Wargame vs "Living world"

[Alio]

And now I see where you were going with the "living world". Really sounds badass. It would take some major coders to get it to roll, but basically, you're never having server resets and what not, ruining the overall story.

It would be very cool just to see how it plays out, making that the best part of the game. I love it.

[Slamz]

The thing I don't get is that the "living world" concept doesn't even seem that hard, from a programming standpoint. It's no more complicated than what Warhammer is already doing with their Public Quest system.

e.g., imagine a Public Quest where orc NPCs form up and raid a dwarf village. (Kill enemy lieutenants, 0/5. Kill enemy chief, 0/1.) If they win, they take over the village and this automatically generates another PQ to take over the next closest dwarf village. Throw in a little decision making for which enemy village the PQ is generated against and that's basically it.


I honestly think the only reason nobody has done it is because it's perceived as a divergence from the norm, and thus, "risky". They would rather just take WOW and make minor changes to it, just as WOW basically took other MMORPGs and made minor changes to them.


Although you would need a big map, I think, for it to work the way we envision. WAR and WOW are simply too small. You'd want something the size of EVE or WW2O.

[Vllad]

Not only would you need a big world but you would need to eliminate fast travel short cuts.

In order to make resourses worth fighting over and make the world seem larger for out of the way things to develope things like Flying beast and helicopters that make travel easy need to be eliminated.

You can't have ways for people to instantly zone anywhere they want with in an instant. If you are going to go some where the pain of travel will have to exist.

As unappealing as that is, it is the best way to make the world big enough for constant growth.

With Faction based PVP the fights are going to be where the resourses are and where the faction fights are. You might be able to get away with a bigger world that usually dappens PVP because the fights will center where the action is.

In this case the action just evlolves and changes places.


Vllad

[1000xZero]

I agree to a point on the fast travel idea.

I think slow travel is more important but I do think there should be a transportation hub area that connects some regions. Think Oasis Docks for access to maybe 5 other points but that overland travel is necessary.

Do not make travel unnecessarily focused into certain routes either like many games.

[Hoofhurr]

Damn no transporters...

[Alio]

Anywhere your guild controls can be a spawn point. Simple. If we control wood forest 87 on the furthest west of the map, we can spawn there....

If we control silver mine 14 on the far east, we can spawn there.

Getting there in the first place should be the basis of the whole game. How much territory and resources can our guild defend?

Talk about some great guild vs guild warfare.

[Diggles]

Anywhere your guild controls can be a spawn point. Simple. If we control wood forest 87 on the furthest west of the map, we can spawn there....

If we control silver mine 14 on the far east, we can spawn there.

Getting there in the first place should be the basis of the whole game. How much territory and resources can our guild defend?

Talk about some great guild vs guild warfare.

Why would you be able to spawn in some wilderness your guild has 'claimed' instead of say, a temple or barracks building?

If that silver mine or forrest was important enough to your operations, then you might want to build a barracks there.

Only allow temples in large towns, and the size of the barracks determines the rate at which the faction can respawn there.

Ie...if one of your mines was under attack, and the defenders were losing ground, your small barracks will only let 1 person spawn every 30 seconds...so you are waiting in que to spawn up and the enemies are overwhelming you

[Slamz]

I think I would prefer Planetside style respawn delays over a queue. So if you respond with 50 people, all 50 can respawn at the little barracks, but maybe a "Rank 1 Barracks" comes with a 30 second respawn delay whereas an attacking party using a "Rank 10 wizard" (mobile respawn point) has 0 spawn delay.

[Veraphim]

I think I would prefer Planetside style respawn delays over a queue. So if you respond with 50 people, all 50 can respawn at the little barracks, but maybe a "Rank 1 Barracks" comes with a 30 second respawn delay whereas an attacking party using a "Rank 10 wizard" (mobile respawn point) has 0 spawn delay.

I think a balance between this and Diggles idea would be needed.

