[devPLEASE] Dynamic World - If Ever You Do Something - Do This!

[Icehunter]

Please In some way make the world breath life like what they describe here:
http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-gam...ents-overview/

Here's the artical:
Introduction:

My name is Colin Johanson, and I'm the Lead Content Designer for Guild Wars 2. The content design team is responsible for developing what happens in the events, storyline, mini-games, and any other content you encounter in the Guild Wars 2 world. In this article I'm going to focus on explaining how the dynamic event system we've developed for Guild Wars 2 works, and how it challenges the fundamental ways content has been presented to players in traditional MMORPGs.

Quests: A Flawed Content Type:

When building an MMO, we had to examine every core piece of accepted content from traditional games in the genre and ask, "How can this be improved?" By looking at the traditional quest system used in basically every MMO ever made, we've come to the conclusion that quests have a lot of areas for improvement. To address these flaws, we've developed our dynamic event system.

Traditional quest systems involve walking up to a character who usually has an exclamation point or question mark hovering over their head and talking to them. From here, you get a massive wall of text hardly anyone reads that describes a horrible or totally mundane thing going on in the world that you need to help with. You run off, complete this task, then return and talk to this character again to receive another wall of text and a reward. Traditional quest systems rely on these blocks of quest text to tell you what is happening in the world; this is just an outdated form of storytelling.

In Guild Wars 2, our event system won't make you read a huge quest description to find out what's going on. You'll experience it by seeing and hearing things in the world. If a dragon is attacking, you won't read three paragraphs telling you about it, you'll see buildings exploding in giant balls of fire, and hear characters in the game world screaming about a dragon attack. You'll hear guards from nearby cities trying to recruit players to go help fight the dragon, and see huge clouds of smoke in the distance, rising from the village under siege.

There is a second fundamental flaw to traditional quest systems: what the quest text tells you is happening in a quest is not actually what is happening in the world.

For example, in a traditional MMO, the character who gives you a quest will tell you ogres are coming to destroy the character's home, and you need to kill them. You then get a quest which says, "Kill 0/10 ogres" and you proceed to kill a bunch of ogres standing around in a field picking daisies. Since every player in the game needs to be able to do this quest, the ogres will never actually threaten the character's home - they will just eternally pick daisies in the field. The ogres aren't actually doing what the quest says they are - the game is lying to you!

At ArenaNet, we believe this is NOT good enough. In Guild Wars 2, if a character tells you ogres are coming to destroy a house, they will really come and smash down the house if you don't stop them!

A Living Breathing World:

By building a world where you see and hear the experiences, Guild Wars 2 will evolve the MMORPG genre by making a game world that feels truly alive. The core of this evolution is our event system, which allows the world to dynamically change based on actions and decisions made by the players. A single player decision can cascade across a zone, changing the direction of a chain of events until they dramatically alter the content played by players in a map.

Other developers have tried to tackle this problem, but in Guild Wars 2 we go further. Where other multi-player quest systems were pass or fail - our dynamic events evolve in response to player interaction and the outcomes they achieve. Where previous systems reset and start again and really don't change the world, dynamic events chain and cascade across a zone and leave persistent effects in the game world after the event has ended.

In traditional MMOs, when a quest is completed it has no real effect on the game world. You receive your reward and then move on, looking for the next quest to do. The world appears no better or worse for your actions. In GW2, the outcome of every event will directly affect the game world around you. If an enemy dredge army is marching out of their main base, players will be asked to mobilize with their allies and help destroy the army. If the dredge army is defeated, other events will cascade out from there. Players will be able battle their way inside the dredge base, face off against their commander, rescue captured friendly troops being held in the dredge prisons, and even hold the captured base while fighting waves of dredge, who arrive from deep underground to try and take back their home.
Dynamic Events

If, on the other hand, players fail to destroy the army, it will establish a fort in friendly player territory. From there, the dredge will send shipments of troops and supplies to the fort from the main base while building up walls, turrets, and siege engines to help defend it. Enemy dredge forces will then begin to move out from their newly established fort to attack friendly player locations in the area, sending snipers out into the hills, sending assault team forces to capture friendly player villages, and trying to smash down friendly fortifications with massive dredge walkers. All of these events continue to cascade out into further chains of events where cause and effect is directly related to the player's actions.

For example, if the players do not mobilize to stop the dredge snipers, they'll begin to shoot down all the villagers and merchants in nearby friendly villages. If they fail to stop the dredge assault teams from capturing a village, players will need to lead a force to help liberate the town and free the villagers. All of this content is derived from a single initial event - the dredge army marching through the map.

