EverQuest Next, p99, and on

[Calthaer]

Originally Posted by jcr4990 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

There is ABSOLUTELY a market out there. Just nobody has really gone after it and provided a decent product for that crowd in many many years.

A lot of this gets back to the business model of massively multiplayer games. People don't just buy the game once - they keep paying, month-after-month, for these games. It's not unreasonable for people to expect that, if they keep paying money, there should be new stuff to do with every installment of their payment.

Companies seem to solve this in a few different ways:

• "Mudflation": Make lots of new content that is just an order of magnitude higher (but effectively the same) as old content.
• Grinding: Take a little butter of content and spread it thin over a lot of bread simply by making you experience the same content over and over for a long time before you can hit the next piece.
• Player-versus-Player: In this model, other players are the content. EVE Online seems to have executed on this one pretty well.
• Expansion Packs: Make people pay a premium, additional fee for new content and a monthly fee just for access.

What it seems like nobody has done really well in an MMO is create a system for compelling and dynamically generated PvE content. Some single- or multi-player games have done this really well - e.g., the "random map" generators in things like Terraria, which manages to create a compelling-but-slightly-different world with each new event, and each world takes like 10-20 hours to complete. Dynamic content in a MMO might look like:

• A living economy that automatically creates "money sinks" to prevent inflation, and carefully manages supply and demand for items, money, etc.
• NPCs and NPC factions that have goals and aims and pursue them in various ways.
• A robust crafting system where the items that can be created are not fixed, but not entirely random, either. Minecraft's enchantment system does something a little like this.
• A game that intelligently takes into account the "metagame." E.g. - if too many people are playing magic-users, then more magic-resistant enemies start showing up. Don't constantly, manually tweak the classes to balance them - create rules so that the classes balance themselves (e.g., all "trainers" for Rangers now offer skill X that is designed to help correct trend Y shown in the play-data).

In short, the game should balance itself. "Zones," in this world, that are empty become gradually filled with harder (and wealthier) enemies until players show up to plunder it. Those enemies might not be the same every time - maybe new and different types of mobs would move in from adjacent areas (say, for example, that the orcs of Everfrost Peaks moved in and booted the gnolls out of Blackburrow). There should be advantages to keeping zones clear, and it should be hard to do so - enemy armies perhaps generate to swarm particular areas at certain times. Maybe creatures can gather resources and "farm" players the way players farm creatures - strategically preying upon weaker players to gain strength. "Good" NPCs should perhaps auto-write their own stories and interactions with players (like this chatbot, but dynamically written).

There is no practical way for any team of people to keep generating enough content for a player-base sizable enough to support them. Even with really great content scripting and generation tools. Make the system make its own content, give it the power to change the game, and give options to manually tweak as necessary. Take the principles of agile development and apply them to a living game world. Get routine feedback from players: randomly ask them "Did you have fun in the last hour / last night? How much (scale 1-5)?" and then correlate that with an event log to see what events occurred to create that fun. Create customer personas so that you can see what % of the player-base enjoys social functions, what % enjoy loot, what % enjoy high difficulty, what % enjoy crafting, what % are casual vs. "hard-core." In short: use the last 15-25 years of data analytics to the advantage of the developers so that they can know what to add or subtract to the world to maximize revenue while creating maximum value for the players.

No one out there seems like they're even thinking along these lines. MMOs are all intent on creating something like a theme park - the boring kind where you go with you drive hours to get to with your kids on a long, hot summer day and you stand in line on a concrete floor sticky with spilled soda and popcorn and condiments just to enjoy a one-minute ride. The kind of theme park with big, expensive roller coasters that are difficult to build and install. No one wants to pay for that any more. The digital world is learning to adapt through rapid change and analytics; subscription games that can't keep pace are going to be left in the dust.

Create an experience that is worth that fee, and people will pay it.