AfterWorld Survival Forum

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/8533/Can-We-Make-Quests-Matter-Again.html 

good article

Dynamic content! Years ago i suggested this as part of the landscape and events of the future games.
Now it seems it's the Only Way Out.
Am i good or what?




I don't believe in the miraculous salvation through player generated content though. It's been tried already, go look at Second Life, it's a mountain of boring tasteless worthless crap. Good 95% of the playerbase is consumers, they'll never create anything even if u stand on your head. And all the "new and original content" you will get is just echoes and clones of something the Average Joe saw yesterday in some other game or a movie. A professional level designer can effortlessly roll out tons of the same stuff but with much better quality.


Besides, you 1st have to build building tools for users, then take care u don't accidentally give the hackers tools to exploit (or just simply blow) your game, and afterwards u spend even more resources and time to review a mountain of worthless crap.
The team that reviews player generated content has to have a talent. You have to use artists and designers for that job. Send artist to rummage in dirt see what happens? This job will be so frustrating he will soon need a drink to keep going and not hang himself.


No, in the end of the day AI generated dynamic content is the only way out.

never assign a human to do machine job

Dynamic quests do not need to have HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey running the show.
Testing strategies have shown that you can get a huge variety of test cases through divergent/convergent tree structures. Billions of different test results by providing a very small number of conditions which are manipulated during the testing steps. Looks non-deterministic, produces random looking end results (from the outside) but is quite deterministic from the inside.

Not to worry, we'll definitely fight back when Big Rob decides to take over.


I think the OP's article makes some good points, but the comments make even better ones. Quests were only initially introduced in games to provide optional things to do in single-player games to provide extra gameplay and maybe some additional goodies. The current trend of games - especially MMOs - being nothing more than environmental wrappings around quest systems that are the best way to gain experience points is lame and overdone. Quests in AW should be optional ways of experiencing everything that the game has to offer but shouldn't provide more XP than just playing the game does. At most they should be interesting distractions from the primary goals that we each provide for ourselves, and not goals unto themselves.

Very true. If nothing else there should be a newcomer walkthrough that does in-game what the wiki's First Steps post talks about.

Yea, the article on MMORPG.com only talks about quests.
I'm not sure why they can't see the full scale of possibilities. Because the average mainstream MMO today is nothing but stupid pile of quests, maybe?
Whatever, their problem.
Obviously you can apply the same principle not only to the quests but to the whole virtual environment. The dynamics of the nature recreated in the virtual model of the reality. If u look at it this way, this is the logical next step. Result will be more realistic and less repetitive environment: massive increase in the fun factor.
Ofc it's much harder to code, there's no real AI yet that could take care of everything for us. Programmers have to write those complex scripts and object trees. Pseudo-dynamics that will try to mimic the real thing.
Even worse, dynamically created content will be a real pain in the backside to balance. Etc, etc etc.....

However, the result would be well worth it.