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Ultima Online revisits dynamic content with Magincia reconstruction
Long before RIFT barreled on to the MMO scene and made a buzz-phrase out of "dynamic content," Ultima Online developers were busily pumping out some dynamic content of their own. In the fall of 2007, the influential fantasy sandbox title saw a horde of nasty demons descend upon the hapless town of Magincia and raze it to the ground despite (or in some cases, because of) the efforts of players on each of the game's shards. The invasion was part of a larger story cycle called Warriors of Destiny, and a new event is now brewing that will bring players back to the site of the ruined town. As part of the New Magincia rebuilding process, the provisional government of Britannia is holding a lottery for 22 land plots atop the city ruins. Said plots may be used for residences or shops at the winning player's discretion. The city is also playing host to a new public gardening mechanic, and you can find all the details at the official Ultima Online website.
The Daily Grind: Is dynamic content the wave of the future?
With the recent launch of RIFT fresh in our minds, one of the key aspects of the game -- the dynamic rifts and invasions -- has a lot of people talking. For some, it's a breath of fresh air to encounter a virtual world that challenges the status (static?) quo by changing the landscape as mobs erupt onto the scene, fight common enemies, and charge into the local towns with the intent of conquering it all. Guild Wars 2 is also holding high the torch of dynamic content with its shifting "events" that will change the game world depending on players' actions or inactions. Players seem intrigued by content that responds to their decisions rather than standing in place and expecting imaginations to fill in the gap. So do you think that dynamic content is the wave of the future for MMOs? Should we expect to see more games develop systems that mold, manipulate and morph the game world around us, or is this just an experiment that will ultimately fall apart? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Scott Hartsman answers RIFT player questions
RIFT's launch is getting ever closer, and that means more and more questions for players to start wondering about. Scott Hartsman recently took part in an interview responding to several player questions, ranging from guilds and dungeon grouping to the disruption the eponymous rifts can wreak upon a questing environment. As Hartsman puts it, the large-scale changes that can happen as a result of the dynamic spawns can shut down questing, but that's part of the goal, and it's tuned so that an empty zone will never be subjected to a cascading series of unbeatable enemy invasions. While the game isn't set to have any sort of group-finding system in place on launch, Hartsman is of the mind that it's better to wait and launch an excellent tool than to simply put in a half-hearted attempt. He also expands on the varied high-end content available to players beyond simply raids as well as what players can expect for content releases down the line. While RIFT still has about half a month until release, the information already available is painting a fairly cohesive picture.
Scott Hartsman wraps up the sixth beta event for RIFT
With the open beta less than a week away, now is the time for Trion Worlds to step up and address the lingering issues RIFT has before it starts being available for general consumption. Fortunately for the development team, it's a task it's proven quite accomplished at, and the newest wrap-up for the sixth event proves that there's still a lot going on behind the scenes. Scott Hartsman takes the opportunity in the last pre-open beta wrap-up to discuss PvP in the open world, damage tuning, and the difference in raid sizes for endgame content. As Hartsman puts it, some of the anti-PvP measures put into place will be removed on PvP servers, meaning weaker guards around hubs and destroyable wardstones. Damage levels seem to be in a fairly good place across the board from the development perspective, but they're something that will be watched closely during the open event. Hartsman also touches more on the late-game rift content and what it will mean for the game's balance and the availability of content. RIFT players should take a gander at the full rundown and get ready for the open beta starting on Tuesday next week.
RIFT challenges unwritten rules of the genre in a new dev diary
"There are countless unwritten rules for creating an MMO world that successful designs in past games have impressed upon the entire industry. No monsters on the roads; never stop the player from questing or doing what he plans to do; group content should always be separate from solo content. While I will acknowledge that these sorts of rules of thumb are the guidelines that we designers live by, challenging them is where we have found a lot of success in RIFT." Thus sayeth Will Cook, Trion Worlds' content designer for RIFT. In a new developer diary over at ZAM, Cook explains how challenging stale MMO conventions opened up a whole new world of possibilities for the dynamic content in the game. By allowing enemy invasions to use roads, bosses to conquer quest giver outposts and rifts to pop up unexpectedly, the team was able to make an "anything goes" atmosphere over top the traditional PvE treadmill. One of Trion Worlds' biggest goals, Cook says, is to create "emergent experiences" that are never quite the same twice. Even though such content can be and often is disruptive to players running quests and working on other solo projects, it's proven to be exciting and interesting enough to draw these players in without complaint. Cook thinks that if you give it a chance, you'll get hooked: "You can't help but get carried away in the fun of a living world where you can see the effect of action and inaction."
Guest Post: The death of in-game interaction
This article has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. WoW's evolution has changed the course of both MMO game design and the landscape of the MMO player base in dramatic ways. By exploring the road most traveled, WoW has led the way from the roots of tabletop pen-and-paper RPGs and early MMO tabletop simulations into MMOs as virtual RPG themeparks. Despite WoW's fantastic success on many fronts, in its evolution toward catering to the most common, casual style of play, it's removed much of the human interaction that made early MMO experiences special. Today's WoW is slick, seamless and streamlined. There is nothing one player can achieve that another player cannot also relatively easily achieve. Yet while players in today's WoW maintain that this thinly clad, egalitarian experience is "best," in reality, what we see is a continuous striving for distinction free from the confines of the game design itself. The ever-present GearScore sniff test has streamlined the need for player interaction to the point that interaction is barely needed at all. In fact, it might be this very streamlining that has caused this MMO behemoth to slide away from the real magic of the early MMOs, to become a sanitized gaming experience that only barely acknowledges its need for virtual face-to-face gameplay. I miss the real interaction with my fellow players that speaks to the oldest traditions of what spawned MMOs: tabletop RPGs. I want player interactions to drive the game experience, from raiding to crafting to questing. The biggest villains and heroes of an MMO should be players, not pre-scripted heroes and playerless cut scenes. The next big MMO, I hope, can make this happen.
