Virtual Worlds of 1e

[Gerto]

I've been reading through some of the posts here about the whole story/thread vs a world arguement (Or if you prefer, 2e/3e vs 1e). It reminds me of online games and VWs. They are always billed as "come explore our world" or "you're in our world now", but they usually fall short. They are really just railroads, you go from level 1 to level 50 and see the different zones and monsters and get the spells and reach the end. Then you wait for an expansion, and do the same thing from level 50 to 60. Where is the world to explore? The possibilities? The emphasis on players and not the environment?

Im deeply interested in virtual worlds, having played them for almost 10 years now. I've come to find the ones I like best are most like 1e, meaning they are simply worlds that you live in and choose to do what you please. Kill monsters, kill players, bake bread, build houses, converse with people, make guilds, essentially, everything is fair game. Many MUDs (those text based VWs) even grant the players limited access to create and alter code to create their own possibilities. This is so 1e, the players make the world, not the developers.

Imagine having a massive Gygaxian 1e world to explore, 24/7, by yourself or with friends. No railroads, no stories, and infinite interactions with the world and players. It'd be a virtual world, a virtual D&D world, and it'd be fun as fuck.

If a world was to be created online, could the spirit of 1e be translated into the digital medium? Not how it would be technically implemented, not whether it could be a commercial success, but could you have EverGygax?

[Gorthakh]

Yes, I believe you could have EverGygax. But not yet.

Mechanically, D&D is very simple. It was successfully translated into computer game format in the 1990's with the Baldur's Gate series. Devising a D&D world is so simple and straightforward that thousands of people have done it in their living rooms; there are tables for everything and they're easily devised.

As I see it there are three major challenges to overcome.

First, there are too many people and not enough adventure locations. In order to create a workable D&D-based persistent world, you'd need to be able to create a unique instanced dungeon for each adventuring group - so it would need to be randomly-generated, accessible only to a small group of people, and save itself so you can go find it again the next time you play. That way, the group really has the feeling that it's setting off into the unexplored wilderness... nothing in MMORGS sucks more than leaving town and finding 38 adventurers hanging out in the first zone, all killing all the lone rats and goblins that are wandering in the area for no apparent reason, while some idiot yells "Can ne1 give me free gear im a n00bzor?" every 20 seconds.

Second, the monster AI in most MMORGS is atrocious. A D&D dungeon needs to be a scary place where intelligent monsters use intelligent tactics that can sometimes surprise you.

Third, NPC interactions in MMORGS suck. You can ask the NPCs a tiny range of valid questions and receive a tiny range of pre-scripted answers. The NPCs need to feel like beings you might meet in a fantasy world. They don't need gold question marks hanging over their heads when you've unlocked a new dialogue option, either.

These three aspects are probably soluble, but I don't see anyone solving them in the short term.

[Gerto]

So you are saying its not possible? I'm not concerned with the technology needed (AI, graphics, whatever), but with the ability for a digital medium to express a Gygax world that can handle multiple numbers of people.

1) The adventure world needs to be large in relation to the amount of people. Making a game that appeals to 1 million susbscribers (world of warcraft) is never going to be intimate unless you severly partition everyone's playing experience. I know VWs today suck in this respect, and in the one you describe, but the question, can we change this? Can we have an intimate game?

2) Can unpredicatability be expressed in terms of actual code? Can humans play the parts of monsters? Is there a difference? Again, todays AI does suck because the emphasis isn't on fighting, its on killing massive numbers of creatures to gain levels and goodies. Can we change that paradigm via VWs?

3) Just as #2, can we have interesting NPCs? Can they be more than quest-vending-machines? Do they need to be more than that in 95% of the time? Can the majority of NPCs hand out quests and spread rumors, while the 5% most integral NPCs (villians in this case) have some superior system?

I really want to know how these IDEAS implement into a Virtual World, not how todays VWs suck(we know that) or the technical limitations. Technology changes, problems are solved, but if an idea doesn't work, no amount of proccesing power can change that. The question I want to pose: can the ideas work? Is a Gygaxian open-ended world, free to explore and interact with and upon, loaded with danger and oppurtunity a viable VW?

[Gorthakh]

gerto said:

So you are saying its not possible? I'm not concerned with the technology needed (AI, graphics, whatever), but with the ability for a digital medium to express a Gygax world that can handle multiple numbers of people.

Yes, I think it's possible, although technically very difficult.

gerto said:

1) The adventure world needs to be large in relation to the amount of people. Making a game that appeals to 1 million susbscribers (world of warcraft) is never going to be intimate unless you severly partition everyone's playing experience. I know VWs today suck in this respect, and in the one you describe, but the question, can we change this? Can we have an intimate game?

The issue is that you do need cities and towns which are thronging with people; it's nice if those are played by other real people. And also, you need to meet people to group with and trade with.

