Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
1)Yes it would impress people more than the 24/7 mannekins that most NPCs are these days. Especially with the ability to make the NPC vary in appearance as the players do (they can be made to fit the role, and then when they are no longer relevant or their presence would be odd [HEY I KILLED HIM LAST WEEK!!!])
There is also only so much real estate in towns and having a magnitude more
'quests' would soon make for quite a crowd of 'prop' NPCs standing around.

How does this really think this would help 'purpose in RPGs'? Don't just say "it would impress people" because that isn't really relevant here. There are 101 ways to impress players but that's not the same as reducing the aimlessness that the original poster talked about.

Quote:2)Think of the possible permutations of just 20 NPC factors (binary option to simplify this example) -- that would be over a million combinations.
And Im not talking about some half-assed script system here, the scripts for each factor would have different behaviors depending on other factor present (a system of scripts building the NPCs behavior script dynamicly would eliminate running the validation/configuration logic every time).

Hardly a tiny increase of variation.

That's very vague. 'Permutations of factors'? If you've got some great ideas for how this would work, can you share them?

Quote:1) Its the game companies who dont care (its costs them $$$ and their systems werent designed to facilitate such things). It gets disreguarded by the players currently because of the limitations of the existing games (camping, endless harvesting, grind patterns, static maps/spawns/quests).

You're drifting off the point. You first implied that games didn't have these things, but they do, so now you're saying that players disregard them due to the other limitations. Can you explain your logic here? Surely if plot is more interesting than (for example) endless harvesting, why do players ignore plot to focus on harvesting? What you call a limitation, others call reusable content. And players lap it up. They could buy several new games and enjoy different plots and stories instead of paying a fee each month, but instead they choose to harvest and grind. Maybe it's not as boring for most people as it is for you.

Quote:2) Constant staged events would help. Some 'significant' mass quest that if solved moves the plot one way and if failed may be repeated (with some differences). Remember the system I am talking about allows alot of things to be changed/placed/removed/adjusted on a daily basis (and pretested to prevent screwups).

The 'system' you have talked about is vague and means little without concrete detail. It's all very well saying what you'd like to see in a game but more often than not it's impractical given financial and time resources. Constant staged events for example require some significant degree of supervision. Pretesting events as well as executing them doubles the amount of effort involved.

Quote:3) Playing part in a 'assault' on the evil mages castle that was threatening X and trashing the place and killing the evil one (and getting unique items/loot as proof of their involvement/exploits). The world changes and they played their part. The GMs then come up with another sequence (something completely different) that threatens the world (or parts of it).

So, you want GMs to come up with this sort of thing daily? 365 castles or something similar erected and conquered each year? And yet people are still to think that this really gives them a purpose in the game?

Quote:Its sad that you think that WW2 consisted of a bunch of conscripts herded into machinegunfire.

Are you suggesting this didn't happen?

Quote:Original post by Kylotan

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
1)Yes it would impress people more than the 24/7 mannekins that most NPCs are these days. Especially with the ability to make the NPC vary in appearance as the players do (they can be made to fit the role, and then when they are no longer relevant or their presence would be odd [HEY I KILLED HIM LAST WEEK!!!])
There is also only so much real estate in towns and having a magnitude more
'quests' would soon make for quite a crowd of 'prop' NPCs standing around.

How does this really think this would help 'purpose in RPGs'? Don't just say "it would impress people" because that isn't really relevant here. There are 101 ways to impress players but that's not the same as reducing the aimlessness that the original poster talked about.

Your are the one who said such things dont impress players. RPG = Role Playing Game. The more things that make a player feel that they are in a unique place, dealing with unique situations (that arent the same over and over and over) and
playing a unique role, the more interesting will be their game experience.

Having mannekins that stand there all day saying the same thing on all the servers for as long as the player plays the game DEFINITELY isnt impressive.

You have to aggregate all the things Ive been talking about -- nearly unique quests, in different locations, that fit into the overall plot of the game.
NPCs that can be customized/changed/placed to fit into those quests is just one
component. Using a system of templates (for appearance, behavior, themes, etc..), NPCs could be configured quickly to fit the situation desired by the GM and a good editing tool could then integrate them into the other elements.

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
Your are the one who said such things dont impress players. RPG = Role Playing Game. The more things that make a player feel that they are in a unique place, dealing with unique situations (that arent the same over and over and over) and
playing a unique role, the more interesting will be their game experience.

Having mannekins that stand there all day saying the same thing on all the servers for as long as the player plays the game DEFINITELY isnt impressive.

You have to aggregate all the things Ive been talking about -- nearly unique quests, in different locations, that fit into the overall plot of the game.
NPCs that can be customized/changed/placed to fit into those quests is just one
component. Using a system of templates (for appearance, behavior, themes, etc..), NPCs could be configured quickly to fit the situation desired by the GM and a good editing tool could then integrate them into the other elements.

