We saw that in Guild Wars 2, yes they were scripted but nonetheless the world felt more alive, things happen around even if you weren't part of it.
I thought for myself at that time , wow this quest system will be the new norm and usher in a new MMO era, I really thought that, that the classic ! and ? were gone and the the new dynamic questing gonna be the new thing but better than Gw2, I really thought other game developers would take this idea and improve on it and make it even better, the future were so much brighter and I had such joy.
Now I'm sad, I still see the classic ! and ? and I still see the crowd hail the oldschool playstyle, the quest systems, the mob farming, the raid boss camping the holy trinity ect
I thought we all were done with that kind of gameplay yet you all hail it now, I really don't get it.
Comments
Dynamic events work better in singleplayer RPGs
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
If you want to access both HoT and PoF then there's an optional bundle for $50. After selecting PoF into the basket you get a discounted $20 offer for HoT Standard before checkout. Note that HoT is not required for the second expansion but Gliding Masteries, HoT Elite Specializations and a lot of content are bound to HoT. You'll be able to play PoF without buying anything else but PoF though.
+ There is a Season 3 content package containing a new story line with 6 extra maps, a map for each of its episodes. If you haven't unlocked S3 episodes for free (each episode could be unlocked for free with a login regardless of having HoT or not) then they can be bought for in-game gold or real money. You can completely skip S3 or get it later. Or just buy the single episode that has the easiest way of getting an Ascended back piece. I would say buy it for gold.
Second, I believe this comes down to the difference between telling a story, and building a story.
If a game is trying to tell a story, it is entirely developer led and requires generally linear gameplay and tightly scripted quests. Quest givers (story tellers) and the actions you complete are still the best way to tell a story.
If the game is trying to build a story, this implies that the ending is not known and this is where personalisation and dynamic content comes in. It is about creating a world for you to live in and for you to have your own story. The dynamic content might well result in similar experiences for most people, but should be different enough to feel like your story. For example, orcs might mount regular raids on a starter village. The dynamic aspect of the game would vary the size of those raids and also allow for different outcomes.
Player 1 might experience a small raid - 5 orcs killing some cows in a field. That player can solo the orcs, save some cows and be a minor hero. Player 2, who joins 1 month later, might experience a large raid. He is unable to solo it but saves a few villagers. The outcome is the village is reduced to ruins, and that player remembers "the great raid of '07". Player 3 joins slightly afterwards and rather than defending against a raid, he now has to help rebuild the village by staging raids against the orcs to steal supplies. Player 4 joins later and experiences another large raid, but he groups up with other newbies and successfully defends the village. Player 5 joins even later, but with the village safe and the orcs afraid to attack again, the game asks him to eradicate the orcs, which he does with some friends.
For each of these players, the experience is slightly different, and the player's success or failure affects the gameworld in a semi-permanent way. It forms part of a dynamic ecosystem where player actions affect what spawns and what is available. The story is personal for each player, yet the experience is roughly equivalent so can be balanced and controlled. Early players might fondly remember attacks by orcs, whilst later players had to contend with wolves (which replaced the orcs when the orcs were eradicated).
I am much more of a fan of dynamic content and personal stories. I don't like traditional quests and never have. That said, I have basically never seen dynamic content done well. It is much more appropriate to a sandbox design but very few designers seem to be able to handle sandbox.
For the first few months I loved this! Nowadays I venture in to an area and if the village is under attack and I need to get there I just find it a nuisance. Maybe the problem is me, hehe.
I think that's why a lot of MMOs have a personal story that changes the game as you play through but in general resets the rest for a better group experience.
It is nice hearing NPCs talking about your adventures when you go to the local pub for ale.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
This is the biggest problem. Never mind the work involved with creating branching possibilities and/or having lasting effects on the world.
The real issue is there would be a handful of players who could play together, and that's it.
DM me if you'd like my in-game names to add to a friend's list. I know Bill and the gang also have a presence in-game.
Then you would have no control over anything and everything would be controlled by the first people to arrive. That would be stupid.
