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I've been toying around with an idea for a little while and figured I'd put it up here.

While working on Endless Saga, I've sometimes wondered what an ES MMORPG would be like. Rather, what an ES MORPG would be like. While there are games that do something similare to what I'm going to post about, they don't take the concept as far as what I have in mind.

I'm a big fan of randomly generated material. Creating random maps and dungeons isn't too hard and can add a lot of replay value. Creating random storylines and quests is a little tougher, but Endless Saga's powerful conversation/interaction system (I'll elaborate on this if anyone is interested - it's a good bit ) gave me enough experience in this field to pull it off. So what I'd do is this...

When starting a new game, players create their characters. The game creates a random world and a random series of quests bound together with a randomly-generated storyline. Essentially, a small but carefully-crafted random RPG built around the game's engine. Players join in (wether as a group or in seperate locations, in order to eventually meet up perhaps after an individual dungeon or two) and are treated to an opening scene or what have you, and then the game begins.

The game would play exactly like a traditional RPG. You'd have a menu screen to manage your character, a global inventory, and random encounters with a traditional side-view battle system à-la Final Fantasy I-X (more specifically à-la Endless Saga. )

However, every player controls their own character. Therefore random encounters are individual - if character 1 gets a random encounter, character 2 doesn't. But there's a catch. To other players, the character caught up in the encounter will stand in place and have a colored/illuminated region around them. Any character stepping into this region will also (fluidly) join the battle as another party member. This could also be made to extend to all characters present (within perhaps a screen of each other) for certain battles, such as bosses. There is nothing preventing character 2 from running into an encounter of their own when character 1 is fighting, which can put a lot of tension on the party when the healer suddently gets ambushed by some big beastie and the rest of the party has to hurry to him/her.

I should note that the Endless Saga engine treats random encounters a little different than other traditional RPGs. While the encounter rate is very low (and drops even further if you're overlevelled; you'd be unlikely to run into lowly slimes every couple of steps when passing through an earlier dungeon if you decide to revisit it after gaining a few dozen levels) enemy encounters are generally brutal, being on par with a regular boss battle. Bosses are impossible to beat without making careful use of all of your resources and having a plan - mashing "ok" throughout the battle won't get you past even the first few turns. In short, getting to a character caught up in a battle shouldn't be immensly difficult if your party sticks together.

I've left out various small details. For instance, you wouldn't gain as much experience getting in a fight if it's almost over. You can't just wait until your friend tells you the last monster is almost dead, jump in, and gain huge amounts of EXP.

Cons
- A shared inventory could be annoying. This is something players have to work on themselves - you're a party, after all.
- While I'm confident in this working out (partly due to how well the conversation engine in ES worked out,) randomly-generated material can sometimes cause uninteresting situations or boring plots.
- I've yet to think of a way to handle parties disbanding and racing to each complete the game on their own. If character 1 decides to beat the game on his own and completes a quest or two, characters 2, 3, and 4 will soon find themselves lost with no clue what to do.

Pros
- In this form of MORPG, party members can really take on a life of their own. For instance, you could leave the party to do your own little thing and later come back (perhaps running into the party as it struggles to beat a huge boss) with a higher level to save the day.
- Having a storyline to go with the game should take care of the typical complaints about how online RPGs are just about gathering items and beating monsters.
- Dude. It's a multi-player RPG. You KNOW you want one of these.

One cool thing that could happen is having a branching storyline. Say you'd find some ancient book, and two opposing groups want it. The party decides to give it to the first group. However, while the party is in town busily getting their equipment updated and restocking on items, a character grabs the book and leaves for group 2. Suddently a new storyline emerges on its own, with the character being a traitor to the party and the rest of the party racing to find him before he can get the book to group 2. Better yet, with a bit of effort on the game engine's part, if the character succeeds he may end up getting his own series of quests leading him on the road to having ultimate power while the rest of the party gets their own series of quests to stop him. Maybe even culminating in a final battle with the now-all-powerful former party member.

