You're about a decade too late assholes.
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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This could be the End of the World
of Warcraft.
I don't think Blizzard understands how to make a social game, and I'm beginning to realize they never did. The game used to be more social, but it seems like that was by accident instead of by design.
Like, you used to have to use the chat channels to find a group for a dungeon run. That forced you to chat. When they added dungeon finder, you didn't need to chat anymore, making it less social. When they made cross-realm things happen, zones felt less lonely which was good for being social, but then it meant that you no longer ran into all the same names over and over, so you stopped knowing people. That was really bad for social things because it meant that people who behaved badly didn't get a bad reputation and people who behaved well didn't get a good reputation.
This is a great feature given the current state of the game. But, I wonder if it will have the unintended side effect of making the community even more toxic.
That reminds me, I haven't experienced a MMO that was successful at fostering a community since asheron's call for the reason you describe.
The game didn't have any of the "quality of life" features you can find in modern games, no fast travel, no markets, no difficulty indicator, if you wanted to travel to another region, it was a quest in itself or you'd have to beg top levels players to escort you there or open a portal for you, and since you could only hold a single portal to a location if you were a high enough level mage (I think) it wasn't that easy to find.
Death was punishing, you'd lose most of your gear and you'd have people begging for help to retrieve it on every village square and because that actually mattered, it's something you could do out of good will or for a fee.
The only way to get good gear was to get it from player who could craft, and since crafting was bitch to level up, guilds were the only one who could afford it.
Oh and that's not really a part of the game, but internet was young and games didn't yet have hords of people dissecting game and dumping every possible details on wikis or at least not as fast. So actually discussing quest, place and strategy with people mattered.
PVP was rough, no level limit, barely any zoning, a level 60 could camp your noob spawn and grief you forever, until you asked your guild for help and it turned into a week long manhunt to punish the griefer.
To be honest I don't remember if the game has quests, a few I guess, mostly forgettable, most of the good memory I have from the game were from player induced adventures.
The game did eventually end up having all the tools you'd expect a community to build including XP allocation optimiser for cookie cutter built and a large database, which fucked it up, people would race their glass canon to level 60, kill a couple of the highest level monsters and get bored.
I wonder how you could build a game like that nowadays without the community ruining it with a wiki.
The sad thing is, I think those days are 100% over. With data mining, wikis, etc. I think there will never be a game that's played mostly in-game with in-game tools, with people chatting in-game about how to do overcome various challenges the game throws at you. The world has just moved on. I never played something as hardcore as Ashron's Call in the early days, but I do miss the early days of WoW when so much more of the fun was player-driven, and there was so much more interaction with other players.
I think that's one reason why D&D is seeing an increase in popularity. It's a game where you can optimize things to some extent, but because it's human-driven, a DM can mitigate that somewhat. It's also inherently social, and it's impossible to data-mine, and difficult to min-max because each campaign is different and many DMs have slight variations on the set rules.
Well, the opposite might be possible as well. An AI and genetic algorithms could keep a world ever evolving making information obsolete over time and since we know data mining will happen, I'd look at making it a game mechanic somehow.
Some of my favourite games use procedurally generated maps. But, those maps are not hand-sculpted the way MMO dungeons are. And, while you could certainly use generative AI to come up with generic babble from NPCs, that's not the same as designing entire quests. It may be that eventually a generative AI system will be able to do everything a human could have done: hand-crafted maps, full quest chain dialogue, etc. I just think we're nowhere near that point yet.
For example, a quest chain almost always has a goal behind it. You're revealing a certain aspect of the story to the player bit by bit as they complete parts of the quest. But, to do that you need at least a very basic theory of mind. You need to understand what the player knows before the quest chain starts, what each bit of the quest chain will add to their knowledge, and then what they'll understand at the end of the quest chain. That "theory of mind" stuff is the thing that generative systems just can't do right now because they're just fancy auto-complete.
As for auto-generated dungeons, WoW tried that with Torghast in the Shadowlands expansion, and it was not well received. Granted, part of the problem was that Torghast was a depressing, death-themed "dungeon". But, a bigger issue was that there was no intention behind the design of the levels. It was just a randomized set of corridors that fit together in a random way. Good dungeon designs require intention. You want to reveal something to the player as they go through the dungeon. Ideally you want to know that you're working your way towards a boss. WoW's black temple raid is a good example of this. You start in the sewers, you work your way out into a courtyard, you enter another building, clear out the ground floor and open a door that unlocks access to a set of staircases that works its way to the top of the building. You beat the Illidari council which allows you to access a door that opens to the roof of the building where you face the final boss Illidan. I don't think generative AI is anywhere near being able to come up with a concept like that, let alone design the maps and art for the whole thing.
