Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

popsicledeath

popsicledeath

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Dynamic NPC Encounter Groups? Exciting stuff! If WAR, GW2, FFARR, Rift and every game, and basically every MMO that has promised this including Luclin with zone battles could have delivered then they might have been worth it!
 
Arden

Arden

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Rogosh_sl said:
If Pantheon can deliver on this it might be worth while:

Dynamic NPC Encounter Groups
The world is not static and unchanging ? every day is not ?groundhog? day. Events occur that can completely change the population of a zone or the population of a group of NPCs within a zone (and the rarer the event, the rarer the rewards -- many exotic items can only be obtained when one of these zone events occur). An example: after you kill some key mobs guarding a hill giant camp, this triggers a zone event that loads up an invading force of Storm Giants who then proceed to attack the Hill Giant camp.
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Pathfinder online had the exact same plans. This is one of those obvious ideas that has been tossed around for years. It makes sense. It's a great idea. But it's not new and there's nothing groundbreaking in suggesting it. It may be the first time you've heard it, but lots and lots of people have had the same idea.

The groundbreaking part would be making it a functional part of a working mmo. Wait until that part happens before you get optimistic.
 
D

Debase

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Who cares if something is "groundbreaking"? If its good, clean and fun, I (and probably we'll) play it. I have no problem saying I threw $40 at this way back during the KS (then right after the KS), but I have 0 expectations for ever seeing the benefits of that investment. The probability is absolutely that this doesn't get released and if it does, it won't be good enough, but there certainly is some chance that it surprises. Independent of what I think about Brad, I certainly hope for my sake that the game is fun.... just not expecting it.
 
Convo

Convo

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It's all in execution for any game. These guys have the right approach.. Keep your head down and keep working. It'll be a few years but they will eventually pop up with something and then good or bad, they'll be judged.

It would be really bad for Brad and his company to release a game that isn't running at a quality level. It's the first thing people will look for. If it's not there, they won't stick around to see what the game is like when you dive deeper in b/c they'll assume nothing has changed.
 
pharmakos

pharmakos

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Rogosh_sl said:
If Pantheon can deliver on this it might be worth while:

Dynamic NPC Encounter Groups
The world is not static and unchanging ? every day is not ?groundhog? day. Events occur that can completely change the population of a zone or the population of a group of NPCs within a zone (and the rarer the event, the rarer the rewards -- many exotic items can only be obtained when one of these zone events occur). An example: after you kill some key mobs guarding a hill giant camp, this triggers a zone event that loads up an invading force of Storm Giants who then proceed to attack the Hill Giant camp.
Click to expand...
eh sounds nice but it won't be as "dynamic" as it sounds once min/maxers figure out how to game the mechanics in order to maximize the number of those "exotic" items that enter the world.
 
Utnayan

Utnayan

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Rogosh_sl said:
If Pantheon can deliver on this it might be worth while:

Dynamic NPC Encounter Groups
The world is not static and unchanging ? every day is not ?groundhog? day. Events occur that can completely change the population of a zone or the population of a group of NPCs within a zone (and the rarer the event, the rarer the rewards -- many exotic items can only be obtained when one of these zone events occur). An example: after you kill some key mobs guarding a hill giant camp, this triggers a zone event that loads up an invading force of Storm Giants who then proceed to attack the Hill Giant camp.
Click to expand...
You know what's Groundhog Day is seeing this same bullshit that isn't going to be implemented because they cannot even get animations passed 2 frame move signals during combat.
 
Rangoth

Rangoth

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Dynamic Events:

My beef is similar to those above. When I FIRST heard this years ago i thought "awesome". Like wow, all the places they could go with this. I pick up a rock, shit attacks me, walls cave in. next group needs to unclear rocks but maybe no remembers so treasure builds for years, blah blah. Then I thought about ok, shared but instanced combined. You are a group in a dungeon, so you walk in and see 20 other people, but as you adventure in less and less. Then a goblin runs out of the wall and you chase him down, which starts an event only you can see. So while others may be around they can't "ruin" your event. maybe they can pitch in if they are feeling generous, or watch you die and laugh, but not "steal" it. I mean the possibilities were endless.

In the end it resulted in what FFXIV and Rift and others do, some type of generic dynamic fate/rift whatever that happens, everyone joins in then parts. Which is fine, I suppose it is a baby step forward, but it's clearly lame. Combine that with me being old an generally not playing anything that takes more time than a solid poop(30 minutes at my age) on the ipad.....yea, don't care.
 
