As time goes by, I find myself more and more excited about Cyrene and it's release. Our team keeps growing in many ways and the choices we make help define us as a company, a team, and as a group of friends. One of the things that is currently happening is Creative Kingdom and Digital Scryers have started working on building new offices from scratch here in Thailand. The new Digital Scryer offices will help us grow in a very positive way as we are getting a little cramped where we are (no complaints though). Change is a great thing and something I always welcome. The problem is change can lead to stress even if it's a good thing. On one side, I have the ability to mold the offices in exactly the way I wish, but on the other, it means having to make even more choices on a daily basis. Needless to say I take Cyrene very serious and making choices is what defines my role on this project. We all make choices throughout the day and these definitely have positive, negative or benign consequences. I believe that the choices we make can be a result of a chain of events that happen due to prior choices or options we have had. That said Cyrene will mirror this quite a bit. At the beginning Cyrene will be a large open world. As time goes on, the choices the players make will define much of the history and development of the Planet. What I mean by this is that areas that players quest on, interact on, etc will develop as time goes by due to player influence. I am not sure exactly how this will pan out or if you "The Players" will even like this. Many people are not exactly for change and many might oppose it. It is a risk I am willing to take though as I find this will be ultimately rewarding for all of us in the end. Now, do not get me wrong, not everything will be a player choice. Much of the content is pre planned out and change will happen no matter what. The thing is, how prepared will the player be when it happens. In every MMO I have ever played some of the Players (the Ubers if you will) have always out paced the content, but that is not the majority of the player base. The delicate balancing act is to know when the proper time to allow change to happen is. You do not want to alienate any of the Player base but this is going to happen no matter what is done as people are unique and play in different ways. My question to you all would be this. How much do you feel the players should influence content release? Is it more important to release content on set time schedules or perhaps be more flexible and roll with the punches? The choice is a difficult one to say the least. Ultimately it will fall on my shoulders as I take counsel from the data that is presented to me. Still I would love to hear what you all think on this subject and perhaps get a little insight in to how you deal with the many choices you are presented with daily. Thanks.
Sounds great, Ed. I've always been in love with the idea of a world being shaped exactly like that. Like in the US in its early days, the first pioneers would have defined where a city was added, and guided by both the landscape as well as pragmatism, roads would have started taking shape as initial paths were created and later on more heavily used. There would also have been places suitable for innocent people to be ambushed easily, which in due time would have gotten cleared, or protected. If that would be possible in a virtual world, it'd definitely be an even greater treat to be "one of the pioneers". In similar ways, none-physical objects would be formed, such as laws, which basically are nothing more than a set of rules defined to secure a set of values shared by a community. That, and a more structured implementation of certain actions having ever-lasting copnsequences are some of the things I miss on Calypso. Looking forward to see what you and your team have in store for us all :) Peter
Giving people choice and at the same time progressing the game forward in a sensible way is going to be a hard task but It's awesome you are trying to actually achieve it. It makes me very excited about Cyrene too! I guess if I was trying to approach the situation I'd want to do it in a similar manner to a choose your own adventure style game where every choice is carefully mapped into the over all plan and circumstances moulded so that even though people 'appear' to have choice they actually have very little ability to steer the game away from pre set directions. By monitoring those choices though and using chracters and events to guide things you should hopefully be able to keep the game going in a direction that satisfies you and the people playing. The hard part will be in keeping the storytelling immersive and having an open feel at the same time. It's almost like combining Mass effects very choice based storylines with a completely open world like Calypso has been for many years. I really hope you guys manage to pull off something so cool anyway.
I have recently been playing an MMO with full terraforming capabilities, and I like it :) The feel of the areas is not the same as you get from professional level designers, but the fact that you can make your own place to live is very attractive to me.
Nice story there Ed and I love the idea. It would indeed be cool if we, the players, could have a hand in developing the planet. One example that comes to mind is the location of towns. A town is there for a reason, so lets say that we find a nice place to gather sweat (if we still do that on Cyrene) and more and more people go to that one spot to gather it, after a while there will be the need for stuff at that location, so we would be building a settlement there, with some shops and auctioneers and stuff. Also if there is one place where most of the boats leave to visit some sort of island that would be a nice location for a small settlement as well, or at locations with lots of mobs so a lot of hunting. This would mean that you guys will have to monitor very well what we are doing and where we are doing it, but it can be a nice way to develop the history and story of Cyrene.
Great post, Mr Robles. My opinion to your question... give people enough rope and they'll eventually hang themselves with it. This is YOUR baby, your team's blood, sweat, and tears. Your years of planning and stress are going into what will be your masterpiece. It IS for the players to enjoy and be a part of, and thankfully it appears your providing some avenue of subscriber input into its evolution. Make the maze fun and challenging, but hopefully don't allow too much wall moving by the participants or eventually it'll be a hallway. Best of luck finding that fine line. :) Looking forward to Cyrene's launch.
to be honest i dont think anything you said above really matters to us. I know people will sound like it matters and people initially will say it matters. But take a look at the forums over the last 8 years. We care more about stability, things working, and things that where previously promised. So honestly don't give us hopes of cool new things. We'll just be happy to see a planet with an economy that works, missions that work, and a planet that you can walk around and not get stuck at some outpost Revive Terminal surrounded by uber mobs that take an army to get away from and that you actually go out there and bring in new players. If you dont have those then it wont really matter what cool new things you do. But if you do fix those things i mention you can do anything you want and we'll love it. Right now the economy sucks. There are way to many items, the game is complicated more then it needs to be. Something as simple as each mob needs to only drop 3-4 different materials instead of 10-30 different materials would make bigger difference.
trying to discern the meaning of the question(s) you are asking here... Perhaps certain quests could be 'time limited' in ways?... perhaps after x amount of the quests are handed out, the quest shuts out anyone else as that branch is gone unless those that took it on abandon it, in which case the quest giver hands the quest out again since there is x amount on this particular quest... now take this idea and combine it to others... quest 1 has reward A, but only 25 participants that can undergo it. Quest 2 has reward B, but only 50 who can complete it. Quest 3 has reward C, but only 50 participants can undergo it. If any of those that undergo any of those quests abandon it before doing whatever is needed to get the reward, the quest reopens... now the tricky part... NO avatar can do quest 1, 2, and/or 3... they can only do one of the three... and will have to solve all sorts of complex things to even find the quest giver of these 3 seperate quests.... Now the really tricky part... Rewards A, B, and C have to be combined to create reward D... and D is unique, in that there is only 25 maximum possible... so that limits the next quest that D opens to a maximum of 25, etc.... Maybe that ultimately leads to something special like an estate deed as a reward?
Have a set time frame in mind and sometimes roll out a release when it suits you or rather the storyline best & other times don't update to a schedule unless x number of players have reached or achieved x condition. So for example say the storyline means part of continent george is blown up this could be triggered by two conditions: - 100 players managed to reach story part where bombs are successfully planted - Although no player managed to plant bombs the Ed meteor unexpectedly appeared out of nowhere and blew up george continent I think it's best to have a combination of these triggers makes it more fun and lesss predictable. Sometimes it's good to have a "random" factor i.e. developers fun previleges :). This could be really interesting if linked to forum player behaviour ..e.g. many players expecting such and such ...so instead we'll just do something different :D The key and the most difficult part i guess is judging player base general expectations and needs and using the right mix of triggers as mentioned above. The forum input could be interesting so even players who may not have reached a certain storyline part may have strong feelings of how it should develop and a forum gives people a chance to voice their opinions. That could be really engaging ...
