[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Player-generated content

[Matt Chatterley]

On 18/09/2007, cruise <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:
>
> [Snip]

Assuming a reasonably "standard" MMOG, with various quests that provide
> achievements or rewards, how can you ensure player-provided quests
> follow the difficulty/reward curve well? Is it even worth doing? What
> other forms of player-generated content is possible to support in-game?
> Any experience with such systems?
>

I'm going to take a slightly different tack to approaching this than other
posters have thus far. Please note I've never DONE this, although elements
of it are drawn from a long-dead project I was involved in.

Lets think for a moment of a different genre of game - the RTS - e.g.
Warcraft; before it was a whole world.

Now, lets propose that we create a world engine, drawing on elements of
both. Instead of playing a single character, you oversee your society of
creatures.

Character generation begins with the creation of the base model for your
creature - settings its attributes, physical look, naming it, and so forth -
then you are allocated a bit of land, upon which you can create your first
settlement.

Growth (or levelling) is achieved by gathering resources, expanding your
settlement, and perhaps even setting up new ones. The world map could be
manually or procedurally generated - as long as it is kept at a size related
to the number of active players, so that it isn't too large or too small.

As space becomes constrained, tensions will undoubtedly grow - requiring
players to work together to expand (perhaps as far as integrating their
societies to pool resources) - or to fight one another to claim valuable
land and resources.

Individual members of each society could have roles which depict their
general function (hunter/gatherer, warrior, priest, mage, civillian, etc) -
within which they would follow AI determined or Player-given lists of tasks.
But we could permit the player to "sieze control" of an individual and play
"first person" at times - perhaps if launching a raid upon an enemy.

In terms of "quests", these could be formalized within a framework whereby
the player sets objectives for his people - the rewards would typically be
predetermined e.g. "I need more iron, therefore my reward for completing
objective A (Capture the iron mine to the east) is simply access to the
iron" - or the game could compute a point value against these objectives,
and the player could be permitted to spend these points on upgrades.

Snack for thought!

--Matt