I like what I'm seeing from Smed:I'm not sure if this has been mentioned here but both Brad and Salim came out pretty strongly against the idea of dynamic content in Pantheon in the recent Project 1999 video on YouTube.
I believe dynamic content is the future of the MMORPG genre as it is far less costly to create and provides far more enjoyment for the players than the current stale scripted theme-park model.
Ipublished an article about thistoday.
The Sandbox MMO | johnsmedley
My belief is simple - the content driven model is not where we should be aiming as an industry. Why? It's unsustainable. When we first began making these kinds of games 18 years ago there was nothing to compare our games to. Players were so excited about being able to be a part of these virtual worlds that just about any content was exciting. Over the years the quality has really been steadily rising to the point where we have some brilliant narrative and exciting storylines in many MMOs today.The real issue is a simple one - our ability to consume that content as players has gotten to the point that most content is done by the players nearly immediately after it's released. It's also laid out for all to see on any number of websites that contain complete spoilers up to and including the loot drop percentages.
In my opinionthe solution is focusing a lot more on letting players make and be content for each other.Battlegrounds are an excellent example of an Evergreen style of content where it's the players themselves that actually create the content. Auction houses are another example. So are things like storytelling tools in SWG.. or the brilliant music system in LOTRO. Building systems into the games that let the players interact with each other in new and unique ways gives us the ability to watch as the players do stuff we never anticipated. We'll see a lot more creativity in action if the players are at the center of it. Imagine an MMORPG of a massive city.. and the Rogue's guild is entirely run by players. Where the city has an entire political system that is populated by players who were elected by the playerbase.
There's a great example of this today with Eve Online. It's a brilliantly executed system where the players are pretty much in charge of the entire game. Sure there is a lot of content for players to do, but anything that's important in the game is done by the players. This is a shining example of how this kind of system can thrive.
Our belief at SOE is that it's smarter to head in this direction now rather than waiting. We want to innovate and let players be a part of everything we do including make the game in the first place. We're going to take the idea of sandbox gaming and we're putting it at the core of everything we're doing. We'll obviously still be making awesome stuff for players to do, but we're going to aim very high in terms of letting players be a part of the game systems. The more emergent sandbox style content we can make the less predictable the experience will be.