Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

All great ideas. But in order for that to be worth while, you have to build content at an incredible rate.

If you constantly have these server firsts and those events are unique people will complain about not being able to see them. They will only complain if they are few and far inbetween. But if you can get it where they missed the last one and they can say, "Damn I missed that one, can"t wait for the one next week!" then you can do it.

It"s all about rate of content creation. Bad thing is, most of the time, the faster the rate of content creation the lower in quality it is.

Aphextwin said:

When WoW was released I would often group with my two teenagers, however, they would accept a handful of quests at a quest hub and be off and running before I had even finished reading the first one. I was in a constant state of rush.

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This is EXACTLY what I"m talking about with the quest delivery mechanics and exactly why a large percentage of players in a multi player game skip quest text.

Here you have a best selling author penning your game lore and story, coming up with interesting and complex quest stories, but they are being skipped because the quest delivery method is lacking.

Atmosphere, story, events, believable NPCs (do they not need to eat? sleep? have they no goals of their own outside of obtaining 8 more bear hides from random adventurer #234235?)

These are the things that can set your MMO apart from the pack IMO. Don"t let R.A."s work go to waste.

On this topic please take a look at what FFXI did!

They had "cut-scenes" in game!! To everyone else it looked like your character was just standing there with his thumb up his ass, however on your screen you were going through a small cut scene that contained information, lore, and entertainment.

Perhaps others could testify whether they are willing to edure such a thing? I personally loved it. It got me much more involved with what was going on.

Just to toss in another idea, what about dungeons with scalable content, random mob placement, and various quests available within due to levels/previous accomplishments/flagging supported by a well-written storyline.

I personally liked the concept behind the Splitpaw Saga adventure pack (not so much the implementation on some levels) and what I"ve heard of the LDoN.

UnchainedAcolyte said:

Just to toss in another idea, what about dungeons with scalable content, random mob placement, and various quests available within due to levels/previous accomplishments/flagging supported by a well-written storyline.

I personally liked the concept behind the Splitpaw Saga adventure pack (not so much the implementation on some levels) and what I"ve heard of the LDoN.

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I thought the Splitpaw Saga was excellent and had EQ2 put this much effort into every single part of their game I"d probably still be playing. (well outside of the combat and insane amount of instancing)

I think it largely depends on the size of the questlines involved, the leveling rate and a slew of other factors. I agree that content creation speed is the issue, but I can"t really think of a game that"s stayed ahead of that curve without artificial cockblockery.

The game could offer toned down repeat events for people to deal with if they want to see what happened when a zone first got opened as one type of event. For example:

You"re level 5, it"s taken you 4 hours to get here, and you"ve completed a few quests, one of which seems to lead you to eventually killing the orc boss. You follow up on the quest line as much as possible, doing the exact opposite of kill/fed ex quests at this point. Each quest is to kill a single named mob in a different area of the orc lands outside the orc fortress. You gain the majority of your xp from having to kill towards these orcs, maybe with an xp bonus since you are on the quest (another idea, will expand after example.) Each one you kill completes your quest and gives you part of a progressive item that eventually unlocks the door to the fortress. These are all solo quests, the camp is spread out and the orc minibosses only drop loot if you are on the quest to kill them and haven"t killed them yet. You complete the key, upon hand in a couple orcs bum rush the Bob Orc-Slaying-Questgiver, you defend him, he tells you to go slay their leader. You head to the fortress, killing a couple orcs on the way there (again, solo designed area so shit"s spread out) and when you reach the gate you find the Gatemaster Orc who summons wargs to attack you. They"re a pretty beefy challenge, but still doable if you are the right level with the upgrades from the orc minibosses. He gets off his mount and attacks you, same difficulty as the orc minibosses that you are now outclassing. All done solo. Now Orc"Gar the dungeon is open. If a player comes after you, he has to do all the normal sub quests, but the orcs no longer drop the key parts. When they get to the gatemaster portion, instead it"s a slightly toned down encounter with a warg keeper guy and his warg pups. You have the same gear from killing the minibosses, but the fight itself has slightly less hp, does slightly less damage.

I think the actual content speed issues and people missing things will only happen at the low end really, as the speed at which people progress is faster in the early levels, and by keeping a somewhat expanding leveling range you will have more people at the appropriate steps as you leave the low-mid level range to see the grand opening events.