I currently have no plans to do this. However, maybe once I run out of projects to work on I'll give it some more thought. This is just a budding idea, and there are plenty of things left to work out before it can be usable.

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 30th June 2007 22:57

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

hmmm. i dont quite get how the entire random storyline would work out. but the stuff that i do understand sounds great. the shared inventory could be a hastle though, unless your party is all people that you trust to not screw everything up.

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Currently Playing : Final Fantasy V
Most Recently Beat : Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
Favorite Game : Final Fantasy X

The newest CoNcast is up! Have a listen!

Indeed, i like how the battle system works, and how everyone only controls one characters..! You have some very nice ideas, i don't understand how a game could make a random storyline, creating an exciting storyline should require some human intelligence no?

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All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Broccoli to die.

You already know how I feel about this, RL, so I won't say too much. I would definitely play a MORPG without hesitation. The dynamic emotion/conversation system you set up is unbelievable, and I think that expanding it into an online RPG would actually work really well. I say go for it. That is, after you finish some more pressing projects.

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Is PJ

Like I said, I have no intentions of doing this right now. Too many pressing things to work on.

For those of you curious as to how a storyline could be built dynamically, I'll explain. The key concept behind any dynamic system is finding a way to break down the final result into a series of smaller steps and creating rules to bind these steps together. For instance, a randomly generated sentence breaks up into a series of words bound together by certain relationships (ex, two nouns shouldn't follow each other directly; "The dog dog barked.") More complex systems, of course, will require much more complex things to work out.

I've applied this in Endless Saga to conversations and personal interactions. In ES, going through the same cutscene a dozen times will never result in the same scene. The event script, mainly the dialog, is build dynamically based on various strict relational rules and influence from what the game expects (ie, the bad guy isn't going to start chilling with the party and inviting them over at his lair to play parchesi.) A simplified model of each entity's current emotional state is used to further give the conversations life.

The end result of this is that any cutscene going through this little bit of code will come out being randomly generated within the bounds of what the game script allows. And it gets better.

Originally, this was so I could have party members chat amongst themselves. After extending the emotion engine a little, I made this work with NPCs in town so that discussions with them aren't static either. In fact you could keep talking to some people and soon they'll start being more open and familiar with your character, maybe even going as far as developping emotional relationships between each other. Though it's still experimental, I'm trying to add support so that NPCs can also converse between themselves, changing their view of each other over time and building social groups dynamically.

This isn't an idea or a theory - it's what I've already implanted in Endless Saga. It's much simpler to pull off than it sounds. Some games have been doing stuff like this for a while, frankly. And some eagerly-expected games go even further (Spore, anyone?)

To make a random storyline, the next step would be finding rules to link these dynamic events together into a coherant mass. And frankly, it doesn't sound too hard to me - if a system can use guidelines to build itself like the conversations in ES, so can a storyline. Mapping out important characters, their relationship with each other (and how they change over the storyline), and linking events together is nothing more than a glorified version of what Endless Saga does to generate its cutscenes and manage characters' emotions and relationships.

Edit: For those of you familiar with chaos theory, dynamically-generated systems all fit into the concept of universality really well. There's a pattern to it all inherant to all systems, which is why things like random storylines are possible.

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 2nd July 2007 19:58

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Wow. I'm glad you aren't going to pursue the MORPG (as cool as it sounds in its own way.) You just dramatically increased my level of interest in Endless Saga, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it finished.

This post has been edited by BDZ on 3rd July 2007 01:11

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Status:
FF6 -- Finished! Yeah!
FF7 -- Finished (easily, and without KOtR)
FF8 -- End of Disc 3
Secret of Evermore--Leveling up for Salabog

"Go sit over there. Put your seatbelt on."--Squall

He never said that. He just said he has no intentions of doing that right now. There is still the possibility of RL going crazy all over this in a few months after some other projects die down.

