Persistant world where monsters stay dead

[Mabrukk]

Hi!
I hope this thread will create some intersting discussion, so I will make this first posting rather short.

I would love to play in a persistant world where the evil monsters stay dead after being killed. Or if they return than for a reason. But i realy hate dump mob spawning. Why killl something when it returns after a short while.

Imagine this: Deep underground lives a big mother spider. She\'s laying small black eggs day in, day out and the tiny little spiders hatch and grow. When growing above a certain number they start to leave the mother\'s cave and explore the world, mainly to find food. Like yummy little NPC kids or such.

So in close vicinity to the cave there will be no NPC crafting, farming or selling stuff. So there have to be mighty PC heros to come and kill the tiny spiders. And the larger ones...

Then, finally, after more than 20 mighty heros joined their strength, the evil mother spider is slayn and the land is freed! After an our later the big mother spider respawns :-(

So I would opt for a world, where monsters have a reason to exist. No need for strong AI in those monsters, just some simple rules they follow (minimum space for new spidys to hatch etc.) to make them behave more realistic. And when they\'re dead they stay this way.

So much for my \"short\" first posting.

[Moogie]

So where would the larger, \'mother\' monsters come from? According to your suggestion they shouldn\'t just spawn in for no reason.

If they died permanently, what would all the hundreds of other players do to gain xp?

[Kixie]

i dont agree at all. the whole genre of mmorpg has revolved around every player getting the same chance at experience and the same gameplay while being massively online. if there were one set of monsters that could die and never come back then very soon the monsters would be gone and no one would be able to kill them again. so one person would kill your momma black spider and she could never be killed again. in theory it could work out but every time monsters ran out the developers would have to work thier magic and come up with a whole story for why this monster got here and what its doing, and well its all very confusing and the developers would go crazy, gravity would give up, up would be down, down would be up and the universe would explode. then we would have a situation on our hands wouldnt we...

The world is flat i say!

[Fish]

I think it is possible to pull this off.  However to do this way you?re thinking the world would have to be utterly massive.  Way larger than any other game has ever been.  It would pretty much have to work on the same ground rules that our real-world works on.  You would have to have large breeding grounds were monsters can be born and grow up.

I suppose the real question, is that practical?  You don?t get something for nothing.  This means the computer running the game has to keep track of all of this.  Somebody would have to program all of the nuances of the breeding program into the system.  I don?t think you?re going to find a game that doesn?t have to take some shortcuts to get the job done.  Good enough is good enough.

It might be better to pay more attention to how monsters spawn.  It might be possible to simulate breeding by spawning monsters in various age groups. Then have an algorithm that will remove lower age groups and grow them up.  When they get a critical mass they do something like start attacking a city. This might not be a perfect solution I think it would be reasonably easy to deal with.

Unfortunately there are no perfect solution.  Only ones that are good enough.

[paxx]

If Player characters stayed dead?then I see no problem with monsters staying dead?but wait they don?t. and even if they did, player characters would respawn?hmmmm, but if we made a game where no new players characters  where added for say 20 game time years (200 if playing an elf) and they where permanently killed then I think we could find a balance.

This would of course be because you have to take into account that there is a limited population of everything and it needs time to rebuild.


I don?t know why I responded to this other then I think people should truly think about what they ask for and possible repercussions.

No monster spawning, and no returning of monsters has been played around with a lot by the dev team. But if this is the case, then as players gain the upper hand on the monsters, there will be fewer and fewer places for newbie?s or midlevel to go?since all the high level people cleared them out. Not to mention what happens when the last monster is dead :-).

But in essence I agree that I would like and end to franchise RPGs, where everyone has almost the same experience playing the game. This is not the game to do it (yet) but also I do not think that the MMORPG is the place to do it?perhaps a NSMORPG (not so massive role playing game) with a server life span, might be the trick. The world has X amount of resources few replenish at all, and the ones that do are on a ?seasonal basis? of player abuse their resources, they don?t come back.

