Having played so many MMO’s under the stewardship of so many developers has shown that there are definitely many different ways to support a game’s on-going post-release development. Playing WoW lately has reminded me of Blizzard’s development cycles and how they churn out patches very quickly. Some developers choose to leave the content of their game alone for long periods of time while simply changing balance. Heck, with WoW we see both of these things since there are constantly more dungeons being released as well as class balance changes that drastically change the way a game is played.
In some games like EVE, Darkfall, UO, and other sandbox games we see that a lot of the ‘change’ comes from how the community of players decide to run the server.  Sometimes this hands-off approach giving the players all the control works well. Other times it leads to a stale world that never changes.
Thinking about how I would approach the continued development of a MMO if I were the developer, I would most definitely want mine to be a truly “ever evolving and changing world”.  The design I’m running with right now is really borderline sandbox where the players have a lot of control over the world and the outcome of how it advances. Yet at the same time there is a great deal about the world and the game itself that can not change — in fact the backbone of the game doesn’t change at all.
New stuff needs to constantly be introduced. The problem with doing it vertically is that you really lose the value of what came before, as well as creating this feeling that players can get left behind if they don’t keep up. That’s exactly what I want to avoid. Given that my game is skill based in a way that is pseudo level based, I want to allow players the opportunity to use their skills in different ways as the game continues to evolve.
One way in which the world would constantly change is in how the resource system works. Some resources are available all the time (yet most of them move around) and others are rare and only appear at certain times in random locations. This leads to a dynamic economy since certain resources will gain and lose value due to supply and demand, as well as creating certain variances in which items might be ideal to make, sell, and use.
I toyed with the idea that a certain boss can only be killed once and then never appear again, but I think in the end this is a practical nightmare. I’ve thought about just continually adding content, but then I can’t help but think about how a game can reach a point where there is just too much content that it feels saturated.  Then I started thinking about how my game involves a conquest component where your realm takes territory away from the other two realms. Similar to DAOC, there will be many (and vast) places like Darkness Falls. Taking it further, when certain territory is claimed your realm receives the allegiance of certain factions (I’m still working out the details) which grants your realm access to even more. However, I don’t want it to simply be a case where “if my realm controls X then Z faction likes me”.
I want to work in a faction system like EverQuest uses where an “evil race” can actually gain rep and become liked me a “good race”. Working this into how the world constantly changes, I think it would ultimately lead to a very dynamic landscape of territory and content that lock and unlock for you as well as your realm based on the decisions that you and your realm both have to make (both collectively and independent). I’m even playing with the idea that your realm allegiance is not a permanent choice.
All of this is still deep in the conceptual phase, but the point here is to ‘raise the bar’ in a sense for the “ever-evolving” world concept. If you push the world, it needs to push back on you. If you choose to do something, then there needs to be an outcome. When one door opens, another should close. I also believe that no MMO out right now currently comes remotely close to the level of on-going development we should see in MMORPG’s.
I’ve been thinking about dynamic content as well.
One possible way to do it is to have zones that are constantly in flux. Basically, the bad guys are putting pressure on the good guys. As the players participate, they slowly push back the bad guys and “civilization” spreads. If the players stop participating, the bad guys slowly make gains, and “civilization” recedes. Ideally, the zone would be balanced in such a way so that neither side can ever totally defeat the other.
Another option would be to have small, periodic, localized events. Imagine a medium sized invasion force showing up on a beach. It would slowly spread out, attacking things that it encountered. The players would be able to push it back, eventually defeating the boss or bosses and ending the invasion.
They are both pretty high level suggestions, but I think they would be interesting. My biggest concern would be large groups of players “breaking” them. For example, maybe you could assemble a high level raid that quickly wipes out an invasion, denying the level appropriate characters a chance to participate.
I love the thought process here, and seems to be the next logical step forward. Conversely, I would also love to sit down with a current MMO developer and try and understand the technical aspects/hurdles. Are these things they want to do but just can’t?
Oh to get a peek at WoW’s database structure….(sorry, something that I’ve always wanted to see!)
I found asheron’s call did a very good job of this. There were ongoing events, with respawns so everyone had a chance. And some of the items were “cool collectibles” others were awesome epic stuff (Hoary Matt Robes), yet the random loot you got off some random Shadow Warrior outside the gates of Fort Teth that you knocked down was the most epic sword all the l33t farmers above you had ever seen.
BRING BACK THE ASHERONS CALL LOOT SYSTEM!
GM events!
Let a GM make up a world altering event. Maybe an undead plague ravages an elf village. A bat sh*t crazy necro blows a hole in the ground and it becomes a lake.
