7 ms·
Halo Creator Unveils Its Next Masterpiece, a Persistent Online World
- huhtenberg 14y agoLooks spectacular, but why does it have to be a shooter? I still hope that someone will eventually make a large scale world exploration game. Journey on steroids, basically.
- OmarIsmail 14y agoI think this will become a lot more prevalent after the Oculus Rift + whatever Oculus spawns gets some traction. With the Rift it feels like you're actually _there_ so just exploring becomes a lot more immersive and engaging.
- tchock23 14y agoI completely agree... I'm hoping the Oculus opens up a new style of gaming that isn't focused on shooting and competitive gaming and instead centers instead around immersion and cooperative gaming. While I'm known to play the occasional FPS now and again, I'm really bored of the format and want something new.
- Nikolas0 14y agoSounds like a great idea, especially now that the idea of doing this for real is becoming a reality :)
- geuis 14y agoAgreed. I've said it before, somewhere else. I would love a persistent universe that takes place in the solar system. Navigating around Sol takes a real amount of time. To make it really interesting, the rest of the galaxy is explorable too. It would take a massive amount of effort, but eventually you can build ships that can travel to the stars. But instead of instant travel, it takes weeks or months of real time to get there. Basically this game would be very similar to Eve in many aspects. Probably one of the reasons I enjoyed playing Eve for so long.
- anigbrowl 14y agoBut instead of instant travel, it takes weeks or months of real time to get there. That sounds incredibly dull.
- ajlburke 14y ago"Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called 'Journey to Alpha Centauri'. It was a screen with some dots on it. ... He'd seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they'd be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, 'Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home.' " - Terry Pratchett, Only You Can Save Mankind
- huhtenberg 14y agoWhat was that game when you had to drive for several hours on a straight road to get to the destination, only to get a bonus level of traveling back home (and then needing to swerve around a single stray dog in the last hour just to stay on the road)?
- ajlburke 14y agoThat would be "Desert Bus" - an attempt to make the worst video game ever. Of course people have formed leagues and tournaments to play it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirrors#Desert_Bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirr...
- jkubicek 14y agoAre you talking about Penn and Teller's Desert Bus? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirrors#Desert_Bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirr...
- knowaveragejoe 14y agoYou may be interested in this game: http://infinity-universe.com/ http://infinity-universe.com/ Unfortunately, the sole developer seems more interested in developing the engine for commercial use first before making the game.
- pestaa 14y agoI wanted to do that at one point, with both a huge fantasy world and my city modeled and constructed from satellite pictures. Too bad I'm just a software engineer with no money.
- acgourley 14y agoBecause journey needs painstaking design of every element, and a shooter lets communities generate random and unlimited content even on randomly created landscapes.
- frozenport 14y agoIf you go on a journey and bring a gun is it a shooter?
- 10098 14y agoObviously, because it's fun to shoot stuff and watch it be blown to smithereens.
- anigbrowl 14y agoUnless you want to do something else and can't because people keep shooting at you. I eventually lost interest in MMORPGs such as Eve because so many players just fall into a mode of competitive hostility; I'd go exploring and on the way back I'd have to deal with piles of griefers that just sit around waiting to ambush passers-by, and fending off boredom by using multiple concurrent logins. It just becomes tedious. I believe the main reason that Minecraft is so popular is that there are other interesting things to do besides combat.
- confluence 14y agoShooters sell. Costs to produce this game will probably go into the hundreds of millions of dollars, with 350 full-time staff. You don't fuck around on that scale - it's make or break time - so you want to make sure you hit the largest possible audience and push as many copies as possible.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoComputer games (non-independent) seem no longer target ALL gamers. Instead every one of them is targetting the largest subset of those (those who like shooters). Everyone else is kept in the cold. No games for us. This is a nice tactic but terrible strategy, games will only be seen as a stupid and shallow thing for teenagers and they'll not have the next audience once those get fed. The same is happening with action movies (most of non-independent movies actually). Yeah, there are also MMOs but they shut off most would be gamers too.
- dbaupp 14y agoThis isn't true. Almost all indy games aren't shooters (or if they are, have some interesting twist). Admittedly this may reflect that non-shooters are an area in which low-budget developers/studios can still compete.
