Ngruk said:
The hardest thing to avoid, and it really is unavoidable in many cases, is having players replay content.
Unless you hit on a random content generator that creates bad ass totally random FUN AND MEANINGFUL content, it"s next to impossible.
If you are telling a story, a TRUE DYED IN THE WOOL story, with iconic heroes, villains, plot, sub plots, beginnings, middles, ends, it IS impossible.
It really comes down to work. As in the amount of work you are willing to PAY FOR, and assign time to, in content creation.
I think replaying certain content is not that bad at all, because it can involve different emotions then when you played through it the first time. Replaying old content can involve nostalgia and revenge for instance, to name two. Nostalgia has gotten a bad rep for some reason but is a major reason why I am stil playing EQ (and why SOE is getting my money). Revenge is sometimes known as bottomfeeding, i.e. revisit Blackburrow and lay waste there with your level 75 Beastlord for some payback time. Or just having fun with your high level against light blue mobs in a dungeon that is "not your intended level", and feel badass about what you accomplished with your toon. I think it depends on how you build your world though. I constantly revisit old zones and dungeons in EQ, revisit NPC"s, even do old quests with crappy rewards (but with funny and touching little scripts) and look for old Rare mobs, no matter if their loot is obsolete.
If your world is built like a Themepark, then the "rides" get old, and your content gets stale after a while for sure. But if your World is built in a way where NPCs are memorable, and the World forced you to make memories, then you will have content that hardly ever gets old. Well at least for explorer types like me.
EQ had such a world, both through some harsh mechanics(Death penalty), but also through its intricate Racial landscape, complicated Faction system that linked remote parts of the world together in intriguing ways and gave many NPCs a "face", the many KOS NPC"s that added danger and urged you to peek around corners first before storming into a room, the fact that we could attack most anything(and be punished for it) and the tiered /con system (from Ally to Scowling) which painted the NPCs or mobs stance towards us and made them memorable to us, and make us care about them (in several ways..).
EQ is definately the *only* MMO I ever played where I actually got some emotions about NPC"s or mobs. The faction system and tiered /con system, but also the way we talked to them(through the same means as we talked to players, i.e. the chat channel) all helped immensely towards this. Next to many being KOS to us, killing us often on the spot(that certainly made me care).
Off course lots of other mechanics helped make the world memorable too(and replayable). If your MMO does not have actual doors in the first place, then peeking around the door to see if a mob is KOS is not even possible. Personally I am amazed by the amount of MMOs that do not have doors or even do away with interiors entirely exept a few Quest instances....
Merchant mining, or NPCs stocking other players stuff for you to buy: another such mechanic that entails much more then just "someones garbage is another mans treasure". This always has been a typical "Massively Multiplayer" feature for me in subtle ways. For me, such an NPC merchant always has been a kind of "link in time" between players of the same world. Not only is this NPC an intermediary between 2 players in making certain items change hands: but it tells a story at the same time. When I for instance find a single Brownie Parts on some Merchant in a remote Inn in Highpass, then I immediately know that at some point another players was here, who apparently had been hunting Brownies somewhere in the world and decided to get rid of that loot here. When I find a few Arctic Scallops on the merchant too with maybe a Wyvern Hide, then I can conclude that this player probably hunted in Cobalt Scar. Was it a Druid maybe, who were fond of kiting Wyverns there? Where would he have killed the Brownie, was it in Lesser Faydark? Intrigue!
Through this NPC, I see the actions of another player, and we are linked. Not only that, but the NPC becomes part of our world too, being the intermediary.
Again, caring about the World and the NPCs in it. This is so much different in modern MMOs where most NPCs are just pez-dispensers for Quests.
Well, now that I have made my post so long that everybody will skip it anyway, I may as well add another pet-peeve of mine: pop-ups. A well built World needs
thisand not some popup in 12pt Arial_Bold when I mouse over some blank texture(or gibberish). One of the NPCs in EQ that I truly cared for (in many different ways) was Tumpy Irontoe. And
his graffiticertainly helped with that.
I think using popups for this sort of stuff is a copout. No doubt is it easier to implement, easier to change, easier for localization of your product and cheaper then having to design an actual texture with writing on it, but it sure looks better if I can see such graffiti as being an actual part of the world, rather then the MMO Database rearing its ugly head in my world.
Not a fan of the humongous Dialogue popup windows in modern MMOs either, I"ll take chatting through keywords anyday, for the above mentioned reason(we talk to NPCs in the same way as we talk to players) but also because I might actually catch a phrase or two from your Lore while looking fo the keywords. Fishing for hidden keywords was even more fun but I guess there is no way in hell that a company will ever dare to "punish" their customers like that anymore.
Another thing: dialogue with NPCs should be seen in the world, by other players. I will not play the "realism" card here (I could though!) because people love to go on a tangent on that sort of stuff, but personally I like it when I see stuff happening in the world and see other players converse with NPCs. I"ll just wait my turn if the NPC is spamming his text too fast for me. I always get this tired feeling when I see a player talk to an NPC, see the NPC turning towards the player and then.......utter silence. The player and the NPC are in their own little bubble, mindreading apparently. Making certain things private in a MMO can be good(some instancing) but this is bad.
I think MMOs are not being social enough these days and I am not talking about the trusted "group up to kill mobs for 6 hours" feature, which sometimes seems to be the only "social" aspect left. If you have that in your game you can call yourself a MMO.....
So much left unsaid but I will stop now.