I think this idea has merit, but game servers would have a true life, in that they start at X and end at X, the appeal for many is shot in this. But if done right, it would be a legitimate type of game. The issue with this is that if players are not conscious of resource management. The server will die a quick death. And sign up for a certain server would probably only be 3 months and life of the server about 12 months real time.

Interesting idea, good idea for a Open Source project since this would not have great monetary appeal. And if done right, say 1000 accounts max. with some matrix so that players only have 2 characters per server and can be only on 3 servers at a time it might work?but you risk mass exodus when a new server is started and of one (other game) guild taking up all the slots.

Many difficult social issues that the program has no account of?but a nice idea.

[Wedge]

It certainly ain\'t the type of thing you would be making a small open source project for, but I always thought a lifespanned ORPG game would be perfect for making an online LotR game.  The Ring starts out lost, very far away from Mount Doom and Sauron.  It could be lying around on the ground, or a fish could have eaten it and it comes to some fisherman, or some monster has it and is hiding.  Everyone in the world pursues the Ring for Sauron or to destroy it, and it ends when one of the two happens.  It would be like a whole new LotR story everytime.  Ummm yeah I guess that\'s sorta off-topic, but that would rule.

[Fish]

To Paxx Mostly.

I suppose if you have a bunch of different servers you can run with modified rules on each one.  One could have the typical spawn monsters, another with a set number of monsters.  However the ability to obliterate a particular monster type seems problematic at best.

At the very high end the player will only really be able to kill the serious bad guy once.  That would mean if you have 20 of them after 20 high-end adventures you?re done.  It would seem almost as bad as permanent death, all the skill with nothing to do.  And building 10,000 separate high-end adventures so that you can kill them only once would seem like a lot of work.  I suppose you could make the case that if one dies another one will take its place filling the power vacuum.  But isn?t that the same thing as a spawned monster?

You can have an area where characters couldn?t possibly kill all the monsters because it?s way too large.  I suppose you could also have the breeding grounds protected by some very large nasty big Brother type monsters.  Then there is the whole how fast do they grow up question.  Or put a different way how do you balance out the attrition rate with the birth rate and the need for characters to gain experience killing them. It would seem simple but when you add the factor that attrition rates would vary greatly over the course of a week it makes it not so predictable.

With a few simple modifications spawning monsters doesn?t have to look so fake.  I believe if done correctly it might be indistinguishable from a permanent kill system.  For instance try to get them to spawn out of sight.  If your spawning a named monster have a random name.  You can even have a randomized monster type but still keep it in the same power range.  Then when you get a quest have the random name/monster mentioned in it.  If you kill too many monsters in a particular area have the spawn point temporarily shut down.  Having the monsters travel patterns be more complex would also add to the illusion.

[Mabrukk]

I\'m happy that so many people replyed, even if a lot did criticise.

To Mogura:
Yes, there has to be some spawning of a kind, of course. For all those poor players to get there much needed XP ;-) Even though I thought that in a largely skillbased system like Planeshift you can only increase that much skills by killing monsters... but, well, what do I know?
The Ubermonsters would habe to be created by the devs or gamemasters (which AFAIK could be two seperate groups). There could even be a quest for evil players to create (set free) a big bad mom-monster. Or there could be events setting free such beasts (like digging to deep in search for precious metals, hint, hint). And those monsters should be so big and powerful (or maybe only killable with a certain artifact) that\'s it\'s a major event to kill them. An event where all paricipating PCs get many XP...

To whemyfield:
Well... I don\'t think so, too. When I read the interview with one of the devs (Luca) at
http://www.warcry.com/scripts/news/view_news.phtml?site=15&id=8889
I got the strange idea that THIS MMORPG is about giving every person the chance to do some RPG (whoopy - those 3 letters even apeare in the abrv. of the whole game genre - unlike XP...).

