Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Gecko said:

I disagree. Given what we were playing gamewise even 10 years ago, and the ridiculous computing and disk power that we can get dirt cheap now, I think it"s just a matter of time.

I think Blizzard is a lot closer to this than anyone thinks. Asherons Call 2 had some good ideas, but they were way ahead of their time.

I"d bet if Blizz weren"t limited by WOW"s legacy engine and tech, they could release something completely dynamic now. Some of the Lich King quest pieces are teasingly close and allow for amazing changes, just not at the server level, solely at the player.

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zehn means this

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Altering the course of in-game history by killing bosses is kinda difficult when everything respawns. I gave up on immersion in MMOs after the third or fourth genocide I committed in WoW before level 20 and I realized this was the future of the genre.

Phelps McManus said:

I feel less connection and sentiment to people I interact with on the internet than when I discuss books or even video games with people IRL. So, I am not sure about your point.

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That anecdotal evidence is anecdotal.

While cut scenes are good (flag them to skippable AFTER the first time through), the answer is clear.

*tongue in cheek* Simply make a randomized quiz (say 5 questions out of 20 possible) after each quest text block that needs to be answered to get full exp and loot rewards.

Would still be Gamefaqs"able, but nothing will stop that.

Farmer Joe says: "Blah blah blah blah 3 long paragraphs of blah."

"Now, I"ve had it up to here with the mentally damaged children who call themselves heroes in today"s society. I swear the reason they all wear helmets is to keep their brains from leaking out when they watch a birdie fly by. So lets see if you"re any different.

What color bear asses did I want you to get?

How many Bear Asses do I want?

Where did I suggest you go find Bears?

[Success:] Ok you passed. Now get out there and get me my asses!"
[Failure:] O Jesus, I"m talking to another one. You know what? Just collect whatever your feeble brain think I wanted and I"ll reward you accordingly. *grumbling to self* I think I have some shiny tinsel left over from the winter celebration that should keep you entertained for hours. Now git"

Ninen said:

While cut scenes are good (flag them to skippable AFTER the first time through), the answer is clear.

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Oh man, that would make for an awesome encounter. At 20% Arthas stuns your raid and you have 1 minute to answer 10 questions about WoW lore. Pulls from a pool of like 1000 questions with new ones added each week.

I get a woody just thinking about it. Especially when a question asks what Garona"s parentage is and you answer "Is this pre-retcons, post-first-retcon or post-second-retcon?" and the system glitches and casts itself into the gorge.

Nicely played Zehn.

Gecko said:

I disagree. Given what we were playing gamewise even 10 years ago, and the ridiculous computing and disk power that we can get dirt cheap now, I think it"s just a matter of time.

I think Blizzard is a lot closer to this than anyone thinks. Asherons Call 2 had some good ideas, but they were way ahead of their time.

I"d bet if Blizz weren"t limited by WOW"s legacy engine and tech, they could release something completely dynamic now. Some of the Lich King quest pieces are teasingly close and allow for amazing changes, just not at the server level, solely at the player.

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You run into problems because servers have to be limited to a few thousand people, depending on your code, and in this scenario every single one of them would evolve differently. Unless you have AI that shits stories, your writers will go nuts, not to mention the whining when one server gets something the other ones don"t have.

I would be interested in seeing AI that can mimic player behavior so well that you can"t see the difference between player and NPC. Of course, some NPCs would still have to exist because vendors can"t simply go afk. Just something to give you an illusion of a living world, when I see patrol of NPCs in RvR lakes in WAR, they simply follow a predefined path, if they for example told that they found tracks of several destro players and offered me a place in their band to slay them, yeah that is something I can see myself doing. Not some world-changing stuff, the beauty is in the details.

Zaphid said:

when I see patrol of NPCs ... they simply follow a predefined path

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I swear to god EQ had special code where mobs would alter their paths just to go near if you if you were low on health. It never fucking failed. Want a rare mob you"ve been camping to show up? Be low health with no mana!

Zehn - Vhex said:

I swear to god EQ had special code where mobs would alter their paths just to go near if you if you were low on health. It never fucking failed. Want a rare mob you"ve been camping to show up? Be low health with no mana!

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THIS IS THE FUCKING TRUTH.

I even did an experiment and proved it to a bunch of my guild mates. When you are low health in EQ the aggro range on mobs HAS to increase. I sat next to Karnor"s castle in Dreadlands one time to prove it. There was a Drovlarg *spl* that would path around the front pillars. At FH I would sit at the corner and he would just walk his path and ignore me. I zoned into KC and got beat up some then zoned out and sat down in THE EXACT SAME SPOT... wasn"t 30 secs till he aggroed me. They said ah he paths strange sometimes. So I said ok. I went to OT and went to the ramp. Next to the ramp is a "safe" spot for pulling. I sat down and watched the sarnaks, rhinos, cats, and cati walk around for about 30 mins. Never got aggroed once. Ran out got beat up and came back and sat in the SAME spot. Was less than a min and I was aggroed by 3 mobs. They shut up after that.

EQ had some interesting aggro rules and they were certainly more complex than WoW or most other newer games. It is a shame too, learning the details and how to game those rules was a lot of fun. I don"t know so much about altered pathing though but it wouldn"t shock me.

Northerner said:

EQ had some interesting aggro rules and they were certainly more complex than WoW or most other newer games. It is a shame too, learning the details and how to game those rules was a lot of fun. I don"t know so much about altered pathing though but it wouldn"t shock me.

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i think the issue was being low health and sitting both added to mobs threat tables. remember sitting while a pull occured will pull aggro, so would being low hp.

No no, it just wasn"t increased threat range. I mean they flat out changed their roaming paths to head right for you. Trust me, spend enough time kiting and you tend to learn pathing routes and -every- time I"d get low on health from a bad pull or something, suddenly mobs would roam where they"d never pathed before and I"d be doing some fucked up zig-zagging shit just to avoid pulling my quad into the agro range of one roamer while avoiding 3 more as I moved around that suddenly came out of fucking nowhere.

Mobs in EQ would straight up drop whatever the fuck they were doing and go for someone who dipped low. It never ever failed.

Oh, sitting aggro and low health aggro were staples and quite well known. Positional, distance, aggro-decay, sneak-arcs and so on also were documented to some degree and tested quite a bit. Actual straight-up pathing changes (as opposed to aggro) for roamers though I haven"t really seen but hey, I was a Rogue and stealthed pretty much all the time I wasn"t actively stabbing something.

I do wonder if anyone there even knew how it all worked or if it was just a result of spaghetti.

From my experience on some of the EQemu / SoD back ends. Its ALOT of spaghetti. Some of it still has me puzzled on what it was supposed to do.

Spawn said:

From my experience on some of the EQemu / SoD back ends. Its ALOT of spaghetti. Some of it still has me puzzled on what it was supposed to do.

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All I remember from EQ was this kind of in-game frustration: satanic pathing, random aggro, 4 am corpse runs after my pick-up raid wiped the 2nd time to Vox. Between the random bullshit and playing on dial-up, it"s hard to believe I played for over 2 years.

EQ is the like the ex-girlfriend of mmos: endless frustration during the relationship, but still something you use as a standard, something nostalgic, something you know you"ll always miss, and something that leaves a void that you"re never quite able to fill.