[MUD-Dev] Re: Family, was characters per account

[Jeff Freeman]

From: Daniel James <dan at sensei.co.uk>
>Family does seem to be a grossly neglected construct in
>online games - and such an obvious one! 

I've been especially disappointed in the graphical MMORPGs.  Family?  They
don't even have NPC children.  Because, I'm supposing, someone somewhere
decided that it wasn't the least bit important.  Waste of disk space for
the art, waste of system resources to have them in-game.  It's not as if
anyone wants to pretend those are real towns with real people in them anyway.

>The potential plots and player motivations that spring from
>family generate marvellously the sort of sandbox gameplay that
>we were aiming for. I'll be glad to see someone pull it off.

Since we use UO's client, we no longer have the art for it - OSI removed it
when the t2a CD came out -  if we did, the newbies would start as kiddos.
That alone would mean that a players new character would be taken as the
child of his older characters.  Which would be... neat.  I have to see if I
can get the art off the old CD.

>p.s. I actually like the idea (or rather 'Mark Wells' idea,
>ahem) of character persistence. I'd really like to build
>it into a future game. Heavens, though, not for realism's
>sake (I vaguely recall this being his principal motivation),
>but rather that it increases attachment to the world and
>opens up some interesting gameplay avenues. And yes, you
>would need some sophisticated AI/scripting to make it work, 
>making it a pretty scary implementation proposition.

I implemented it for about a week.  The players griped a lot so I took it
out pending more AI/scripting.  

Basically, if they're going to hang around in the world after they logout,
they want more say in what they'll be doing - that seemed to be the main
gripe about the whole thing.  Although some people liked it, "as is", many
more wondered what the point of it was, and just a handful flat-out
complained of the "change is bad" sort of complaining.

I'm going to let them setup keywords and responses for the "npc versions"
of themselves, as well specify a basic AI type.  One might be "guard" for
example, so they can go logout at the mines and their character will hang
around killing monsters so that the miners are safe.  Another  quick AI
types would be merchant - where they'll buy and sell items just as though
they were an npc vendor.

They're wanting npc versions of their characters that will actually work
for them - harvest resources, craft widgets, etc. - while they are
off-line.  I can already see someone taking four warriors to a dungeon,
logging out in guard-mode, logging in with a 5th warrior and just
harvesting mobs for hours on end...

Seems like there are an awful lot of potential exploits with the npc's
doing much of anything at all, but for the week or so that they remained in
the world after logging out - it was very, very neat.  There was just
something surreal about it - walking through town full of all the people
that weren't there, etc.

I really liked it.

--
 http://dundee.uong.com/




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