First thing first, and first and foremost thing is that someone must know how to design a skill-based game. As long as the game is level-based, just grind up and beat the levels, that's all, other things will of course be disregarded by players. On the other hand, dynamically spawned NPCs and quests are not that difficult as one might assume, rather they are just meaningless in a level-based game.

Best quote of the day,

"...and we expect people to move as they go up in levels, leaving buildings (or at least build-able land) behind."

[http://www.vanguardsoh.com/faq.php?eid=12&faqid=12&ptext=In-game+Property+Ownership]

roflmao..that says all about a level-based game and how lame it is regarding to role-player, of course, an exception is given to those role-playing a house mover.

Quote:Original post by Kylotan

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
2)Think of the possible permutations of just 20 NPC factors (binary option to simplify this example) -- that would be over a million combinations.
And Im not talking about some half-assed script system here, the scripts for each factor would have different behaviors depending on other factor present (a system of scripts building the NPCs behavior script dynamicly would eliminate running the validation/configuration logic every time).

Hardly a tiny increase of variation.

That's very vague. 'Permutations of factors'? If you've got some great ideas for how this would work, can you share them?

OK I guess I have to spell it out for you.

Factors:

NPC role - blacksmith, beggar, peddler, king, guard ......
skills - (various skills of goods/services for players etc..)
Loyalty - to town, to self, to evil power, to player, to nation...
temperment - risktaking, cautious, fearful, benevolent...
competancy - poor, good, excellent, great, bumbler, fool
motivation - greed, selfgain, loyalty to group,religion,...
appearance - normal, odd, desperate, rich/poor, shady, kind, official...
integration - group member, loner, mob minion, family, individual/conformist
needs - raw materials, information, selling, duty
alignments - good,evil,neutral, chaotic, lawful,neutral, unlawful
nationalities
races
religions
etc...

Alot of these could be configured/selected/adjusted with sliders and checkboxes and pulldown lists of options. Logic in the NPC Builder scripts would use
attributes like this to compile a script for the specific NPC -- applying hierarchical templates which have logic to combine different factors and make appropriate selections from optional attribute ranges.

There are also higher level organization Entities that the NPCs interact and are part of (which get placed just like NPCs do except they arent usually visible).
These carry common situational themes/genres/memberships (so when NPC is linked to the entity, many factors are inheritted, thus saving alot of tedious editing).

example - 'town' which has a 'nordic' theme (effects NPC random names) and has a structure with town council (government factor - effecting NPC loyalties, titles of officers etc..), technology level - medieval (effects goods available in shops or that can be made by craftsman, and decorations on building and misc props laying around) Properity/economy level, Local Unrest level, etc..

Multiple Entities may exist in an area that overlap or mix.
The Entities contain attributes that define world situation and can be members of .higher level Entities like kingdoms, alliances, good side/bad side.


Alot of generic NPCs could be placed in sets (and the build scripts would configure most of their attributes) .

The quest generating system (which Ive spoken for of before) would use the
characteristics of the Entities of the various nearby areas to parameterize
and create quests and to adjust/place NPCs to match the quests.

Quest Builder scripts also use a template system and have logic to patch components together and pick amongst random options (and to evaluate the present factors to check for relevancy and best fit). The world situation can change and effect/change what quests are generated. High level situational Entities (placed by GMS) control what subsets of quests are available for use.


The system would be designed to allow constant changes in the world and gradual phasing into a new plot change (placed by GMs shaping their world plot ideas).
New Enities replace old ones (or old ones are modified) and the new quests reflect the new 'reality'.

Quests themselves have feedback into the 'Entities' which can have script logic that reacts when certain tasks/thresholds are reached (by players completing quests). Escalations and patterns could be controlled in the logic as well as feed back to higher Entity levels (including flags to the GMs to tell them that they have to decide what is to happen next in the world macro script).

Quote:Original post by Kylotan

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster

1) Its the game companies who dont care (its costs them $$$ and their systems werent designed to facilitate such things). It gets disreguarded by the players currently because of the limitations of the existing games (camping, endless harvesting, grind patterns, static maps/spawns/quests).

You're drifting off the point. You first implied that games didn't have these things, but they do, so now you're saying that players disregard them due to the other limitations. Can you explain your logic here? Surely if plot is more interesting than (for example) endless harvesting, why do players ignore plot to focus on harvesting? What you call a limitation, others call reusable content. And players lap it up. They could buy several new games and enjoy different plots and stories instead of paying a fee each month, but instead they choose to harvest and grind. Maybe it's not as boring for most people as it is for you.

