Emergent Scenarios

In a lot of games, its all too easy to fall into a routine in that world. You log in, run to the mob zone, grind up some EXP to get to new levels to get shinier abilities so you can go to the better mob zone to grind more EXP to get more levels, etc etc.

It is my hope that SotA actually takes more lessons from single player RPGs than it does MMOs, particularly open world ones with emergent experiences. Take something like the Fallout series, for example; you'd be hard-pressed to find a routine in the original pair, since fighting was a harrowing experience and you were constantly just trying to find anything to give you that upper edge. And also something like Morrowind, where you were making your own little goals as much as quests were. There were plenty of higher level enemies wandering low level areas that players had to either be very smart to take down, or choose to flee. Making these actually goes against the tenets of most MMO game design; that of making sure everyone has a 'good' experience where you are always succeeding because you don't want to upset the paying customer. But sometimes the customer likes to be upset, because even if the experience was negative, they enjoyed having it.

I tried to think of a couple of ideas that I'd enjoy seeing in the game that could feasibly be allowed, even in an MMO setting;

Dynamic NPCs engaging in their own tasks, like hunting animals or chasing criminals. Even if that boils down to just seeing a prisoner running down a road away from a guard because he happened to be free and his programming told him to run from authority, that simple sight would make the world feel much more alive, as it wasn't preplanned or part of a quest.

Non-combat solutions for enemies. Maybe you're fighting an ogre and it proves too much for you, so you want to flee. However, it broke both your legs and you can't run. Maybe you could reason, or better/simpler yet, bargain with this monster? An actual gameplay use for emotes even! You use an emote to mean 'no fighting', and the ogre demands something from you. Perhaps your sword, or some food? Or maybe he just wants you to dance for him... so you type in /dance and he is entertained. On a functional level, this would probably just boil down to heirarchy of needs; if the monster doesn't need to eat or kill you, and desires something else, it could recognise your "no fighting" and send a message to you asking you to fill that need for them.

A proper reaction to your actions. This could be something like town-specific heroism or infamy; if you are caught murdering or stealing, the guards start putting up wanted posters of you and offering bounties to NPCs, or even other players, for your arrest.


If any of these are actually already sited in the game or are future goals, that's just awesome and I'd love to know, but if not I seriously hope they put in some more things like these. Scenarios that don't really level-up your character, but rather tend to give you trouble, do give you a richer and more unique experience on the whole. It keeps you coming back for more just to see if you can find something new.

 

I've read through this post and from a software development perspective, and as someone who really enjoy challenges in A.I., I like what you've written here. I have no idea how feasible the SotA/Portalarium folks will find your suggestions, but, as a fellow participant, they are definitely interesting.

With regard to some of your suggestions: You may wish to check out some of Raph Koster's previous attempts at these types of behaviours in game as well: http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/bakebread.shtml, http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/03/uos-resource-system/. If I recall correctly he helped devise a system of ecologies where monsters would forage/hunt and dynamically establish 'homes'; either in caves, or other various areas conducive to their 'needs'; very interesting stuff.

I also believe that over taxation on this system eventually led to its removal from Ultima Online. I say this not to suggest Raph's work was bad--In fact I believe just the opposite. However balancing these aspects appears to be challenging to say the least. It'd be interested in seeing these kinds of systems in SotA. I'd also be interested in hearing suggestions on how these features could be accomplished.

 

Great thread. I especially like the idea of non-lethal solutions to combat. In paper n pencil, there are often several solutions to a seemingly linear fighting scenario. Bribing guards or monsters would be very interesting. The hypothetical ogre could be set to respond to 'types' of items. ie - he wants food, or not just any food but anything flagged as meat. Or gems. Likewise, a ravenous ogre that gobbles up any food around could be tricked into taking a potion of sleep or another spell (benevolent or otherwise). Maybe he's hurt or sick, sorta thorn in the lion's paw scenario.

It would be great to see some adventures where a thief could go through a compound successfully without fighting at all and receive credit from the game for it. Or a priest who abhors violence might adventure and heal and attempt to 'defeat' obstacles through non-combat methods.

And this brings me to another thought - what about spiking someone's drink in a bar, with a potion or alcohol or poison. Hmmm..

 

I like this idea of using emotes as a form of expression in conflict. It would really enhance the range of interaction that can be done to avoid, plead or otherwise communicate with non verbal entities.

 

@cs2501x

That is some super interesting stuff (for those that haven't read them, in addition to the two entries linked to above, there is also an entry on why it failed in UO: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/04/uos-resource-system-part-2/
and where the system was headed had it been implemented: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/05/uos-resource-system-part-3/ )

To my mind, these features are some of the most interesting I could hope to see in SotA. The idea that every NPC has some desires, and these desires drive changes in the environment leading to spontaneous quests or alternate ways of dealing with situations is... incredible. Brawls could break out in taverns, for actual reasons. Monsters could attack towns for a reason (perhaps this could be built into the siege mechanic?).

As for actual implementation, Raph mentions at the end of the third post about UOs resource system:

<blockquote>One approach that would probably work for the latter is to use ?level of detail? for the areas. If no players are around, stop instancing up individual wolves hunting individual rabbits; instead, save all those off, and calculate periodically how many wolves and how many rabbits would be there after a certain amount of time.

You could stuff the world data into a quadtree and run higher and higher-level sims, instancing all the data back out only when you needed to interact with it in granular fashion; or you could timestamp the last interaction, and ?catch the sim up? when a player approaches. This latter method was in fact used for handling harvesters and the like in SWG, since they tended to reside in areas that we actually took offline when no players were around. Using hillclimbing and broadcasting rather than constant radial searches is another approach. Lastly, truly treating the whole thing as an artificial life landscape would allow you to even use image processing techniques to update the grid, since they have been highly optimized.</blockquote>

The fact that there are discrete hexes and separate shards changes the problem a bit. You would have to have some properties of hexes that interact with others (like, since wolves can't move from hex to hex, just keep track of # of wolves and how likely they are to be roaming, and "move" them as necessary, updating the population in another hex as necessary).

Here are some (possibly naive) ideas on how you could deal with sharding - having each shard act somewhat independently seems weird, but I think it could work. Imagine that each hex has some set of properties - number of wolves, and each wolf has some properties (hunger, etc). When you enter that hex, it updates those properties and spawns the wolves in the appropriate state. You kill a few wolves, that changes the properties. Now someone else enters the hex, and we have two shards. The second shard is generated based on the updated properties (so the actions you take change what someone else in a different shard will see when they enter). Now you can each independently mess with the wolves. The hex's values, which are used to determine both the base properties used to generate new shards AND to determine hex-to-hex interactions, is just the average across all the shards. You've killed all the wolves, and the people in the other shard fed them and had them breed - so the hex's actual values will stay the same. So, to reiterate: Each shard has its own properties, and each hex has its own properties, and the properties of the hex are generated by the average (or some other function) of the properties of all of the shard. New shards have their properties generated via the hex properties.

Not sure if any of this is useful, but it's fun to think about, and I sure hope at least some sort of system this open is implemented.