MMOs and "wilderness"

I can answer the bolded part.

They call themselves citizens of paragon even though they are native to the shard because when Ruluruu came to our dimension to devour it the Midnight club used the dagger of Joacas to take a tiny piece from every citizen of Paragon and make a shadow world that when Rularuu ate would kill him. Well Rularuu is super powerful and realized just in time and he gave life to every piece of person that was taken thus the citizens of the Shard were born but originally they had come from Paragon. The shadow shard originally was a shadow of Paragon but Rularuu over time changed it to fit needs/desires what have you. Rularuu can't escape because He used so much of his power giving life the the Shadow Shard.

Hope that answers some questions .

I actually agree with this. Even Shadow Shard doesn't feel like wilderness because...you can just fly. It's hardly wilderness when you've got speedy transit through any zone either through leaping, teleportation or flight. Wilderness stops being wilderness then and instead becomes nice scenery to look at while you zip by.

The wilderness of SWG changed over time, but there was always a wilderness to visit if that's what floated your boat. Being an explorer type myself, it's what kept the game alive for me in a lot of ways.

It was never possible to be completely self-sufficient, in that you would need healing at some point and that would eventually require medical facilities and/or entertainment facilities. As time went on and the game changed it became much easier to deal with those issues on your own and towards the end, those factors became nearly irrelevant, as healing was mostly replaced by buffing instead.

Training was something else that you had to deal with, though there was a unique mechanic in the beginning. You could get your training from other players. After the game remade itself into more of a classical class-based game, training became irrelevant.

In other words, as time went on, players became more and more self-sufficient, often to the point that certain classes that existed as support classes were frequently challenged as being superfluous. To their credit, the designers tried to deal with that problem and sort of succeeded.

As for the wilderness proper: In the beginning, you were in the wilderness the moment that you stepped outside of the hub cities. If you wanted to go somewhere, you walked. If you died, you cloned and walked back to your corpse. It was a challenge to hang out in the wilderness. You could spend your career out there, though, coming in only to sell whatever resources you had gathered to the crafters in town or out in the wilderness themselves. The developers deliberately put things out in the wilderness for explorers to find. There were "dungeons" and such, of course, but the sorts of things I mean are unique sights and "attractions" that would never be seen except by players who made the effort to visit the hard-to-find places on the planetary map.

As time passed, and player cities took root, much of the wilderness was replaced by urban sprawl on the civilized planets. As someone who had spent a great deal of time wandering the wilderness of Talos and Corellia it was a bit disappointing to come back after a couple of years and find the "hidden treasures" with towns plopped nearby and turned into, essentially, tourist traps. That's how things go in the real world, though, so it's not like it would be that surprising.

That was the civilized worlds. The adventure worlds, if you will, were almost entirely wilderness. The toughest did not allow player structures at all, though as the game aged, the restrictions were lifted to at least allow resource gathering machines to operate. On the adventure worlds, the "civilization" consisted of an outpost just big enough to contain a hospital, a cantina, a starship landing pad and a handful of NPC's to establish whether it was a scientific, military, smuggling or some other kind of outpost.

The wilderness on these worlds was deliberately made large and devoid of support systems besides those that you brought with you. Whether you were hunting, mining, exploring or doing something else (like leveling a Jedi out where bounty hunters would be unlikely to find him) you were on your own and you only went back into town (which generally meant not just "town" but flying to another planet entirely) when you absolutely had to do so to resupply or seek healing of wounds or fatigue.

Essentially, the wilderness existed as an option if you chose to exercise it. The advent of vehicles and mounts made it quite a bit less dangerous and more convenient to spend time there, but with very little in the way of instant travel it was always a commitment to do so and you went there looking for a particular kind of experience that you generally would not get in the cities and on the civilized planets.

If by "hideous", you mean extraordinary and awesome, I agree!

I was going to mentionm SWG and see what Sam thought about it, based on what he's saying and where he's coming from (sorry for the "he" there, Sam... I started it that way and am leaving it, but I am actually still speaking to you, of course, haha).

Before I get into my own take, I see Slick talked a bit about SWG:
That's not entirely true. I'm sure you remember though. Still, over time, you could heal up by just sitting/resting in a campsite.
With the Scout and (advanced) Ranger skills, you could create better and better camps for yourself (and others).
Sam, these were temporary campgrounds that scouts and rangers could place (this was not limited by a class system, just skills that anyone could learn [the more advanced ones being an extreme commitment, skill-points-wise]). They would last as long as you, or teammates, would remain within the campground (which grew bigger with each advanced camp type). You created these campgrounds by obtaining the resources and crafting the camp kits yourself (or you could buy or trade them [and sell them]). The more advanced the camp, the more you could do within those camps: use crafting tables, heal, buff, entertain...
Anyway, you could actually heal away all wounds by resting yourself in your own camp. The rate of healing was a lot slower than if you sought out professional medical (and entertainer) healing (medics healed certain types of wounds and entertainers healed "battle fatigue" and mental wounds).
Beyond that, you could have medics and/or entertainers in your campsite and they could heal you there. So, technically, you could all survive together in your own commune out in the wilderness.
And (just for the record, for those not experienced with the game) anything and everything that you needed in that game could be done by players. Any and every spec of resources (whether it was gases, minerals/ores or animal parts) could be found and harvested by players.
I'm just sticking with the SWG before the NGE (which changed the game mechanics from chess to checkers... went from CoH to Wow, as far as skills and such were concerned [33+ professions, made up of 17 skill boxes each with a number of combinations equaling roughly 3-4 different professions for a character to just... One choice of 9 set-in-stone Class options) The only thing that you really needed to start with City NPCs was the training in the skills/professions. Just like Trainers here... except that once a single player trained in any skill, they could teach it to any other player that had the appropriate xp and prerequisite skills.