Once you get out into the borderlands, the zones need to be semi-instanced to restrict the number of people in them at any one time. Then you need full instancing in the wilderness and certainly in the dungeons, such that these places feel genuinely empty of people aside from your own group. I'm sure it's technically possible.

gerto said:

2) Can unpredicatability be expressed in terms of actual code? Can humans play the parts of monsters? Is there a difference? Again, todays AI does suck because the emphasis isn't on fighting, its on killing massive numbers of creatures to gain levels and goodies. Can we change that paradigm via VWs?

Player -v- player fighting sucks for a number of reasons, and that would apply to situations where humans play the part of monsters as well. I feel that humans should play humans and demi-humans, and the monsters should be played by the DM (or in this case the program).

You can express unpredictability in code, but you do need for the monsters to act in a way which suggests they are thinking tactically and co-operatively.

gerto said:

3) Just as #2, can we have interesting NPCs? Can they be more than quest-vending-machines? Do they need to be more than that in 95% of the time? Can the majority of NPCs hand out quests and spread rumors, while the 5% most integral NPCs (villians in this case) have some superior system?

NPCs need a wide and deep range of dialogue options to make them feel like real characters run by a DM/program. They need to be capable of rumours and gossip if that is desired, and it needs to become possible to get to know them. They need daily routines such that they move (in a reasonably predictable pattern).

Yes, I think these are challenges that can and will be solved in the next couple of generations of MMORGs.

[Gerto]

On instancing, is that too restrictive? Could we have dungeons that can be tackled cooperatively, or maybe even competetively? It would be cheesy to assign a time limit to dungeons, but allowing others to compete creates a sense of urgency.

I agree that PvP sucks in that it would not fit into this type of VW. D&D was never about fighting other players. However, I would offer a different opinion of NPCs.

Socialization in VWs is done by the people inhabitating them. Players chat with other players for many reasons, including that no computer could hold a good conversation. People will play the game to meet their friends and make new ones, not to get to know NPCs. The vast majority of NPCs are filling even in tabletop D&D (shopkeepers, guards, unintelligent monsters, etc). Now, I don't think that all NPCs need to be quest-machines and rumor mills. The important NPCs, such as major villains and protagonists, as well as plot hooks, need to be fleshed out. I don't think mercanaries and followers need much personality either, because the emphasis is that if you need more characteres, you find real people playing them, not hired NPCs. Thats the whole advantage online play allows.

I agree alot with what you say, but I feel the major changes need to be made to the VW paradigm, which is the heart of my inquiry. Can we shift away from emphasis on leveling and "grinding" and "level treadmills" and place it on interaction with players and the environment and exploration? Its very easy to create online systems (hoops) to jump through to hit level 60 and get the uber loot. But is it possible to create a (non)system that allows exploration and improvisation, the cornerstone of D&D?

[Gorthakh]

I reckon the key to creating a game environment that the players can genuinely explore will be to ditch the approach of having pre-loaded zone files and replace them with instanced zone files unique to each group. In other words, you might have an instanced fractally-generated wilderness area rather than a pre-loaded zone, and each group of players would have its own fractal key, so they have a different wilderness to the next group.

This then creates problems when players switch between groups; you'd need a protocol to figure that out.

I don't see that it's necessary or even desirable to get rid of level-gaining. But if the wilderness gradually depopulated as you killed the monsters, via a roster of some kind, then people wouldn't be able to locate an experience hotspot and sit in it for hours.

[Gerto]

Two ideas: 1) Level-gaining and level treadmills are different in this case. A level treadmill is where you spend your time gaining experience in the same exact way ad infinitum to gain levels that are not really distinguishable from each other. Case: EverQuest. Sit near 1 of 2-3 exp hotspots in your area and attack monsters as they respawn. There's nothing else to do to gain experience, except kill monsters with different skins. And when you level up, you usually don't gain any new play options. All of your damage spells increment and do more damage, your buffs increase in strength, and you might get 1 new type of spell. It does change a little bit when you near the end-game, but that's 100's of hours later.

Gaining levels is about gaining options. In D&D, wizards don't ge Fireball I then II then III. They get more options available to them, flight spells, polymorph, etc. If you gain levels just to increment your exisiting powers, you are on a treadmill. But if gaining levels opens more unique content and options, its meaningful.

2) Is randomly generated content the best way to create exploration? It might be, but a few thoughts come to mind. Random content can be coherent, but can it be engaging? Different DMs and module writings have different flavors. Is this something we want to emulate in a digital medium? Do we want to have actual writers create area? Can manually created content be fit into some kind of randomization so that the experience is sufficiently different to each group?

Also, one metric that seems to be lost in random areas. If you can complete a hard module in real life, you get a metric to compare with other players. "Oh, I beat XGY1 AND 3, those are killer modules!" Do we want to have some constant content to create this situation?

[Gorthakh]

I think that separately-coded, GM-designed individualised content for each gaming group is probably not going to happen at a normal monthly cost. Maybe if each player was paying $150 a month.

