Cool “Moments” are not “Dynamic Content”

Keen, I’ll be honest with you, I have been following your posts for 2-3 years now, but it’s getting hard and harder each day to read this blog, you just seem to want to complain about everything, nothing is good enough. You should really try to take a look at what you’ve been writing and do a little soul-searching, because you are killing the great image as a fair writer you got over the years.

I mean, have you even read or watched anything about GW2 before this post? If a player takes down a bridge during an event, it will stay down until another event brings it back. Sure, it’s possible to one player see the bridge there, and come back another time and completely miss the whole sequence of events that blown up then reconstructed this hypothetical bridge, but that doesn’t mean that the event was meaningless to the world or to players. If this isn’t a dynamic content, then please, enlighten us on what does the word “dynamic” means to you.

The way you put it, it seems that unless a player is able to kill the main antagonist, which will never ever show up again, you won’t be satisfied enough to call it dynamic content. Dynamic content does NOT implies on persistence. It means that the content is not always the same every time you go to a certain area (and if you played Rift, you should know that rifts and invasions make playing much more unpredictable and dynamic than the usual get-quest, kill-mobs, turn-quest-in structure from previous MMOs, and even Rift itself uses as a basic structure). This doesn’t mean that the area will be forever changed, and no one is saying that; it’s only you who seems to expect that.

If you don’t care at all about these attempts of making MMO content more interesting, why do you even bother to read and write about these games? MMOs will not change in such drastic ways, because you cannot make permanent changes to the environment and expect the next set of players to just deal with it, so just give up if that is what you expect.

No offence, but I don’t think you are actually paying attention to what the devs of GW2 are actually saying. Events in GW2 are supposed to make lasting changes and there are indeed events where whole areas may be taken over until players come to free the place.

With Rifts, the developers obviously has a “Reset State” of the world where all the NPCs are up, and players move around the generic mobs in the countryside.

It seems then they have these moments as you call them, that changes the behavior of the zone. After this moment is over, the zone returns to the pre-defined “Reset State”. The problem is that it seems to be rather binary – either you’re contested or not. So when rifts are closed the same “Reset State” is obtained. The zone isn’t dynamically changed… Someone reset the dungeon.

Compare this to the demon attacks on thrallmar / honor hold in WoW. At random (?) times, a horde of demons will stomp in and wreck stuff. but moments later, order is restored into the “Reset State”. How are the Rifts different from that? Would you call Burning Crusade WoW “Dynamic Content”?

The core “Incursion” feature of the current EVE Online expansion is designed to have an impact on all star systems in a constellation (a local group of 5-10 systems).

Once it becomes active pilots in the constellation will not be able to run PvE missions efficiently (damage/resist/bounties are all nerfed), mining asteroid belts will become more difficult as they will populated by tougher-than-normal Sansha NPCs.

Once the Incursion clears, there’s no lasting effect, but the intent seems to be for the Incursion’s impact to be sufficiently irritating that pilots in those systems will either have to relocate temporarily, or group up and clear it rather than waiting several days for it to dissipate naturally.

Inflicting annoyance on PvE players with a new PvE content system. I love CCP sometimes. 🙂

I have to agree with Keen on this. This industries definition of “dynamic” does not come close to what I would call it. Rifts are NOT dynamic they are at best random. For me a dynamic world needs consequences. Someones actions should have meaning and long term impact.

I’ve said this in other places before but for me a truly dynamic world would have the chance to constantly change. Lets say there is a cave containing trolls. Players could fight their way through the cave and kill a named troll. That troll would not respawn again. That said a new troll might respawn but if players cleared the cave of all trolls and perhaps destroyed their “subterranean entrance” then trolls would never respawn there. Some other creatures might one day take up occupancy in the now empty cave but maybe not. Possibly even players could build there only to be invaded later on as something new encroaches.

Things like that should be coupled with an over-arching storyline that would advance beyond the players direct control. GMs could control an advancing faction that is constantly attempting to take potentially player-controlled land. Towns could be wiped out and would stay wiped out. Plagues could come into a town and turn its inhabitants into zombies. Give the game a life expectancy similar to A Tale in the Desert. Some faction (including the GM one) might actually “win”.

