test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Living in a Non-Static MMO
Archived Post
Member Posts: 5,050,278 Bounty Hunter
I've played a lot of MMO's over the years and one thing that always drove me crazy as I was Killin Kenny the orc is that his buddies 10 feet away didn't jump into the fight because I didn’t cross that magical line. Then I go over to his buddy Billy the ogre and get stepped on but what does Billy get for killing me? Yep that's right Nada. See while MMO's might have a roaming monster here, or there the majority wait for you to come to them even if they are in a clear line of sight. When I grind I want the world to feel more alive so here's my thinking.
Say you’re in a forest and in this forest lives Orcs, pixies, treants and stuff. Now lets say these monsters get to wander. While they may spawn in a camp they eventually wander once that camp starts to get a bit full. They may be tagged to wander in groups or solitary as they hit a certain boundary on the map they turn around and wander elsewhere.For this thought of mine we start off all monsters between levels 1 and 2. Ok so now that we have wandering monsters say they come across other monsters as they have in other MMo's and proceed to beat the snot out of each other without pc intervention. The winning monster (I'll use Billy the Orc) gets some experience with a percentage of the loot the defeated monster was carrying. If Billy the Orc kills a PC he may get a copy of a crafted named item the PC was carrying as long as it fits within his level. He may be able to carry multiple magic items depending on his script, but generally as a new item comes in the other item disappears. So say Billy managed to survive a few levels and now when he roams he has gained a following of two lesser orcs to help. Billy the NPC has become more powerful. Some PC's might start hunting for him as they noticed a toon has changed a bit to a more powerful toon. This will hopefully be harder for the higher level monsters having open an world available to them. Eventually Billy the Orc has maxed to his scripted level and his area can only have one king so he goes back to camp. Now that basic camp model turns into a lightly fortifed area with Billy being the orc chieftain of the area. From here Billy has now become named on a bulletin board and becomes a quest all unto itself.
This is just my open world idea for an MMO and needs to of course be fleshed out, but honestly static MMO's have lost their appeal. The more alive the world feels the better it is. As a side note put more people in cities and have them walking around. you can have them disappear as the server feels up, but I hate walking into what feels like ghost towns and when they are there they tend to just stand waving their arms to nothing.
Say you’re in a forest and in this forest lives Orcs, pixies, treants and stuff. Now lets say these monsters get to wander. While they may spawn in a camp they eventually wander once that camp starts to get a bit full. They may be tagged to wander in groups or solitary as they hit a certain boundary on the map they turn around and wander elsewhere.For this thought of mine we start off all monsters between levels 1 and 2. Ok so now that we have wandering monsters say they come across other monsters as they have in other MMo's and proceed to beat the snot out of each other without pc intervention. The winning monster (I'll use Billy the Orc) gets some experience with a percentage of the loot the defeated monster was carrying. If Billy the Orc kills a PC he may get a copy of a crafted named item the PC was carrying as long as it fits within his level. He may be able to carry multiple magic items depending on his script, but generally as a new item comes in the other item disappears. So say Billy managed to survive a few levels and now when he roams he has gained a following of two lesser orcs to help. Billy the NPC has become more powerful. Some PC's might start hunting for him as they noticed a toon has changed a bit to a more powerful toon. This will hopefully be harder for the higher level monsters having open an world available to them. Eventually Billy the Orc has maxed to his scripted level and his area can only have one king so he goes back to camp. Now that basic camp model turns into a lightly fortifed area with Billy being the orc chieftain of the area. From here Billy has now become named on a bulletin board and becomes a quest all unto itself.
This is just my open world idea for an MMO and needs to of course be fleshed out, but honestly static MMO's have lost their appeal. The more alive the world feels the better it is. As a side note put more people in cities and have them walking around. you can have them disappear as the server feels up, but I hate walking into what feels like ghost towns and when they are there they tend to just stand waving their arms to nothing.
Post edited by Archived Post on
0
Comments
Let's say you run through a forest swarming with monsters, and they react based on line of sight like you suggest. They seem to not have seen you, so you're like, "that ws close."