I wasn't thinking of an AI generating the world map and dungeon. I was more thinking of an AI driving the agency of world actors. It doesn't have to have a complete theory of mind, a reactive AI or limited memory AI, aka "chess engine" could "simply" drive the opposing faction.
We could imagine a war scenario, where the AI plays one side and the players the opposite and the effect of war would naturally change the world. That town where the wiki tells you you could buy that cute horse? Well too bad the AI invaded it or reduced it to rubbles. The HQ where the commander is supposed to be, well it moved back 20 clicks after the last player attack, etc...
The AI doesn't really need to understand the purpose of its objective.
Of course it's a frigging huge undertaking, it would probably cost the GDP of a small country and need it's own nuclear powerplant to run (hello Microsoft!) but not impossible with today's tech.
That's one thing I've always admired about Eve Online. It's an MMO that's almost entirely player driven. Various sectors of space change hands between different factions of players. That results in the sorts of things you're talking about. Unfortunately Eve has extremely boring space battles (for players, for watchers it can be fun), and a toxic community.
But, I've always wanted an RPG where the world evolved. To me, the key thing to make that realistic would be NPCs that didn't respawn. Like, if you killed a certain golden dragon named Gurnadom, that dragon was dead, gone, nobody else could kill it. There would be no Gurnadom killing guides because there was only ever one Gurnadom and only one group of players ever killed that dragon. There might be tips on killing golden dragons, but each dragon was unique so it wasn't a matter of watching videos and understanding the patterns. Each fight against a golden dragon could only happen at most once, and every fight was unique.
And, in any game involving war, there should be permanent destruction of things: fortresses that were attacked would take damage over time and eventually be turned into rubble. A side that's winning a war should be expanding its territory. As a result, where a player can safely go should depend on the progress of the war, which is something not programmed into the game, but player driven.
I'm just so tired of the WoW style of MMO where the player is "The Champion" who has saved the world multiple times... along with the hundreds of other nearby players who are all the one-and-only champion who also killed a certain raid boss over and over every week for a month.
Oh and I never actually tried Eve. It was great to read summaries of the big events but actually playing it seemed more like a 9-5 job than a game.
I remember reading, a "how-to start in eve" and thinking "hell no, I'm already doing that shit in the office".
Yes, I totally and entirely agree with all of that. I also would love to see permanent impact of actions on the world and ditch player is the chosen one, hero of the ages paradigm like the 2k other players.
Let design a game together and we'll just need a 100 millions $ to produce it :D
This is great for me. While I enjoyed raiding with a guild back in Wrath all those folks moved on and I find it harder to make those connections as I get older. Plus the toxicity which has always lurked in dungeon finder and LFR. This lets me play the game solo.
I agree, but at this point it kills the value for me. Why am I paying for the game and a monthly subscription?
This game used to be social and about working together. They should have pulled the plug years ago.
This content is the lowest common denominator. It is the easiest baby mode raid. You do not get end game gear (except for weird kinda quest rewards you get for beating the last boss on any difficulty). This is literally only there so someone who doesn't interact with people or cannot physically do the raid for disability or skill can expirance it and see the cutscenes. This is inclusion not erosion.
There is still a large community around the harder contents and if you want real gear you have to still group.
I almost always played solo because I liked exploring and crafting and doing things at my pace. Whenever I had a group, I felt like I was pressured to move move move and finish as much as possible without absorbing the environments or reading the matching story lines.
I was able to finish a few of the low level instances, but was rarely able to find a group to run with and thus usually just skipped over any quests that required them. Sure, picking up some legendary gear would be nice, but I would have just loved the option to stroll through these quests on my own.
Exactly! This is why this was added. It doesn't take away from the people who group to push hard content. It just allows casual people to experience the game.
It's still pretty social, the article title is extremely misleading. They can't do raids solo, they can only do the final fight, with an AI controlled group, for the purpose of non-raiders seeing the end of the story line. There are no loot rewards for it either, it's just story.
Yeah it's always really stupid how articles come out and say something misleading and people who don't play anymore just believe it or horribly misconstrue it
That's the part I always hated. It was hostile towards people who liked the lore but didn't want to group up with some guy named LaserButt4000 who didn't want to go to the same dungeon as you, but was happy to get your rare loot in a bad roll of the dice.
Private servers with scaling for dungeon soloing were a godsend. WoW is actually awesome as a single player game. It's unfortunate the devs never realized that.
Somebody tell FFXIV, I'd go back in a heartbeat.
You can actually. FF14 let's you run "trusts" which are just dungeons where your party is a bunch of NPC bots drawn from the story's roster.
The only thing you can't do it for iirc is the end game raids, but those are generally not connected to the main story very directly.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaat? That's awesome. Thanks for letting me know!
No problem! It's actually handy for learning dungeons and stuff cuz you can watch the NPCs who rarely mess up their positioning.
I could not figure out how to get acquainted with people on there.