If there’s one game the MMO consumer really seems to enjoy, it’s playing “the next big thing” game. Hopeful fans project their best wishes forwards onto the next game, jaded players are certain that the next game is just “the next WoW clone,” and fervent players are certain the next game is the much-prophesied “WoW killer.” In each case, what brings us all together is looking at the next shiny toy. With TESO, Wildstar, and now, Archeage released, the horizon is looking pretty barren. EQ:Next is most likely the next big thing, but it’s still quite a ways off of being a thing.
In the recent Youtube release “Devs Talk of a Life of Consequence in Everquest Next,” we were given a really interesting reveal of what’s happening under the hood of Story Bricks and the proposed adaptive world of Norrath:Next. The real culmination of the video is the game-world simulation of a three NPC faction battle between Dark Elves, Dryads, and some really nasty deep dark beasties. Spoiler alert: in this simulation, the Dark Elves wind up winning. However, the really interesting statement comes from Stefan at Story Bricks noting that they didn’t know which faction would win. In other runs of the simulations the Dryads win, sometimes the deep dark wins. It could genuinely go any of the three ways and different servers are likely to see the event play out differently.
This idea of an adaptive world is, far and away, the most ambitious part of EQ:Next that we have been made aware of. Voxels got all of the hype last year and there’s been plenty of opportunity to see what a Voxel like world can look like with the EQ:Landmark beta playing out. But an adaptive world, where the various NPC factions dynamically create content based on, and driven by, the players agency is a complete upheaval of the classic MMO. In many ways, this aspect of EQ:Next is a graphically rich, massively multiplayer adaptation of the game Dwarf Fortress. For those who aren’t familiar, DF allows you to build and simulate a world of Dwarves, replete with drives and needs.
What EQ:Next is offering us is the promise of a game where the world is different each time you play. The things that happened while your character leveled up are now part of the history of the region. They are no longer available to new characters (yours or someone elses), but the content the new character has access to is itself material your first character didn’t experience while leveling. Even more jarring, were you to transfer servers (assuming that’s possible), the content and history of content on your destination server could very well be notably different than the one you came from.
This is, quite possibly, a genuine game changer in an MMO marketplace which is largely about refining and iterating a few recurring themes. The direction they are taking EQ:Next opens itself up to some genuine questions. In this list, I present five questions that we will hopefully see addressed over the next year.
1)How do you handle player griefing?
The video makes it pretty clear that PVP is opt-in only, but that you can support different sides of a conflict. This is certainly going to put players against each other in their agency and, for the most part, that’s a really interesting thing. Server dynamics and outside interaction potentially become important. Even more interesting, server drama no longer means “he camped my spawn.”
Assuming this plays out as billed, there will undoutedly be some frustration as your goals supporting one faction are offset by others advancing a countering action. That part seems like a natural, and possibly neat, part of the system. But that’s not the fellow that has me concerned. The fellow that has me concerned is that fellow who has no allegiances to any faction. He (or she I suppose) just kills. Wantonly, indiscriminantly, constantly.
That player exists. (S)he takes serious pride in just mucking things up for everyone. Wipe out a human village and then move on to destroy the dark elves who had been their opponents. In classic MMO’s, this player was held in check by artificial rules. Certain NPC’s weren’t targetable and you were PVP flagged for targeting others. How does EQ:Next handle both aspects of player conflict their system is designed to create? It’s not PVP, that’s made clear in the video.
Closing Thoughts
I want to make clear that I’m not playing naysayer here and I don’t want to be pedantic and suggest that “I’m just asking questions,” either. I am asking questions and they are, to me, fairly important questions. But I think EQ:Next deserves a ton of thanks for what they are striving for.
I haven’t found myself questioning how things would work in any MMO released in the past ten years. Sure, there were always questions but they were pretty bland questions (how many raids, how many dungeons, what’s the death penalty, yada-yada). EQ:Next is charting some serious new territory. The questions that come with it may seem fairly incredulous because the ideas driving them are potentially quite game changing.
