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Dynamic World
Taerrik
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
Wow, the dev update was amazing, seeing all of the effects weather had on everything has me really excited. An alive feeling world is one of the key ingredients for someone like me to stick around for the long term and this looks like AoC is going to nail that completely.
Now I have so many questions and suggestions about all the things that can be put in a dynamic world I thought a discussion would be fun.
To start off, I am a PvE main, I like to do dungeons, do bosses, gather, and craft. This is my 90% gametime activity in games with PvP being the rest. Seeing the dragon flying around in the background was pretty cool. So how can such things dynamically affect my gameplay? That is what I am interested in talking about. Things like gatherables not being available in certain seasons.
1) Looking at mechanics as basic as monster/animal spawning. Can my normal stomping grounds have this mechanic heavily impacted by node growth in this area as well as seasons/weather? Can already spawned entities be encouraged to migrate based on server conditions? If they normally hang out in area A but its flooding or too much snow, maybe they will want to walk over to area B now?
2) In the alpha test, we had a handful of world bosses, but they spawned on a timer, and always in the same location. This kind of thing isnt exciting to me since I will feel like I have to play the game by a certain clock and do activities at a certain time always. Maybe these bosses change their availability based on server conditions. Maybe a dragon that lives in a certain mountain range will decide it wants to move to a different one if other conditions are met.
3) NPC vendor costs. Scarcity of material could impact the cost of things we normally buy from vendors.
Just some thoughts to think about, any other dynamic world ideas to talk over would be neat to discuss.
Now I have so many questions and suggestions about all the things that can be put in a dynamic world I thought a discussion would be fun.
To start off, I am a PvE main, I like to do dungeons, do bosses, gather, and craft. This is my 90% gametime activity in games with PvP being the rest. Seeing the dragon flying around in the background was pretty cool. So how can such things dynamically affect my gameplay? That is what I am interested in talking about. Things like gatherables not being available in certain seasons.
1) Looking at mechanics as basic as monster/animal spawning. Can my normal stomping grounds have this mechanic heavily impacted by node growth in this area as well as seasons/weather? Can already spawned entities be encouraged to migrate based on server conditions? If they normally hang out in area A but its flooding or too much snow, maybe they will want to walk over to area B now?
2) In the alpha test, we had a handful of world bosses, but they spawned on a timer, and always in the same location. This kind of thing isnt exciting to me since I will feel like I have to play the game by a certain clock and do activities at a certain time always. Maybe these bosses change their availability based on server conditions. Maybe a dragon that lives in a certain mountain range will decide it wants to move to a different one if other conditions are met.
3) NPC vendor costs. Scarcity of material could impact the cost of things we normally buy from vendors.
Just some thoughts to think about, any other dynamic world ideas to talk over would be neat to discuss.
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2) The open world bosses, no matter how static or random their location and respawn timing is, will be taken down by players that are willing to fight other players. How do you see a PvE group fitting into this?
3) I put that as NPC gameplay, which I dont care for in mmos.
I'd rather stick with players factoring price costs in nodes, not the game itself, depending on how high taxes are.
As for materials, that's a player to player transaction. Npcs have nothing to do with it.
Can I ask you why you dont PvP?
Stomping ground is an area you normally play in. Maybe I am just old and young people dont get it.
Yes the world bosses will be contested by players, I dont care or mind that at all, I want to discuss them not being on such a predictable and static timer than we have a website tracker that tells me when to log in and to go where to kill or fight for a boss. I want to discuss the bosses and mobs instead being dynamic to the world situation.
Why should animals weak to the cold remain in an area during winter, instead of migrating.
Why should bandits or monsters just continue to mindlessly pathfind in the open plains during a thunderstorm and not go to a nearby shelter to mindlessly pathfind around there instead.
This topic is for how to discuss the world being more alive, and not how to avoid pvp. There are dozens of threads about players not wanting to pvp already and this is not one of them I would have posted there.
And when it comes to mobs migrating, even w/o considering the coding difficulties that might bring, Intrepid want to have resource scarcity based on world events. If you have a super rare bunny that only spawns when there's snow around, you'll value its loot way way more when it's summer. But if you have that bunny now spawn on a snowy mountain, the loot is not removed from the server loot pool, it's just moved. Yes, it'll move some player money around, but the resource itself won't be scarce. At least that's how I currently understand the system. I might be wrong.
I don't entirely disagree, but even still, you went from 500 bunnies in all the fields in the region, to 50 on the tops of a few mountains. There'll be an economic impact there regardless, even if they're highly sought after.
There are now fewer of them, so supply is restricted and can't meet the same demand as it once did. (Obviously this can be negated by poor tuning, but why assume poor tuning? They'd just fix it.)
They are now more work to get to (having to go climb whatever mountain and deal with whatever mobs guard it, or whatever travel hazards or travel time is involved), and it's not worth it until the prices are above a certain point. A certain point that would, normally, be strange to see in winter when they're abundant.
These sorts of things would function more like soft caps on the difficulty of acquiring certain goods, and serve as a way that devs could tune the economic factors involved. Some things you want unavailable when the seasonal stock runs out. Some things you just want rare.
This sort of bottleneck could even play right into the intended style of Ashes of Creation by creating a situation where people going to a central location to compete over limited resources that are in high demand may need to deal with PvPers either trying to steal their hides on the way back down, or guilds wanting to control the spawn areas. Something you don't get with 'absolute scarcity'.
And as long as the cherry doesnt conflict with the cake being there, who cares. It's just extra work and costs to an alrdy very detailed and complex game.
Hopefully people can post good suggestions. Ill just read from now on.
As a crafter main, things like this will encourage me to adjust my practices heavily.
Do I keep a reserve stock in the bank to have enough for the season change kind of questions. Instead of selling everything I craft and make I could always hold on to reserve stock, at the cost of bank space.
BDO did this once, for an event. It's not that they spawned randomly and freely, but that they spawned in unusual locations (specific to the event). It was mostly just annoying. While encountering a world boss in the wild would be somewhat memorable, having them spawn in random locations just made it difficult to assemble people to fight them.
This sort of thing would work great for "secret" bosses that only spawn more rarely (to be sighted by explorers), but for world bosses that people will be fighting on the regular? It's only good in theory.