Raph Koster weighs in with a fascinating discussion of what went into UO’s gloriously failed ecology design. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).
The last big element, however, was that there were a fair amount of team members who saw the whole system as a boondoggle, and not worth pursuing. Alas, one of them also ended up in charge of implementing it in beta.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing drives how and why things in MMOs are implemented more than you’d think. Or about the same, if you share my distressing lack of faith in human nature.
Regardless, Raph is far too modest (as usual). Ultima Online still has one of the most advanced economy models for a virtual world, years on. Only Eve currently comes close, mainly because it clearly read the playbook for both UO and its “successor state” SWG. Suffice to say I’m also stealing like a bandit taking notes.
#1 by BPLlama on June 8th, 2006
“For people to stick around long term they\’e2\’80\’99re going to have to believe they can affect and change the world and that the world changes around them, essentially becoming a new game every day. How much fun would a TV show be if nothing ever changed?”
A TV show may change, but the people watching the show are not the ones who cause that change – it’s the writers and producers of the show who drive the change. (Reality TV could be considered an exception I guess, but even then the producers have a really heavy hand in controlling things from behind the scenes.)
Likewise in an MMORPG, why shouldn’t the development team be the ones driving the change and adding new content to the game? This is certainly the approach Blizzard is taking with WoW, since they won’t allow anything to detract from the high level of polish which is the trademark of all their games. They want to ensure every part of their game has a level of quality and consistency (in terms of rules, appearance, etc) that your average player-created stuff generally can’t match. Sure, players can generate an awful lot of very cool content, but for every 1 cool thing that’s created you’ll also get 100 awful things cluttering up your world, and detracting from the game.
Procedural content creation and player-created content can have a huge positive impact, but it’s got to be really easy to filter and control what gets into the game, or you just end up with a big mess. That’s the problem that nobody’s really solved yet (although we’ll see how well Spore does on that front…)