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Random quest/dungeon generater idea for balanced hardcore/casuall play
Dzone
Member UncommonPosts: 371
EX. of a setup for dungeon (when entering)
Short - medium - large (what that does is determine how many rooms a dungeon will have)
2nd option
Easy - medium - hard (Will determine the difficulty of the dungeon
Now what that lets ppl do is determine how casuall or hardcore they want there dungeon experiance to be. Lets say you get a casuall group of players together for a dungeon run, the party leader will select short and the difficulty level. Then the casuall party could go through their dungeon run in like 30min - hour.
Now lets see what a hardcore party would do. The party leader would select large - and prolly hard difficulty deping on how hardcore they want it to be. It would take that group around like 5hr-8hr to complete. Maybe little less extreme, But you get the idea.
The diffrence between the hardcore and the casuall runs would be in the rewards. There would be a much higher percentage drop rate for epic gear for hardcore runs, but casuall's will still have the chance for the same loot, would just be much more rare.
The same idea could be used for questing to. It would prolly just be a choice of difficulty level though. Since can't custom generate in the open would.
A quest example - Choose what difficulty you want the quest to be ( easy - solo ) (Medium - 2-3 players) ( Hard - full group ) , and a few special quest would have the option for epic ( full allience)
What our ya's thought on this? Would it work? Any mmo out their that does this?
Comments
Giving an advantage to players who can dedicate a block of 5-8 hours in real life to playing a game is bad game design.
If you have a particular dungeon, scaling the difficulty up or down shouldn't really be that hard to do. It's certainly a lot easier than making random dungeons, as the latter is rather tricky.
What do you propose be random about the random dungeons? Quest text? (Hooray for word salad!) Graphics? Mobs? Loot? Do you want to manually make a hundred fixed dungeon blocks and choose some of them at random to link together to make a random dungeon? If so that, gets repetitive pretty quickly, as you'll start seeing repeat sections before you've seen all that many.
The more you randomize things, the less repetitive you make it, but the harder it is to make sure that most of the randomly generated dungeons are decent. I'm of the view that it's acceptable to have a relative handful of "bad" dungeons pop out, though obviously, the less of this the better.
Already done in Diablo 3.
First option: which act to run .... act 3 .. big dungeon with lots of rooms. Act 2 .. more open space. Sure there is nothing going for 5-6 hours of gameplay but that is only because no sane dev would think that is viable.
Second option: Monster Power 0-10. Difficulty scales with MP. Rewards (xp, gold, loot drop rate) scale with MP.
Third option: hardcore or softcore .. hardcore = perma death
Works pretty well.
Haven't any of you ever played Dungeons & Dragons Online..? (DDO)
It^ is exactly what the OP is talking about. Under a well defines ruleset. Too bad the game ended up sucking.. The game bomb big, because it could've been much bigger/better. Cheaply done and had zero for the free roamers..
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
Sucking is a matter of preference.
The game is succcessful enough (after F2P) to have expansions. Didn't you hear about their new content?
And why is "had zero for the free roamers" a problem? It is a game about DUNGEON runs. Not every game has to let people free roam.
What does success have to do with sucking...?
Your nammering indicates your knowledge only comes from reading, not from any actual gameplay experience, or knowledge. Though... it funny listen to a newb rant-on like you do...
Dungeons & Dragons... my son has nothing to do with dungeons, it was about roleplaying and there were as many openland modules, as there was dungeon modules. Now, I suppose u not understanding any of that, because your berift of the fact the DDO stems from a dice roleplaying game from the latee 70's/early 80's... later called Advenced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D)
Now, if you understand that those who played that game, would have no financial problems PAYING for a game based on that... that market (at the time) was underserved by this game, thus it lost massive potential. Thus, not a flop, but opted out to end being an ultra-casual social club... (ie: too lbby'ish).
WoW brough the MMORPG genre mediocrity (ie McDonalds) & the adults wanted something more premium/elite than Everquest. Knowing & asking for such a game... yet WoW's billions pulled every MMORPG afterwards down trinkets avenue, of softer subs, to lesson the burden on the millions of children & young adults finding out about these types of games.
Ironically, .. "The game is successful enough^..." <--- for You Narius... it's just successful enough for You, to make this/that point. But in other threads, it is not. laugh... Ur talking points are all over the map kid.
Get your troll under control..
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
why colorful?
LOL..?
Learn to read^ my friend. Your rebuttal makes no sense, cuz you didn't read properly.
Again... DDO was successful enough to make your point. But not mine.. who are you arguing with ? Yourself?
.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
So you agree DDO is successful enough to have expansions and more content?
Great .. now we can move onto the next point.
Was there some financial report that said that DDO wasn't doing well? Last I checked the game and forums, it was doing fine, with active guilds and new updates coming out.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Anyone saying DDO wasnt a success after F2P really has no idea what they are talking about. DDO has been the most successful game to convert from subscription to F2P.
Anyway, to the OP. This is not a new idea at all, Anarchy Online did this a decade ago and one of the few things it did right.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
I had this exact same thought when I read OP. Diablo 2 and 3 really do do this and they do it the best. I can't really imagine any other game having better dungeons created on the fly like in diablo.
I would prefer it if players were able to create dungeons using traditional dev tools, then an oversight board made up of players chosen by the devs would monitor and rate created dungeons, acting as a quality control. I imagine a system like this would suck in a lot of mature creative types to the game and would be great for the community... And I am really thinking of Pirates of the Burning Sea here, which allowed players to submit 3D ship models, and these player submitted ones were 10x better than the ones made by the original devs, and there were 10x more of them, and for that reason this game has some gorgeous ships in it.