E

etchazz

Trakanon Raider
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Rangoth_sl said:
Dynamic Events:

My beef is similar to those above. When I FIRST heard this years ago i thought "awesome". Like wow, all the places they could go with this. I pick up a rock, shit attacks me, walls cave in. next group needs to unclear rocks but maybe no remembers so treasure builds for years, blah blah. Then I thought about ok, shared but instanced combined. You are a group in a dungeon, so you walk in and see 20 other people, but as you adventure in less and less. Then a goblin runs out of the wall and you chase him down, which starts an event only you can see. So while others may be around they can't "ruin" your event. maybe they can pitch in if they are feeling generous, or watch you die and laugh, but not "steal" it. I mean the possibilities were endless.

In the end it resulted in what FFXIV and Rift and others do, some type of generic dynamic fate/rift whatever that happens, everyone joins in then parts. Which is fine, I suppose it is a baby step forward, but it's clearly lame. Combine that with me being old an generally not playing anything that takes more time than a solid poop(30 minutes at my age) on the ipad.....yea, don't care.
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A game that can create truly dynamic content will be the future of MMO's. I highly doubt Pantheon will be that game, given their shoestring budget.
 
Lunis

Lunis

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There's no such thing as true dynamic content unless it's actually run bypeople. All the automated dynamic content fucking sucks - see Rift.
 
Convo

Convo

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There are ways to make dynamic content really good and more unpredictable in when they occur, we just don't have anyone really caring to make that happen.
 
Ukerric

Ukerric

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Luxer_sl said:
There's no such thing as true dynamic content unless it's actually run bypeople. All the automated dynamic content fucking sucks - see Rift.
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It depends. If you refer to "monthly content changes" ala Asheron's Call, then it requires people to make, but not to run. People liked that, just having snow extending from the mountains and winter beasts coming down the plains in winter was a breath of fresh air that is still remembered 16 years later. And that no one made again.

If you want responsive dynamic content (i.e. stuff that changes in response to player actions), then you get into two problems:

1) It requires static servers; the concept of fixed servers is probably a dying concept in the MMO space since it leads to dead and empty servers very quickly, and causes lots of problems if you really are a MMO when people find no one around them. A fairly large number of MMO are starting with "megaservers" immediately rather than getting to implement one later. However, if you want dynamic responsive content and your zone vanishes after 2 hours because it"s now empty, then it becomes silly.

2) If you want interesting dynamic content, as opposed to scripted content (which is what Rift implemented, and what you have in a few of the GW2's zones), then you need to run the risk of failure. That is, you have to run the risk that the players can screw up. And devs are deathly afraid of having people finding themselves in an "unconfortable" situation.

Example: there's this mid-level zone, let's call it Kitticar Grove, and a nest of Undeads got seeded by the devs. And for whatever reason, on a handful of servers, players neglected it, and when the server woke up, the entire zone is a massive death trap that nobody in the proper level range can survive. And if the devs intervene, it makes a mockery of the responsive dynamic content idea.

(this is the reverse of the problem that AC1 ran into when one server didn't "cooperate" with their content story and defended to the death the Crystal 24/24. Since they didn't had truly dynamic content, they needed to cheat which was a slightly frustrating experience for all those involved).
 
Rezz

Rezz

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There's a few ways around those issues (primarily, my ancient posts about procedural content creation) in that an area being overrun by powerful monsters needs to be enticing to higher level players to deal with. Rift tried that by having the rift-only crystals being used for the trinket slot. Problem was that you could easily max that out (when I played, no idea about now!) with a few high level rifts, so there was no incentive to deal with the lower level problem ones. In a really procedurally generated system, there would -always- be a reason to wipe out those problem areas for the high end folk. Either you have a reason for players to deal with ingame "problems" or you have a timer on how long they impact the playerbase. In order for the second response to work, you need to have other areas that are sort of similar in risk/reward for the level range of the impacted area. Many games simply do not have this; EQ was notorious for having "routed" paths to the endgame. If you weren't on one of those paths, you were floundering in the vast majority of circumstances.

I'm not sure pantheon is even sort of leaning this way, and I would be surprised if they were. It's a much more sandboxy problem than Pantheon is even jousting at.
 
Jimbolini

Jimbolini

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From email this morning:


So this Friday, the 11th of March, tune in to twitch.tv/visionaryrealms at 4pm Pacific Standard Time to catch some of the crew at VR in game. You're going to see some never-before seen areas. You're going to see some combat. You're going to see some of the game's exciting exclusive features. And you're going to see it all live during one of our regular internal play sessions.
 
Muligan

Muligan

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Bold step for them. They have faced a lot of scrutiny over screenshots and forum posts, now they're going to really put it all out there for the haters and fan boys alike. This could get really, really interesting.
 
Adebisi

Adebisi

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This Friday:
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