To be clear, I want to play the game I see in the linked video. I’d be happy to toss money to play that game. I’m not sure it plays well as an MMO, but it would be an amazing single player or small-group coop game. Will it make a good MMO, though? Potentially. But MMO’s have player problems. A non-PVP sandbox, with extensive player agency, hasn’t been tried before with MMO population numbers.
Over the next year we will certainly learn more about EQ:Next. Some of our questions will be answered along the way, and those answers will certainly generate new questions. It’s actually pretty cool to have questions of this scope, though. Whether this all works or not remains to be seen. But it should be very interesting watching it develop.
What types of questions do you have about EQ:Next? What are your hopes/fears for this game? Are you planning on sitting in the middle of Freeport killing guards on patrol? Because if so, brother, get in line!
2)What is off-limits (flagship NPC’s)?
As with its iconic destinations, the EQ franchise has many famous NPC’s. Firiona Vie, Antonia Bayle, Lucan D’Lere, Mayong Mistmoore, Fippy Darkpaw, Garanel Rucksif and others were all key parts of bringing EQ1 and EQ2 Norrath to life. It makes sense that these people aren’t likely to be present in the next chapter of the franchise. Except Mistmoore perhaps? Others signature NPC’s will take their place certainly?
What’s off limits in a world of consequence?
If there’s one thing MMO’s have conditioned us, as players, to do is to stick a sword into anything with a Capitalized Name. Just seeing uppercase letters on a moving NPC makes me wonder what’s on the loot table. How does EQ:Next handle this? One way would be to resort to respawns and returns (in different places in the world perhaps) while another would be to simply replace the named leader with an heir. Maybe EQ:Next uses both, maybe neither?
3)Which points back to my first question. How do you preserve the dungeon and thrill of exploration in the face of players?
I would hope that in a modern MMO-market replete with ideas like open-tapping and personal loot, a game like EQ:Next could hearken back to classic MMO staples like vast, complicated shared dungeons. I certainly could see how instancing makes sense for the voxel-based randomized underworld, but it seems like EQ:Next is screaming for open-world shared dungeons. Is it?
4. How does this not turn into an unplayable lag-fest?
EQ:Next promises us a world where every single NPC has a set of motivations. Some of these motivations are individual (or more precisely role-specific) based on the NPC’s class-template. Warriors seek different things than do Priests, who in turn have different goals than do Mages. On top of those role-specific motivations like group motivations. The Dark Elves have one set of objectives, the Kobolds another, the Dryads still another.
Each of these group and individual motivations are turned into player content with the NPC’s and players participating in a principal-agent relationship. The NPC’s have needs that are fulfilled or obstructed, at least in part, by player actions. Content is generated dynamically in-game based on these needs and players in the vicinity are pointed to these needs via a player journal.
New game content from the developers largely becomes setting up events (Rallying Calls) that trigger off certain world conditions. These Rallying Calls can be placed in different parts of the world specific to how each server has evolved if I’m following the video correctly. Alternately, simply changing faction alignments creates whole new conflict possibilities. I can visualize patch notes now stating, “do to recent events at a wedding, the Frey faction is no longer aligned with the Stark faction. For the moment, the Frey faction alignment is tied to the Lannister faction. Please enjoy.”
How does this not turn into an unplayable lag-fest?
It’s a brilliant idea, but it’s going to require a fairly ridiculous amount of data generated, communicated, and responded to, nearly instantly. Each NPC needs constant status updates on the world around it. This in turn has to be processed into a set of “quests” or actions the NPC’s wish for players to engage in. That, then, has to be communicated to every player and this has to all keep up with the actions of the players (locusts, remember).
As a birds-eye level simulation, sure I get it. It works. As a single player game, I get it, it works. As a small-world cooperative emulator, I get it, it works. But how does that keep up with dense player clustering? In every MMO we have seen recently, player density and clustering behaviors wreak havoc on game stability. That’s in worlds where the NPC’s are functionally dumb-as-a-stump. In EQ:Next, the NPC’s are far more active than in any prior MMO, seeing that scale up will be very interesting.