I feel that if you release an area that's the same for everyone, then only a few people will ever really explore that area. Once they've explored it, they'll rush to post their maps and details of the phat lewtz0rz they found out onto spoiler sites, which people will access - and thus it will be practically impossible for anyone else to explore that area for themselves.

[Gerto]

If you charge the standard rate $15/mo (ignoring the profits from selling the box), and hit a VERY modest amount of 10,000 people (<1% of WoW's subscriptions in North America alone), you make $150,000/year. Alot of that goes towards server costs, paying the live team, and recouping investments, but you surely have enough money to hire someone, even a consultant, to provide constant, unique content. I agree you wouldn't have a 1-1 "GM" to group ratio, but the money stream subscription games provides definetly allows plenty of extra content. Most games make complete returns on their investments within 1-2 years, and the rest of their lifespan is pure profit (average game length is 5 years). I didn't want to get into a comercial view of the game design, so I guess I violated my own premise, but I just wanted to point out that money is not a large hurdle in non-extreme cases.

Spoiler sites: They are very optional. I know, that's a week arguement, but it holds water. I can't use any statistics, but the people who use spoiler sites are the ones who are "achievers", or people who play the games to "beat" them. In this case, we are designing a game for "Explorers" who derive their pleasure from the journey, not the end. Tee spoiler sites only spoil the game for those who choose so, and the same goes for single player games AND D&D modules. Some people will spoil their experience, most won't, and I doubt it will remove from the experience.

Note, "Achievers" and "Explorers" are player types, as espoused by Richard Bartle. He's written many scholarly articles examing player motivations, which can be found at www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm if you are interested in a very thought-provoking article, irregardless of its slant towards online gamers. I believe it has alot of universal appeal to even D&D gamer-types.

[Gorthakh]

First off, the thing with spoiler sites is that you only need one person in the group to "infect" that group with spoiler-itis. So if the average group size is 5, and one player in 10 is using spoiler sites, then on average a zone will be spoiled for you by the end of the second visit.

And you can't get rid of them.

So you know, I'm a former EQholic (leader of a raid guild, over a year /played time, cleared both versions of Sleeper's Tomb with 2 characters, etc.) I sold my characters for a total of rather in excess of $1,000.

I'm of the view that repeatable quests killed that game.

If you had the spoiler, you could do the quest. If you didn't have the spoiler, you were screwed, because you were competing with other people who did. (Spawns like Ragefire or the Velious bosses only appeared once a week, and when they did, there were always thirty people sitting around waiting for them to arrive so they could gank the critter and score another cool magic item).

Where you can find a known monster in a known location for a known reward, you have a problem, because spoiler sites then become the only way to get the gear you need to stay competitive with other adventurers.

I remain convinced answer is randomly-generated, instanced zones, where you won't get too many players in the same dungeon and you can't possibly know what's waiting around the next corner.

[Gerto]

I can see your point. EQ is very centered on loot; it is the only defining characteristic. Every level XX fighter/mage/whatever is 99% the same. The only differentiation is what gear you have. The entire mentality of EQ is to achieve materialistically, levels and gear. A 1e world would not be based in such a way. There wouldn't be such an emphasis on concrete goals such as level or unique drops. I guess I should ask that as a question though: Would a game that doesn't have concrete goals, and rather focuses on exploration of environments, players, and the self, be a fun world to play in? Some people\academia define "games" and "fun" as having concrete rules, results, and goals. Is this always the case?

[Gorthakh]

Concrete goals and results certainly aren't necessary; people play The Sims.

[Gerto]

Good point, I agree.

A side note: The Sims actually tanked commercially. With the huge market of people who bought the original Sims and its packs, they expected a huge population in the online version that never materialized. Thats not important to the people who play the game and enjoy it, but it does concern the suits who finace the game. I guess its just a lesson that you have to design a game to an audience, and not spend money thinking you can hit a huge market with a niche game. I imagine a D&D VW that was true to 1e, it couldn't afford a huge bugdet since it wasnt targetting a mass market.

My hope for VWs that are worth playing in the future is actually large numbers of small niche games. Instead of making a bland, derivative game to attract millions, make dozens of targetted niche games that attract thousands. But I guess theres better money in the mass market, so theres not much a chance I'll see this situation as a reality.

[adoniasservant]

If one were to take the diferent elemants of several different genres they could come up withh a fairly well done game...


Taking parts of MMORPGs and melding them with elements of FPSs and add a dose of BG style RPG, and perhaps, using a method I have seen in Socom 3 as they take several maps and blend the edges together to create the illusion of a vast map, but it is actually smaller maps.. if you get my drift. A certain amount of cheap AI could be useful, but to keep leveljunkies off of hot spots , the xp value could be lowered in comensuration with your level. also make the game a true killer game, make it simply impossible to be succesful in the game without a team effort. that keeps most of the level junkies out,(they dont like to share), \\

just some disjointed ideas.