[MUD-Dev] Persistent worlds in NWN (was: Retention without Addiction?)

[Matthew Dobervich]

Valrio Santinelli wrote:

> NWN is much like a graphical MUD :)

> You can customize it a lot. But it lacks a decent PW support but a
> lot of people (including myself) are making more and more tools
> available to manage PWs.

I'm glad to see a NWN Persistent World developer use this list as a
source of wisdom for their designs, I was just competing to a friend
the other day that I was surprised I hadn't seen any NWN PW
developers pop in here.

I also think the state of Persistent Worlds in NWN might be of a lot
of interest to members of this list as they arguably have a larger
audience than text MUDs do, due to their graphic nature, and share
the same kind of open source ethic I see in text mud development.

Not to say all NWN PW are open source, but one of the most popular
is, and even worlds that aren't open source use open source game
mechanics in their world (The Ambrosia trade skill system, or the
HCR rule set being two of the main examples)

It's interesting to me to see the developers of these worlds run
into the same problems faced by mud and MMORPG developers over and
over.  An early game so challenging players leave, rampant
inflation, etc, etc.  That being said, I'm also taken aback at how
polished some of these worlds are considering NWN launched 6 months
ago, and as a result of this they've all had very short development
periods.

It will be interesting to see how these worlds grow and mature.  I
have a feeling the speed of game world evolution will continue to
outpace commercial MMORPGs, it is yet to be seen if they overtake
commercial games in time.



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