The initial reveal of EQ:Next placed it firmly in the action combat category. In this, it’s not so much innovative as it is playing into the current hot-feature in MMO’s. The system revealed, and mirrored in what we see in EQ:Landmark, is one of wide cleaving area of effect attacks and splash it fireballs replete with red-splat warnings for avoidance checks.
advertisement
I am not a fan of this type of combat. I understand its short-term visceral appeal. Done right, it’s got a lot of potential to increase the engagement in combat. In practice, unfortunately, it winds up being little more than a different way to bang out a combat rotation while playing through the synchronized swim of boss mechanics. To quote one redditor discussing Wildstar combat: “backing up while spamming an attack isn’t all that engaging.” I’ve killed pirates in Conan, tanked BAM’s in TERA, slain all the fun bosses in the Secret World, and stabbed a few things in Neverwinter, I have seen more than a few action combat systems. While I haven’t played Wildstar, I understand that redditors quote.
But that’s not my concern for EQ:Next. My concern involves how this aoe-fest style of combat works within a world of consequence. Picture a scenario. You come across a farm being invaded by orcs. Everywhere you look, farmers are fighting orcs. You decide you are going to jump in and help. Farmers? Orcs? Whichever, it’s your choice. Remembering it’s a world of consequence, you make a choice. Your actions will change the future of the region. This isn’t a far-fetched scenario, it’s drawn directly from a release reveal of EQ:Next from their own developer team.
But how does that mesh with an aoe-fest action combat?
You jump in to help the (farmers/orcs) and walk up to the nearest (orc/farmer) and mightily swing your weapon. It winds up hitting both the farmer and orc fighting and now both (and their respective groups) register you as a combattent out to harm them.
The thing is, I can see how this works in a tab-targeting world. It’s not that tab-targeting is superior, it’s that it’s more precise. If I want to kill (orcs/farmers), I have the freedom to target (orcs/farmers).
This question isn’t so much about my preferences for one system over the other, although clearly my bias frames how I think about the question. I genuinely want to find that place where orcs are fighting farmers. I absolutely want to help one of them. I don’t want the combat system to get in the way of enjoying that world.
What does this mean for dungeons and other classic Norrathian capitals?
The EQ franchise has numerous iconic dungeons that players will be looking forward to. Crushbone, Unrest, Guk, Befallen, Blackburrow, Castle Mistmoore and others (just to stick to vanilla EQ) are all parts of iconic Everquest.
How does an adaptive world of consequence handle NPC outposts and dungeons?
In places like Gukta and Crushbone, you can kind of see how the idea of an adaptive AI plays perfectly to those zones. The Guk dungeon was built around the premise of a constant fight between the upper level living frogloks and the lower level undead. The gates of Guk features a conflict between Trolls and Frogloks. That idea of a three-faction conflict centered around control of the Guk fortress/dungeon has some really great promise to it.
5. What happens when players actually show up?
German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke coined the military theorem commonly expressed as ‘no plan survives contact with the enemy.’ In military theory, it’s the realization that war is dynamic and requires adaptiveness. This quote, though, could easily be adapted to MMO-space by simply noting ‘no game system survives first contact with the players.’
MMO players have been compared to Locusts. It’s not the most flattering analogy, but it’s not exactly an incorrect one. MMO players congregate around, consume, and move through content at an alarming pace. It’s a pace faster than any development house can keep up with, hence the promise of an adaptive world AI. But can a world AI survive first contact with the players?
Picture a video of a Wal-Mart opening up on Black Friday (the shopping day immediately after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday). That’s what every starting zone looks like in every MMO launched in the past fifteen years. In an MMO world where players can choose to side with virtually any NPC race, every NPC race will be chosen. In a world of consequence, this means every village, every campsite, every moving NPC object will be attacked and (most likely) destroyed. How does an AI keep pace with that?
Picture the landscape of Mars. Is that what a starter zone will look like after a week of player exposure? This isn’t entirely speculation on my part. It’s exactly what happened to Ultima Online. They originally built a dynamic, reactive ecosystem. Brilliant in concept, until every living, breathing animal was killed in short order. Their solution: the static spawned NPC world we have come to accept as the norm in MMO’s. EQ:Next is overturning an old card here, what’s their solution to it’s accompanying problem?
没有评论:
发表评论