Let the GMs have some fun with the environment.
@Fyzzle Hell yea. Really like that idea. Kazzak attacking Stormwind is truly one of the great moments, and more random stuff like that would be awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1shA5CNtOg
@Fyzzle Yeah, that would be pretty cool. As long as things are properly calibrated, it could be a ton of fun.
You could also spice up instances by having the trash be a set of random encounters instead of a set of fixed encounters. If you think in terms of 3e D&D, every pull would have an encounter level that would be filled by a random selection of appropriate mobs. You would simply generate the encounters when the instance is created. You could even extend this concept to bosses, although you’d have to be careful not to break any of the lore/quest texts.
I think it would be cool if towns changed to reflect the state of the world. In a “flux” zone, you might have additional vendors when the PCs are winning and remove vendors when they are losing. An event might cause a shortage of some resource, causing prices to spike, which can only be relieved when the event is resolved. Things like that.
I think you could take what is basically a theme park world and make it feel alive with these kind of things.
It’s the “never changes” part that drew me to MMOs in the first place. I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but I get more change in the “real world” than I would choose. I come to MMOs for consistency and sameness, not an “ever evolving and changing world”.
“Then I started thinking about how my game involves a conquest component where your realm takes territory away from the other two realms.”
Eventually you will come to a crossroads where you have to decide:
(a)Do I let one side completely beat up on the other side and will I let this side be dominating – potentially forever.
(b)Or will you help the weak side recover and out them back into a position where they can fight back?
I think this is an interesting dilemma.
I imagine that with most of your design choices you will run into similar dilemmas. The more you go to one side – the more exciting the game becomes but the more opposition you create within the community. The more balance you achieve, the more boring and inconsequential the game will become but the more content the community will be (until they get bored and leave).
I always loved the player generated content in NWN’s…such a great idea.
@Argorius: Indeed that is an issue. Do you let one side constantly dominate the others, and in the process create the potential for a never ending lopsided war? That wouldn’t be fun for anyone.
Three sides to the fight does help against one side gaining too much of an advantage. Perhaps building incentives for the two losing sides to cooperate against the dominator, and allowing for the conquering of territory to anger NPC factions (who are displaced a result of the conquest) who will aid the losing side in their plight.
The key here is to keep the war between the three sides only in certain areas. Similar to DAOC, the “frontier” is where the taking of territory will happen. This can be reasoned into the lore or the world in some way, such as resources or magical ties to that particular area of land.
Quote: “a game can reach a point where there is just too much content that it feels saturated”
IMHO that’s an impossibility. Oh for sure there are ways to unbalance content, over-saturate it in certain areas, but every single MMO out there has not had enough content overall.
You could add an entire planet’s worth of content and players would still want to reach into the stars.
The point is to not make your content trip over itself. It’s no good to have a ton of content in an area that will soon become irrelevant by the next expansion for instance. But I see that as a flaw in the design where anything becomes deprecated in the first place.
I agree with all of this post except for where you said Blizzard churns out their patches quickly. They’re one of the absolute slowest companies to produce patches and expansions out there. They’ve put out 3 significant content patches (not just balancing/tweaking/etc) in the last 18+ months. Six months between patches is glacial in comparison to most other companies.
Of course, there are reasons for the length of time it takes, but still. If they put out content quicker, they wouldn’t get such a huge ebb and flow of players between updates. That being said, once you max out, the game gets so mind numbingly repetitive, they couldn’t put out content quick enough.
How about this for an idea? A weekly patch that introduces a new quest chain somewhere in the world. Not much, 5 or 6 new quests maybe. One person could do that, without a problem, I’m sure, yet no company does it and I have to wonder why.
I like the ideas. As far as your resource theory, I think the SWG system is still the best, resources constantly spawn and despawn, no resource is ever seen twice, but whats server best today may not be tomorrow.
Still the best game for crafting and player economy I have ever seen hands down, I cant think of another game where you could play as a crafter only, and be completely fulfilled and in demand.
And about your thought on making a boss only killable once, ever, makes me think of items in mmos that become unobtainable for one reason or another.
That never seems to go over well, two things happen… people that cant get it are unhappy and complain, people who do have it, sell them for outrageous amounts of in game currency, then the item is reintroduced later on, and the now you have a whole new group that is pissed.
@Rog: That’s what I meant by over saturated with content. The content would trip over itself and there would be content that sits being unused. I think at that point there’s too much content. Ideally though the idea of this post is that Devs need to add more content — just at the rate at which people can consume it.