And, yes... there was enormous amounts of wilderness to explore in that game. Each planet had vast expanses. You could hike them on foot, ride mounts and/or drive faster vehicles. Even on vehicles, the distances were impressive. Not a chore though... it was incredible. Plus, there were shuttles in cities, if you wanted to get places quickly, so not much of a slog if you were adverse to such things.

This aspect of the game (the wilderness of the planets), you can actually still see if you check out the SWG emu, over at swgemu.com.

I'd think it is worth it, just to see (although, you need a copy of the game in order to run it, for legal purposes).

Beyond that...
As Slick mentions, player houses and villages and towns and cities sprawled out over much of the wilderness. However, given the size of the planets, there still was an incredible amount of wilderness!
Still... it was indeed a bit depressing as a wilderness explorer to have the landscapes so marred by buildings, houses and cities created by players.

Still, that aspect may also appeal to what you're saying. The game had so much wilderness that... they allowed you to corrupt that wilderness and turn it into your own community, city, society. You, eventually, could have any and every facility that you could find within an NPC city/town.
As mayor, you could place NPC trainers, shuttleports, cloning facilities (our hospitals), medical buildings, cantinas and theatres for entertainment purposes, crafting workshops, personal housing, guild halls...

Or, you could shun all of that and build a campsite out in the wild somewhere, or in the mountain tops.

And there were locations that you simply could not place buildings/structures/cities... but you could place campsites.

Anyway, just rambling about this to try and convey what it was like to you and see what you think. It was indeed my first mmorpg love. And my first mmorpg loss...

Agreed completely.

Oh man... yes.
I am missing Enraged Rancor hunts on Endor...
Good memories though.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

Not necessarily. Yes, that would be true if you were making an actual realistic survival game in the vein of Deus (in that game, I've died from infection, food poisoning, insomnia, cold and I forget what else), but that doesn't have to be the case. For instance, one of the "personal stories" I've written for one of my characters - the Steel Rook - has been a survival story. In this story, he ends up marooned on a cold alien planet with nothing but a broken suit of power armour that doesn't work and his "nano-forge," with which he can forage basic chemical elements and reconstruct them into new materials. And if you think that's random, I didn't come up with this idea. I stole it from Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising.

Why I bring this up is the story, as I told it, revolved around the Rook first surviving the cold and atmosphere, but then eventually building bases of operations staffed with automatons and eventually basically colonising the planet by himself. It was, technically speaking, a story of survival, but outside of the very beginning of it, it was not "realistic" survival. He didn't have to worry about food or water - those could be produced. Instead, he had to worry about about titanic predators, spectral apparitions, migrating giant insects, absolute zero temperatures and so forth. These were sci-fi challenges approached with sci-fi tools, but I still consider them to have taken place in the "wilderness" for my own two rules: He was trapped on that planet with NO way to return until he could build a MASSIVE inter-dimensional portal which consumed vast amounts of resources and power, and there were no other humans on the planet until the very end and the final portal opening.

Basically what I'm saying is you can have wilderness without necessarily turning it into an extreme survival game. As with MineCraft and the SWG examples, it's sufficient (to me) that basic mechanics can be achieved with the need for static NPCs for wilderness to "work."

I meant to comment on that, actually. MineCraft is a good example of both wilderness and of wilderness turned into a developed area. Believe it or not, I actually liked the game a LOT more when it wasn't much of an RPG, before we needed food and there were NPC villages and such. What I will praise MineCraft on is how it made me fear the night. During the day, it was all sunshine and butterflies as I was free to go outside and forage, but I'd lie if I said I didn't spend nights in a cold, dark cave having walled myself in with no torches left, praying for daylight. Similar to Castle Story, actually. It is, in fact, a lot like what I just described about the Steel Rook, just more... Blocky.

But at the same time, I have a problem with MineCraft, and it's a big one - the game has no point. It's not a "game" so much as it's a sandbox level editor and, surprise-surprise, I tend to play it in "creative" mode more than anything else. Because it's still a massive grind and it still anchors you down to a "town" of your own making if you want to construct anything bigger. Limited inventory and stationary constructions aid to that. To me, a game simply needs to have a point, or at least some system with which to create and track objectives without having to pretend they exist.