Now, back to the other idea I mentioned about bonus xp while on a quest, I think it"s a potentially viable alternative to generic "kill 10x" quests. When you get the quest to slay the orc chieftan, every kill you make inside the orc dungeon gives you a small amount of bonus xp up to a certain point. Or bonus skillgain, or bonus whatever. Leveling isn"t going anyway anytime soon though =/ Anyway, these quests could simply work off monster/zone type. If you are sent to kill the orc chieftan, for every orc inside his stronghold you get a 5-15% bonus xp. This could be visible in the UI or not, but it does run out after a period of time/number of kills/amount of xp earned. Whichever. Granted, this would alleviate the quest log issues as you wouldn"t have those kill quests in there. You could also simply make it so that you can"t drop quests, but you get an infinite number of slots for quests.

Personally, I like the concept of some named npcs in a dungeon only dropping loot if you are on some quest to slay them. This would alleviate the concept of farming to a degree. Just make these npcs always drop certain items. Which gets into my next idea that "rares" should always drop one item, like they do now. But instead of a more rare item possibly taking place of the lower rarity item when you kill it, he drops it in addition to. Take the ghoul lord in Lguk. He drops the SSB the majority of the time, how does it take away from his ability to wield the SSOY? He "always" drops the barbute in my system, with the chance to drop both barbute and sword. Or if he had another rare on his table, he could drop up to 3 items at once. This goes with the "moar loot!" idea.

Brainstorm, so to speak.

edit - was a reply to Draegen for the most part

There is no reason you can"t have all varieties of quests. The small tasks that the npc"s in the area you are in need completed, the exploration type, the kill quests, the collections, the fedex, the find so and so, and huge chains and epic quests.

They can all be there and actually all need to be there for different play styles. Some folks really only do the smaller one shot stuff and don"t want the bigger stuff, some want only the bigger stuff. Some people will do it all. I love the mechanic of a "found" quest. Its not a quest giver, I didn"t get it in town, I found an item, a bottle, an area, a wanted poster, it arrived in the mail, or any other mechanic that caused me to pause and examine what I had found. It added life.

Honestly that is what most of the little quests are to me, added life in the game. They add depth and substance to a pretty 3d world and give a bit of meaning to things. I would love to have a guy in the bar slide up to me and say if I buy him a drink he would tell me a tale and get a quest, or before the final blow lands on a creature he begs me to spare his life in exchange for a "secret" that he has.

Sure, a lot of folks dislike a certain flavor of quests but if you look over the whole of the responses its more about making the quests look and feel natural. Make it fit, make it seamless, make it worth while and interesting if possible. Will it be worth while and interesting to everyone? Nope, some people could care less unless it gives them something. But others will care.

Make the game know what I am doing, if I have been slaying monsters to return a certain relic to the priest in town then maybe the commander of the city guard hails me on my way back into town and proceeds to thanks me, etc, etc. I know if someone is working their butt off doing something that benefits me I am going to say something about it. Why should I have to walk up to that guy and have him tell me to head right back out to where I was and re-kill the things I was already killing?? Shouldn"t he know I was wading knee deep in their blood already? Thats a disconnect that can be bridged with thoughtful character flagging and scripting.

To me it comes down to moving and playing my character naturally in the world. I don"t want to mindlessly kill simply because mobs are there and they make my pretty exp bar fill but I also don"t want to mindless quest just to get a shiny and some exp. I want to thoughtfully move through a world that allows me to craft my character into something that I enjoy. Add a reason to the journey other than simply the final carrot of max level.

Add more meaningful quests that advance my character in ways that perhaps others choose not to do. Allow me to differentiate my character by what I choose to do. Hell, just allow me to differentiate my character period. I am sick to death with item based games where if you stripped any 2 same level characters of the same class of all their gear they would be essentially the same. They would, or could with ease, have all of the same skills and abilities.

It can be simple things like questing for a new emote of some kind, or a new weapon move, even if they really didn"t effect game play a whole lot would create a sense of unique satisfaction for the players. Or you could have class quests where you are required to group and hunt for a period of time to attain group based skills. Make it akin to the leadership exp that EQ1 popped in so that folks that are really interesting in doing the group stuff gain different skills than the soloist. A player that is always soloing shouldn"t have the same skill set as one who has always grouped.

The truly revolutionary game will have the fun, polish, and accessability of WOW with the ability to create unique, or at least semi-unique, snowflakes.

UnchainedAcolyte said:

Just to toss in another idea, what about dungeons with scalable content, random mob placement, and various quests available within due to levels/previous accomplishments/flagging supported by a well-written storyline.

I personally liked the concept behind the Splitpaw Saga adventure pack (not so much the implementation on some levels) and what I"ve heard of the LDoN.

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LDoN was good for what it was and the time it came out. Had good gear for "casuals" and like a token system you could earn your way to the gear, it wasn"t hit or miss like a boss loot drop. It also came a time when people were starving for good xp groups that eliminated competition etc. It played its role perfectly at that time in the game in my opinion.

