General Discussion

I've always wondered about this.  When I say no NPCs, I mean no quest givers, merchants, auction house NPCs, or any form of humanoid mob.  There would only be creatures, and they would be finite.  You could hypothetically kill off an entire species of mobs if you worked hard enough.  Of course, the game world would have be HUGE because there would be people who try to accomplish this.

Players would have to fill all the roles, you'd have player lawmakers who handed out tasks to players who then enforce the law.  Players could break off and form their own countries and governments, so long as they could recruit a large enough army to do so.

There would be a player driven economy.  Day 1 of the game starts with nothing.  No looted items other than hide/meat etc.  Players would have to figure out how to start creating items from the world around them.  They then would have to run their own stores, determine their own prices, set up their own security so other players could not steal the items.

Could something like this work?  Maybe not to this extreme, but could a real sanbox world ever work as an MMO?

Asherons Call 2 tried this and failed horribly.  And I loved AC1

It could work, but it'd require a lot of work and not appeal to many players, thus making an MMOG in this way that'd be profitable would be nigh impossible.

My dream MMOG is almost like that though. Plus free PvP and full looting, all with repercussions of course. Guess I'm not too realistic in my dreams. :-)

WurmOnline is pretty close.  But the developers decided to add traders and merchants just because NO-NPCs isn't really it's design goal. Even if they could remove them and only 10 people would notice and 20 care after it got to the forum.

Originally posted by Dreamagram

It could work, but it'd require a lot of work and not appeal to many players, thus making an MMOG in this way that'd be profitable would be nigh impossible.

My dream MMOG is almost like that though. Plus free PvP and full looting, all with repercussions of course. Guess I'm not too realistic in my dreams. :-)

Yes free pvp would have to be in there.  But there would be groups of players actively hunting random PKers.

It's a pipe dream.....

Originally posted by Sabiancym

Originally posted by Dreamagram

It could work, but it'd require a lot of work and not appeal to many players, thus making an MMOG in this way that'd be profitable would be nigh impossible.

My dream MMOG is almost like that though. Plus free PvP and full looting, all with repercussions of course. Guess I'm not too realistic in my dreams. :-)

 

Yes free pvp would have to be in there.  But there would be groups of players actively hunting random PKers.

 

It's a pipe dream.....

Rather hunting anything that moves.

I like the idea.  The only problem with this is that the majority of the peopulation that plays todays games would not go for it.  They rely too much on npc's to give them goals and point them in the direction of content that they'd get annoyed and bored without trying to make up their own goals and findig things to do.

Some people might suggest that there would be a sort of server "downtime" where everybody would be sleeping and you might not get to sell your stuff or buy when you play.  My soultion to this would be to have a server setup like EvE and include people from all time zones that way there is always someone waking up and loging on while others go to sleep.  Potentially, you could have one crafter call it a night while another in another part of the world might just be gettin on while sipping his morning coffee.  There might be language barriers to overcome but by the time a game like this goes live I think we'll all end up speaking the same language since the way it looks right now it's going to take quite a few years.

The idea of being one of the first poineers in a new world is pretty interesting.  Going in with nothing more then a loin cloth and having to find a stick or a rock to beat my next meal to death is something I've been thinking about for a while.

No I don't think so, unless the world was considerably different than your average MMO world.

NPCs do things that most people consider boring.  Inn Keepers for example, to make inns useful you would need somebody manning the Inn at all times.  Players would not really want to do that.  Does anybody want to be a dedicated shop keeper and never leave the shop, or a dedicated drunk and stumble around town for atmosphere.

You could add more player involvement like player owned shops and inns, but NPCs would be needed to run it.  NPCs also add more believability by adding people in the world that do not run around in a suit of armor industriously making and killing things all day, and then sometimes dissapear.  They are needed to have cities that feel like cities because NPCs can be permanent residents and do the less glorious jobs and not make cities just hubs where people occasionally meet up.

I don't think it is an issue of giving players goals but more an issue of making a believable and interesting world.