[MUD-Dev2] [Media] Informal poll on MMOWatch

[Mike Sellers]

John Arras wrote:
> So what other possibilities are there? One option might be to give the
> NPCs some kind of internal state and motivation, and also a memory and
> knowledge about the world they live in. This would include knowledge
> about each player they've interacted with and relationships between
> entities. Then the world itself probably has to probably be dynamic and
> changeable by the players to make the NPC interactions meaningful as
> time advances. This gets into other issues such as knowledge
> representation and search and learning and many other areas of AI.

This is what we've done (as have others in various ways like Mike Rozak I
believe, and Matthew Mateas).  It's a hard problem -- but then so was
realtime 3D rendering back in the day.  Creating NPCs like this definitely
requires a different view of the players, the world, and the players'
actions in it.  
 
> Much better NPC interaction requires a whole new way of looking at
> things and a lot of machinery must be built to go beyond something like
> conversation trees. You can't just keep adding more branches to your
> conversation trees in the hopes of getting richer and richer
> interaction. 

Exactly.  And just as conversation trees go away, so do quest trees.
"Quests" have become such a mainstay of MMO gameplay that it's difficult for
many to see what the game would be without them, but that's because quests
are doing the heavy lifting of "what's going on in the world and why is it
significant?" rather than the interactions between the PCs and NPCs.  

It's much easier to simply create a new static world with a new look and new
combat system, but after awhile this is going to get stale even for die-hard
MMO players.  I still see WoW as the apex of the first generation, and
everything similar that comes after it as just more of the same.  The next
generation will, I hope, be something completely different than pressing 1
to swing a sword to kill a rat to fill in the blank in a task given by a
vending machine.

Mike Sellers