Neverwinter MMO

[Beriallord]

The traditional MMORPG teams are boring, they all play the exact same way and there is nothing new or challenging repeatedly playing a game according to that setup. Things get more interesting when you aren't locked into a specific team combination required to win. A game I used to play called City of Heroes, traditional team requirements were out the window in that game. Unless you were taking on a Arch Villain, which was pretty much = to a raid boss, you didn't really need a tank or healer. And you only needed a tank in AV fights because they could 1hko non-tanks. And there was a class called Controller, who could mitigate threat with holds, stuns, sleep, and then grab a heal or support role as secondary. That was the first MMO I played that did something completely out of the box.

[FavoredSoul]

Someone needs to make a tileset based game with the multiplayer and modding capabilities of Neverwinter Nights 1, not this typical F2P MMO crap that people are gonna get bored of in months.

Edited June 2, 2013 by FavoredSoul

[Vagrant0]

Someone needs to make a tileset based game with the multiplayer and modding capabilities of Neverwinter Nights 1, not this typical F2P MMO crap that people are gonna get bored of in months.

Find me a software house that is capable of handling a MMO project and who is willing to let me design them an MMO for a cut of profits.

[Zewp]

 

Well, actually the way that Skyrim, but really more Baulders Gate differs from almost every MMORPG setting, primarily, is that those quests you do have some meaningful impact on the world around you. You go into that dungeon to kill something, and it tends to stay dead with whatever premise that led you to go inside to have some sort of conclusion and progress; in an mmo, this doesn't exist. In an mmo, you go into the dungeon, kill the boss, loot, then can go right back in again to kill them again facing the same opponents you did last time, in the same spot, with the same exact traps. in an mmo, even if there is a quest related to that dungeon, the quest doesn't actually affect anything other than giving you experience, faction, and possibly some loot. The dungeon will still be there, the NPC will still be in the same spot, and some other player will be along to do the very same thing that you just did.

 

That's if we're talking about dungeons, which I wasn't. I'm talking about Neverwinter's normal quests, which is separate from the dungeon content like in most MMOs. Many of Neverwinter's quests have their own instances which you cannot go back to once the quest has been completed.

 

I also want to touch on the following, because I think it's a very interesting discussion;

 

Afterall, you cannot have an open world and quests which allow drastic changes to that world without ending up making some of those quests impossible to complete or start after a point. ME, DA and NWN singleplayer games didn't have this problem since areas are closed off, the story is mostly linear, and it is expected for you to not be able to do everything in a single playthrough.

 

I feel Fallout New Vegas (and to a lesser extent, Fallout 3) handled choice and consequence really well for openworld games. A lot of your choices had the possibility of locking you out of certain content, which is something I enjoy in an RPG not only because it encourages multiple playthroughs, but also because it grants weight, impact and meaning to the player's actions. This is one of the key things that put me off Skyrim. After a single playthrough, I've seen 95% of the content available, so I have no will to play through it again. I really wish more open world games would incorporate C&C properly. :(

 

 

The difference with a standard themepark MMO is that even if there's a somewhat linear storyline, you cannot actually have anything that affects the world in a meaningful way since the world has to be there for the next person in the same exact way as it was for you. Even one-time events have almost no impact on the world since any changes from that event would inherently require some adjustments to all the quests and areas that were affected by that event... Which is why Cataclysm had to be released as a whole new expansion where the end result of the event already happened, rather than a progressive change of the game world based on events and player involvement.

 

This isn't 100% accurate. It is technically possible to implement player choice and consequence in an MMO, but it would require heavy use of instancing which isn't ideal for an MMO. It would either be very limited to minimize the amount of instances players are placed in, or it would have 1000s of instances for a variety of different decisions, which wouldn't be very feasible either. I'm sure if an MMO developer really sat down and looked at the possibilities properly, they'd be able to find some way to make it work, but it's a lot more work than making a standard, traditional MMO. Tabula Rasa allowed players to take over outposts for their specific factions, but sadly that was pretty much the extent of their choice and consequence.

 

Choice and consequence on a large scale in an MMO might be very interesting, though. Imagine the entrance to mountain-ranges being blocked by a dragon, then when 100 players or so collaborate to kill the dragon, it leads to the goblins inhabiting the mountain ranges moving down into the valley and slaughtering everyone in it, meaning players have a harder time finding vendors in that area. Or after the playerbase has slaughtered a certain amount of centaurs, the centaurs decide to take up arms and assault the main city in the area, forcing players to either fight their way into the city or look for alternative ways to get in. These changes obviously wouldn't be permanent and would run on a kind of cycle, but it would be interesting to play an MMO in which the game world can change at a whim.