For me never knowing what to expect in the game world would make it dynamic as something more related to ecosystems and how they can change.

None of the new games have anything like what I want to see as “dynamic” instead they continue to give meaningless game”play” drivel.

Let me start by saying I know this post will seem like irrelevant semantics – for which I apologize. Nonetheless I do have a point: I think as it stands, Keen’s original criticism is effectively hamstrung due to a lack of clarity or specificity. It will have no power to truly criticize, because it can be easily deflected. I.e. “but, they didn’t mean dynamic in the sense you meant it”, or “but, the world really changes for 30 minutes, or an hour!”

That said, for any of this to make sense, we need to determine whose definition of “dynamic” we’re using, or if that’s even the right concept to be making the center of the argument.

Frankly “dynamic” is kind of useless to us. In its general sense it doesn’t really say anything relevant to game design, with the closest thing being:

“Dynamic. Computers. (of data storage, processing, or programming) affected by the passage of time….”

So really, “dynamic” is only meaningful as the opposite of “static”:

“Static.
1. pertaining to or characterized by a fixed or stationary condition.
2. showing little or no change….
3. lacking movement, development….”

Static certainly described most MMO questing. And in this sense, it’s completely correct to describe Rift’s world as dynamic – over time we can observe change or movement; its condition is not fixed.

Yes, it is true that it always tends to cycle back towards the default state, but I don’t see that precluding it from being “dynamic”, as long as the cycles aren’t locked into a specific, static rhythm.

That is, we can have set, unchanging cycles that are in fact static, but as long as the cycles show change, they are dynamic in the general sense. In contrast, this shows why we still call WoW’s questing static, even in Cataclysm: On each player’s individual questing “timeline”, the phasing events always happen at the same point; the phase cycles show no change, the events are fixed in relation to the quests before and after.

All that said, I agree strongly with the other points Keen is making, and I totally understand why the harping on “dynamic” or not – I follow what I would call similar distraction myself, all the fucking time.

The point must be emphasized: The devs should be pushing these ideas *more*, and trying to inject more *simulation and NPC agency* into the world. And that’s really the issue here – if I’m understanding it correctly – we’re not talking about dynamic versus static, but about pre-designed scripting versus simulation; a controlled world with a limited number of options for the player, versus a world full of self-directed NPCs who could decide to revolt – against the players and the designers alike.

Basically the developers are giving us pre-animated death animations – of ever increasing quality and sophistication (now you get a different animation depending on when you shoot the person and where! It’s “dynamic”!”) – while some of us really just want ragdoll physics and get it over with.

As a side note, I think GW2 and Rift are so different in their basic philosophy towards content, (quest-centric versus a hybrid between Animal Crossing and WoW’s reputation systems) that comparing them isn’t particularly meaningful. Particularly given how little is still understood about GW2…

The simple reason why the moments haven’t lasted long enough to provide long-term consequences of the quest hubs being gone, etc. People. Lots of people. All excited about rifts. All converging on them at the same time as soon as they appear. How is this not working as intended?

What may be more interesting to observe over the long term is as people get bored of the rifts, what happens then.

Fair enough, Keen. I know it might not seem like it, but my whole rant was offered more as a friendly criticism than anything else. My IRL friends and I find occasional digressions helpful, in order to better specify the terms and concepts we’re using to grapple with an idea, and that’s what I hoped to do here. I realize, however, this sort of digression doesn’t translate well to the internet, and tends to come off as semantic bickering.

And I’m not trying to change your mind about anything, really. It’s just that, if I understand the argument you’re making, I think there are some more specific concepts (scripted versus simulated for example) we can use to talk about things in future – you know, later, when all the ideas around this whole “dynamic content” shitstorm start to coalesce more, and we have more concrete examples to refer to.

Also, as you say, there is merit to simplifying things for the sake of consumption in the context of a blog. I, obviously, have never perfected this skill. 🙂

As to my GW2 comment, I was just sort of typing at the aether, pay it no mind. ^^

@Keen: Now you’re just discussing semantic. You’re giving names like “phasing”, “scripted” and “dynamic” to things that are essentially the same, however with very small differences. And all of them are dynamic, but you chose to use the word “dynamic” to name one of them.