- chc 14y agoThis is a huge exaggeration. Most games target the majority (which, duh), but it's not remotely all games. For example, Valve's two most recent games are a puzzle game and a MOBA/Action RTS. The highest-rated game of 2012 was The Walking Dead, an old-school adventure. Probably the most hyped game of 2012 was Assassin's Creed 3, a stealth action game. If not that, then Diablo III, a dungeon crawler. The game that AFAIK is the biggest around right now, League of Legends, is not a shooter. Shooters are the new platformers. If you don't like them, you won't like most games. But there are other games.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoShooters are like meat and potatoes, they're easier to make and easier to sell, but they aren't the entire market. Of the top 10 best-selling video games of 2012 only 4 were shooters, 3 were sports games, one was a dance game, and two were action-adventure games (assassin's creed and lego batman). This doesn't count MMO subscriptions which would have put WoW into the top 10.
- potatolicious 14y agoThe problem with exploration, especially at the AAA-level is that content costs a lot of money. For multiplayer-centric shooters, the cost of maps and levels can be spread across a relatively long lifetime, millions of matches. An exploration-based game by definition cannot recycle its content. Attempts to proceduralize world generation have been mixed - Diablo did it, but the world itself is not the focus there either, and other games have been torn to shreds for their repeated, boring automatically generated content. Even open-world games like GTA are focused on specific locations in the game world, and you can see the amount of detail drop off precipitously outside of these areas. Content is really, really expensive - today moreso than ever. An exploration-based, AAA-level game would have to solve a lot of completely unprecedented problems.
- Negitivefrags 14y agoProcedural generation doesn't have to be the generation of random content purely from algorithms alone. It can just be tools to automate artist work by allowing them to specify what content should be at a higher level. For example, the artist specifies that he wants a road going one way, a river crossing it and a cliff that runs along one side and the terrain generator creates the level. I have a video of this process here. The input is a graph specified by the artist as well as a bunch of other metadata that he specifies in text files: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PRsHyyFoaM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PRsHyyFoaM I have done a talk on the terrain generator as well which you can see here if you like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcM9Ynfzll0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcM9Ynfzll0
- mark_l_watson 14y ago+1 yours is the best comment I have read so far. Higher level tools really do speed up content creation. It was a long time ago, but when I worked at Angel Studios, we put a huge effort into infrastructure tools. A high level scripting language driven generator with good fix-up editing capabilities sounds good. All that said, I would imagine that large entertainment companies have great smart creation/editing tools, but they are probably kept under wraps.
- 14y ago
- radley 14y agoAlso, shooters are exploration games, just with AI obstacles slowing your advancement.
- kmfrk 14y ago"[Creator] Unveils Its Next Masterpiece" says a reviewer who has barely seen the game. This is some horrible journalism right out of the gate.
- ihuman 14y agoSo you're not going to blindly preorder the game?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- chobo 14y agoIt's video game journalism, my friend. Everything is 10/10, buy it now!
- kmfrk 14y agoBacks will be scratched. It's pretty hilarious, because journos were basically invited to look at, tadaa, ~~~ASSETS~~~, and that was about it, and a lot of people are tearing them apart for wasting their time by essentially sitting them down to bullshit them with screenshots and concept art(!). Some examples: 1. http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/a-grown-man-in-his-underwear-tells-you-about-desti/2300-7055/ http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/a-grown-man-in-his-underwear... 2. http://i.imgur.com/suMjjQ8.png http://i.imgur.com/suMjjQ8.png 3. http://i.imgur.com/XMa5HYT.png http://i.imgur.com/XMa5HYT.png So basically the Peter Molyneux treatment, I guess.
- iharris 14y agoI'm intrigued by the concept, but... XBox 360 and PS3? For a game that is going to span years? I hope to see an announcement of PC support at least.
- runevault 14y agoGiantBomb also put up a video about this, and I agree with Gerstmann, I think this is really for next gen console not PS3 and X360, since it isn't coming out until 2014.
- 10098 14y agoThe pre-order page lists xbox360 and ps3 as target platforms http://www.destinythegame.com/wheretobuy http://www.destinythegame.com/wheretobuy
- runevault 14y agoThat's... surprising then. Because I don't see how you can have a 10 year game on a console that is about to be obsoleted. Technically you can just move an account up to the next version of the same console, but that still seems... strange.
- potatolicious 14y agoI strongly suspect misdirection. There are no games right now that have openly declared themselves to be on next-gen platforms, even though the amount of noise we're seeing suggests that both MS and Sony will drop their new boxen before the holidays. They pretty much have to say "360 and PS3", because "next gen consoles" or "unknown platforms" would be a dead giveaway. I expect them to make another announcement next week amending this, after the official unveiling of Sony's new machine.
