A thought on comics and MMOs

[cmdr_zoom]

It's difficult if not impossible to have a consistent, coherent world when parts of it are moving forward and other parts are standing still. It'll tear itself apart or, if the anchors are strong enough, grind to a halt.

Comments

[seawasp]

The solution for comics is to agree on a coherent world, and write in that world for an agreed-upon time.

For MMOs, it's to let people follow their own instantiation of the world SEPARATE from other people except those they have selected for their own party/group. This eliminates the munchkins and the n00b-killers and also allows everyone to walk through your living world, while not having to decide either to have things that Joe finished last week reappear for new player Jane, or to have anything Joe finishes be unavailable to any other player.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Difficult to keep the latter from devolving into a single-player game in which other players mostly appear as voices on a chat channel or, occasionally, a bubble which briefly intersects yours.

[kowh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, WoW's instancing mostly came to your attention when it made it impossible to find other people who are on different steps of a quest chain. The illusion of affecting the world is nice, but never, ever, get in the way of playing with friends.

[seawasp]

I would see it more as having small to moderate sized parties. You and some of your friends join. You are now a party. You explore the world together. However, Marty McMunchkin and his band of 500th level killers cannot come in and ruin your fun, because their world-line is marked separately from yours. (marking the world-line, events seen, etc., would allow you to use the same basic database/world for everyone; your characters would have an event or world-line file that said where you'd been, what you'd done, and who you were with in your version of the universe)

There could be designated common areas, open quests, and such, but the main game world would be a new and untouched adventure for each new group of people joining. This was something like the original NWN intent -- a way of running RPGs electronically, though NWN was intended to take it a step farther and give you a real GM. The technology wasn't there, though -- it's starting to get closer to possible.

(Also, never make a world based on some famous thing and then tell me I can't affect the events in the world that I read/watched. That's the POINT of an RPG, that I get to do the cool stuff, save the world, etc.)

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Static parties aren't always practical or a good idea. (Ask anyone who's played FFIX.) Any time someone falls out of sync (you went adventuring without them, or they did without you), there's going to be cases where quests are repeated, monsters are defeated more than once, NPCs are going to pop in and out of your view depending on who you're grouped with and what choices they've made...

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Guild Wars 2 is supposedly going to do something quite similar to this.