If some group wants to attack a remote mining settlement on the outskirts of an empire, they shouldn't have to face 200 people that just instantly teleport in. It would be too easy for 200 people to just hang out in their Capital City and keep warping around instantly to every remote mining settlement in their empire and defend every single border at the same time. If they have the numbers, then they won't have to deal with the 30 second respawn delay that often. A smaller faction wouldn't even be able to make hit-and-run attacks at a mega-faction that has spread themselves too thin, if they can keep warping their entire force to wherever the fight is to defend it.

Diggles' trickle idea would allow you to reinforce outposts that were under attack, but would still require you to allocate forces to defend the borders ahead of time to deal with raiding parties that show up.

[Slamz]

Yeah, maybe respawn is a simple delay based on the rank of the spawn location but teleporation requires a queue.

Like maybe you need to build a Wizard Tower anywhere you want to teleport to and then you can teleport between towers, but the "recharge rate" depends on the lowest rank of the two towers. A rank 1 tower can teleport one person every 30 seconds. A rank 5 tower can teleport 5 people every 30 seconds. A rank 10 tower can teleport 10 people every 10 seconds.

Something like that.


So 10 people in 10 villages trying to teleport to a mining outpost with a rank 1 wizard tower would require 5 minutes to all get there. Whoever queues up first goes instantly. The next person is waiting for the receiving tower to do its 30 second recharge.


Plus, wizard towers are probably resource hogs (and also, you need a spare wizard NPC to man it) so it may not be practical to just plop one down everywhere you want.

[Veraphim]

Yeah, that would work I think.

I think we need to preserve a way for an attacking force to "Lay Siege" to the outpost. If the people teleporting in can keep bringing in supplies then I don't see how that could happen.

Someone brought up an idea earlier about the teleportation only working on biological material, so you end up on the other side naked. You would need to grab some armor/weapons from the stockpiles that are there. In a siege situation, the attackers might have cut off the ability of your NPCs to cut down trees and mine ores. If you show up late, you might be swinging cod in the name of your empire.

[Kakarat]

Since this is a living world. Do the mines get deeper?, Do the mines get depleted of resources? If they are depleted, what sort of 'base' does the mine become? or is it abandoned all together and opposing forces can move in to plan future attacks?

[Diggles]

Since this is a living world. Do the mines get deeper?, Do the mines get depleted of resources? If they are depleted, what sort of 'base' does the mine become? or is it abandoned all together and opposing forces can move in to plan future attacks?

I would envision it like a RTS game. They spawn with a predetermined amount of material, which would take somewhere between 1-3 weeks to deplete? Depending on the skill of your miners and/or equipment, you may to pull out extra. (ie...if you go slower and use more precise practices you end up with more overall material, whereas quick and dirty some of it goes to waste).

I would imagine letting players create underground tunnels would be too hard to code in a game. So they are randomly generated based on the type and amount of material is present. When done you could claim them for use as structures? But they require maintenance and upkeep or they collapse and disappear.

[Slamz]

Since this is a living world. Do the mines get deeper?, Do the mines get depleted of resources? If they are depleted, what sort of 'base' does the mine become? or is it abandoned all together and opposing forces can move in to plan future attacks?

I would vote "no", that the mines are basically just a fixed location, perhaps a fairly shallow cave, and NPCs just go in there and bang sticks on the ground for a few minutes and then come out with some ore, UO style.

I don't particularly want depleting resources because:
1) "Realistically" it would take an awfully long time for 10 orcs to mine all of the iron out of an iron mine.
2) I want resource locations to be fixed and infinite so that they become focal points for conflict. By contrast, in SWG you might say, "Oh well, we missed out on the rich resources but let's just wait a week and the resource pile will move." I want people to fight over it.


If NPCs could be allowed to modify the game world fairly easily (Dwarf Fortress / Evil Genius / Dungeon Keeper style) then I'd be all for it but that's a level of detail that probably represents lots of development effort for relatively little gain.


On the other hand, we might NEED that level of detail or all of our dwarves are going to be surface dwellers.

Might be doable... if you did it like those other games and NPCs would basically "dig" causing a big cube of rock to vanish after a few hits, that might work.