@Chris: I can not name a single company that patches their MMO as frequently with the same amount of substance as Blizzard. Can you name one?
@Sentry: Yeah, that’s why I think I’ll end up just passing on that idea of bosses being a 1 time kill.
@Keen: Yeah I’d mostly agree with that.
There’s been this– I dunno if I’d call it an attitude or just an assumption in the industry: That old content should be replaced / deprecated. I disagree with that, especially in a virtual world sense.
The developers get tired of the old stuff for sure and I think there’s this perception that all of the players do too. Speaking for myself tho: The bigger the world is, the greater it is. To add new content, I don’t want it paved over the old content.
That’s gonna require re-thinking of the usual move-the-endgame expansion designs. And for a PvP-centric game, balancing player population with territory / content could be tricky too. LOL you don’t want to um, pile all your players into minigames if you expect them competing in open world battles. 😉
I would really to see the Reputation like they have in EQ2. As an Avid “Legend of Drizzt” reader, I always wanted to be that lone “evil” guy that instead of choosing the path of his heritage, chose the path of good. It would give it a dynamic that even if you are “exalted” in said good faction, there would still be those that despise and fear you. Just my tidbit 😀
(sorry for double post)
I would really like to see how you organize your ideas Keen, I myself am too writing an MMORPG but become all jumbled because I am OCD (lol, not really but whatever). Nothing revealing of what your coming up with, just a gist of how you organize onto paper/computer/etc.
@Keen – I agree that the DAOC model would be an option to adress real warfare, DAOC showed it worked (WAR tried that too and failed which shows that some stupid decisions like implementing BG’s can ruin your entire game).
However, by limiting warfare to frontiers, we are still “balancing” the game to ensure that players wouldn’t be too frustrated. By letting one realm for instance take over, enslave, invade another realm, you add a lot more excitement, emotion, and suspense. People will care much more what happens in the world. This comes of course at the expense of frustration. The two options mentioned involve emotions that are extreme in the latter example and just medium in the former. If a loss can be devastating to one side, it means that a victory is extremely rewarding with a later recovery of the loser and payback being the holy grail of emotional involvement.
The balanced frontier only approach invokes less emotions – positive or negative emotions. Less is on the line, victories and losses may sting a little but in the end, life goes on.
Games have become less and less emotional – the balancing act reduces both good and bad emotions. Eventually, they become boring. I believe that this is what made UO attractive – you could really get screwed over (and I have seen people just furious in game) but you could also get some cool victories. The key is to implement a design that has emotional extremes, then harness the positive emotions and have people accept the bad emotions and deal with it. This is the tough part. Your game needs to offer something special or have the losers be too tied up in the world to quit. I think there are ways to accomplish that but overall, I think games of the future need a emotionally charged atmosphere and not th ebland everyone is a winner attitude.
KISS(Keep it simple stupid). It is your first attempt at design, you are trying to do too much already it is called scope creep, do not do it. Concentrate on one aspect.. conquest 🙂
1. 3 sided war autobalances. There is no need for incentive to cooperate. Game theory in action.
2. Round system. You might consider what would happen if each of the 3 sides could move between server based on wins/losses (best hibs matched vs best albs and mids)
3. Setting. I think one the beauties of DAOC was that each side people associated with before they even made a character. Vikings, Brits, dirty irish(haha). I think this is a big consideration, shamelessly rip the setting from Earth’s history. Something instantly recognizable and familiar. For example.. Crusaders vs Muslims vs Mongols.
Also except global dynamics think of some basic really new systems for combat. Horses and horse combat (have you played Mount and Blade?). It almost seems that after DAOC styles everything else has been a regression in terms of combat, AoC tried to go forward but fucked it bad. Realm collision detection with momentum and preservation of energy, combat should really be much mroe fun then it is now.
Real ship combat. Forget cannons. Galleys with rams and boarding action. Bunch of stuff to rip from Allods here. Small galley: slave master (oar speed, balance settings), sail master, stearing, manning catapults and balistae.. rest of epoeple could be marines basically.
I really agree with this also. I’m a person who jumps from MMO to MMO and at this point I’m not playing any much.. City of Heroes a little. Anyway, this post reminded me of Asheron’s Call. It’s not quite the same as what you were meaning, but there is constant updates to that game every month. Back when I played there was always things happening. New villains showed up, new dungeons, new items, new land masses.. I know one time all the water turned to blood.
If they had made AC2 an upgraded version of AC1 and not some piece of junk, I am sure I’d be playing that now.
