Twystyd wrote:Sense were on the subject what about Shadowbane? The problem I see is that Shadowbane was a well thought out system that failed on the programming level more than anything else. Guild created cities and non static global development (cities/politics) were such awesome concepts. Aside from the midnight city sieges and stale leveling, the concept was phenomenal. It was only the crashes and severe exploit abuse that killed that game in most peoples eyes. In short if the exploits/crashes never happened the game would have had a long and healthy lifespan.
Edit: That turned out a lot longer than anticipated... skip to the end for the down and dirty.
See, that sounds a lot more interesting to me now than it would have 8 years or so ago. But even with all the potential a system like that has, the inherent problem with player controlled environments and player policed/developed worlds is the potential for exploitation. In competitive gaming any way a person can get a leg up on the competition will always be utilized to the fullest extent it can be, whether legal or not. Radar in DAoC, speed hacks like GEAR, duping in Diablo, maphacks, wallhacks, and geometry exploitation are just a couple of off hand examples of things people will do to ensure they beat someone else and I'm sure all of us have used or been a party to people who have used any or all of the above while gaming.
Small instances of this don't have a hugely adverse affect on gameplay, particularly when the game has set boundaries for player vs player interaction (e.g. frontiers for DAoC, BGs and flagging for WoW, Abyss and riftable zones in Aion). When the entire gaming world hinges entirely upon player interactions then something that's typically only found in a small group of the upper echelon of players, the same that want their names to go down in the hall of legendary douches that can't remember winning every time does not always equate to fun, becomes general practice and it destroys any semblance of balance the game world needs to continue to thrive. This leads to cancellation of the players that don't want to cheat or don't have enough free time to keep up with the exploiters, and in player driven games people leaving creates an inherent domino effect wherein their associates, who are now even further behind the curve due to lack of support, also decide to leave. We all know that while the lower tier of players quit due to frustration the upper tier stagnates and most of the "uber" guilds quit before someone can dethrone them causing the ladder to degrade at both ends of the spectrum simultaneously.
If there was a game where the players decided politics/faction choice based on player interactions with other players and the npc factions enviornment (e.g. good/evil lawful/chaotic etc.) which are controlled by devs and which are the primary moving force in shaping the world events that didn't involve ingame politics/factions then it could be interesting. In a game like that you choose what you want to be vs. picking a faction then a race then a class, this makes far more sense than games like DAoC and WoW where I may want to be a human, but I'd also like to be a highwayman or a mercenary. Here, depending on player participation certain realms may become subjected to other realms, like if Hibernia was conquered by Albion or the Alliance by the Horde and while that changes the dynamic of the world that the players exist within, it doesn't change the dynamic of the player itself unless people become fugitives for siding with the losing realm or whatever.
Once again though, the problem with this sort of game still follows the others, wherein the characters begin to stagnate because nothing new happens. Likewise the player vs player aspect of the game itself would be far different seeing as guild vs guild would clash with the idea of a greater ordered world unless you could only fight against people of different ideals or good/evil alignment.
In the end sometimes I think simpler is better when it comes to entertainment from a game. Once things become too complex with factions, politics, policy and enforcement through the players themselves, people become too invested in the game. At this point, when they do finally lose (something like a guild city or whatever) it's such a significant blow that the drive to rebuild from the loss doesn't outweigh the effort that it takes to start over. Particularly when, at any given point in time, something could happen completely devaluing all the effort yet again. I mean, look at AoC, who wants to put hundreds of hours into the creation of a city only to have it completely destroyed in a matter of 45 minutes some random Thursday night? Not any adults who have other things that their time can be justifiably used for.
I like competition in my games, but I'd almost rather it be against an illusionary player controlled opponent that can't truly undermine my hard work in any meaningful or tangible way. Kill me and I'll try to get better; destroy hundreds of hours of in-game 'work' and I'll simply quit rather than put in the time again. Everyone would eventually be offered that choice, and the simple results are: 1) you quit because you lack time/drive, 2) you decide to just build shitty and most of he rest of the people in the game do the same, because it's not a big deal to lose something you can put back together in an hour as long as you had fun fighting for it, or 3) you have ample time on you hands due to striking it rich in the lotto when you turned 18 and don't have enough cares in the world to do anything other than grind away hundreds of potentially meaningless hours in a video game over and over.
All that shit said, I think that if Shadowbane worked perfectly as intended, creation didn't take forever and a day, and the human element didn't totally fuck up the concept and corrupt the original intent (e.g. you have a reasonable schedule for things like city-raids, people didn't exploit as often as possible, and somehow cheats weren't applicable/used) then a game like that would easily be one of if not the most interesting type of game available today in my opinion.