"Kris Schnee" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The appeal of the > simple RPG would be that it's procedural rather than truly random, so > that you can say to other players, "Check out the island at (42,0); it's > got neat stuff," and it'll be the same for them as for you. People would > end up mapping the game world together.
Well, "procedural" and "random" aren't necessarily opposites. A randomly generated dungeon IS one kind of procedurally generated dungeon. And, if you use a random generator that produces reproducible results (using a known seed, and knowing that the underlying implementation is the same), you get results that can be shared between players. There was a recent interview with Ubisoft's Clint Hocking at gamasutra.com where he discusses exploration in RPGs (think "Oblivion"): http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070514/ruberg_01.shtml In particular, he says: "I can only assume if your open-world game doesn't do well, you didn't support exploration as well as you should of. If you don't design systems that support the exploration, you have a giant empty game. Then itÂ’s you walking around in space for a little while until you get bored and then you give up." The discussion of Daggerfall's dungeons being boring and repetitive sounds like they failed to properly provide incentives for reaching the deeper parts of the world, and they didn't provide enough variation in their dungeon generation procedure. Thinking about Laura's suggestion about commerce - that's one system that supports the exploration. It's easy to think of a simple economic sim that implements supply and demand, and the more exotic areas of the world generating scarce (and therefore expensive) goods. I recall one of the early massively multiplayer games trying a similar supply/demand model for their magic systems - if you were using a rare spell, you would get a greater effect from it. As people started using the spell more frequently, it would decrease in power. That's something you can do if you have a shared server to track spell use, but even with a disconnected game, you could use the magic system as an incentive for exploration - the most powerful spells require the most exotic reagents, and the most exotic reagents are, of course, the most difficult to get to. If you wanted to further borrow from online RPGs and implement a crafting system, you could have more incentives to explore, with powerful items requiring scarce resources. I'm currently in the design stage of my own RPG with large world exploration, and one of the carrots that I'm planning to use to encourage the players to explore further is to have certain skills be taught in certain places - if you want to learn to be an assassin, you have to find someone to teach you those skills. One thing to think about when considering procedural generation is that "Infinite Game Worlds" are not infinitely satisfying. If you haven't explored your own world pretty comprehensively, you may be surprised to find the players exploring the island at (42, 0) that has neat stuff, and then going off to the island at (44, 1), which has a large supply of pointed sticks, which they use to attack the natives at (47, 4), which are meant to be really tough, but have an unfortunate weakness against pointed sticks. The point of that example is that a simple procedural system used on a large area will almost definitely have unexpected combinations of features, which may be exploitable. And, given the existence of the internet, your players will communicate with eachother and publish exploitable trade routes or geographically convenient combinations of features. Which means a certain amount of planning and a certain amount of time exploring the world after generation time, which means a finite scope to your game. Just some thoughts - I'm certainly not discouraging procedurally generated content; I think it's a crucial tool to deal with the trends in content size we've been seeing over the past several years. -Dave LeCompte
