I thought GW2 was going to do something like that, but I was wrong. But yes, if they can pull off event scripting and that kind of procedural stuff then that would be great. The tough part is making it varied enough so it's just not another bar your have to fill up. Hopefully it's not a bar at all and it just happens. But it's really difficult to pull it off right. Because after the first or second time, it'll become "lets grind orcs to force phase 2" or "Only phase 1? I'll log in later for phase 3 so I can grind X Y Z". It's got to vary a bit more and not be as stale and repetitive.
Remember some GW2 devblog where they said you can raid a goblin town and talk to the king and if you kill him X happens and if you save him Y happens or whatever? That shit never happened. It's tough and time intensive to create. I hope they do it though, that shit would be great.
I'm not sure event scripting really needs to be a focus with these type of procedural spawns. It would probably be really simple to just come up with a set of parameters that are npc neutral (ie, not specific to any individual mob in the game) that can be randomly or semi-randomly assigned. Sort of like prefixes on Diablo mobs. Can be explicitly stated in the mob title or not. Bertog the Axe-Lord or Marvin Ice-Flinger. Then have more complex series of parameters as the content gets into higher tiers.
As to logging in and going "Just going to kill orcs today!" that's fine, people can do that intentionally to try and cull populations. But being that it would take the work of many people lots of time to force spawn a specific mob, it would be more in line with stuff happening semi-naturally. Also, nothing is a bar that can be seen. All that stuff would be server side and hidden.
The idea would also make people want to travel to different areas if monsters are not of a type they currently wish to fight. EC has too many goddamn darkweed snakes? Go to WC to kill Kodiacs instead. And to force spawn stuff would effectively require coordination (combine respawn rates and semi to completely random modifiers on just what is required to cull a population) so that inherently means you have to get the community involved in the creation of endgame content.
Then, to spice things up a bit, you could easily have static spawns that require certain conditions to be met before they show up. An average crafting level on the server of X and 2 red dragons would spawn Mordath the Ice Giant Tinkerer in some frozen cavern that would drop schematics for higher level crafting techniques or killing would create a game/faction/guildwide buff that potentially returns crafting materials or something. The only way to coordinate on the level to force spawn specifics like that would require inside knowledge of the game to "force" it. And since in my theoretical system if you are forcing dragons to spawn, it means that players are actively coordinating shit to kill the requisite number of kings, which can really only be forced by coordinating the killing of specific mobs in specific zones. I think people would be willing to sacrifice a little bit of 100% freedom in order to have a game that rewards player interaction and a solidified community.
I mean, in theory that is what happened with EQ anyway.
As to the tech being super difficult to implement? At least involving mob AI, I can't see it being that difficult to come up with a system that semi/fully randomizes a set number of abilities for npcs/mobs based upon relative difficulty. I likened the concept to the idea of the Gambit system from FF12 (stfu I liked that game =|) but instead of being for players it is for developers. Each tier would have a number of slots corresponding with their difficulty to put in responses and abilities they use. Then, for each tier, have half of the slots on a complete random slant that uses level specific abilities appropriately.
For complete implementation, I can see why GW2 didn't do it. As much as they wanted to not be "you don't just pick up quests to collect bear asses!" they really ended up exactly that, except that it became "You have entered the area of bear ass collecting. PREPARE TO ANAL-SCALP BEARS!" The game had a narrative and a sandbox game, in theory, probably wouldn't. Modern games generally use a sort of random "mobs of x type and y type spawn here" localized style of mobs popping up. In the theoretical game idea I am proposing, it would use almost identical concepts except that it would sort of have a concept of "if less mobs of type x exist, spawn more type y" in a given area. Then to spawn a boss type mob, it would just check for "if mobs of type x > y, and mobs of type x > $($ is a minimum amount of mobs of type x to spawn a boss mob) and mobs of type y < #(where # is some predetermined threshold for potentially spawning a boss), spawn mob type x boss."
Yes my programming lingo sucks, but you get the idea. Instead of spending time heavily scripting events and encounters, they would instead spend time on creating the system that allows that type of spawning to happen smoothly. To increase, you simply add more spawn parameters. Then, in the background, whenever one of the conditions are met for spawning raid bosses or whatever, tally marks are added to the requirements that would cause the next tier of stuff too.
So instead of spawn timers on raid mobs or named mobs or anything other than normal npcs in general, you would have everything controlled by population fluctuation and overall content consumption speed. Higher content consumption? More shit to do. Low content consumption? Less shit to do.
But! All that being said, this is Sony and they have next to zero sandbox cred at this point. So we'll see what they come up with.
