One of the complaints about common quests I have always read is that they seem boring. Go here. Kill X number of Y and bring me Z and I'll reward you. Some MMOs try to rationalize it by telling you things like the people needing the hides so they can have coats for the coming winter so they won't freeze, or that the foodstores are running low and without the boar meat, people will starve.

But here's the deal:

Winter never comes. People do not starve.

But what if these events actually happen?

What if not enough food is gathered and people in the town actually DO start starving? What if winder DOES come and if there aren't enough coats made to keep people warm?

One of the things that The Elder Scrolls has always offered players is jobs. What if in order to supply armor, blacksmiths need materials. They would all start with a significant amount so players would be able to buy stuff, but it would start running out and more would have to be gathered.

Mines scattered throughout the lands (actual mines you can go into and mine ore and such) would allow mineral resources to be obtained. Farmland would allow for crops to be grown. An abundance of wild animals would allow for organic components to be gathered. I wouldn't mind going out and hunting boars for an hour if doing so actually meant something. So if you ask an NPC about work, and he tells you that he could use boar hides, it wouldn't be for no reason.

Speaking of winter coming, I think it is long past time for seasonal changes to start taking effect in MMOs. with different needs arrising with each season.

Let Tamriel be a living world in TESO...

That's a great idea. But it won't happen. If people do starve, that means content will be lost. If anything, it will be like WoW. They'll have a little quest description, some re spawning wolves to kill for the quest item, and you'll return.

However I really do love the idea, a dynamic world would be brilliant. Even if they could take advantage of the Phasing software.

It's not as if people have never thought of these things before, it's just impossible to do. Rockstar and Bethesda, with all their AAA title money and sandbox-y style games (I mean it in the more contemporary sense of a big world that feels 'real') can't implement weather systems or particularly great AI, or in-game economies etc., because you'd need to delicate a hundred people just to deal with the logistics and programming for the entire development time. Same with WoW - I'm sure they'd make it more dynamic if they could, but even on their mountain of cash it's still like asking Ferrari to make a car that flies.

these things kinda work like that in GW2 , just not to a very big extend. But for example Settlements can be overrun by Monsters, quite frequently in fact if players dont help, and that way you wont have a spawn point there and also no vendors and so on.

its pretty sweet. But as it stand it feels like thats not the way they go with TESO, instead they go with phasing.
Wich to me doesnt feel as good in an MMORPG

Actually, I was thinking of

Actually, I was thinking of ways to add content, rather than remove it...


If a town is in a state of famine, more dangerous sorts would start showing up in areas other than the seedier places. Common people would be begging for food. Taverns would be closed, or at least they won't be offering food, because it's gone. Imagine being a member of a player guild, and you come across such a town. You and your guild come in, clean up the streets, Feed the people, bring in crops and meat and other such things. Imagine your guild's banner being flown next to the town baner, as a way of honoring the saviors of the town.

A living world would consist of many conditional events. Stuff that players may never see if the conditions to trigger them are never met. But if they are, it would add to the sense of depth of the game. The one who resolves a conditional event like this would be remembered in the game's history. I'm sure a town record keeper would record the names of those who helped out in a time of crisis. Depending on the degree they help out, monuments, plaques, etc might show up.

On the contrary... In Arena and Daggerfall, they had seasonal changes. They swapped out textures used. The further back you go with TES, the more dynamic the worlds were. This CAN be added again. And an MMO would be the best environment to do it with.

In Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, the story is sort of compacted into a relatively small timeframe. With Arena and Daggerfall, the idea of a living world, at least aesthetically speaking, was a central focus with the player left to freely decide what he or she wanted to do..

So it is not impossible. It's just a question of whether they want to do it or not.

I assume that players could drive the mosters out of the town and people will come back, right?


Phasing gives an individual a sense of continuity, and therefor a relatively unique experience. It falls apart when for me a town is overrun by bandits and for my friend, it's still thriving and peaceful.

MMO developers really should start focusing on the dynamic world aspect again, where the world changes based on actions and everyone sees those changes. That way, if players would be upset that a settlement falls to bandits, they can be motivated to do something about it. Drive the bandits out and restore order.

It's sad that the further back you look at MMOs, the more alive the worlds felt, even though the technology of the time wasn't as good. Now we have technology that can really make the gameworlds feel alive, and they make them feel more and more bland.

They can get rid of phasing and create a single world when it actually becomes possible to keep adding and destroying content at a reasonable pace for thousands of people per server. I love seeing 'emergent' gameplay, and mechanics that make for interesting, sometimes unfair but amusing results (like a player founded cross-faction alliance that throws PvP askew), but in reality companies don't want that risk that all the content they spent five years making has just been wiped out by emergent mechanics, or complex and unpredictable systems like famine, plague or whatever destroying NPCs. We like to think the community will band together and go 'Oh we better help this starving town by boosting their economy,' but there's not much evidence that would actually happen. God I wish it would, and if I had 150 million I'd be willing to gamble on it by trying to make it, but I can understand why a lot of companies don't see it that way.

I can't wait for the gw2 coolaid to wear off on these people.

It isnt like that in TESO, they removed quest hubs, they give you choices. Theres probably story line you need to follow but they give basically more freedom/choices than normal MMORPG. Also it seems you can kill NPC's if you want to be villain. If you see monsters you just kill because you want it not because you need to complete your quest.

What if it isn't coolaid. What if it is really a step forward for the MMO genre? We won't know for sure until GW2 launches and has mass exposure.