These are just some of the thousands of events we've designed in Guild Wars 2, where every action taken by the players will have direct, visible, cause and effect in the game world.

Putting The "MMO" Back In "MMORPG":

One of the challenges of a massively multiplayer game is building a game world where hundreds of players are able to interact together and feel a sense of community, not a sense of threat, from other players playing with them. One of the great flaws of content in most traditional MMOs is that players generally cannot actually play together unless they are in a group, and the content types actively encourage them not to interact, or worse, become hostile, when another player is nearby.

Traditional MMO quest systems will send multiple players off to kill a boss. One player kills the boss and gets the loot. The rest of the players have to stand around and wait their turn for the boss to re-spawn so they can kill it and get credit for it. You don't want other players around you because they're stealing your kills and slowing your rate of achievement. MMOs are supposed to be about hundreds, if not thousands of players, playing together in a community, not putting them in the same world and then pushing them apart!

The event system in Guild Wars 2 is designed to specifically address this problem. All players that fully participate in an event are rewarded for doing so; everyone who helps kill a monster or blow up an enemy catapult will get credit for doing so. There is no kill stealing and no quest camping. Everyone works together towards the common goal of the event and everyone is rewarded for doing so. To help ensure there is always enough for everyone to do, our events dynamically scale, so the more players who show up and participate in the event, the more enemies show up to fight them. If a bunch of players leave the event, it will dynamically scale back down so it can be completed by the people who are still there playing it. This careful balance created by our dynamic scaling system helps ensure you have the best and most rewarding play experience.

Events are designed to help bring the community together and to give everyone a shared sense of responsibility and camaraderie in the game world. Even if you're not grouped up with someone, you'll only be rewarded for having more players come help you with an event! In Guild Wars 2, when you see another player you'll actually be excited to see them, where in traditional MMOs you generally think, "Oh great, here comes a guy to steal my kills." Through our internal game testing so far, it's been remarkable to see how well this idea has functioned in practice. Our entire studio has experienced countless moments where we've been drawn together to parts of a map to do events and felt a strong bond with other players; a truly dynamically created sense of community born out of the event system.

Benefits To Replay & Exploring:

There are two very common types of MMO players that generally are not specifically catered to by traditional games in the genre. One is the explorer who wants to explore every nook and cranny of the game world. The other, even more common, wants to make alternate characters and play through the game as many different ways with as many different characters as possible (aka the altoholic). In Guild Wars 2, we're using our event system to help cater to these kinds of players in ways no one has ever attempted before.

For the explorer, much of the joy comes from discovering new things. In a traditional MMO, the explorer gets to explore a vast world, but after they have explored it once, there is nothing left for the explorer to do, because the game world does not change. The game becomes stale, and much of the joy is lost when the explorer has run out of things to discover. Our dynamic event system in Guild Wars 2 ensures this sense of joy from discovery is never lost in the game world! Every time you enter any map in the game, completely different events and situations could be occurring to discover in a new and different way. A village that was previously filled with friendly norn could, on a return trip, have been taken over by evil Sons of Svanir who are now using it as a base of operations and have put up their own architecture in place of the norn's. This dynamically changing world will create the ultimate sense of discovery for the explorer.

As an added bonus, we've also hidden hundreds of events all over the world that require interaction with the game world. This helps give an extra sense of reward and discovery for those who seek to explore the entire world. Finding an entrance to a secret cave deep at the bottom of the ocean and removing a glowing orb from the cave could let an evil creature loose from its ancient prison and kick off a chain of events as the creature terrorizes the ocean shipping lanes. Reading the spells written on an ancient wizard's spell book in a ruined castle at the top of the highest mountain peak could open a portal to another world and trigger a chain of events as creatures from that world come through the portal. GW2 is all about being a game for every type of gamer, and we're specifically using the event system to make this possible.

Because the world is constantly changing through our event system, we've created a living, breathing environment that is especially rewarding for altoholics. The event system will help ensure that every new character you create has a truly unique experience when playing through the game world, making playing new characters more fun and rewarding than in traditional MMOs.

What's Next:

MMOs have become extremely popular, but the genre has done little to evolve over the past decade. Generally MMO players explore an unchanging, persistent game world, leveling up by performing quests which do not change the world in any way once completed. It's time for the genre to take the next step, and explore the idea of a truly dynamic, living, breathing persistent world where the player's actions really make a difference, and everything that occurs in the game world has cause and effect. The event system in Guild Wars 2 is going to bring this concept of a dynamic world to life for our players and we cannot wait till you all get a chance to play it with us. You won't be disappointed.