- coldpie 14y agoI expect it'll depend on which comes out first, the game or the new consoles. They seem optimistic that the game will come first, so they'll get loads of sales on the old hardware. Then when the new hardware comes out, you'll have to purchase it again to continue playing on your new hardware. I don't really see anything wrong with this. I can't imagine it costs much to port from 360 to Infinity (and PS3 to PS4). They get a wider user-base, which is extremely important for an MMO, and many will buy the game twice when they eventually upgrade their consoles.
- thefreeman 14y agoThis has been rumored for years as Blizzard's (aka maker of World of Warcraft) next big MMO. It's cool to see all of those leaks and conspiracy theories add up, though they don't mention Blizzard in the article, just their parent (partner?) company Activision. Here's my favorite one: In February 2007, an episode of 30 Rock entitled Hardball aired and in the credits it said, “Promotional Consideration Furnished by Blizzard Entertainment.” What makes this interesting is that no Blizzard products were featured. No Warcraft. No Starcraft. No Diablo. No World of Warcraft. However, Halo was featured in the show! So Blizzard was advertising for Halo in 2007? This was right before word got out that Blizzard was working on a brand new MMO and they started hiring “Science-Fiction Texture Artists.” Coincidence? Maybe. http://obsoletegamer.com/could-blizzards-next-mmo-titan-really-be-a-halo-mmo/ http://obsoletegamer.com/could-blizzards-next-mmo-titan-real...
- chc 14y agoI don't see anything adding up here. It's always been known that Bungie was working with Activision, and it's been known for a long time that Destiny was sci-fi. The idea that this is Blizzard's major product of the past few years and they'd forgot to take any credit seems weird.
- NelsonMinar 14y agoOne particularly confusing or juicy thing about the codenames: Blizzard's rumoured MMO is internally called "Project Titan". In 2010 Ensemble+Bungie were working on a MMO also called "Project Titan", then cancelled. And Blizzard's rumored game sounds an awful lot like a Halo MMO. It's probably all just a coincidence, but it's a bizarre one.
- zach 14y agoWhen you only have a few pieces of information, it's easy to presume that they're the most important ones.
- zach 14y agoAs someone who has been on that team at Blizzard, those Halo rumors were the kind we laughed over. With the talent and experience in game design, lore and art which the company (and that team in particular) has access to, it seems silly to imagine Blizzard going out and borrowing a game universe from elsewhere to base a game on.
- abraxasz 14y agoSeems like a french retailer [1] guesstimated the release date as being October 6th 2013. Note that I have no idea how reliable this information is, and I'm taking it with a wagon of salt myself.. [1] http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Bungie-Destiny-Release-Date-October-52643.html http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Bungie-Destiny-Release-Date...
- cyphersanctus 14y agoPredicting the output and conclusion date of the work of 350 developers is not an easy task. I bet not even their CEO has a clear date in mind. The french retailer is probably just seeking PR attention.
- akurilin 14y agoI'm almost certain that every MMO since UO has claimed to be about having the universe's story be written by the players themselves. It never turns out to be true, with exception to maybe EVE.
- Roritharr 14y agoI have to say, Star Wars Galaxies came very close, supporting lots of player created content. Even better was City of Heroes in the end with player created missions.
- Jach 14y agoThat's more or less correct, and you can blame WoW for it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64
- mattbaker 14y agoBungie's original plans (circa 1999) for Halo a.k.a. BLAM! were much closer to a large world like this, also with minimal guidance. The ring-world of Halo was supposed to be a large landscape, requiring you to engage in guerrilla warfare and letting you improvise your way through the game with the storyline unfolding dynamically. I'm excited to see this project happen, I've been waiting 14 years for it!
- aaronbrethorst 14y agoMe too. Reading about this project made me think back to the first time I ever heard about Halo. I'm sure they won't be able to quite nail it, but here's hoping they get a bit closer!
- socalnate1 14y agoExactly! I could feel my 16 year old self getting all excited again.
- DanBC 14y agoIf you want persistent online worlds created by the users you should look at Minecraft. Yes, it's blocks. Yes, it's mostly children. But the variety of different gameplay is remarkable.
- beering 14y ago> Yes, it's mostly children. [Citation needed] For anecdotal evidence, you can look at the number of "my [husband/wife] made this in Minecraft" posts on Reddit and so on.
