And the NPC lived happily ever after...

Or not, if you plunged your +2743409 Sword of Everlasting Beatdown into his chest. But that wasn't even the point of your adventure. It was the journey to get to that moment of defeating the big bad NPC... At least, it would be if you weren't playing that story out in an MMO, where 50,000 people had played it out before you...

My latest blog is straddling the fence between a dev blog and a rant. I had the very cool opportunity to get to sponsor this years IMGDC in Minneapolis, Minnesota (kudos to Jonathan Stevens and Last Straw Productions for pulling it off again), and while I was out there, sort of do some shameless promotion (and for those of you who went, you'll probably agree that I was shameless about it, haha). Also, I got to sit in on a number of really informative sessions, panels and roundtables pertaining to various issues surrounding persistent worlds and MMO's.

One of the roundtables proved to be more of a hoot than others, and that was the "RP vs XP" roundtable, which seemed to have a few AAA MMO developers in attendance. Without going into a huge amount of details, I think it's needless to point out that just by the name of the roundtable, feathers on both sides of the issue can get ruffled- and in a very professional way, that's what happened (after all, it's not exactly the forums). In any event, one thing that I took away from the roundtable was something a particular developer stated. Even though it ruffled my own feathers, he was very correct. It pertained to the opening up of persistent worlds to more dynamic use (and abuse) by users, with features such as dynamic content, quests that allow for failure, striving for more "unique" content, and designing features that naturally allow roleplaying to affect a game in ways that did not involve Old English. His response, in so many words:

It's too hard.

Now, that's what ruffled my feathers, even though I understood what he meant. And not even those words themselves, but just the one in the middle: too. That word denotes that the amount of effort required is prohibitive. It amounts to giving up. Someone else pointed out that what I wanted with all those features was not an MMO, but a virtual world...

But... Isn't that exactly what an MMO is supposed to be? Especially the ones with "RPG" tacked on the end of them? Like I said, it was an interesting roundtable, and good points were brought up about many issues, and I think at the end there was some level of agreeing to disagree at the table, but that line was mostly drawn by the amount of work involved, as well as the amount of risk- a very big deal for the larger companies, the developers readily (and rightly) admit.

However, I'm not one to mince words, so I'll just state my position on the matter: It is entirely possible, and should have been done already.

Throughout the conference, I took every opportunity I could to molest the gaming press into checking out my PC-NPC chat demo, including firing up the laptop at the after-party (I'm a whore for self-promotion... it's all good). That Sunday, I added another feature to the conversation system called "familiarity"- better known as "short-term memory". It's something of a buffer between the PC and the NPC where the PC has to work a bit harder to get acquainted to an NPC before they can have "deeper" conversations (or before the NPC decides to offer a quest to the PC).

And speaking of NPC's giving quests to PC's... How would you go about generating quests? It's a rhetorical question...

1) Old School: Hire writers. Give them lore book covering the world they're working on. Make them write out quests for PC's to follow. Insert into game.

2) School So New That It's Not Even Open Yet: Hire Writers. Give them lore book covering world they're working on. Take into account the factions/races/classes/professions/locations of NPC's. Make them write out parts of stories that can be reassembled in such a way as to make sense when done by a server. Make functions that will do that without making writers want to chase you down with pitchforks and torches. Insert into game. Succeed. Or Fail. Then whichever happens: Adapt and adjust it.

Okay, so I admit that the school in #2 was actually touched on slightly by Anarchy Online's mission generation system. But the system was about as far as I've seen anyone go. The potential of it, should it be expanded to encompass much more complex plots, is enormous...

::cliffhanger::