Or maybe not and I'm just increasing my post count.

Post_count += 1

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Is PJ

Quote (BDZ @ 2nd July 2007 20:10)

Wow. I'm glad you aren't going to pursue the MORPG (as cool as it sounds in its own way.) You just dramatically increased my level of interest in Endless Saga, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it finished.

I'm beginning to see that I often word things the wrong way. I did mean "I'm glad you aren't going to pursue it right now." I know how it is with programming and managing projects. It's really easy to get sidetracked with absolutely fantastic ideas.

Edit

I program with QuickBASIC. post_count = post_count + 1.

This post has been edited by BDZ on 3rd July 2007 14:13

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Status:
FF6 -- Finished! Yeah!
FF7 -- Finished (easily, and without KOtR)
FF8 -- End of Disc 3
Secret of Evermore--Leveling up for Salabog

"Go sit over there. Put your seatbelt on."--Squall

i still would preferr just one large storyline with multiple paths that you can take, even though i now understand your system.

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Currently Playing : Final Fantasy V
Most Recently Beat : Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
Favorite Game : Final Fantasy X

The newest CoNcast is up! Have a listen!

The idea doesn't sound too hard to implement. Unless you consider time as part of the difficulty factor. I see these randomly generated storylines becoming stale rather quickly unless you brainstorm a crap load of scenarios that could be strung together randomly as well as based on actions the players take.

I suppose it would be a good idea to just make a lot of things available to the player at the beginning and the game engine could start molding the story from there.

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-- You're Gonna Carry That Weight --

Quote (Rujuken @ 10th July 2007 14:39)

I see these randomly generated storylines becoming stale rather quickly unless you brainstorm a crap load of scenarios that could be strung together randomly as well as based on actions the players take..

And that's where I would have to claim failure.

You see, a dynamic system that uses a bunch of static material isn't a real dynamic system. For instance, having a bunch of quests that follow preset goals like "kill monster x" or "beat the boss in dungeon y" - that'd be a failure because there's no chance for emergeant behavior. The key here is this latter concept.

Emergeant behavior is what occures when you program a system very loosely and something completely unexpected arises from it. The simplest example would be a neural network, one of the more important structures in AI programming. A neural network is just a big pattern-recognition machine modelled loosely after the brain. The military once used it to attempt to create software that could tell apart US tanks from german tanks (I may have the wrong countries...) The program, after some training, performed flawlessly and could identify the test set of tank photos with near-perfect accuracy. However, once present with a new set of photos, it failed utterly.

The reason? The first set of photos had the US tank pictures taken in the morning and the German tanks, in the evening. The program could identify with perfect accuracy what time of day a picture was taken at, though.

This isn't the most relevant example because in this case the program failed to perform as expected. But it illustrates emergeant behavior very well. In my case, emergeant behavior would be the quest generator being able to come up with its own material, even to the point of coming up with abnormal quests (such as secretly assassinating a party member) that would've never been a part of a static bank of quests. Or perhaps even some very tight-knit storyline with a completely unexpected twist never used before. THIS is the real goal here: having a dynamic system with emergeant behavior.

The problem is that most people associate "randomly generated" with "generated using a/multiple lookup table(s) of possible options." Take a coin and flip it. This is one of the simplest dynamic systems with only two possible options (unless your coin is screwed up and lands on the side, or decides to cease obeying the laws of gravity and flies upwards into infinity.) This is akin to using a lookup table: two outcomes. Now look up (or out your window, since you're probably indoors) at the sky. Clouds are a true dynamic system - from a simple principle (water particles following some sort of flocking pattern) you can end up with all kinds of shapes and patterns.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Ah, that gives me a better idea of what you are shooting for. I take back what I said about it being simple. Not sure why I said that in the first place. Does sound interesting and fun to create.

I'd think you would have to give it some static material at some point, though. At least to keep it within certain bounds. But that might be due to my lack of understanding.

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-- You're Gonna Carry That Weight --