To me, a game in a similar vein that still had a point was The Settlers II - Veni, Vidi, Vici. I played that as a kid, and most of the time I played it without competition, just my settlers expanding their territory. You start out with a central building in an uninhabited land, and everything you do sprawls out from that building, but the game still ultimately has a point. The basic point was, regrettably, combat. The whole infrastructure is designed around either creating intermediate tools or good with which to mine and forge, or around the production of weapons, beer and gold with which to train and upgrade soldiers.

If we ever want to see an MMO that revolves around solitude in the wilderness, it has to have a point of some sort. That doesn't have to mean combat, but it should offer progress of some kind that people don't have to track on their own. It's why I suggested exploring a distant land for artefacts of a lost civilization in an attempt to piece its past together. An MMO like this wouldn't technically even need to be about combat at all. It could be all about, say, Prince of Persia style climbing, or solving puzzles, or beating mini-games, or building for stats and skills that revolve around solving problems other than combat.

The biggest thing to remember, though, is that while an MMO might be a sandbox, strictly speaking, it is also a game, and it's very important to remember this.

Oh, I'm not defending forced teaming at all. If I had a say, no game would ever REQUIRE you to team if you didn't want to, even if it has to resort to using bots ala Left 4 Dead. However, I've had this argument many times before, and it's one that cannot be "won." Some people are convinced it's not an MMO if it doesn't have forced teaming and some developers are convinced it's not a successful game unless force people in the same 3D space with all grace and dignity of trying to mate Chocobos. Basically, at this point, I simply accept it and try to work around it instead of trying to challenge it. I'd like nothing better than an MMO which can be played entirely by myself unless I go out of my way to look for company, but that's unlikely to happen.

You don't even have to give the player a linear path at all. Look at how City of Heroes does it - the game's lore (at least from 2004) is all interconnected, but the player isn't expected to run it in order. That's because the lore doesn't tell a "story," so much as it defines a setting, and every arc you run adds a chunk to the setting. Not the next chunk or the previous one, but A chunk somewhere across. There are "opportunities" dotted around the overworld, and the game encourages you to seek them out and capitalise on them.

At least, I want to see MMOs break from their rigid system of static supply lines. Yes, practical hubs also develop into social hubs since people are there on business anyway, but to me the right approach is "global communication" rather than meeting spots. Both City of Heroes and Champions Online did it well by moving the bulk of social mingling to global channels where players can "hang out" and chat, such that the game doesn't need to squeeze people through social hubs in order to force it. If you want to be sociable, the channel is a mouse click away, but if you don't want to be, you're not forced into a crowded area to jostle other people.

That's a double benefit, as well, because global chatting is "out of character," generally speaking, so having global chat in a game about solitude would not - at least not to me personally - ruin the atmosphere. Sure, you'd have people chatting constantly but you can always silence that, and it's not too unlike leaving the TV to blare on in the background - it's not part of the "game" game, so it doesn't matter.

I actually think that moving away from the need for people to run across each other physically will do MMOs good. I know there's a need to have people "meet" in at least some way, but migrating this to omni-present, out-of-continuity player-to-player chat frees up gameplay to experiment with themes of solitude, entrapment and distance. So what if you can't make it to Coruscant? If you can still meet people over chat and they can "teleport" to your location temporarily, then isn't this just as good? You still have a way to "mingle," but at the same time actually meeting people in person becomes meaningful, as well, because... It's a rare event. You keep hearing other people, but if you rarely see them, it matters.

I remember that one time I met that one other person in the Shard. We didn't say much to each other, other than to express surprise that another person was even there, but the encounter was much more remarkable than all the deadbeat heroes I'd passed in the streets on my way to the FBZ portal. When encounters are rare, they begin to matter and, to me at least, they begin to set the stage for social interaction. When an encounter is special, the least you can do is say hi, which nobody does when you pass another player in a crowded city.

To be fair, for as big as the zone is, that's not as big of a problem. Prior to Afterburner, fly was so slow that I just never felt it to be a good way to travel around the shard. The distances are just too large. Consider that neither Jumping nor Speed work there, either, and you are kind of "on foot" even with travel powers. But I do agree. Back in the day when I was suggesting "travel missions," I suggested disabling travel powers and asking people to visit several waypoints scattered across a huge map. To me and, from what I can gather - to you, the problem comes down to the fact that if you can fly over terrain obstacles and enemies, then the "trip" doesn't really matter. A journey through the wilderness is only ever meaningful if you're forced to interact with said wilderness. If you're not, then it's just an interchangeable backdrop because... Does it really matter what it is that you fly over?

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On SWG: I didn't know who to quote on saying what, so let me share some basic thoughts.

I like what's being described so far. I like the idea of player-made cities and I like the idea of vast, spanning wilderness, with self-sufficient characters who can take their supply infrastructure with them and go backpacking. That's more or less exactly what I meant, and thank you for sharing. I wish more MMOs did this, and not just for some characters who took some perks, but foe everyone. I honestly want to see an MMO where player characters are not tied down to static resources of any kind. I imagine it would have a much different, much more liberating atmosphere.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.