Originally Posted by Grave  I'm going to go with more dynamic content as well, though I disagree with Gecko's extreme version. What he describes would never work in an MMO.
I'd like to see things like the world changing based on day/night, season, and so on. Weather changing as the season does, complete with snowfall during the winter, etc. would be really cool and immersive. A lot of work too, though, admittedly. From a gameplay standpoint, maybe certain events or quests are only running during a certain season. Maybe certain tradeskill goods become more or less valuable depending on the season. Stuff like that.
The Day/night cycle could effect anything from what creatures are roaming at what time of day to certain quests only being available or doable at certain times. You could have a graveyard area that might be graverobbers and cultists during the day, but at night the dead rise out of their graves and roam around. Or, maybe there's a quest to slay vampires and collect a certain type of dust from their remains, but the catch is the dust is only valuable if the vampire is awake and active when killed. The player would need to wait until nightfall to find the active vampires and fight them. Probably very simple to do, and yet it would add a lot of interest and replayability to the world.
I'd like to see NPCs actually going about their daily activities during the day, and going to sleep at night. A city could change completely in the hours of the night as the rogues and assassins make it their own.
Speaking of that, in a similar vein I just want to see city life be more interesting in general. In a next-gen game, I want to see huge sweeping cities that I can explore. I want to be able to actually sit down and just "play" without ever leaving the city if I want to. Give me an assassin's guild to join and some 'daily quests' that give me marks to track down within the city and eliminate without getting caught, Assassin's Creed style. You could easily come up with various other little mini-games for other types of characters that would give players something fun to do in between adventuring. You could simply ensure that everything the player needs is easy to get to (AH, Bank, etc all close together in a place that they can reach easily, the rest of the city can be for other things) and the size of the city would never be a hindrance to people who aren't interested in the other stuff.
If you implemented a system like this you could also take it to another level and actually track time as it goes by. Let's say a year in game was 3-4 months, so 3 times per RL year you could patch in a little update that represents this passage of time. Maybe new structures are erected, or new leaders appointed, new events take place, wars reach a conclusion, etc. This could be sort of like the monthly content update that Asheron's Call always had (very cool) except you don't need to do it quite that often. |