Massively's hands-on with Rift: Planes of Telara's dynamic content
Just a few weeks ago, I was invited to attend Trion Worlds' Gamer's Day in San Francisco to get some hands-on time with a couple of the company's upcoming titles, including Rift: Planes of Telara. If Rift seems to have come out of nowhere, that might be due both to the acquisition of EverQuest II veteran Scott Hartsman to head the project as executive producer, and to a clever name change meant to reflect the team's shift in development focus. In fact, that shift in development focus is precisely what I was at Trion's studio to test -- I got to check out the Rifts themselves in all their glory, in the context of the greater dynamic content system that the developers are so excited about. Massively's writers have been able to play and report on character creation and the starting areas of Rift several times over the last year or so, including earlier this summer at E3. But until today's embargo lift (coinciding with the reveal at Gamescom), no one had quite seen the fabled planar invasions and takeovers in action. Now we have.
Guild Wars 2 Lead Designer reveals new information about questing and content
Today brings us more Guild Wars 2 news, this time from Lead Content Designer Colin Johanson who has a few things to say about content and traditional quest systems. In Guild Wars, we're all familiar with the quest system and the giant green exclamation point. In such an immersive and beautiful world, it's admittedly a bit jarring when an NPC has that strange floaty thing that sticks out like a sore thumb -- or like a giant lime-green exclamation point. Filling your field of vision with a big black rectangle with a few paragraphs of text and a "check yes or no" acceptance option didn't exactly alleviate the problem. Once you accepted the quest and completed it, the overall world was still unchanged. You were the hero of Tyria but overall, you didn't seem to be making a difference in the world around you. As Johanson points out, if a villager is asking you to kill 10 ogres who are about to ravage his village, they shouldn't be standing around picking daisies. They should actually ravage his village if you don't help. The Guild Wars 2 team is working to remedy the questing problems of the past, offering some exciting ideas for a "living, breathing world" that changes as its citizens interact with one another and their surroundings. Take a look at what Johanson had to say about how the world of Tyria is going to change, and check out the gallery for the latest Guild Wars 2 screenshots. %Gallery-92890%
Anti-Aliased: Socially awkward
So, ok, we've been talking about Champions Online recently here in the column. Been talking about it a lot, as a matter of fact. I don't feel like risking having this column turn into a Champions love fest (as much fun as I'm having with the game), so we're going to change gears significantly this time and get onto a completely new train of thought.This week's topic: social gameplay. No, I don't mean those games you play obsessively/compulsively on Facebook or your social network of choice. I'm talking about how some aspects of gameplay completely rely on human interaction, for better or for worse. It's present in all of our games, but are we really taking advantage of it? We're going to take a look at some games that do take advantage of human-powered conflict, and why, perhaps, it might be a wave of the future for online games.
Anti-Aliased: It will all be fine in ten minutes
Back in the day when a 500 Mhz processor was fast, we were lulled into these weird online universes with multitudes of golden tongued promises. "Play online with thousands of others!", "Make a hero and save detailed and vast worlds!", and, my favorite, "Live in an persistent universe where your actions will have long lasting effects!"Certainly, two of those promises have come true. Our worlds are traveled by thousands upon thousands of users daily, and the characters we have created are truly the stuff of legends who have saved these vast worlds countless times. But the one thing that has still eluded us all this time... persistence.The funny thing is, it's not because we can't program or realize persistence in our games. We have the technology and expertise to do that just fine. We don't have persistence because persistence isn't profitable.
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Geldon Yetichsky, of the blog Digitally Staving off Boredom, wrote an interesting piece about why he canceled his City of Heroes account. He contends that CoH is lacking one important thing: Nothing really changes. Aside from a few pieces of dynamic content like Recluse's Victory, Safeguard Missions, and the Rikti invasions, nothing ever permanently changes the game world.CoH is (almost 4 years later) still one of my favorite games, and the MMO that brought me around to actually liking the genre. As much as I hate to admit it... he has a point. No matter how many times you lay the smack down on the bad guys, or rescue a damsel in distress... none of it has a lasting impact. The bad guys continually respawn and the same seemingly hapless citizens always need to be rescued.What he wants to see is a game world so full of life that it actually disrupts and inconveniences players. A game world that is more like real life, where actions have real consequences and where change is an everyday occurrence. As Geldon says: change and consequence may be inconvenient, but without, there can be no real meaning of player's actions in a virtual world. I couldn't agree more. He offers EVE Online and 10Six as exceptions, but there is another.Tabula Rasa has ongoing, contested battlefield control points, and the Bane unceasingly fight to take control of them. These dynamic, world-altering areas are at times completely inaccessible. They're important because they not only house teleporters, hospitals, supply depots, but also mission NPCs. Additionally, you can earn tokens for defending and taking back these CPs. Participating in these skirmishes really gets the blood pumping and what you do has a direct impact on the game world. All in all... it's something we need to see more of within the genre.
