[MUD-Dev2] Meaningful Conseqences

[Christopher Lloyd]

> On Behalf Of Eric Lee
> John Buehler wrote:
> >
> It is my intention that they come to an end, and that's it for that
> world; a month, a year, a decade.  The gamemasters declare that
> they're going to start a new game, and players sign up for it. 
> That's the ethic of the nomadic MMO - experience it and move on.
> >
> 
> That somewhat reminds me of A Tale In The Desert; it doesn't have
> nomadic content in the way you're describing but the game comes to
> a definite end and restarts with changes.  I believe it's currently
> on its fourth telling.
> 

It seems to have stalled at the end of the third telling - At least, I can't
see any information on the fourth telling on the website (other than that
it's started) and the player-run wiki seems to be inactive too.

I can see where John is coming from with the finite lifetime. No one plays
Ultima Online forever, right? Sooner or later there will be a competing
product that will draw players away. At least if you're making sequels then
it's your company that's keeping the playerbase instead of another company
gaining it.

I was thinking about how Richard Bartle's stereotypical games would react to
this cyclic rebirth system. "Achievers" may be torn between losing all the
achievements they've gathered in version 1 and being able to do them all
again (only this time faster, better, and before anyone else because they
already know how to do them) in version 2.

"Explorers" are going to have difficulty if the world is exactly the same,
so significant changes would have to be made so that the new world didn't
feel like a carbon copy of the old one, both geographically and perhaps in
the way the game works. This means different quests, improved AI (and
different AI counters by players), maybe better graphics where appropriate.

"Socialisers" and "Killers" might not care either way. Socialisers will
probably want to maintain the same friendships they did before. They'll
probably want to keep the same name as before, so maybe that should be an
option. But such reboots will inevitably break up old friendships and there
are likely to be plenty of cries of "it's not the same as when we all knew
each other back then..."

Chris Lloyd.