A few games have flirted with dynamic events - and I don't consider ESO's phasing one of those - but no one has yet made it into what it could be. Ashes has some good ideas with their town growth and events that can spawn from that but it still sounds to me like it could get to be predictable over time.
What we need is unpredictability of for example, undead invasions that have a chance to happen but could just as easily be one of tens of other events. And not on predictable timers. I could see a game developed like that having far less need for solo quest content.
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That would, however, require exponentially more resources in creating content throughout the game world.
While you on the other hand were somewhere else in the world and read about all this and decides to help out rebuild the town or help out clearing the wilderness around the town for that dragon minions to make it even safer.
Just because you missed the initial dragon attack dosent mean you can enjoy what comes after.
GuildWars2 is played by so many because it's the best pay model ever being "buy-to-play". It's also a good game, I'll say this absolutely. Both are the true reasons its played by millions....... Well, in fact it's now the best "free-to-play".
NOT BECAUSE ITS EASY..... Going to work now, have a nice day
The first MMO quest I did was killing rat in a moat in M59 1996 but there were already rather advanced quests in 80s games like "Pool of radiance".
GW2s version is the most advanced so far but it is still very basic, there are 2 things that might happen depending on success or failure, usually are there a few to 20 events being cycled. Often do they just go on timer even if some events start due to players doing things that isn't always related.
It is still rather fun and DEs feel far more urgent then quests and less forced but for DEs to truly reach it's potential we need far more games experimenting with them. They do have gone a far way from WARs public quests and Rifts DEs already but we are barely glimpsing the potential yet.
Sadly are they more expensive and gharder to make then quests so we might never see them reach that potential.
So, lets take mob spawning as an example. A large proportion of quests we get involve killing stuff - be it 10 rats, a whole camp of enemies, or a mini-boss somewhere - so the world needs to spawn the creatures we kill.
Artists, animators, devs and whoever else already have to put in the work to create these mobs, assign them skills and behaviour, create huts / tents / camps etc for them to live in. So, static or dynamic, the bulk of the heavy lifting has already been done.
In a static system, you just assign zones and say what can spawn in those zones. You can use the same principles for a dynamic system. You can still have zones for spawning, it is simply that what spawns changes depending on in game actions.
What spawns, as a result of player actions, can also be pretty simple. Lets say at launch there is a goblin camp near a village. At that point, spawning is the same whether static or dynamic. There just needs to be a trigger event that changes what spawns. Maybe that trigger is a single kill of the boss. Perhaps it is a counter - 100 kills of the boss, or 100 completions of a quest. Once that trigger has happened, the game simply changes what spawns within that zone.
So, the hard work in such a system is:
I think these are all fairly easy challenges to overcome. For example, if you have your spawning algorithm sorted nicely, then in the future you can easily add a new race to an area by just creating a new potential outcome (e.g. uruk hai), adding the mobs and the buildings to that outcome, then defining the triggers.
From that point on, the right set of outcomes would result in the uruk hai invading an area, building their own unique buildings and spawning automatic quests for new visitors.
I'm probably not doing a good job of explaining myself, but I firmly believe that with a talented game designer and a great lead developer, you could implement dynamic content for roughly the same price as existing static content. You'd have more upfront costs in terms of design and dev, but less ongoing costs as you only need to design a single system (mob spawning + triggers + quests) which can then be used to populate every single zone with mobs and quests.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
The quality of a well designed DE certainly makes it worth the extra job but I still think that there generally will be more of it unless we aree talking about a game that skips filler quests.
One awesome DE system I would like to see is one that actually change the season in the zone (better have a rather long cooldown on this one, 2 weeks or so). For instance to end the winter you get a chain that if successful let you kill the frostqueen and turn the zone into spring.
It is not that hard to make a good DE system but making good chains, especially if you want them to branch out is rather work heavy.
I think the perfect system would use both quests and DEs, but save the quests for the more epic stuff that takes a while to complete (like EQ2s heritage and signature quests). Stuff like saving a farmers field, saving a village from maruading orcs or similar things work far better as DEs then quests. Gathering parts to make a pair of magical boots works on the other hand far better as a quest.