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Player generated content?
Kulthos
Member Posts: 89
I made areas for MUDs and Neverwinter Nights had a great toolset, can something like that be set up for a modern MMO? You would need a central group to edit and balance the areas to prevent things like "The land where high-end gear grows on trees" and "The island of the Nazi porn stars" but some of the best stuff I have seen in games has come from non-professionals.
Player-generated content would help freshen up the MMO world and give the players a feeling of investment, IMHO.
Comments
Hero's Journey is doing something like this through their volunteer GM community you should check it out. Alot of MMO's aren't made for Users to have access to 'sensitive' data & art work etc etc but Simuntronics is trying something rather revolutionary by having Volunteer GM Systems where you create areas & quests using their tools.
Not sure what sort of QA they could have set up for that because user made stuff for P2P MMO RPG's at least would definitly need to go through QA. I don't think they'll take just anyone though which to be honest is a good thing...letting every single user create stuff is equivalent to all the really horribly broken & just plain bad things users made with the Aurora Toolset. (I enjoyed quite a few scenarios but every so often you'd get a really badly done / buggy one )
Please Refer to Doom Cat with all conspiracies & evil corporation complaints. He'll give you the simple explination of..WE"RE ALL DOOMED!
the 5-15% of areas in second life that are good user generated and used content.
open PvP can work out nicely for a bit of content, nothing like a bit of random mining in a spot to send a few kingdoms to war. the unsurping of the crown quest works quite nicely to.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
This is some of the same stuff I'm working on!
I am an MMO developer. I have one project where we are trying to use volunteer GMs and another which is designed to allow for unlimited amounts of player-created content like the old text-based MUDs used to.
The game that uses volunteer GMs is a text-based multiplayer online role playing game called "Nations and Empires". I'm pretty far into turning it into a 3D MMORPG, but technical problems have delayed release of "Yostan 1.0", the first segment of the game. The basic problem is that we licensed a game engine and trying to make an existing innovative game fit into someone else's game engine is not easy.
I realized that it would be far easier to invent a new game that was designed to work with the
game engine we have. I've now done that. The new game is tenatively called "Magic of the Gods" though we probably will change the name. It is now available for free playtesting.
The idea is that players can appeal to "gods" in the game to give them money, items or magic. Players can invent their own magic spells by writing them in a scripting language. They can also appeal to the gods to change the game. Players can, by learning magic, change the game themselves and even create their own areas like in the old text-based MUD games. Players can become "gods" of the game who control how the game works.
The idea is for the game to grow by means of interaction between "gods" who have vast powers, wizards who have lesser powers and newer players. We expect that this will create a world similar to that of Greek mythology where mortals strive and struggle to achieve their own goals, but are often playthings of fickle bickering gods.
If that idea doesn't sound all that great, I'm open to other suggestions.
If anyone wants to try the Magic of the Gods game, click here:
www.naegame.proboards83.com/index.cgi
or paste this into your browser:
http://www.naegame.proboards83.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1189212425
It will tell you whether the game server is still running Magic of the Gods (and what version) and will give you a link and instructions to download the software and get started.
At the present time there is not much to this game. It has a few areas you can go to, some items, some different types of characters. PvP is allowed everywhere. There's not a lot to do yet. The point is not what's already there. The point is what do you want to be there?
You can contact me at [email protected] to tell me game ideas, especially comments about Magic of the Gods.
The download instructions are on a forum devoted to Nations and Empires which is still continuing as a text-based game, but you can ignore that and just download the "Magic of the Gods" software. The latest version as of this writing is version 00.83.
One final note, don't try to play a werewolf character, a playtester has reported a bug that prevents that from working in version 00.83. It may be fixed in later versions.
WELL online is going to have a lot of player generated content. It is being implememnted in a rather curious way: There are organisations - mixed player and NPC systems where players lvl up within the organisation getting certain skills quests andmissions from the NPCs and once they get "to the top" they are able to rearrange NPCs, influence the missions they give and so on. Also high ranking players can set their own organisations. Organisations can be anything from Polixce and Mafia to religious confessions, mining and production corporations etc etc.
Check it out here
And here
Here's the game's off site: www.wellonline.com
This thread http://www.totalpcgaming.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=86&start=0 details the EVE 'Great War'.
It is probably the most epic war fought in any MMO and has involved around 25,000 players over the course of the last two years... Hell it was such good content even the NY Times wrote about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/arts/television/28eve.html?pagewanted=1
100% player driven content with no Developer interference...
Amarr Victor
It can be done, it has been done. There's no need for editing and balancing if the rulesets are clear and balanced to begin with. The Ring for Ryzom was the perfect example of controlled player-created 'content' but certainly not the first to attempt it. A real shame the company had to rush it out due to financial troubles; the version that went live only scraped the surface compared to what the alpha version could handle. Perhaps the game nor the Ring tools didn't apeal to the mass public but ever since it's release I have heard more interest of larger production houses in player-generated 'content' than ever before. But my personal guess is it will be the smaller 'indie' companies risking and attempting to integrate such tools first.