“dynamic content or a dynamic world is one where a change is made (usually by players) and it sticks until players change it.”

Here is the contradiction: you say you did your research about GW2, and yet you ignore that this description you give is EXACTLY what happens on the game. An event starts when a group of invaders try to take a village. If players do nothing, the village is taken, and stays that way. This can trigger further events where the invaders get further away into the area, possibly destroying our dear bridge. If that happens, you would need to go through an event to rebuild the bridge, another to repel the invader, and these can now trigger new events with different consequences. The world changes (in different scales, depending on the type of event), and can stay that way until the player takes action. This is dynamic content by any definition.

What you are calling dynamic content, you should be calling sandbox content, and even worse, you seem to think that just because the events have any scripted changes (like a bridge being destroyed by AI invaders, not the players), then it’s just “smoke and mirrors”. Sorry, but if what you want is a world where all changes must be made by specific choices of players, that’s going to be a very boring world. The player is not, and should not be the only force capable of changing the world on games where any form of PvE exists. Players are fighting creatures on this world, why should these creatures not have any way to change the world?

Games like GW2 or SWTOR are trying to include compelling story into the world, and that requires a storyteller. You won’t find a good story on MMOs unless there is a script. So yeah, there events follow some rules. Of course, so does any type of changes players can possibly do on an MMO (like having your guild take a keep and control it on DAOC), these rules are just more simplistic and don’t try to tell anything about the world, and they are an illusion of change just the same (you can take a keep from another player, but you cannot destroy it forever). That doesn’t change the fact that anything that gives players a perception of change on the environment is going to make the world feel more dynamic (in opposition of static, which is what the word means despite whatever meaning you want to give to it), hence being called Dynamic Content. Trying to differentiate what can or cannot bear the title of DYNAMIC according to where the change comes from, and how long it persists, it’s just being nitpicky, and to be honest a little silly.

@Keen: the only thing GW2 or Rift are implying is that events will take place and give you different content to play on a same environment, and players can affect the outcome of these events by actively taking part on them, or not. They claim that these events are not static, always present occurrences on the world, and might happen on different times or depending on different conditions, with some of these conditions possibly even being triggered by players. GW2 is saying further that events can change the world, on small or large scale, until players takes action. All of these claims are true if facts are your concern, and anyone that played those games can testify to those facts.

When compared to the usual MMO content, when you get a quest, some mobs are standing around, you kill them and go away, and they respawn like nothing ever happened, these games are calling these these new mechanics Dynamic Content, which is a fair definition. By your example, this is just an all-encompassing “Fruits” definition, they didn’t claim to be any specific one, that was all you.

Now what you are implying is that because their mechanics don’t fit what you think when you hear the world “dynamic”, then it’s not dynamic, and that is not a discussion on content, it’s just on semantics. No one is denying the existence of phasing, scripted events or sandbox content, and none of these games are defining their content as any of those, just as… fruits. Your arguments are just that “they don’t change the world enough or long enough”, and “they are scripted”, but being scripted or player-driven, if they change the world for one minute, one hour or one week, they still change the world, therefore making it more dynamic.

And yes, I realize that by that definition even a weather system can be called dynamic content… because it is. Just because they are not the “brand” of dynamic content you want, or as impactful as you wish they were, doesn’t make them pointless as you claimed on the article. They are still major changes to how MMOs are played, and this is great. At the very least, they help pave the way to further innovations, taking the genre further towards something anyone can truly agree is “very dynamic” and “player-driven”. And hell, to some players, they might be even fun enough as it is, which I think it’s still the point of these games, more than trying to fit into some ideal definition.

@Syeric: oh, sure it could be improved. I have been playing Rift since the first beta, but personally I’m not really interested on buying the game, it just didn’t grab my attention as I wish it did. My guild is going en-mass to it tho.

You are right that immersion is broken quite a lot by how rifts can show up, get closed and disappear sometimes all under a minute. But I would hazard a guess that this is for performance sake; they would need to make rifts open less often to avoid multiple scenery effects starting to get overlaid on top of each other, so they just make the effects disappear faster so more content can appear. That’s just my guess.