If I were to design my own MMO it would be a mix of AC and UO. More of AC though. Heck if I had the money I’d just buy the rights to AC and pay people to upgrade the engine, make a true AC2 and live happily ever after. 🙂
Intresting.. and here I thought actually gamemastering MMOs was an unique idea of mine..
Now since it seems everyone seems to agree that it’s the way to go, I’d be really intrested in hearing why the devs aren’t doing it. I mean they do this for a living – they have to have thought of it.
It’s even more suprising since I don’t think you would really need that much of that. I mean some creative scripting to make NPCs actually do things would go a LOOONG way. And these wouldn’t even have to be that impressive. Just having the feeling that the NPCs may be stupid but still playing to win would be enough.
@Keen: Sure, I can name two. LotRO and WAR. Both games have produced more content patches (read: they’ve added something substantial to the game) than WoW has in a similar time frame. Look at the release schedule and what’s included in each patch. They produce significant content additions about every six months.
I’m not saying WoW’s aren’t good -when they’re content- but the fact is, most of them are very minor. PvP balancing, skill/talent tweaking, adding a flight path, or adjusting some other system in a small way. Big content additions are sparing.
Perhaps it’s a definition of what makes a substantial patch. In my opinion, balancing and mechanic tweaks are back-end additions and usually come in the X.X.whatever variety. Real content usually comes in the X.insert number here variety.
A list of WoW Patches
In 17 months, their content to fix/balance ratio is 1:4.3. Not too substantial.
@Toivoton
One thing many people never got to see was something that SOE put into SWG’s testcenter for about 2 days. They implemented a mechanic where a farmer on tatooine (NPC) would come out of his home every now and then to gather up his extracted goods from the extractors. You could go up to him and threaten his life and he would either give it over or fight for his life. This rang true as well as I remember the other instance that was added in a hotel in Naboo where there would be a female or male (depending where you went) “entertainer” (the naughty kind) that after a little dialog led you to a “secret” room and tried to ambush you.
Sadly, for whatever reason was behind it, SOE threw this idea in the trash and abandoned it. I just felt that kind of life (even though it was extremely small) in an NPC gave new life to SWG. Not only were the players around you doing life-like stuff, but the NPC’s were given a script that allowed them to feel more human. I just though to bring that up as I really wish to see something like that implemented as well as my dissapointment for SOE trashing the idea.
Hurt my hand so i can’t type much but look at EQ1 and the amount of zones… how often, even during it’s prime, did people visit the Karana’s. EQ simply had to much empty space in their zones.
Rather than having resources randomly appear and disappear, have them slowly deplete as they are mined/forested/etc.
This might also give rise to interesting developments: consider a mine, being driven ever deeper, until one day they uncover something quite terrible deep down below. Now they have a boss-mob to deal with.
I think I finally came up with another reason MMO’s are falling short recently. Intimacy. When was the last time you played an MMORPG and felt connected with your pet? Your home? Your Mount? Only time I ever felt that was when I played a Creature Handler (Self-Explanatory) and Bio-Engineer (created Creatures from DNA extract, almost like a creature crafter) and literally gave birth to my pets. I would go on to name them, teach them skills, and then live life with them. They literally were an extension of me in game and I felt sad when they died or I gave birth to rejects I would have to throw away.
All I know is I want that feeling again, to actually feel a part of me sucked into the MMORPG I play so that every time I log off it feels like I am falling asleep in a different world. (Figure of Speech, of course)
Interesting ideas once again. To have a faction system where the players have to choose which group/party to join forces with would be interesting. Lets say that a player wishes to be a tree hugging elf. We’ll he probably shouldn’t then do quests where he is killing animals of the forest and cutting down trees. An industrial mechanic on the other hand would cut down the forest to get timber for the mill etc. Then one could create a system where the player factions are not created in the beginning of the game (like Alliance/Horde etc.) but by choices of players ingame. For example by cutting down trees the engineer would become PvP flagged against the treehuggers and so forth. That way the engineer would want to hire some warriors to accompany him on his quest to get trees and the treehuggers would try to ambush the people who are destroying the forest. If you still add the feature where every tree which is cut down will make the forest a little bit smaller it would make things really interesting.
The other idea I was toying with was to let players have their flame wars ingame. The game developers would be a council ingame and they would give players a chance to vote about what will be the next main focus of development. Will it be PvP, PvE, some new hairmodels for the characters or what? Instead of flaming eachother on the forums the players would have to take an active role in the politics and game development. Naturally this would have to be balanced really, really carefully and it shouldn’t be based solely on PvP, because otherwise the PvP people would win every time 🙂