The way the games have 'plots' is so pathetic compared to what could be done.
Effectively they have a smudge of them, which is nearly and effectively none.
Players disrequard/ignore them because they have so little impact and are so repetative/ mechanical/ uninteresting.

Players harvest and grind because they have very little else to do (besides Pvp,
Rares Trading, finding loopholes and cheats, and chatroom -- al things that also have little to do with 'plot').

Buy new games? We are talking about MMORPGs, and there arent too many of them to constantly buy new ones. Many people do buy several, play for a month and move on after being disappointed again.

MMORPGs have a great potebtial because unlike single player games they often face interactions with real people (complex, intelligent, variable, unpredictable) instead of only monolithic choreographed scenes and lead-by-the-nose plots.

The designs Ive spoken of are an attempt to bring those good aspects into the MMORPG by bringing back the interaction of GMs to shape the game world.

due to its market culture ,MMORPGs should be designed based on endless-history fact.
but the major problem with current MMORPGs is the lack of interesting history.
in my oponion the age of haveing-history-in-hand-then-build-the-game is over!
future MMORPGs should be designed the way that the players themselves make histories of the game.

Quote:Original post by Kylotan

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
2) Constant staged events would help. Some 'significant' mass quest that if solved moves the plot one way and if failed may be repeated (with some differences). Remember the system I am talking about allows alot of things to be changed/placed/removed/adjusted on a daily basis (and pretested to prevent screwups).

The 'system' you have talked about is vague and means little without concrete detail. It's all very well saying what you'd like to see in a game but more often than not it's impractical given financial and time resources. Constant staged events for example require some significant degree of supervision. Pretesting events as well as executing them doubles the amount of effort involved.

As I said before, a good set of GM tools would go along way (be required actually) to make something like this work. The GMs would manipulate
well designed building blocks that do alot of their own validation.
Take a look at an interactive editor and GM interface like what Never Winter Nights has (less the script stitching stuff).

Impractical ?? By my calculation EA lost US$30 million because they cheaped out on their maintenence programing on UO (one $80000 a year programmer could have made the difference).




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Quote:

Quote:
3) Playing part in a 'assault' on the evil mages castle that was threatening X and trashing the place and killing the evil one (and getting unique items/loot as proof of their involvement/exploits). The world changes and they played their part. The GMs then come up with another sequence (something completely different) that threatens the world (or parts of it).

So, you want GMs to come up with this sort of thing daily? 365 castles or something similar erected and conquered each year? And yet people are still to think that this really gives them a purpose in the game?

Read my previous post about hierachical templates and script builder systems...

Dozens of different generic quest types customized with local variations and higher level plot situational attributes to have a continuous stream of different (plot fitting) quests. (Oh and I forgot matched somewhat to the chars current abilities...)

Quote:

Quote:
Its sad that you think that WW2 consisted of a bunch of conscripts herded into machinegunfire.

Are you suggesting this didn't happen?

Are you suggesting that that was all WW2 was ???

If you say yes, you know very little about WW2.
'Thousands of Heroes' IS possible to have.
You have to get past trying to make a MMORPG into a single player game.

Quote:Original post by Nytehauq
This starts off with a tangent about combat - but it gets where it's going :)

A thought has just occured to me. In the PS2 game Devil May Cry 3, you level up different fighting styles by acquiring style points. You get style points for defeating enemies. The more complex and daring the moves you perform, the more style points you gain. The more mundane and repetetive your moves are, the less you gain overall.

Duh! Why not make the experience gains in RPG's (Online and/or otherwise) tied to the player's performance? Not neccesarily in a 'style' based way, but in some way or form? That would greately add to the satisfaction factor. If you were rewarded for performing better in fights, this would create a motive to suffer through hours of repetetive grinding. But wait...why even suffer through hours of grinding?

How many MMORPG's force you to grind to level? When you enter the game world, what is your purpose? Why are you just killing things for days? Why are you even going on quests? (This ties together, bear with me)

In level-based games (they are flooding the RPG market (online and/or otherwise), the ONLY indicator of your in game achievement is your LEVEL while the way you leveling up is to hack'n slash. "style" is to add anther way to achieve your LEVEL, but still LEVEL is the only indicator of your in game achievement.

In a skill-based game, every single skill (and/or a set of skills) can be an indicator your in game success.

In a level-based game, char comparison (of in game achievement) is plain and simple, your LEVEL, that's it. In a skill-based game, it's hard to compare who's more successful even when you take out 2 mages of the same sort, one with 98 magic skill another 100 skill, as what matters CAN be a good combination of skills instead of any single skill.

So if the *achievement* is not strictly defined and is rather abstract, players might spare themselves sometime to do something else than grinding, which in turn will gain the in game experience other than killing mobs and grinding.

But...it seems that teh profit of a level-based game is somehow guaranteed while noone knows how to make a good skill-based game. :(