[lonewolfkai]

Doesn't that already happen in GW2? I thought you said you didn't like that game.

[hoofhearted4]

Ya sounds a lot like GW2 to me :P

[Zewp]

Doesn't that already happen in GW2? I thought you said you didn't like that game.

 

Unless I missed a major part of the game, no, it doesn't. GW2 has small dynamic events that don't impact anything outside of their immediate area. I'm essentially talking about a living ecosystem that reacts to the playerbase's actions. GW2 contains no large-scale choice or consequence and the dynamic event system relies entirely on timers, not player actions.

[Vagrant0]

 

Choice and consequence on a large scale in an MMO might be very interesting, though. Imagine the entrance to mountain-ranges being blocked by a dragon, then when 100 players or so collaborate to kill the dragon, it leads to the goblins inhabiting the mountain ranges moving down into the valley and slaughtering everyone in it, meaning players have a harder time finding vendors in that area. Or after the playerbase has slaughtered a certain amount of centaurs, the centaurs decide to take up arms and assault the main city in the area, forcing players to either fight their way into the city or look for alternative ways to get in. These changes obviously wouldn't be permanent and would run on a kind of cycle, but it would be interesting to play an MMO in which the game world can change at a whim.

 

It sounds great and all, but isn't really practical with current development methods. Not only would you need a development team to design, script, and implement such an event, that development team would also need to create the areas behind those mountains and setup whatever other barrier was present to block further efforts. You would also need to have a staff of GMs around to manage the various events just to ensure that the various scripts worked properly and there wasn't any significant amount of exploits to make that fight easy... All for an event that could only be done once for the life of that server. To put it simply, you would need a development team which could roll out new content faster than the rate that players would finish that content. Even if you pre-loaded events at launch to give you a few months time, you would still need to have debugged all those events, manage all the usual launch problems, and be constantly rolling out new content in hope that you have enough made before there are people who are able to resolve those "roadblocks". The current MMO setup just isn't made for that sort of thing, so it would be insanely costly or risky to attempt it. And unfortunately, if you start a game like this, you would have to keep it up through the life of that game in order to keep people playing since THAT is what they'd expect to happen, constantly. You also can't just increase the difficulty to insane levels or make bosses immortal until you're ready with new content since that would just make players get bored and leave the game.

 

That's not to say that it can't be done, it would just need someone who can plan things out properly and who knows enough to re-write the rules. But, why do that when another WoW-like game makes just as much money without as much cost or risk?

[lonewolfkai]

 

Doesn't that already happen in GW2? I thought you said you didn't like that game.

 

Unless I missed a major part of the game, no, it doesn't. GW2 has small dynamic events that don't impact anything outside of their immediate area. I'm essentially talking about a living ecosystem that reacts to the playerbase's actions. GW2 contains no large-scale choice or consequence and the dynamic event system relies entirely on timers, not player actions.

 

You must've missed several parts of the game then. There are several sections in places where what you stated exactly happens, and it happens to be with Centaurs to boot!

[Zewp]

@Vagrant0, yeah, sadly the pursuit of profit has become a lot more important than the pursuit of making great games. Take SWtOR, they spent upwards of $200 million on development, yet it's nothing more than an elaborate WoW clone. :(

 

 

You must've missed several parts of the game then. There are several sections in places where what you stated exactly happens, and it happens to be with Centaurs to boot!

 

 

 

 

And you must've misunderstood several parts of my post then. The dynamic events you're talking about are all based on timers. They happen regardless of what the players do and they do not affect anything outside of their tiny, immediate area. Not to mention the fact that you do not even need to fight the centaurs in GW2 when they start besieging the city, because you can just slip by them.

 

The system I was talking about hinges entirely on player actions. The centaurs don't attack the city because a timer reaches 0, they attack because of the playerbases' actions. An example of the world-wide repercussions of this would be the city being unable to trade placed on its auction-house with players in other cities, or the price of health potions hiking up globally because of opportunistic vendors taking advantage of the war.

 

My discussion was purely theoretical anyway. No MMO has incorporated a system like I'm talking about, and no MMO likely will, because it would result in a lot of maintenance and it would constantly have to be updated with new content in order to keep it fresh. GW2 makes use of dynamic events, not a living ecosystem like what I'm talking about.