While this article covers how the event system will fix many of the core flaws with quests in traditional MMOs, it does not address some of the other flaw in the genre, like a lack of character development and overall sense of personal story. Ree Soesbee, one of our world designers on Guild Wars 2, will be following this article with her own look into the personal story system we're developing to solve these fundamental problems. If our dynamic event system is putting the "MMO" back in "MMORPG," then Ree's article will show you how our personal story system is putting the "RPG" back in the "MMORPG." You won't want to miss it!

[Alhanelem]

Or you could just play that game instead of begging that one company copy everything another company does.

Also, the only other thing I will say is a lot of things sound better on paper than they do in practice. For example with the "event" system versus the "quest" system- people will complain about lack of equal oppertunity for content. When you build "living, breathing" content like this, people will undoubtedly complain that he/she didn't get to do this or that content because someone else got to it first. Quests and instanced content and such seem like a flawed system, and to an extent they are, but they make it easy to keep things equitable. I'm not saying that a more dynamic system is bad in theory at all, because it's good- but it's VERY hard to implement this in a way that actually ends up being both fun and fair.

[Icehunter]

Or you could just play that game instead of begging that one company copy everything another company does.

Considering Ultima Online touted itself as having that as a launch item only to remove it at the last minute it's not really GW's design. They are just releasing it the way it should be.

Edit:
There's also only 2 mmo's I've stay with since release of each, XI and GW1. I respect both sides.

[Alhanelem]

Considering Ultima Online touted itself as having that as a launch item only to remove it at the last minute it's not really GW's design. They are just releasing it the way it should be.

Obviously there was a reason why they removed it... I don't really give a rat's behind whose idea it was though. Let SE develop it's own game and if you like something some other company is doing better, go play that game instead of pleading for SE to copy them.

There's also only 2 mmo's I've stay with since release of each, XI and GW1. I respect both sides.

I'm not taking sides either- Only stating "let each game develop on its own, instead of insisting that one copy another one you think has good ideas."

[Icehunter]

I just lost a bet.

I bet my friend the first response to this thread would be someone telling me to GTFO and whine like a miner's guild scut about what I said.

[Alhanelem]

I just lost a bet.

I bet my friend the first response to this thread would be someone telling me to GTFO and whine like a miner's guild scut about what I said.

I would never say that to anyone.

While I don't really care for GW, There are a few simple things they could do to make the world feel a bit more animated. Nearly every NPC that isn't part of a levequest or other content is completely static. They could easily add a few NPCs, objects, monsters etc that at least look like they're leading a daily life. e.g. an NPC that comes out of The Dunes district in the morning, goes over to one of the shopping avenues, stops at the tavern, and goes back home in the evening. Even FFXI with its mostly static NPCs had more of this.

Also, why are you telling me about how WoW isn't original? Did I say it was? You don't need to tell me it wasn't original, because I know that already.

Everything that was ever original about FFXIV has already been cut from it, because originality doesn't seem to sell games.

[Irishwars]

I just lost a bet.

I bet my friend the first response to this thread would be someone telling me to GTFO and whine like a miner's guild scut about what I said.

You made a stupid bet then, making a thread on a game forum, praising another game. What type of reaction did you expect?

That being said, you are right. FFXIV is soooo dead on the weekends, more action in the world would happy alot

[Icehunter]

Obviously there was a reason why they removed it... I don't really give a rat's behind whose idea it was though. Let SE develop it's own game and if you like something some other company is doing better, go play that game instead of pleading for SE to copy them.

I'm not taking sides either- Only stating "let each game develop on its own, instead of insisting that one copy another one you think has good ideas."

If no game copied life, art, another game or some random thing is this world we wouldn't have games. It's about taking others ideas, making them your own, adding to it and perfecting what you feel is the best for your own product. WoW was not original.

The only thing original about WoW was it's phase technology. Everything else it copied and perfected.

[viion]

I'd love for XIV to get some real world changes based on player action, be really nice, right now the world is static, boring and completely lifeless.

Same for the cities, the cities are so damn lifeless and all the NPC's just stand around doing nothing.

So dull. So dead.

Bring some life to the game!

[Jokerz]

I don't know how much of a dynamic event person I am. I don't want to be involved n a dynamic event when say I'm heading out for a event run or something. It's kinda hard to say but, I don't want that feeling that my choice is going to decide the fate of a town.

However, a dynamic event that included everyone I would like. Something like you hear a screech in the air while your in town and you see the imperials storming the city, you see crafters cancel their crafting and run, and you ls's scramble to gather themselves to repel the invading force. I want it to be real, I don't want it to be scripted, I don't want to know when the invasion is going to happen, I don't even want a cs to let me know what is going on. I just want the event to happen, and I just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I want the option to flee if I must or stand and fight.