Despite calling them just scripted events, even Keen said that what they need is just more persistence, and sure enough while invasions can completely take over towns (possibly even the main cities, since attacks also get there), they disappear by themselves after some time unattended. But imagine if they didn’t: with a game the follows the progressively-higher-level-areas structure as Rift does, 6 months after release there would be nearly no one playing on the initial areas, which would be on almost permanent state of siege by other plane’s attacks, since players would have no motivation to retake these areas, therefore making the game unplayable for newcomers.

So my point is that there are always trade-offs. You cannot just allow players to do whatever they want, or allow AI-driven attacks to keep areas under siege forever, if you don’t plan the entire game mechanics to keep the game interesting and playable for both old and new players under these conditions. And that’s just not the game that Trion is trying to make. As for GW2… that’s a different matter, and why I disagree strongly with Keen, because the game is being built to allow entire areas to be taken under control of mobs, and ONLY after players actively repel invaders they can access things like vendors on these areas. So claiming that GW2’s dynamic content is not impactful in any way just isn’t true. The persistence is there, the player-driven changes are there, now it’s not enough because there are scripted sequences on these events?

Of course we will see just how impactful that is on the day-to-day gameplay when the game is released, and I make no claims that GW2 will be perfect, but as far as this discussion can go, I prefer to stick to what I know the developers are trying to achieve, and what I’ve seen from actual gameplay, than claiming their ideas “will all mean nothing to the next player who walks by” without any factual base for that.

Also for truly dynamic content it is rather hard to implement. UO tried very early on in development adding fully dynamic content (all rabbuts dye wolves come. All wolves die rabbits come crap). But realized it just did not work. MMO players while predictable, are not predictable enough to make it a worthwhile system.

The problem is, Keen, Rift is aiming towards a way more casual audience than you. You want to know the response from 90% of people when the quest hub is gone for 2 days instead of 10 minutes “Well, I can’t level up any more, this is stupid, I’m going back to WoW” Dynamic content is unfortunately a “hardcore” feature in that most people don’t want a dynamic experience. They want a consistent, predictable experience.

I think Rift is an attempt at bringing in emergent gameplay to a casual audience, and it might do a decent job at that, but its still going to pale in comparison to PvP dynamic gameplay (dynamic because real players are doing things), because it has to still fit within the theme park game design. I think I was hoping it might bring more “open world PvP” feel but with PvE instead, and from the sound of it, that similar to what you were hoping for. Unfortunately, I think that would be unpopular for the same reason open world PvP is unpopular, people don’t want to be bothered/ganked/interrupted, while playing.

It would be really nice to see Keen for once writing something positive about GW2 and comething negative about WoW and SWToR. That’s all i have to say.

@John:

That is exactly the point!
It is not ab out the nature of the script. Unbless you allow players to create these events (dream on), you need such a script.
HOWEVER, the time scale is the point. If GW2 had an event that was of sufficent scale and affected the world for half a year I would be absolutely satisfied. What feels extremely like a gimmick is an event the repeats itself several times while I am at work. And I fear that is exactly the kind of ‘dynamic’ event that awaits us. It may be dynamic, but it is not meaningful.

@ John:
In addition to that the monsters pose a danger to the world your char lives in. Unfortunately, you need to be an incredible optimist if you, in fact, believe that to be the case 😉

I guess you haven’t played in beta 4. All I hear in general chat now is an invasion has been in a quest hub for hours, and they can’t progress.

I am pretty sure they have the rifts, and invasion spawns turned way up, but I do see this as a problem in the future, and I see why they may not want to punish players.

Look ahead a few months, and than think on how empty the lower zones will most likely be. What will you think if there are only a few players in the zone, and you can’t defeat the rifts, or invasions. It will automatically make you ragequit, and never play the game.

Look at Warhammer as another example of having lasting impressions. Initially city sieges stopped everything for 18 hours. No scenarios, no open rvr, or anything while the other faction farmed invader gear for 18 hours straight.

Once the city siege was over your city was ranked 1 star, and you couldn’t even do any of the PVE city dungeons until you got your city back up to 3-4 stars, and by that time your city was being invaded again.

