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

[Sean Kelly]

Matthew Dobervich wrote:
> 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.

There's been mention of some sort of DB support planned.  I've been
pushing for just giving users the ability to add new functionality
via dynamic libraries.  In the long run, BioWare is better off let
users solve as many of their own problems as possible, and just
giving them the facilities to do so.  But it remains to be seen what
will be decided.

> 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.

This is what attracted me to NWN in the first place.  It's basically
a graphical MUD toolkit, provided you want your MUD to exist in the
D&D world :)

> 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.

I was recently accepted as a player to "A Land Far Away," one of the
more ambitious NWN PW projects.  It will be interested in seeing how
the game does over time.

> 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.

IMO games like NWN have the greatest potential to satisfy players.
They have the revenue-free constraints of a text MUD, but the mass
appeal of garaphical game.  And of course the attention only a rabid
fan-base can provide.  And to top it all off the servers can be
interconnected to form a theoretically limitless game world.  All
for no monthly fee.

The grestest obstacle at this point is the module-centric nature of
the game.  People commonly associate the ability to do things like
carry player-specific data between modules as a Persistent World
issue, but IMO it's almost a requirement for any multi-module
campaign (there were even bugs in the bundles campaign where items
disappeared from the player's inventory when beginning a new chapter
because those items had not been coded into both modules).  That NWN
doesn't have any support for this right now is a major setback
(though it is possible to hack things by shutting down the server,
importing data, and bringing it back up).  The other problem centers
around how the game handles user add-ons (HAK Paks).  Right now,
only one add-on is allowed per module, resulting in a lot of
unnecessary downloading and re-combination of add-ons into large
single-file collections.  How BioWare addresses these issues will
likely have a great impact on the long-term survival of NWN.


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