dynamic world ecosystem

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by Faille

Similar to Braen's idea, I like to have it when you kill a boss mob, a grunt respawns. after x amount of time, he depops and a better mob spawns. So on and so until you get back to the boss mob. So players have a choice of grabbing the less good loot quicker, or waiting for the real boss for the real loot, combined with the conflict between 2 seperate groups of players.

That reminds me of a quest in LOTRO. It was something like rescuing a wolf pup from a cave that was surrounded by wildcats. You were supposed to kill the wildcats and then the pup would come out and follow you back to the quest giver. Well, the quest was bugged for a while and the only way the pup would come out is if you waited for all the cats to respawn before starting to kill any of them. What would happen is a couple people would show up and they'd begin waiting for the cats, one would spawn, then another player would come over looking to do the quest too and they'd kill the cat. The people already there explain to the new person that they're being an asshat and then add them to the group. A few minutes later, another spawn, followed by another asshat. Repeat until the group is full, and then the new asshats that start showing up form a second group and then there's just no way in hell anything is living long enough to complete the quest. The smart people give up and leave.

My point is, you have to do some sanity checking on ideas like that. Or rather, retard checking followed by griefer checking. Lots of good and/or interesting ideas are going to fail one or both of those checks simply because MMO players are what they are. The only safe way to implement a lot of that kind of stuff is through instancing.

[Faille]

A somewhat simpler system would be just having PH's that depop after x time, while bosses don't. So that makes for a candy land for the first people to enter an area, it also means that under utilised areas become more valuable since if no one goes there, then they will have all bosses up.

I would try and balance it so that once every 3 or 4 days if a good time period to go and check the dungeon and clear it. Any shorter then that and it becomes too farmable.

[Skurd]

a great thing to avoid having static content would be to create "migrations" for outdoor populations, be it through static parameters (x time of the year, for animals; y boss getting killed by players leading to underdogs leaving for somewhere else);
of course this would be mainly useful for wildlife and would bring some novelty to regions while also creating a kind of wide-spread terrain use.

[Lenardo]

the migration thing is a good idea.

as to the evolving cities.

it'll work with a Solid evolution plan setup in advance- setup 4 different levels of Main development (where Everything changes) and 2-3 intermediate levels of expansion between the main dev.

have specific design of each city Done to it's max state (castle keep metropolis if doing medieval) down to the 4 building beginning village....

pain to do but it'd look so cool is village xxx after a year is now town xxx that has 4x the stuff that the village had...a year later, it has a castle, mansions, docks, leatherfactories, founderies etc....

[Vatoreus]

For now, it may be a good idea to try and start making some of the basics work in game before getting too far ahead of ourselves, good ideas are great, but worth nothing if they don't get worked on and implemented.

[Rhaze]

Well it's one thing to say that seasons are good. But what about morning/afternoon/night/day, and what effect will they have on players and NPC's.

Are the cities going to be static places, with a couple "novelty" NPC's walking around? Or are they going to be vibrant places, with lots of pc/npc interaction as well as pc/pc and npc/npc interaction.

At night are you going to see more shady merchants, and maybe recieve shadier quests?

Or are you looking for day/night and seasons cyclesjust for looks or will they effect gameplay? Will inclement weather effect vision/status etc?

[ashatumar]

Originally Posted by Vorph

That reminds me of a quest in LOTRO. It was something like rescuing a wolf pup from a cave that was surrounded by wildcats. You were supposed to kill the wildcats and then the pup would come out and follow you back to the quest giver. Well, the quest was bugged for a while and the only way the pup would come out is if you waited for all the cats to respawn before starting to kill any of them. What would happen is a couple people would show up and they'd begin waiting for the cats, one would spawn, then another player would come over looking to do the quest too and they'd kill the cat. The people already there explain to the new person that they're being an asshat and then add them to the group. A few minutes later, another spawn, followed by another asshat. Repeat until the group is full, and then the new asshats that start showing up form a second group and then there's just no way in hell anything is living long enough to complete the quest. The smart people give up and leave.

My point is, you have to do some sanity checking on ideas like that. Or rather, retard checking followed by griefer checking. Lots of good and/or interesting ideas are going to fail one or both of those checks simply because MMO players are what they are. The only safe way to implement a lot of that kind of stuff is through instancing.

This makes me wonder... do all of these incredibly immature kids get into beta testing ahead of everyone else because the devs want to idiot proof their games?

On topic: I know this sounds silly, but there appear to be a lot of different ideas here regarding gameplay. Is it possible for gameplay to change from one geographic locale to another? I know VG did this by vocally acknowledging the camp vs dungeon crawling schools of though, and populated their world accordingly.

But is it ideal to have varying types of spawns, camps, dungeons across the world?

I'm going to back in this thread to get some examples, and I'll edit this.

EDIT:

we could do the same things with sentient mobs.

Say orc are in a certain area, if left alone orcs will start gathering and form a village of some sort. They will add sentries/patrols and start taking resources from the local area to start building into a bigger, more organized village/city.

Don't most RTS's have this type of coding in already?

Similar to Braen's idea, I like to have it when you kill a boss mob, a grunt respawns. after x amount of time, he depops and a better mob spawns. So on and so until you get back to the boss mob. So players have a choice of grabbing the less good loot quicker, or waiting for the real boss for the real loot, combined with the conflict between 2 seperate groups of players.

Ultimately we're talking about layers of AI vs one complex machine of it.

[ashatumar]

Originally Posted by Rhaze

Well it's one thing to say that seasons are good. But what about morning/afternoon/night/day, and what effect will they have on players and NPC's.

Are the cities going to be static places, with a couple "novelty" NPC's walking around? Or are they going to be vibrant places, with lots of pc/npc interaction as well as pc/pc and npc/npc interaction.

At night are you going to see more shady merchants, and maybe recieve shadier quests?

Or are you looking for day/night and seasons cyclesjust for looks or will they effect gameplay? Will inclement weather effect vision/status etc?

Weather should be buffing or debuffing the character. WoW's shown it's possible with zonewide pvp objective buffs, we'd just need to think along the same lines for weather (and remove a visible buff icon).

[Faille]

I want to see an rts / civ4 style city build up for the player cities. collecting resources, wether they be tradeskill based ot just melting down excess loot, to go towards the city for it to use in buying upgrades, which then benefit its citizens.

[Zarcath]

should be simple to implement, just need to do the groundwork. It won't be on-the-fly dynamic, but as long as we code all the quests and the results, and have a system of deterioration if not upkept. It will be psuedo-dynamic.

Have City Tiers and you need to have certain building requistes to expand. Could even have it where if you upgrade the barracks and sentry towers, the city will become more like a fort, rather then a place to live.

[ashatumar]

Zarcath, it almost sounds like you're referring to The Awakening Project... but that one is almost 10 year old vaporware by now.