[MUD-Dev] "Doing a dungeon" (was: Permadeath or Not?)

[Brian Hook]

At 09:14 PM 2/22/01 -0800, msew wrote:

> I think designing a game based on dynamic content is a superb thing!

There are varying types of dynamic content, however.  There is
"handcrafted dynamic content", a la Neverwinter Nights, and there's
the purely randomly generated content you seen in some other games.

But yes, it's definitely one of my personal goals because it solves a
lot of problems very handily and gives things an air of excitement.
Instead of running into someone and saying "Oh, I see you have the
Ruby Armor of Thorgon also", you can ask "Hey, what kind of armor is
that?" and find out that it is practically unique.

Truly random loot drops have their own set of gameplay issues, but
those can easily be resolved.

> I think for it to work the world needs to have a lot more little
> warrens and caves and forts for the mobs to inhabit.

Smaller adventure zones also have the advantage of appealing to casual
gamers.

> With that type of world geography and population mechanism, "doing a
> dungeon" is 100% possible and should be quite fun!

Absolutely.  The old-school AD&D module setup was a blast because, if
you weren't inclined to run your own campaign, you could buy a prefab
one.

I've always felt an interesting variation on the Everquest model is to
provide new expansion zones on a very fine grained basis, i.e. allow
players to pay their $9.95/month to get a large part of the world, say
the size of EQ + Kunark, but then allow them to purchase downloadable
modules.  You attempt to zone into the dungeon and it just brings up a
dialog asking "You may enter the Cape of Darkest Pain for only $2.95,
Accept or Cancel?"  Have a very high quality set of tools so that you
can crank out small dungeons in about a week with a very small staff,
then just go to town and start cranking on the content.

And it is very easy to create tools that provide this.  If you look at
a decent editor such as QERadiant for Quake3, you'll find that
building a good level by a competent level designer takes about 2
weeks from nothing to completion.  For smaller dungeons that are
targeted at RPGs, this could easily be halved.

Obviously some people will complain that their $9.95 should include
all new content, but you could also release new, free content at a
regular pace also.  It's a tough line to balance, but basically you
want to provide a good experience to those that are willing to pay the
minimum, but at the same time provide a great experience for those
dedicated/hardcore types that don't mind spending an extra $15.00 a
month or so to get a new adventure zone every week.

-Hook

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