[MUD-Dev] Re: The Future of MMOGs... what\'s next?

[Freeman]

From: Damion Schubert

> The people attempting to create true persistent worlds with true
> character persistance have run into greater problems with that.
> The one I've heard fairly frequently is problems adding
> substantial changes to the game after the game has been up and
> running without having to do a player wipe.

The characters are stored seperately from the game data, so that's
not the problem.

The problem is that the tool cannot edit save-games.  By default,
doesn't auto-save the game.  And without scripting (and possibly not
even with scripting - I haven't tested adding ExportAllCharacters to
OnClientExit), won't save any player's character that drops
connection (due to client-crash, for example).

For the hobbiest gamer trying to set-up a persistent server, those
are pretty substantial hurdles.

> As a disclaimer, Bioware has said repeatedly that their game was
> not designed to run Persistent Worlds, and that while they didn't
> mind people trying, Bioware wasn't planning on adding features
> that supported PWs over the Tabletop experience (the Tabletop
> experience being, of course, the cornerstone of their game
> design).

It's actually not very good at that, either.  DMs cannot view the
players' character sheets, for example, and some really basic stuff
(like creating and naming an NPC on-the-fly) cannot be done.  You
have to make templates for the NPCs in advance before you'd be able
to drop them in "on the fly", and you can't rename them on-the-fly
(at least, again, not without writing some kinda rename-NPC script).

Basically, NWN is a good single-player CRPG.  And it comes with very
nice tools that will allow you to make a pretty good single-player
CRPG.

As for the other stuff, some people will do it.  But as for being
the everyman's graphical mud-builder, I think the technical
proficiency required is a bit on the steep side.

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