency of Eve) farmers, some using bots, that are mining continuously in the safe areas and in NPC corporations not subject to player attack. Many of the ISK farmers are suspected of selling their ISK for real life currencies in violation of the EULA, and many are thought to operate from Asian 'sweatshop' outfits. These players are routinely reported to CCP, who apparently does little about them since the same players are seen doing the same thing week after week, nor does CCP seem to be taking the problem seriously. In fact, groups of vigilante players started taking it upon themselves to engage in 'suicide' attacks to destroy farming ships.
CCP has furthermore somewhat legitamized the transfer of real life currency into ISK by allowing the sale of time cards, bought from CCP, for ISK. The buyer lengthens their subscription, the seller gets ISK. Since it is allowed by the EULA to sell characters for ISK, this means that anyone who wants to get a quick edge up in Eve can simply sell time cards, buy a well-trained character, and buy all the ships and equipment they want. Now, people have different opinions of whether this is a good thing or not, but it underscores the fact that CCP is exercising an inconsistent principle, on one hand claiming that ISK sales are not allowed on the principle of fairness of in-game competition, but on the other allowing out of game actions to affect in game rewards when there is a profit motive.
Eve has its good points as well, but I cannot let that uninformed platitude fly. As for what's the worst problem of all, well, all of them, but buddy lists not working and not being fixed for over a month is pretty much up there as it was broken in the December patch and its dysfunction compromises the social fabric of the game (are your friends online or not?) and player versus player fighting (are your enemies on or not?).
Re:Eve Updates Do Not Please (Score:2)
The points you bring up are certainly valid, but they are relatively small details. The initial patch problems were resolved quickly, as usual. With regards to the gameplay issues: EVE is quite massively complicated, much more so than any other game I've played (and I've played
Re:Eve Updates Do Not Please (Score:2)
Speaking as another EVE player, there are niggles and annoyances, yes. But as CCP continue to take positive steps to resolve the issues Im going to agree with TFA.
err!
jak.
Re:Eve Updates Do Not Please (Score:1)
First impressions...
Re:Eve Updates Do Not Please (Score:2)
They have a downtime every day from 1100 to 1200 UTC that sometimes runs long like yesterday (if they are deploying hardware upgrades or bugwrangling the cluster).
err!
jak.
You are so wrong (Score:1)
Re:You are so wrong (Score:1)
Re:You are so wrong (Score:2)
Well I suppose if you ignored Da Vinci's genius then he was a lot more stupid than I am.
Re:You are so wrong (Score:2)
Go mention instancing or sharding on the Eve forums and see what kind of reaction you get. The players don't want these things, and are making
Quickified? (Score:1)
P.S. Stop making so many good MMO's. My time and money are unfortunately finite values.
Simple solution (Score:1)
while (true) {
time++;
money++;
}
Re:Simple solution (Score:2, Interesting)
while(1) {
time++;
money++;
}
PlayMMO(time, money);
The problem is, I never got around to the PlayMMO part.
Re:Simple solution (Score:2)
while(1) {
PlayMMO(time, money);
}
time++;
money++;
Re:Simple solution (Score:1)
Re:Quickified? (Score:1)
Also left of the Karazhan preview (WoW) (Score:1, Informative)
Some information on a 70th level instance from the WoW expansion...
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:FFXI is also gearing up for its April expantion (Score:2)
Re:FFXI is also gearing up for its April expantion (Score:1)
Re:FFXI is also gearing up for its April expantion (Score:2)
I do understand *why* they made the changes to try to fix MPKs. They will eventually find a different way to do it, or make BST a viable party class. The biggest problem will be the BST !Party mentality. It's hard to get an invite when you're a BST
Re: (Score:2)
Re:FFXI is also gearing up for its April expantion (Score:2)
As far as leveling BST goes, it can still be done. I know, I hit 75 finally, after the patch, all solo. Some levels are just a lot more tricky to solo, and some camps are no longer as good. Grab a duo or trio of Beastmasters, though, and
Re:FFXI is also gearing up for its April expantion (Score:2)
Re:FFXI is also gearing up for its April expantion (Score:1)
It's just as well. Maat can go to hell.
Re: (Score:2)
I know I'll be modded down for this but... (Score:4, Insightful)
WoW 1.10 Patch Notes: Addendum (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WoW 1.10 Patch Notes: Addendum (Score:1)
Lets change the name too, how about "Politically Correct Adventures"
Re:WoW 1.10 Patch Notes: Addendum (Score:2)
This is hilarious... one thing Blizzard is well known for, back to the first days of Warcraft, is producing polished, well-balanced games. Having played EQ1 for many years, I can guarantee you that WoW classes are FAR more well-balanced.
Re:WoW 1.10 Patch Notes: Addendum (Score:1)
Believe what you will, but War2 wasn't balanced - the races were practically clones of one another, yet the ability for humans to micromanage the paladin's heal ability wasn't interfaced well enough
Re:WoW 1.10 Patch Notes: Addendum (Score:1)
Re:WoW 1.10 Patch Notes: Addendum (Score:2)
Re:WoW 1.10 Patch Notes: Addendum (Score:2)
Balancing the races is clearly extremely difficult. It's interesting that you bring up the micromanag
There's only one real MMORPG (Score:1, Troll)
www.eve-online.com
Please, come a little closer to my Thorax, my "blaster-rax".
Re:There's only one real MMORPG (Score:2)
How about I come close to your larynx and you promise to swallow? Or do you only suck IN THE GAME?
-Eric
Re:Players effecting the world (Score:1)
Re:Players effecting the world (Score:2)
EQ2 adds PvP (Score:1)
and David 'Zeb' Cook left Cryptic (Score:1)
NCSoft subtle announcement [cityofheroes.com] that Zeb Cook no longer works for Cryptic and they wish him well in future endeavors. Still we're all wondering what those'll be?