To Fish (first post):
To let the monsters grow is a good idea in my opinion. And to have them attack the newbe regions could be done if not to often. But if this could happen the mighty highlevel (even though there are no levels mentioned in the description or demo game of PS) chars would have to protect the community, the traders, the builders - well all the noncombatants.

To paxx, Wedge, Fish (snd post):
I didn\'t have a limited server lifetime in mind nor would I ever think of proposing a game where players only die once (which is the reason i didn\'t go to arkhard). I want a world where I can live forever and return from death by Talads or Laanx\' grace or just because I know some cool mages!

I don\'t want all monsters being limited. The rats proposed in one \"design some monsters\" thread are a perfect example for monsters spawning all the time. But it would be nice if one could try to make an rat infested city more or less rat free. A job where noobs can  make their first steps.

And I repeat: The big ones should be realy big. Maybe within the first year of a server running there are no players able to kill the Uberboss - why should there be? And there is a commercial MMORPS coming, doing what I porpose, horizon. Look at the web sites. Yes, it took them 6 year to develope the game - but PS is open source and maybe there are enough people to contribute that we have ongoing fun without just playing hi-res nethack!

That from me...

[kronon]

My opinion is somewhere in the middle.

I think there should be some spawning, just because we need the creatures to get xp. But the should be spawned in \"remote\" location, you could call it spawn area\'s. Now when they have a cool ai and realy walk around, than they would walk across villages, roads, buildings, caves. This way you can make places \"safe\" and have some time before you have to clean the places you want to have safe (safe a city from the ). On the other side you still have spawning, so the monsters will keep comming and every one can get xp if they want to (just walk to the spawnfields).

Just my 2 Euro cent\'s.

[paxx]

In all reality, these are all worthy goals.

In essence making the spawns not really spawns but migratory and nomadic, have rat and insect nests with super fast incubation/gestation in many cases.

The major issue is unique naming and migratory with dynamic yet controlled locations and ends. (so 200 high end orcs are not suddenly in a newbie area as their new home)

This is all a desirable goal. But ATM well beyond  our capabilities. Migration and tweaking of monster population in relation to player population and activity would be a wonderfull thing to figure out?but I?m not sure we can do that without a few years of data. Or by buying some data from games that already exist.

But in the end, perhaps a far off release will have many of the things you are asking for.  

I just don?t think you realize the amount of effort that would need to be made to do it to where it works at all.

As for just having this happen with important mobs, this too would require that we have a long long set of replacements and set of quests based on each new set.

The sets can be randomly named (just not use character names)

All in all it can be done, but perhaps we should wait on the Pentium X :-)

[Davis]

Hey, players just kinda appear when they create their account. The monsters are just creating accounts. In the game world, people just kinda spontaniously generate, so why shouldn\'t monsters?
Think about it that way.

[Kailudi]

Complete Noob here...never even played a MMORP

How about PC monsters?  The above example about spawning creatures (spiders, rats, , etc.) gave me the idea that it might be interesting to play one of them (albeit one of a little more intelligence).

You could grow larger  and acquire skills that would let you organize and control smaller creatures of the same species and develop special attacks(poison,etc.) and defense (heat vision...)  lot\'s of possibilities.

Your job?  acquiring food (other PC\'s ) for your spawn, luring adventurers into traps,...

Of course the roleplaying would be essential, but it would make a trip to the local spawning ground a little different.

[Kiva]

I like the idea of when your character dies, it stays dead, or the way it\'s done in Ultima Online, where you have to venture back to town as a ghost, and find a priest willing to resurrect you, and you have to return to your body, to get your stuff back.

I\'ve also seen a game where characters stay dead, and it\'s only available to the utmost rich/powerful people to get resurrected, as a treat from their god or something, and where the world slowly evolves from stone-age environment into some future scifi thing. It seemed fun, but I don\'t know what happened to it.