- DanBC 14y agoFor anecdotal evidence you can look at the age polls on Minecraft forums which show 60% are under 21. Don't forget that reddit isn't particularly child friendly, and yet even their the MC subreddit is younger than most of the rest of reddit.
- 3pt14159 14y agoWow, I just ventured in there for the first time to confirm or deny your statement, and you are totally right. It is packed with kids. I guess minecraft is the new lego.
- Taylorious 14y agoA bit premature to call it a masterpiece isn't it?
- Yuioup 14y agoPeople are also assuming that Halo is a masterpiece. I don't consider it a masterpiece. It's a good shooter but that's about it. It got the 3d shooting game mechanics right but Bungie is definitely standing on the shoulders of giant developers who created the masterpieces.
- EA 14y agoBut it is the technical 'masterpiece' of the XBOX. It was the killer app on XBOX Live. And they changed the way other developers used the XBOX controller to input commands. And somehow along the way, it became a household name.
- Yuioup 14y agoEA, is that you? http://i.imgur.com/2SrLf.jpg http://i.imgur.com/2SrLf.jpg
- patrickmclaren 14y agoI wonder how this will compare to the Eve Online / Dust514 universe? Eve Online is a persistent mmo, and Dust514 is a console game which interacts with Eve Online for one-off battles. See https://dust514.com/ https://dust514.com/, http://www.eveonline.com/ http://www.eveonline.com/.
- Swannie 14y agoI expect it will compare favourably, except it's first person shoot-em-up style. I wonder how it will compare to Entropia Universe (fka Project Entropia). They've also had a persistent, single instance, MMORPG universe for a long time. They ended up introducing missions because people didn't come up with their own things to do. They also have an open ended skill system with no levels. Higher skilled players tend to migrate to the more dangerous areas which cannot be safely travelled by mid-level or beginner players. Biggest difference I can tell is console vs pc. (Played EvE for ~9 months, WoW for ~14months, Entropia probably ~2 years over a 9yr period...).
- nswanberg 14y agoIt's amazing to see the path Bungie has traveled. They made a couple of Macintosh games in the early 90s, then had a breakout hit Marathon in 1995 on the Mac, back when serious gamers played Doom on the PC and laughed at the Mac (maybe they still do?). When I was a kid with a Mac, wanting to learn to program games, I read this interview over and over: http://marathon.bungie.org/story/jasonjonesTofTMPG.html http://marathon.bungie.org/story/jasonjonesTofTMPG.html I had to read this again to remember that the original Marathon game had taken three developers a little less than a year. And on re-reading it, it's great to see how much solid, long lasting advice there was in that interview.
- bennyg 14y agoGreat read, thanks for the link. A lot of interesting game and low-memory design decisions going on there.
- Tycho 14y agoAlso interesting that this new game is called Destiny, and the word 'Destiny' is the last thing you see in the Marathon series (ie. when you complete Marathon Infinity).
- nswanberg 14y agoWhat I remember about Marathon isn't only that it was a fun, playable game, but also the story arc and it's level titles' semi-serious references to military history, such as "Waterloo Waterpark" and "My Own Private Thermopylae". It's nice to hear they're continuing that story arc.
- Tycho 14y agoI think the story is one of the best works of sci-fi ever... the terminals play with storytelling/narrative in all sorts of ways.
- doomlaser 14y agoI still have my copy of that book.
- zindlerb 14y agoHearing the developers talk about 10 years of content worries me. I know this is most likely a PR exaggeration, but creating a game that will occupy 10 years or anything close to that is a major responsibility. It would be almost immoral to create something that provides no meaningful experience and is just extended escapism. I obviously haven't played it and it looks exciting. I just hope it isn't made to make players feel super powerful, but ultimately fail to enrich a player's life.
- contingencies 14y agoThis is an admirably socially conscious perspective.
- binarycrusader 14y agoBungie says it has a whopping 350 in-house developers working on Destiny Holy burn rate Batman! Maybe it's just me, but if that number is accurate, this looks like an "all-in" bet by Activision and Bungie both. If this project fails, Bungie will likely not survive and Activision would at least take a major hit. If you think that's wild, pessimistic speculation, consider this statement: One thing that was made quite clear is that the game will not be subscription-based. Every presenter was clear in stating that players will not pay a monthly fee to participate in this persistent world.
- knowaveragejoe 14y agoMaybe I'm wrong, but isn't Bungie sitting on vast piles of cash from the Halo franchise...? Even at that amount of burn, if it turns out to be a flop Bungie isn't going anywhere.
