[mud-dev] RE: [MUD-Dev] Thought Experiment: Permanent Monster Death

[Scion Altera]

Thursday, January 8, 2004, 7:01:09 AM, John Buehler wrote:

> This can include the operation of a town.  Imagine a GM breaking
> out the Caesar III town-management interface and directing
> movement of goods from one warehouse to another.  That will
> mobilize some number of NPCs to new activities.  Perhaps the GM
> declares a festival for the town.  Again, the NPCs know what to
> do.  The better the AI for the NPCs, the more leverage the GMs
> have for entertaining the players.

Normally I don't agree with anything you say (although I do value
your points of view since they are so often opposite to my own) but
in this you have hit upon something exceedingly cool. Not more than
three weeks ago I stumbled on a new game called Savage that just
came out.  It's an "RTSS" or Real-Time Strategy Shooter. Each team
has a commander, who plays an RTS game building buildings and
ordering troops around in a top-down view of the map. The rest of
the commander's team plays from the first person perspective,
recieving orders from the commander and trying to carry them out to
help the team win. I don't work for the devs of this game, but it's
the first really revolutionary game I've seen in a long time. While
I don't think they got it entirely right, I think they're definitely
going in the right direction.

Giving the RTS city or region level client to the GMs of a massive
game would allow the fine grained control needed to operate a city
efficiently and intelligently. The AI needed to make the NPCs do
what they're supposed to do wouldn't be any less trivial than much
of what they already do in most games. The benefit to the players
would be that the cities each seemed more alive. The benefit to the
company is that each GM is worth more because everything they do
affects more players more profoundly.

Of course, it's a relatively simple step from here to giving an RTS
client to a player who is the mayor of a town... I know Achaea lives
on players running their own cities already, but the graphical games
still seem to be lagging behind in this regard.

All I know is I'd love to see a new generation of multi-faceted
games that combine RTS elements with first person elements.

  Scion

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