However it was not truely random. There were 3-4 variations of each dungeon and you got one of those at random, along with a random task(either kill, rescue, escort, or collect). It did scale to either the highest level player in the group or the average level, I forget so it was kinda nice in that regard. It also had a "heroic" level of difficulty though they just called it "Hard".

Back on topic though, I do like the idea of random placement and "AI" in games. It"s been said before but it would be so nice if the game changed, even a little, based on player actions. Like killing all the gnolls in a nearby cave allowed the outpost miners to go in there and mine, thus selling some new stuff or whatever in town. But with enough inactivity the mine is taken back by gnolls. EQ tried this in a zone called Hallowshade Moore(or something close) and it was pretty cool. Sadly low level and constantly buggy so it never got praise, but I"m down with the idea.

It would also be nice if dungeons ditched the idea of static mob spawns and all that crap. If I am breaking into the King"s castle people should be about their business....kinda like that inn inside BRD in WoW. It would at least add some variety and limit the "standard strategy" thing a bit, which is really needed at this point.

And even though it was mentioned a few pages ago, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not include durability or item degredation(sp?). All that is does is drain money(which there are better ways) and artificially limit the number of attempts or deaths or time you can spend on in a place or on an encounter before you have to quit. Why should anything other than my own motivations and perseverance control how many times I lung into fire?

As a money sink....look back to Gemstone III which had a boat show up in town from time to time with TONS of stuff. Games, items, riddles etc...much like the darkmoon faire only....cool and worthwhile. Awesome idea, expand on it and make it a real part of the game, perhaps random. Sell stuff that doesnt affect the combat mechanics. Different looking mounts, clothing, gifts. People buy that stuff...as would I.

Daezuel said:

I thought the Splitpaw Saga was excellent and had EQ2 put this much effort into every single part of their game I"d probably still be playing. (well outside of the combat and insane amount of instancing)

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I agree. I think for myself the most frustrating part was being kidnapped while soloing/harvesting and dying down there quite a bit trying to get out.

Going in there with a group was a lot of fun, though.

WAR has a great retro-credit for kill quests. If you"re sent off to gather X or Kill Bad Guy Bob and come back when you"re done and you find a quest giver that ask you to kill ten Little Guy Bobs which you just spent 1 hour clearing to get to Bad Guy Bob you automatically finish the quest and don"t have to go back.

I think that"s pretty nifty and enjoy that aspect a lot. And no, this is not breaking the NDA since it was described by Paul in one of the Podcasts.

What is this thread about now?

Quest design, deployment, type, and theme.

Quineloe said:

What is this thread about now?

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Hey I figured some random joe dev started a thread asking what we wanted to see in an MMO but right here we have a known quantity in a guy that actually has told us who he is, has a company, and is actively creating a product...might as well put down our thoughts somewhere they might be useful

Any quest that requires some convoluted entry is garbage past the first discovery, as all that will happen is people find out about it on the web and do the do-re-mi to get the quest, probably then looking up the next convoluted quest. There are realities associated with how WoW presents its quest content, and those realities have a great track record to look back on.

Commenting of some posts above.

I have seen cut-scenes used in Guild Wars. I don"t think I would want to see them all the time but rather for certain types of quests, group, epic that sort of thing.

Retro-kill idea is interesting, I can"t tell you how many times I have killed mobs while looking for items or something else to later stumble upon an NPC that has a quest for those same mobs.

I admit, I do like unexpected quests that drop off mobs.

While we are on the subject of quests, I like the EQII quest log and the functionality it brings compared to some others I have used.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

Any quest that requires some convoluted entry is garbage past the first discovery, as all that will happen is people find out about it on the web and do the do-re-mi to get the quest, probably then looking up the next convoluted quest. There are realities associated with how WoW presents its quest content, and those realities have a great track record to look back on.

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Hey this is where a believable system of NPCs having real lives in the game world comes in...just because an NPC wants you to kill another NPC does that mean this NPC will be at the same location 24/7? Does he/it not go home? Is he eating and distracted or is he just sitting in the same spot to be thotbotted and defeated in 5 minutes?

The realities associated with how WoW presents it quest content are the realities of today, not the future. I say it can be done better, and you better damn well do it better if you expect to compete with the big boys.

I think Oblivion did Mob AI scripting like that. However I have no idea what kind of constraints or load that would put on a server.

Draegan said:

I think Oblivion did Mob AI scripting like that. However I have no idea what kind of constraints or load that would put on a server.

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Have a separate server in each cluster solely for mob AI. Heck computers have come so far in the past 5 years...quad core those suckers out and go to town.