- tedivm 14y ago350 developers is a lot. Lets say, for the sake of simplicity, that they cost $85k a year (salary plus benefits like insurance). We're talking about almost $30 million a year just on those developers- and that's not even counting administrative staff, buildings, equipment, and all the services that go around that. At the same time, they have basically no other games coming out. They have no licensing for Halo, so that's all Microsoft's baby now. Other games they've talked about launching have failed to reach market. The point being, they're burning through a lot of cash and don't seem to be producing anything but this game. If it flops then Bungie will probably continue to exist, but it certainly won't be the same company it is now.
- Illniyar 14y agoApart from having a story that spans 10 years (which, btw, actually undermines the goal of user generated content), what exactly is new about this? Almost every new MMO tries to be user centric. I'm not seeing the: “We’re not doing this just because we have the tech,” .
- cpeterso 14y agoThis game sound awfully similar to Richard Garriott's (short-lived) Tabula Rasa MMORPG.
- knowaveragejoe 14y agoI really, really, REALLY hope this is not going to be console-only(which is what it's looking like at this point). I've yet to see a decent, popular MMO for consoles.
- avimeir 14y agoSounds like the world described in the book Ready Player One. Awesome read BTW.
- king_magic 14y agoMy thoughts exactly. OASIS!
- akmiller 14y agoI was going to suggest the same thing. Something like this combined with the Occulus Rift would be very entertaining and a step towards the idea of the Oasis. Not all the way through the book, but so far a great read and the technology described seems doable (for the most part).
- JosephHatfield 14y agoWasn't Triton supposed to be a Blizzard property? Is Blizzard's role here to contribute development and artistic resources to what will ultimately be a Bungie game?
- jat850 14y agoThe Blizzard project is titled "Titan".
- JosephHatfield 14y agoThanks! Maybe I won't have to get a PS4 after all. :)
- tomasien 14y agoWhy do you have to refresh the page to change the header image? Wired can hit me up any time, I can fix that for them.
- damncabbage 14y agoIf it's anything like Yahoo! when I was there, they're resisting that because refreshing the page for every image displays another set of ads. (It's 2005-era thinking, but the metrics for some ad networks are [or at least were] skewed to invite abuse of that metric.)
- tomasien 14y agoOh thanks, that's a good point! Didn't think of that.
- Tycho 14y agoSee also: Huxley. A game i really wanted to play but never got released seemingly.
- mvzink 14y agoI played the beta. It was Unreal with matchmaking, a little bit of PvE, and character development.
- husam212 14y agoHalo + Ingress = Destiny
- Corrado 14y agoYes, I was very intrigued by the way they represented off-line play. Its almost like you can continue to "play" on your mobile device even when you are not fully engaged in the universe proper. If they can pull this off it indeed would be a game changer.
- shocks 14y ago> Destiny, slated for release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. This is fucking irritating.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThis is an interesting tease. I'm not sure why they are teasing it (presumably to get developers) but conceptually from a game perspective it could be interesting. I played World of Warcraft from 1.0 (actually 0.9 but whatever) to 4.0 (a bunch of years, I've got the pets to prove it :-) Felt it finally completely jumped the shark with the Panda thing and the simplification of the world to the point of banality. As I told the Blizzard guy who surveyed me about it, I don't go into the library at the Middle School to play DND with the kids there using rules they can understand, I do play complex scenarios with other adults. I think Eve Online gets this, Blizzard has yet to internalize it. WoW was created to compete with EverQuest, which it did, way more successfully than even Blizzard expected. But it ran into the problem that the storyline, while interesting, and which character progression suitably nerfed, it got boring. And adding new story lines helped, but they had to add better gear to keep people grinding for it, and the basically I think they ran into the law of diminishing returns. Making your character twice as powerful was cool, but it made the previous game a bit silly, doubling that again and now you could single-handedly waltz through the old end-game raids (which had been designed for 40 simultaneous players in their best gear), and the dissonance gets to you. It's kinda fun, like God mode, but it's also hard to imagine a world where you could be this powerful and everyone else couldn't just fix the worlds problems without you. When the story line is "we're under seige by the forces of evil" and your character, through a series of quests, singlehandedly overwhelms all that evil? Its like reading Nancy Drew mysteries instead of Agatha Christie mysteries. To simplified to be enjoyable. Then there is Eve Online, which is similarly durable to WoW and yet has a much larger percentage of retained adult participants. I expect for the reasons that Eve does not constrain the behavior and doesn't make it "digestible" to people who