So many players became unmotivated, and quit the game. At the time DF was coming out, and alot of players wanted something better.

Players try to talk like they want punishment, but when it happens to them they are the first ones on the dev forums crying about how 90% of the content is inaccessible. Unfortunately punishment in games doesn’t get people motivated, and organized to make a push, and change things. Most just jump ship, and join the OP faction.

Cataclysm is a really fun single player game with a hell of a lot of replay value. The only thing that is not good about Cataclysm is the leveling 60-80 and the virtual world parts, in my opinion.

Otherwise Blizzard are, indeed, very honest about it. There’s no next-gen addon or anything like that. They don’t even claim to have a virtual world.

Quietwulf,
for some players experiencing the simulation (in addition to playing a game) is fun. Of course, the simulation should not be equal to real life. But it should be similar – as all MMOs are.

The question, really, is not whether games should be completely abstract (Tetris) or based on reality (Counterstrike).

The question is where the optimal point is? How convincing should a simulated/virtual world be to be the most fun ?

I think realistically nothing that is a simulation in a real sense will happen in the next 10 years maybe more. It is counter to what most developers/designers want.. it stops them from tightly managing user experience.

@Keen difficulty, have you played Demon Souls on PS3? there is a really interesting interview worth reading that explains A LOT about how games are developed now

http://www.next-gen.biz/features/interview-demons-souls?page=0,0&$Version=0&$Path=/&$Domain=.next-gen.biz,+$Version%3D0

not sure if this has been posted before.

Building Guild Wars 2, Dynamic content, etc.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013691/Designing-Guild-Wars-2-Dynamic

“I think realistically nothing that is a simulation in a real sense will happen in the next 10 years maybe more. It is counter to what most developers/designers want.. it stops them from tightly managing user experience”

Sadly I think you are correct what is needed is for a visionary innovator like Peter Molyneux to advance this further.

player driven PvE can be enacted immediately and at will but still has to respond to the actions of the player. Getting other players to respond to each others actions I would say is easier and doable. getting PvE to react, without it being simple, bland and redundant. And work in a way that is not just annoying to players is pretty hard.

I’d like to state that I don’t actually disagree with Keen. I do agree that what Developers are calling “Dynamic” is not a perfect system.

It’s not going to create this amazing “living” world, like some people are expecting.

What I’m getting at is that the level of “Dynamic Content” some people are asking for simply isn’t possible with today’s technology. Further still, indications are that those kinds of world won’t make for terribly “fun” gameplay anyway.

Friends of mine and I have been talking about “Dynamic worlds” for years. The idea of having a living, breathing world, where all the factions have ideals, goals and the resources to carry them out. We even suggested the idea of a “God” AI (Think AI Director out of Left for Dead), that watches the world closely and “tweaks” things to influence outcomes.

It randomly spawns a more aggressive mob, with desires to lead it’s faction to war.

It turns the tides of battles in subtle ways, allowing certain desperate gambits to actually pay off.

It does what it needs to to make sure the world doesn’t fall into disrepair, *inspite* of what the players do. Because that’s the trade off for a sustainable, Dynamic world. It has to survive *inspite* of how badly the players try and break it. Because they will try and break the systems. That’s the nature of players.

Did you ever anticipate that there are like 700 people in one zone and that the reason that footholds / rifts aren’t up for very long is because people are in the zone killing them very quickly?? If rifts stay up, they will take over the entire zone, if you dont attack the footholds they will take over everything. They will even attempt to take over the capital city.

Under normal server circumstances and loads I think rifts will come to fruition. Hell, the other day there were 4 20 person raids doing foothold and rift hutning in freemarch. You can expect them to go down very quickly.

They are dynamic in that the rifts / invaders scale in difficulty, spawn rate and spawn locations based on how well players are doing at taking them down, how many people are grouped, not grouped, how many are in the zone, what players are doing, what quest hubs are more valuable targets.

You can upgrade your quest hubs defenses with new turrets, more guards etc.

Sounds pretty dynamic to me. These were merely “moments” to you because of the ungodly amount of people working at them. There are two sides of the coin about rift, just dont be your cynical self ;-P