That reminds me, I haven’t experienced a MMO that was successful at fostering a community since asheron’s call for the reason you describe.
The game didn’t have any of the “quality of life” features you can find in modern games, no fast travel, no markets, no difficulty indicator, if you wanted to travel to another region, it was a quest in itself or you’d have to beg top levels players to escort you there or open a portal for you, and since you could only hold a single portal to a location if you were a high enough level mage (I think) it wasn’t that easy to find.
Death was punishing, you’d lose most of your gear and you’d have people begging for help to retrieve it on every village square and because that actually mattered, it’s something you could do out of good will or for a fee.
The only way to get good gear was to get it from player who could craft, and since crafting was bitch to level up, guilds were the only one who could afford it.
Oh and that’s not really a part of the game, but internet was young and games didn’t yet have hords of people dissecting game and dumping every possible details on wikis or at least not as fast. So actually discussing quest, place and strategy with people mattered.
PVP was rough, no level limit, barely any zoning, a level 60 could camp your noob spawn and grief you forever, until you asked your guild for help and it turned into a week long manhunt to punish the griefer.
To be honest I don’t remember if the game has quests, a few I guess, mostly forgettable, most of the good memory I have from the game were from player induced adventures.
The game did eventually end up having all the tools you’d expect a community to build including XP allocation optimiser for cookie cutter built and a large database, which fucked it up, people would race their glass canon to level 60, kill a couple of the highest level monsters and get bored.
I wonder how you could build a game like that nowadays without the community ruining it with a wiki.
The sad thing is, I think those days are 100% over. With data mining, wikis, etc. I think there will never be a game that’s played mostly in-game with in-game tools, with people chatting in-game about how to do overcome various challenges the game throws at you. The world has just moved on. I never played something as hardcore as Ashron’s Call in the early days, but I do miss the early days of WoW when so much more of the fun was player-driven, and there was so much more interaction with other players.
I think that’s one reason why D&D is seeing an increase in popularity. It’s a game where you can optimize things to some extent, but because it’s human-driven, a DM can mitigate that somewhat. It’s also inherently social, and it’s impossible to data-mine, and difficult to min-max because each campaign is different and many DMs have slight variations on the set rules.
Well, the opposite might be possible as well. An AI and genetic algorithms could keep a world ever evolving making information obsolete over time and since we know data mining will happen, I’d look at making it a game mechanic somehow.
Some of my favourite games use procedurally generated maps. But, those maps are not hand-sculpted the way MMO dungeons are. And, while you could certainly use generative AI to come up with generic babble from NPCs, that’s not the same as designing entire quests. It may be that eventually a generative AI system will be able to do everything a human could have done: hand-crafted maps, full quest chain dialogue, etc. I just think we’re nowhere near that point yet.
For example, a quest chain almost always has a goal behind it. You’re revealing a certain aspect of the story to the player bit by bit as they complete parts of the quest. But, to do that you need at least a very basic theory of mind. You need to understand what the player knows before the quest chain starts, what each bit of the quest chain will add to their knowledge, and then what they’ll understand at the end of the quest chain. That “theory of mind” stuff is the thing that generative systems just can’t do right now because they’re just fancy auto-complete.
As for auto-generated dungeons, WoW tried that with Torghast in the Shadowlands expansion, and it was not well received. Granted, part of the problem was that Torghast was a depressing, death-themed “dungeon”. But, a bigger issue was that there was no intention behind the design of the levels. It was just a randomized set of corridors that fit together in a random way. Good dungeon designs require intention. You want to reveal something to the player as they go through the dungeon. Ideally you want to know that you’re working your way towards a boss. WoW’s black temple raid is a good example of this. You start in the sewers, you work your way out into a courtyard, you enter another building, clear out the ground floor and open a door that unlocks access to a set of staircases that works its way to the top of the building. You beat the Illidari council which allows you to access a door that opens to the roof of the building where you face the final boss Illidan. I don’t think generative AI is anywhere near being able to come up with a concept like that, let alone design the maps and art for the whole thing.
