Design Goals:
In 'The Game' you are a character who interacts with the world and other players in a persistent way. The actions you perform and the choices you make affect not just your own character but the game world itself and thus, through the game world changes, other players.
The game world should also be 'alive'. It should have its own rules for growth and destruction and elements of the world should be able to interact with each other without involvement from any player.
The ultimate goal is for a genuine second earth: a world that you can live and play in, but that doesn't require your involvement - or the involvement of any players at all - in order to exist and grow.
Inspirations:
- Classic fantasy MMORPGs like Everquest, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars etc.
The world theme would be one of low fantasy, a medieval style world with many factions. The player would be a single character at a time, played from first person or over-the-shoulder perspective. NPCs in the world would provide quests and typical MMORPG services. - Real Time Strategy games like Age of Empires, Warcraft, etc.
The factions in the game would be controlled by AIs and capable of growth and expansion. Political boundaries, control of cities and resource nodes, alliances between factions, could all change as the game world lives. - Persistent MMOs like EVE.
The player would be able to change the world, or at least the political and economic overlay of the world. - Minecraft
Simple graphics, generated world, persistent player driven changes to the world.
Basic Gameplay:
You are a character in a medieval world. Although you are one of several hundred players on the server you start in or near a village by yourself or in a group with the friends who start their characters with you. The village itself is AI controlled and populated by dozens (or even hundreds?) of villagers, each with jobs that contribute to the growth of the village, much like an RTS game settlement. Villagers will gather resources, construct buildings, create items, and compete/fight with other nearby villages or nomadic bands. In the absence of player activity, the villages will expand or decline like an AI controlled faction in an RTS, though on a much slower scale. It should take weeks or months for a village size settlement to conquer another.
Players can help 'their' village to thrive by assisting the villagers with tasks.
Players can collect resources, hunt animals, or exterminate beasts/monsters, like in an old style MMORPG questing structure, with the crucial difference that player actions contribute to the RTS-like growth of the village. Resources gathered or food hunted by players adds to the store of resources in the village, helping the village to grow. Players killing beasts/monsters open up new areas for the village to expand into, to make new farms or gather additional resources.
Players can also build buildings, farms, roads etc themselves, further growing the village. They can also create items (tools, weapons, containers etc.) that the villagers can use for their own purposes.
Players can fight against other villages or nomadic bands, whether simply for loot/experience or to help further the goals of their own village. -- It will be tricky to balance the 'slow growth' model of village development with the typical player expectation of being able to slaughter an entire village of enemies/victims in the space of a few minutes. Some distinction between a respawnable death and perma-death may be needed for NPCs, or maybe civilian villagers could run away and return later when the player leaves --
Player assistance to the village could be guided by quests, generated according to the vllage's current needs based on common templates. Villages would have co-ordinators for each job role that would serve as quest givers. For example the chief woodsman would have a standard quest along the lines of "<name> We need <value> more wood. Please chop <value> trees at <location:wood> and deposit them in <warehouse:wood>"
Players can also, of course, completely ignore 'their' village, i.e. the one near where they spawn, and head off to seek adventure and fame elsewhere. There will be many more villages than players so players can complete quests at other villages, gaining reputation with that village and faction. They can kill randomly spawning monsters or beasts or nomadic bands for the experience and loot. They can attack other villages for fun and/or profit. Maybe they can create their own fort and control their own resource nodes, eventually attracting settlers who want to join with the player. This last could become tricky though.
Considerations:
The following areas would have to be addressed in any such game and/or in a future post.
- How would 'levelling up' of villages and regions be handled? Over time factions will become more and more powerful, how will they interact? How should multi-settlement factions be managed? What happens when large factions collide with other large factions? How can you prevent large factions from snowballing? How can factions decline and fall? What happens to their 'champions' if they do?
- How should players interact with each other? How can griefing of other players' home villages/factions be controlled? How can players become and remain relevant to their world as their abilities and gear improve?
- How should the world be created? How can players modify the world? What happens to player modifications over time and/or as other players interact with them.
- How can players interact with NPCs?
- What kind of end-game could be run in a game like this?
Kasaroth had some related thoughts on a recent Ars Technica post:
ReplyDeleteI really wish they would move as far away from the traditional MMO "quest-based" model, where every player plays through the same set of quests even though hundreds of other people sharing the same world have already completed them.
Their PvP ideas seem like a decent starting point, where different factions can dynamically compete over territory, but I wish they would extend this sort of dynamic system throughout the world. If I'm going to share the world with other players, I want dynamic shared world elements so they can see teh effects of what I do, and vice versa. I don't want just a single player game design with multiple players thrown into it simultaneously.
If they feel that there must be "quests" in the traditional sense, they should all be dynamically generated based on the state of the world's dynamic elements. If goblins move into a cave and start raiding a town, generate some quests to go deal with them. Once someone wipes them out, stop generating that quest because the goblins are dead.
Minimize enemy respawn points, and put them in very inaccessible locations, but have enemies actively doing things in the world instead of just standing at their respawn point waiting for players to kill them. Instead of just frequently spawning a few goblins in each area where "goblins are supposed to be", occasionally spawn a whole tribe of thousands of goblins in the depths of some cave, and send them up in bands of 50-100 (with some elite leader goblins) to start seizing territory, and let the players as a whole dynamically deal with the invasion. Give the leaders a decent "strategy game" AI that can assess threats to their group as well as opportunities, and decide when to press an attack on nearby towns,m and when to retreat to a defensible cave. Let the goblins loot slain players and NPCs, and use their equipment.
Let players buy land and hire NPC guards to help defend it. Let people post their own "quests" for other players, offering rewards for accomplishing certain things, or bringing back specific items.
I like all of these. In particular the last point could lead to more interesting 'guilds' that would be more like player based factions than traditional guilds. The leadership would decide what is required and create quests that any junior member could complete for a specified reward, taken from the guild bank. You could do something like that now of course, just manually, but having proper in-game support for it and things that could usefully be done, would be nice. With guild ownership of territory the guild would end up like some sort of feudal aristocracy where the lord/gm sits in their castle and sends their minions out to do things.
ReplyDelete