don't understand that money can buy power and power can be manipulated. Compare getting into a high end Eve Corporation with a high end WoW guild. Interesting difference. And then there is the business model. Everquest, WoW, and Eve, all have pay-per-month subscriptions. That is nice, but Zynga and others have shown it can be just as, if not more, profitable for the company to run the internal economy. Something Blizzard shied away from on WoW, embraced on Diablo 3, and Eve has had I think a mixed relationship with (but I may be completely wrong on that I'm not as familar with the online Eve currency market) That suggests that there may be a market for a persistent world, with 'stories' for interest but not necessarily character gain, an environment where you every bit of content is available to you (perhaps not as successfully as you would like) from the moment you log in, and where you can use economic means or game-play means to achieve goals. Combined with a system for mixing up character strengths, items, and what not. With the game company running the economy, and taking a tax on that economic growth to fund the actual game. You have to be willing to bet that for everyone out there who will diligently cut rocks or what ever for a .001% chance at a powerful gem, there will be 10, 100, 1000 people who will just fork over fifty cents to a couple of dollars to just buy one. And playing the average revenue per gamer game rather than the monthly fee model. Bootstrapping something like that will be extraordinarily hard, but if successful consider how much Blizzard would have profited if they had been the 'gold farmers' which at one point was estimated at a several hundred million dollar a year business in its own right. Tending something like this, keeping it fun and profitable will also required very deft execution since it is tempting to take too much money off the table early on. I hope the Bungie guys pull it off.
- crapshoot101 14y agoI hate shooters, partially because your average 4 year can kick my ass at it. I'm still bitter at Mass Effect turning into more shooter than RPG, because that's what sells. Why oh why isn't there a persistent, space-based RPG for the single player that's awesome? Something like a KOTOR II, without the bugs.
- jfb 14y agoI sort of wish they hadn't sold on the Myth IP, because a) I loved those games and b) I really enjoyed the world (albeit thanks, Glen Cook). An update of Myth II to run on, say, iOS and Android, with good multi-player support -- well, my boss at Apple used to tell me that the company'd go broke building software for me, but c'mon, wouldn't that be awesome?
- morganb180 14y agoDibs on the Parzival handle.
- jacques_chester 14y agoSo far as I can tell from the literature, nobody has licked the user-generated stories thing. (Well, Eve has, in the sense that they basically built a sandbox and charge for time in it.) There's lots of literature on building plots ahead of time. The only project that's come close to doing anything in JIT plots was Façade, and that still relied on picking plot elements based on an overall dramatic arc in a very limited scenario. It also required enormous manual work to reach a usable state. (Look up the papers though, they're fascinating). The basic problem is this: in an AOT plot generator, your system controls all the elements. Every character is controllable, every plot twist is controllable and so on. Add humans and things get wildly out hand, because human players are thoroughly unpredictable. So either you "railroad" the player, which destroys agency and the suspension of disbelief. Or you produce what is essentially random events, which destroys agency but might preserve the suspension of disbelief. Neither alternative is very satisfying. What's wanted is a system that reacts to player actions, constantly replanning current events to satisfy a general plot arc. I looked at doing JIT, automatic, reactive plot generation as an honours project but it's simply too big for a 1-year project. Basically pen-and-paper RPGs with a smart, inscrutable GM are still going to be the state of the art on this for some time yet. (Email me if you want the crappy preliminary research I did on this topic)
- elithrar 14y ago> So far as I can tell from the literature, nobody has licked the user-generated stories thing. Cryptic's new "Neverwinter" MMO aims to do this. How effective it will be is another thing entirely.
- jacques_chester 14y agoPretty much everyone aims to do it. The publicity for just about every CRPG ever made, whether single player or MMO, talks about how amazingly immersive and dynamic and reactive it's going to be. So forgive me if I propose to wait and see :D The thing is that you can go a long way with a sufficiently large, dense story graph. That's the direction that single-player CRPGs have moved in. But it's obviously a non-starter for MMOs.
- nicholassmith 14y agoOn a slight tangent, interesting that it's going to be multi-platform after being signed up as Microsoft exclusives for so long. I'd imagine it's mostly to increase their possible audience, but part of me wonders if it's because the split from Microsoft wasn't entirely without some burned bridges on both sides. Which begs the question, have they found a way to share the universe between both platforms? That'd be pretty spectacular if they have.