There are many sites dedication to bringing the casual (or hardcore) player information about very specific quests, monsters, and items in any given game. Clearly the usefulness of these sites increase linearly with the amount of precise information available on them (more is better); so what happens when the game adds and entirely new level of complexity to this information?
Standard strategy guides are so helpful for getting through single player games. These games are generally very linear (or at least very “event” linear, meaning that while you’re free to go wherever’s available at that time, you may not be able to go everywhere since you haven’t progressed that far yet), which means that someone with some time and energy to spend (and a fat paycheck waiting) can sit down and pound through an entire game and document every event that happens with relatively little ingenuity or effort. Then they can compile it in an easy-to-read book that follows the linearity of the game to a tee.
Then you’ve got the online games to which there’s really no possible strategy guide at all. The completely unscripted, non-linear games like Starcraft, Warcraft, Chess, and most online First-person shooters. These games have no plot, and the entire point is just to have a higher skill level than your opponent. I conjecture that in order to write a complete strategy guide for a game like this, the amount of pages (paper or electronic) you’d have to use would be monstrous, because it would have to account for every possible situation.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this fall those MMOs which allow character progression via quests and other means. This is where popular sites like allakhazam and others come into play. They amass unbelievable amounts of information about every quest, NPC, and item available in these games. They do an amazing job of it. However, most of their assumptions are based on a large, seemingly-dynamic world in which the characters remain completely constant. All of the NPCs are completely lifeless automatons that sit out in front of their shops or in their houses for you to find at your convenience.
My question is: What happens when these NPCs and other world-characters start moving?
I asked myself this very thing after having read a synposis of plaync’s upcoming game Tabula Rasa. According to wikipedia:
AFS and Bane forces are in constant battle with NPC forces warring over control points and bases. Which side controls these areas will greatly impact the players. Losing one of these to the Bane will mean that the respawn hospital, waypoints, shops, NPCs access, and base defenses will be lost and turned to the Bane’s advantage. Players will be able to help NPC assaults to take over bases or defend ones under attack. Control of these points is to change back and forth commonly even without players interfering.
Now, I know that you’re going to say that there are some NPCs in WoW and other games who move around and such, but let me ask you: how good is the information that allakhazam and other sources have on these NPCs? It’s terrible. It gives you an extremely general, and morbidly inaccurate view of the area that the NPC is supposed to be in, and it’s projected path. Usually it’s completely wrong, and sometimes the information was reported from a custom server so the NPC is in a completely different zone. Ew.
So how will they do it in a system as complex as the one quoted above? It seems an impossible task. It would seem in a world where everyone is mobile (think of an offline RPG where all of the npcs are roaming around), writing a strategy guide to tackle all of the possible locations would be very difficult. Is this the kind of situation where we’d expect the producers of the game to export paths for each npc? Even Tabula Rasa’s system seems too dynamic to do even that.
I would expect the first wave of games like this to be handled with similar approaches as the WoWs and EverQuest IIs of this generation. A very rough matrix-like pathing scheme which shows where the NPC could be at any time. Like most things, we’d expect the quality to increase from there. Though they may solve this problem though, what happens as this genre presses forward?
We’ve already seen how worlds like Horizons, Starwars Galaxies, and similar attempts from other games have extended the concept of mobility by making even buildings mobile. What kind of strategy and information databases will we be able to have when even, perhaps, the buildings aren’t where one expects them to be?
It’s not a far stretch to a world where a gaming company is able to generate huge, unique tracts of terrain for multiple servers and plop the cities down differently on each server. Imagine that: every world has the same cities and similar regions, but there is no good comparison between the two. How then, except by experience and long play time, will people be able to know their way around the world? Isn’t this something that companies who really want to reach the next level of player interactivity should strive for?