Then the evil Lord Lag lets go of you and you rubberband back to wher he grabbed you... Right in the middle of the monsters, who killed you.
And it gets better because it turns out that the lag came from the server doing Line-of-sight detection for all those mobs that could see you, and all the mobs that could see joe who was out of your line of sight, and all the mobs that could see tom who was out of your and joe's line of sight, as well as the mobs of one faction who could see mobs of another faction who saw bob trying to sneak up on a mob that hadn't seen him.
See what I mean?
If you do that it limits you to maybe 6 monster types you can run into in the forest! Wouldn't it be awesome if they had true random encounters and you didn't know what you were going to run into!
Not only would it tailor the encounters to you or your group but it would give a sense of danger and that the world was alive!
The only time you should know what kind of monster you are going to fight is if you are near a lair! Maybe near an orc fort or ruins they occupy or something then it makes sense to see them beforehand.
I hope they have a wide variety of monsters at launch and implement this type of system but i doubt it.
Computing power, and network packet size...cause after it makes all those calculations....it then has to send them out along with X,Y coords for all involved and attack results. You only have so many bits you can transmit.
in nwn well higher ground and poa when you respawned the mobs did loot your corpse 25% of your gp and 25% chance 1 equiped item was also taken
In a single player game this would be amazing and innovative. But as an MMO feature you are creating mini-instances in a sense. And removing players from the open world is one of the worst things you can do plus we already have enough MMO's that try to segregate players. Developers should be trying to get more and more players out in the open world and not removing them.
as I pointed out above.....
When you decrease the amount of people in a zone it lessens the data having to be sent so easier to manage. It's the main reason you see so many devs going to easy route of instancing. SWTOR took it to an over the top extreme. To the point you almost never see anybody in the open world.
As to comments on lag and so forth about LOS. I am only referring to a those within a certain range of a character.. If a lvl 1 direwolf sees you from 40 feet away it will run away or attack it should not wait for you to walk up and start beating away at it. I know monsters tend to move around a bit as we level up but so many just sit there drooling on themselves. How many MMO’s have you played where the dread bat of whatever just sits there hovering. You can literally sit there for hours and it just stays put. You would think the damn guy would get tired eventually.
Mobs would spawn in an area and would continue spawning...unless peeps killed them out....in which case they would vanish from that area and start spawning in an new area.
Bosses didnt respawn.
It also had no classes....you chose skills and leveled up skills only, so you could be a dual sword wielding, heavy armor wearing mage if you wanted.
The vendors would only sell...what was sold to them and some few local items.
Game was called Wish....never made it out of beta, but it was a great game while I played it in beta, laggy as all hell, and ran out of funding but if they could have gotten it working, I think we wouldnt be looking at WoW. (that's how long ago this game was in developement)
Havent seen anything else since even consider such things. TSW is the closest for the classless system.....wait and see on it though.
So what you end up with is a bunch of monsters wandering about and a bunch of players doing the same. All in all quite a cluster at times.
Now if a browser game can do it, I don't see why a full blown MMO can't.
Then the monsters that spawn could be at the lvl of the group it was going against! If the players were forced to play in groups it would make the spawning of monsters easier and more exciting!
The only reason you keep fighting the same monsters all the time in an MMO is that they don't have enough of a variety like D&D does! D&D has hundreds of monsters. I would like to see them all in there wandering around in areas that make sense for them to be there!
Of course with this kind of a system alot of attention and planning would have to go into the world map and a robust random encounter system would have to be tested and i don't know if 2 years is long enough for development time so....
Like i said before i don't think it's going to happen but eventually this kind of system needs to exist!
DDO uses this concept during their Halloween event in the graveyard. While it sounds good, it also leads to farming problems with groups. If you're running solo or in a like-level group it works. Otherwise it's "send the lowbie in first" to get the spawn going and then the rest of the group harvests the drops to do the turn in's. You'll also get groups camping the prime spawn points.
Maybe use a concept of "can't group unless you're within 2 levels max of each other?".
I think LotRO does something liek this on limited basis