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
Only massive hit I can think of that did this is Ufo: Enemy Unknown (Xcom for the uncivilized) and I mean the original games NOT the recent console perversion.
Most MMO's use gigantic bosses with scripted attacks creating the "challenge" beyond the huge number of hit points. It is the scripting especially that makes or breaks the challenge of the "boss" fight.
Making this random, does not work IF you do not break open another part of the MMO genre as well
GET RID OFF:
CLUELESS UNAWARE ENEMIES
You no doubt have seen this in countless game, you kill a guard of an enemy base by blowing his head over his buddy and his buddy does nothing. In SWTOR this especially happens with you holding a slaughter right inside a camp with snipers and robots just standing around looking at their shoes.
Make a dungeon with clueless enemies random and all you get is a random dungeon crawler.
Make a dungeon random with AWARE enemies, Dues-Ex (original game not the console perversions) and Ufo: Enemy Unknown style, and you get a dungeon were you have to discover what this random dungeon contains, can I take down this guard without alerting the entire base and getting overwhelmed? Can we form a chokepoint there so alert guards can be take on one by one?
You would also need to get rid of bosses as they are, a random boss with super attacks is no fun, you would end up with the giant fight in Guild Wars 2, sometimes he stomps, sometimes he doesn't, it is just endless dodging, no fun.
In the original Ufo games, the challenge came from not knowing where the enemies were and each layout of the zone being different requiring you to find a way to navigate an unknown area without getitng surrounded, outflanked.
Could that work in a MMO? Yes... but it would have to be a very different type of MMO to the usual "class Y do X when enemy hit Z hit points" MMORPG.
Basically, turn Ufo Enemy Unknown and/or Deus Ex into a MMO. It won't be easy but if you do it right, then just shut up and take my money!
I think the term for this is dynamic instancing. Each entrance offers a range of options for customizing content and thereby reward. The server creates and loads the dungeon on the fly on activation, and then is ready to be entered.
I think it could be applied to questing as well. For example in a GW style world where overlands are instanced, they could be generated dynamically on entrance from a town.
While I'm not a fan of instancing in MMORPGs, I think this would make a great framework for a CORPG.
The concept of aggro has already been done on a simple squad level (aggro one enemy in a group and it aggro's the whole group) and I'm sure I'm missing some more complex experiments out there in games I haven't playered. But in theory, it seems straight-forward to generalize the concept of agrro to lairs not just mobs. Each mob in a lair can cast an alarm spell that, when cast, passes aggro up to the lair as a whole. Once the lair has aggro, it spawns additional mobs, changes the behaviour of existing mobs, etc.
The question is how much work would it take to do the first proof-of-concept and assemble a language for managing lair reactions. You'd need to get it to a state where it's as no more difficult to code a new lair as it is to code a new mob.
I don't think it is that difficult to do this. Even back in the original EQ, you can train out the whole dungeon. In D3, you cannot aggro a single enemies, you have to fight the horde, including the elite/champ which i consider a boss.
It would be great, if we can add stealth gameplay in Deus Ex (or Dishonor, or .. name you stealth game) to it. However, i do question whether you need a MMO for that.
To me, it is just as effective and fun, to have full stealth/aggro gameplay in an instanced dungeon with a few players. In fact, if steath is involved, and we are talking about few players who may need to coordinate (trick this guard to here, so i can kill him type of things), it may be BETTER to be a co-op instanced game.
True this, and it applies to more than just MMOs. Pretty much all games have a serious problem with AI. You'd think we'd have gotten further with AI but nope. MMOs are especially guilty.
I think that clueless enemies are the bread and butter of a grind-centric game. They are the fluff inserted into games to increase play time and stretch out content. This may account for why MMOs have worse AI than other games, and also of course its because MMOs are more complex to program so corners must be cut somewhere and since you are interacting with other players then quality NPCs are slightly less important.
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
So you agree DDO is successful enough to have expansions and more content?
Great .. now we can move onto the next point.
Yes.. and that next point was..? See how u brought up an irrelevent argument just to back out from responding. Then, u kiddingly want to discuss the next point.Which was the potential DDO had upon release, with a 15+ history behind it... to luke warm welcome.
Now, since it had an expansion.. and you feel that that repdesents success and not just a sign of survival, then oh well. But do understand, that a game still alive isnt a succes for the enduser, just fhe dev team/ceo, etc. A financial success means nothing to the geamer.
Your not a gamer, u are a passive entertainer. So anything you can log into, that is cheap and still available to you... is a success.
SWG had and expansion too, once...
So kiddo, back up and reply to my whole post, and face the music like a man. Stop dodging post that obliterate ur illogical diatribes. I have read your last 200 posts... you like to discuss the same off-topic things over and over.
Hope u dont get banned for trolling in the mmorpg section..
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
The problem with user generation content is how it fits with optimizers.
An optimizing player will do that which is most efficent. What happens when they can design their own content? They make their content the best to farm.
In City of Heroes they implemented the foundry system. This allowed player generated missions. The most commonly run ones where ones where boss monsters were split up so you would only pull 1 or 2 at a time. They were given a bunch of super awesome abilities to increase the XP they dropped with one great weakness....normal abilities used on them would chain knock then down making the players able to constantly cc them for almost assured success.
In Diablo 3 you have scaling monster power and you can choose the act. The majority of players chain farm act 3 because it has the highest likelyhood of monster spawns and good xp.
Random generated content will still be optimized and whatever patterns are present will be found. The interesting thing is the desire to optimize and the desire to experience unknown content polar oposite of each other. Do optimization and new experience fight each other from a design perspective? Is it worth trying to design for both of these two crowds?
How does a generator deal with this reguardless of whether the generator is user or server controlled?