But then we need another component of AI to revolve around NPCs making clever use of digging...


Maybe that'll be in Version 2. :P

[Veraphim]

Since this is a living world. Do the mines get deeper?, Do the mines get depleted of resources? If they are depleted, what sort of 'base' does the mine become? or is it abandoned all together and opposing forces can move in to plan future attacks?

EDIT: Slamz beat me to it.

I could envision doing something like this:

Option 1:
Randomly, your NPC "prospectors" would randomly locate a mine, which "spawns" at that time. The mine has a certain number of resources that can be extracted. How fast that happens depends on how many miners your faction can allocate to mining it, as well as how often they get interrupted by attacks - lending to reasons to patrol it.
Once the mine runs out of materials, there is a "Cave-in" event, which closes the mine. Other random events may be that you uncover a balrog, after which defeating it nets a small amount of rare resource (Mythril/Adamantite/whatever), followed by the Cave-in" event.

Option 2:
The mines are always in the world, as underground caverns which can be hunted/patrolled in a PvE sense(Your NPC guards will also need to escort the miners). The income from the mines is unlimited, but trickles in slowly. Since the mine never moves, enemy factions always know where they need to make raids to secure a certain type of resource they need to get their hands on.



In either case, the type of resources in the mines should probably be tied to the local area instead of purely random, so as to promote conflict between different territories ("We need to attack The Red Clan's mines, because they control the only territory with Copper!"). If resources randomly move around, then different clans wouldn't be motivated to attack each other. "Hmm, we need copper, but instead of attacking The Red Clan, lets just wait until the resources shift next week".

[Kakarat]

hehe, just call me FAQ.

[Jakensama]

I would imagine letting players create underground tunnels would be too hard to code in a game. .

Harder than coding this hyper reactive world we've imagined?

[Hoofhurr]

I'm pretty sure we aren't exactly worried about the details at this point. Sky's the pie at this point.

[Slamz]

Harder than coding this hyper reactive world we've imagined?

Maybe. I've always assumed there was some reason so few games out there allow for world manipulation. Star Wars would flatten land for buildings it's very rare to see any game that allows players to modify the 3-D terrain of the world.

I have no idea why. I assume there are a number of difficulties to work out with the client graphics engine. I would think you could simplify it, Dungeon Keeper style, though. Maybe most games don't do it just because they have no reason to implement it (and probably several reasons not to -- don't want you bypassing their linear content by digging through walls...)


I think the hardest thing with our pie-in-the-sky game is going to be the 50,000 computers we'll need to run a game world as busy and big as the one we want...


Still, it would be lovely just to see it happen on a small scale. Someone could probably make a non-massive (yet still persistent) game like this that could be run on a desktop (or two), with a world the size of Karana and a dozen factions or so.

[OrsunVZ]

The trend in these games has been to get rid of zoning. However, I could live with zones if it meant that more resources could be applied to the dynamism of each zone. The loading would enable your client to see what has changed there since your last visit.

[Hoofhurr]

I'm not opposed to zones either really. I hate fucking portals though. Make it an invisible wall like in EQ =D

[Slamz]

Just speculation here but I think the only real reason to do zoning at all is for the graphics.

If you want to have really unique looking areas with unique textures and graphics then you have to do zoning basically to clear out the old graphics and load in the new.

If you can be satisfied with simpler graphics and more common textures then you don't need zoning -- like much of WOW.

[OrsunVZ]

I'd rather feel immersed while in a zone. while heading there, a fairly brief zone time doesn't hinder that for me (even though the effort to remove them is almost soley for immersion).

[Diggles]

I'd rather feel immersed while in a zone. while heading there, a fairly brief zone time doesn't hinder that for me (even though the effort to remove them is almost soley for immersion).

yes and then you have people who abuse zoning mechanics, ala Blizzy, inventor of the BlizzyModem™.

WoW does a good job by limiting the textures to continents. I see no reason why you couldnt do the same.

[OrsunVZ]

bah zone camping was 1/2 the fun.