5punk

Earlier I was pondering Pants' suggestion of having actors play the parts of significant NPC's in MMO's. It occurred to me that one game has done almost exactly what he suggested, albeit in short bursts. The main characters in CoH were, for certain significant events, piloted by the members of the game design team that are their real world alter egos. It didn't really do what Doggers was trying to achieve, but to be fair that was probably because it was, like I say, only for short times and the actual interaction with the players was pretty minimal. But it got me thinking: How much more interaction would you need for it to actually have any effect on how the game feels to the players? Obviously, having hardly any actors spending hardly any time has hardly any effect. On the other hand, having lots of actors spending lots of time in game interacting with players would be absurdly expensive, and MMOs (WoW aside) have a hard enough time making enough money to keep going. There may be some sweet spot between the two, but I think its more likely there is a crossover: a vast area between the extremes where it is both far to expensive and pretty much has no effect.

Having said all that, the core of the idea is sound. Real people make much better NPC's than computers, and unless someone makes world changing advances in computing and AI that's likely to stay the case for the foreseeable future. So how can you make an MMO where all the NPC's are played by real people without it costing you a fortune? I think the answer comes from EVE Online.

EVE was actually designed in a pretty traditional MMO way initially. Theres crafting, theres mining, theres an auction house, but theres also NPC's who give out missions and the like. The reason no one talks about the missions (which are even more generic and boring than the worst WoW has to offer) is because almost noone does them. Certainly not as a focus. EVE is all about player driven gaming. Whats the big difference between stories you hear about EVE and stories you hear about WoW? WoW is all about the NPC's and the stories that the writers have written. The players dont really participate so much as observe. Whereas in EVE I can only think of one story that involved even one NPC, and that was from years ago! All the big news now is about what the players are doing to other players. The big wars are between one group of players and another, and evolve in relatively realistic ways. Its not a static history created by the designers for you to tour about in, its an actual history being written by the players themselves.

Whats that got to do with Doggers NPC problem? Well, simply put, its the solution: Get the major NPCs acted by real people by getting rid of the NPCs. Only have players. Which led me on to a train of thought heading for a Grand Fantasy station, loaded with an express delivery of Holy Shit I Wish I Owned A Games Dev Company.

Here is my idea for an MMO: A game that is a cross between traditional WoW MMO in controls and viewpoint, EVE in its open and player driven world, and Minecraft in its world building and exploring aspects. For a setting, I'm thinking something resembling the colonisation of America: Not in style but in general theme. New players would arrive in the new world as skill-less settlers, maybe on a boat or a spaceship or something. As people spread out from the initial area, the landscape is entirely randomly generated, a la Minecraft but with more realistic distances between biomes, larger scales etc.

The key for the lack of NPC's is in a number of things:

1) No magical money creating or destroying. Money is created as it is in the real world: by getting raw materials and minting coins. Other than that, trade is done through a barter system.

2) There would need to be a simple way to create your own quests. Nothing grandiose and story driven like the CoH mission building, just a simple "will pay x for y" system that the game will manage for you when you are offline. So, as an example, if you have just finished building your badger arse powered generator, you could post up a quest for people saying "Fetch me badger arses. 10 gold paid per arse." Things like maximum amount of things you want could be set, or a limit of things per day. You could even have some sort of simple scripting system set up, so people can drop stuff in to one bit of your grand machine and get paid, and the other end is spitting out products for you to sell on.

3) Because of 1, some sort of system would be required to stop the limited resources disappearing when players stop playing. I would suggest that whatever bank/inventory system the game uses "unlocks" after a certain amount of inactivity on the account. This period could be tied to how long the account has been active. After this timer has run out, your stuff becomes free for anyone to grab.

4) I cant quite put my finger on why, but I think some sort of psuedo-permadeath system would be needed for this idea to work at all. Maybe have it possible to make Eclipse Phase style "backups" of yourself, through some sort of cost. Head off into the back of beyond and get killed, and you would lose whatever stuff you went out with and revert to your backup.

Its often argued that people wouldn't play a game like this because everyone wants to be the hero, but I would say that is missing the point entirely. In a game like WoW, *everyone* is the hero, so no one really feels like one. In something like EVE, some people really are heroes (and villains) and the rest of us either play because we quite like being the cog in some greater machine, or because we dream that one day we will be the hero. The difference between what I'm proposing and EVE is just that EVE wasn't really initially designed to be entirely player driven. Its sort of drifted in that direction, which has left it with some old school traditional MMO bits hanging in there like a humans appendix. I'm suggesting a game designed right from the get go to be entirely player driven. Entirely.

Of course, it would be one hell of a technical achievement to make, meaning it would be horribly expensive to both design and maintain. I'm pretty sure it would be possible though, with current tech. Although I would totally do it on a single server, so it wouldn't need an enormous population to make interesting, I'm not convinced it would get enough people interested to be financially viable. Which is a shame, because I would play the everloving shit out of something like that.

On point 2, just to point out that EVE already does that with its contract system and to some extent, the general market buy/sell orders.

I dunno when the last time you played was Joose, but the old Escrow system was taken around the back of the barn and violently put to rest a while ago, replaced by the new system acting as both auction house, general sales house (want to buy, sell and trade, aka your "will pay x for y" system) and importantly: the courier contract system.

Said courier contracts are pretty much like your standard NPC ones: Take item from place A to place B, of course being EVE it's entirely possible to screw people over by setting a contract to have a big collateral and set the delivery point to a station where the person trying to do the contract cannot dock (aka player owned stations).
That said, it's actually used fairly frequently by hauliers in Freighters, can be some big money in it providing you're selective and can afford the collateral.

It's certainly a workable system, and could easily be made into a big feature, especially if it was tied heavily into a crafting element.

buzzmong wrote: the courier contract system.

Said courier contracts are pretty much like your standard NPC ones: Take item from place A to place B

I think I played Eve recently enough to have done some of these, but they didn't really have any personalisation beyond the player name who had issued the contract - making me wonder whether they were really any different to randomly-generated ones.

Unless you could somehow see the results in the game world of your delivery (like the townsfolk building stuff in the Millenaire Minecraft mod) or have some sort of way for the quest giver to write an interesting story, would it really be that much more immersive? Of course if all quests were player-made then you'd kind of assume what you were doing was of worth, but personally I'd always have either the sneaking suspicion that a few were CPU-generated just to make sure people always had something to do, or that I wasn't having a noticeable effect by doing them.

Sounds like what I imagine Salem to be like.

buzzmong wrote:It's certainly a workable system, and could easily be made into a big feature, especially if it was tied heavily into a crafting element.

Yeah, it had it, but it always felt a bit bolted on as an afterthought. If it was properly worked in to the game from the start, tying in to the crafting like you say, and/or giving more obvious results like FJ suggests, it would be a bit more compelling.

your initial description sounds incredibly like a slightly less hardcore wurm online without a shonky interface in a different setting, which i would love to see and would happily throw money at if it existed.

Sounds like Second Shite to me

Eve missions...because almost noone does them

Is actually far from correct. The majority of the Eve playerbase still hangs out in Empire doing NPC stuff, you just never hear about it because it's terribly dull - it's amazing how many people choose to grind when given the choice of so many alternatives but I guess grinding is very easy and you can see an immediate, albeit small, return. The player driven stuff accounts for something like <30% of the playerbase, but it's a very vocal minority on the forums and where all the interesting stories come from.

In essence though I would love to see a whole lot more player shaping the environment in MMOs. Evochron Mercenary isn't technically an MMO, but on a dedicated server it supposedly allows player created content to develop the game world. The village building in Conaids has the right idea. Unfortunately the rest of the game was terrible.