Quote:Original post by Kylotan
'Dynamically' is a very vague term. What do you mean by it?
Quote:2) if your quest is "retreive the ring of doom", it would have an origin. Somone would take it, use it, sell it. The next guy who wants it would need to use some sort of locator spell. Quest items could exist anywhere in the world
How many objects are you going to have in the world that are worthy of being in a quest? Enough for every player to be on 2 or 3 quests at once? If so, aren't these items going to necessarily be somewhat mundane? And numerically speaking, if there are fewer such objects than players, that means some players don't have quests. What do you do to complete the quest - return the object to an NPC who happens to lose it again so that the next guy can do the quest? Or hold onto it yourself, at which point does someone else get a similar quest meaning that you're now hunted down for that item? Not good if you're not playing PvP. What if the person with the item goes offline? Or stays offline for months? How can each player have a global effect - if every item is so important as to affect everybody, then won't such effects be so common as to be insignificant anyway? Or at the other end of the scale, won't the vast majority of people be excluded since they are unable to complete the really important quests? If some players can have global effects on the world, doesn't that have implications for the other players... probably negative, in terms of fairness and fun?
There needs to be more thought put in before writing off the existing model. It's prevalent because so far, it's the only one we know how to make work.
You need a sophisticated world system that allows modifying the terrain (terrain which is also big enough so that there are areas which players wont
witness changes as they automagically are made) and placement of 'props' on the fly (all procedurally generated with control parameters). You need a large enough script base (scripts that allow alot of random flavors and variants and 'cosmetic differences) so they dont look repetative or generic. Multi-stage 'quests' with variants at each stage to scramble them even more. It would also help to have a small team continually adding addition quest scenarios and variants. Hierarchies of quest results lead to opening additional quests.
Note - these scripts would be shared across ALL servers, so the manpower and $$$ put into producing them would have a multiplied effect (cost efficiency).
These quests should move some game macro plot forward (via player competition and cooperation) doing the many small quests lead to some perceived change in world state. There should be coordination of a small (again) team of game masters to use activations and placement of subsets of quest genres (building blocks) to stage larger game plot events (and supply imaginative and coherant plot descriptions). SOme kind of world cycling scheme might be nice to allow reapplying the same plot devices after a year (but allow for that world macro plot to be taken down different paths because of different player involvement results.
Good tools to allow the GMs to facilitate/oversee plot (and manipulate the available quest scripts)would be needed.
I remember playing UO for 5 years and seeing the near static state of the game map and the sheer boredome of players -- then even their lame macro-plot events would cause half the players to show up looking for something new to see.
They would change some chunk of the world to have some 'invasion' (or such) happen for several weeks or a month and it would be a new conmbination of game play (as if they added a new 'dungeon' for everyone to learn the ways of). Unfortunately their server system code was so fossilized that any macro events like that took too much work to produce. It would have been a significantly better game (and made millions more $$$ for the) if they could have staged daily (different) events of that magnitude.
From what I could tell, the management didnt want to pay for anything that innovative, and was happy to milk the game doing the least possible work (putting millions of dollars towards 2 replacements that were both abandoned).
They lost 30 million dollars (50k players * 5yr * $10/month) income simply because they were slow fixing problems (newbie-killers ran rampant for years),
let alone how many more customeres they could have had if they had a much more
flexible quest/macro event mechanism.