I've only followed GW2 casually. But what I have seen, if it really works the way they say it will, looks far more interesting than what the genre has offered in a long time.

And if TESO takes on some of the same features? So what? It doesn't mean that TESO is a copy of GW2... It just means that we have two developers who "get it".

Agreed, everyone is drooling over GW2 now, at least group of people who follow this genre closely. Sites like MMORPG what let people vote whats the best game kind of causes this, so people think its the best of the best and lose control.

It was easier to do these things when game engines were primitive and expectations were lower. Like you said, in Arena and Daggerfall, changing seasons just required a swap of color palettes - in a fully rendered 3D game it's nowhere near as easy to do and make it believable. The games are more complex and the player base is more discerning.

So we can't do as much now, because the technology is better and people expect more? You're saying that the better that things can be done, the less can be done? It's sad, if it's true. And even sadder if it's not true, but we believe it to be so.

You realize Arena and Daggerfall were not multiplayer games correct?

To do such world wide change you would need to have servers go down for maintenance. If you want the world to "constantly change," you're asking for constant maintenance.

Modern players expect detail and depth.

For example, when you're limited to 2D models and 8-bit graphics,you can cover over 400 thousand square kilometers with randomly generated terrain (like Daggerfall did) and players will accept it. Trying to do something like that - to scale - with the quality players demand today (an interactive world accounting for every hill, tree, rock, and bush and fully rendered in 3D with high res textures and realistic physics) is vastly more difficult, even with current technology.

This is why as realism and detail increase, overall scale tends to decrease. (consider Daggerfall vs. Morrowind)

Or phasing.

So essentially build four different worlds and make three of them "transparent" at a time?

Here's an idea; for obvious reasons you couldn't have every town designed this way, but it's an interesting factor to play with:

There's a small town and a short, but safe distance away, there is a large bandit fort/cave. Players would have the choice of helping either the towns folk or the bandits. Joining each side allows you access to the resources of either side...(i.e: townsfolk offer better heavy armor material from their blacksmith, bandits have better light armor because of the plethora of hunters who gather hide for them.) If you join the bandits, they, and any other PC who also joined that side, fight against the town guards and opposite PC's who joined the townsfolk. A continual war is fought over the town and the bandit fort.

If the bandits win, the town is emptied, and the townsfolk evacuate to form a small tent village on some nearby hillside. (with less resources to trade with, hence the value of 'winning' the quest) In order to keep the quest ongoing, valuable NPC's simply disappear (during the attacks they always stay indoors, doors cannot be opened - barred from inside) And latter will appear at campsite. New-coming players will acquire the 'townsfolk' side of the quest here, and regroup with PC's and NPC's to retake the town.

The situation can be vice versa, with the bandits becoming displaced from their fort, and the left over bandit resistance forming on a similar hillside. This quest will never end, and safeties will be in place to ensure that the system cannot be manipulated.

In these battles we would be doing PvE and PvP with our 'own faction'...but in a controlled environment. Fighting only takes place within city limits, and you can only attack the people and NPC's on the opposite team - after having accepted the quest.

Sound like fun?

WoW, LOTRO and GW2 all do this. The problem is the immersion breaks when one person has completed a quest that initiates a phasing shift and another person hasn't. The trick is not to talk about it.

Player 1:"Hey there's a village over there!"

Player 2:"No there's not, it's just a ruin, a big dragon came down and burnt it all out."

Player 1: "Spoilers!"

Yeah, that'd piss me off. But that was pretty funny at the same time.

Seasonal changes, while they would be cool, are not really necessary and are not really what I wanted this thread to focus on.

In an MMO it is important that each player has a fun personal experience, but I feel that the game itself needs to be designed with the fact that it is an MMO firmly in mind. So yes. I believe that players should influence world state changes, either through action or inaction. Penalties that occur should be severe enough to convey the sense that something bad has happened, but not severe enough that it cannot be corrected.

during times of famine, people tend to act more violent as survival instinct kicks in. Food will clearly be scarce. As the health of the people diminishes due to starvation, and people start dying, disease could become a risk. And diseases have always been a part of TES gameplay, so there is precedence.

For me, if the world feels alive, it is more enjoyable. Especially if I can log on and have real problems to help solve.

Another thing I would hope to see is an approach to content deployment that takes into account places which do not see much player foot traffic. Ghost town areas tend to be a prevailing issue with themepark-based MMOs. Once players exhaust content in an area, they move on to another area. So you end up with places that later on aren't even visited. This is not as big of an issue during the early days of the game, when the player population is on the rise. But after it plateaus, or begins to fall off, it becomes very noticable. New players who go an extended period of time withou seeing any pre-existing players can be discouraging. It makes the gameworld feel dead.

So it is my hope that ZOS will be able to monitor the player traffic in each area of the game. And as they produce new playable content, I would like to see them located it an the places that see the least traffic. In this way, the player population does not keep moving further and further away from its roots. What if a dungeon that a player cleared early on now plays host to some new residents. If the game will be using instancing in logical ways, this would be one of them.

The post I was replying to was part of a sub-thread which was actually discussing the "simplification" changes that have taken place in single-player.

You've got some excellent points here. That would help a lot with the longevity of any MMO.

Longevity is the most important element for an MMO. The problem is that too many development decisions made by too many MMO developers are based on short-term goals to bring short term maximal profits. A living world that draws players in and makes them feel a part of it, which they can effect would keep those players in the game, and WANTING to be there. It really will help those who have reached endgame. The more people who stay coupled with the more people who join will mean more money ZOS gets to make.