alternative to mob spawn points?

News & General Discussion
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In most MMO RPGs (at least among the ones I’ve tried), monsters spawn at certain spawn points. You kill 'em, wait long enough, and they respawn. Sometimes they won’t spawn if there are players nearby (which is probably intended to prevent camping out at spawn points), and in some cases the respawn may be within a certain area rather than a specific point, but the basic idea is the same. That cave over there is the Big Hairy Spider cave, and no matter how many times you kill the BHS, she’s going to reappear in that cave later.

This is one of the things that breaks immersion for me, and also seems like a wasted opportunity for players to have an impact on the world. Basically, killing mobs doesn’t change anything about the world, as the mob is going to just come right back. So, I’d like to explore alternatives.

An easy answer in a single-player game is: simply don’t respawn the mobs. You kill 'em, they’re gone. Of course if there isn’t some means of reproduction, this would also mean a fixed amount of experience and drops in the world. But you could set up a simple ecology where the monsters reproduce, and perhaps even eat each other, leading to classic boom/bust population cycles which the player would affect by killing things (especially top predators). It also means that if you wipe out all the Big Hairy Spiders, then there aren’t any more BHSes in the world, and that cave that used to be infested is now safe. (Until something else moves in… which would require an additional game dynamic: newly born monsters look for a place to make their den.)

However, in an MMO, I think it’d be much harder to make this work. Early players of the game would so muck with the ecology that by the time later players join, it would be unrecognizable. Entire species of monsters would be wiped out — almost certainly including the top predators, leaving a world overrun with bugs and bunnies.

So here’s a novel idea: a multiplayer online game, where you and a group of your friends all start at once, and get your own instance of the world. Then me and my 12 closest friends start in a world with all sorts of scary monsters, and we can choose to wipe them out and plant wheat, or harvest carefully so as to manage the ecology, or ignore them (except in defense) and go set up shop in the mountains, or whatever. As buff heroes with lots of sharp implements, we can have a dramatic effect on the world — and that’s OK, because it’s our world. Basically, this is the same approach as in a single-player game, but with the social aspects of a multi-player game. And I guess, now that I think of it, that it wouldn’t have to be a group of friends; you could just start a new game, say, once per month, and everybody jumps in on that world. But if it really were hundreds or thousands of players you don’t know, the result would uniformly be wiping out of all the large species.

So, what else can we do? What about having some unkillable reservoir of each species? It’s hard to see how to do this without going right back to spawn points/zones, though. But we could take the example of locusts, who disappear underground for some prime number of years, and then reemerge all at once. Maybe big predators could do something similar: when their population is getting low, the last few individuals hide underground or in the Astral Plane or whatever, reproduce out of sight, and then reemerge later, perhaps where they hid. So, you can still clear out an area if you do it quickly, but most likely there will be some other area where some got away and will reemerge later.

I don’t know if that’s enough to prevent the collapse of the ecosystem, but it might help.

A variation on that idea is to assume that the world the players can roam in is only one part of a much larger world, and no matter how well they clear out that part, all monster species continue to thrive elsewhere. So you’d basically get monsters spawning on the borders of the territory, and wandering in (and setting up shop wherever they can find a comfy hole). This is pretty realistic. Again, in an MMO, it could spoil the fun for later players, as they’d find the starting areas almost completely empty, and have to wander for days before they run into who-knows-what. But maybe it would work, especially if you’re trying to create a virtual world rather than the classic stats-based game.

What do you all think? What alternatives are there to respawning monsters at designated locations?

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Well, I like the idea of a semi realistic ecosystem, with mating/predatory species competing over food and water and stuff, but the keep all species alive would be important I feel. Maybe if the population of a certain species dropped below a threshold, spawn a male female group in an uninhabited cave somewhere you know, keeping the circle of life going lol.

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Sounds like a great idea and since you are keeping it focused, you can be more detailed with the ecosystem stuff.

Too many of us try to put too much into one game and it all comes out watered down.

I absolutely agree with the bit about spawns. The only way I see them working in an MMO is to make them generic, so that instead of having a giant rare spider, you have a species of poisonous spiders that return to their den after being demolished…sort of like how ants return to their anthill. :slight_smile:

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For what it’s worth, I’ve done a lot of artificial life experiments, and I would recommend against sexual reproduction. It’s much harder to keep that going in a small population, and just ends up making things much more unstable. Though it’s not as realistic, it’s much easier to maintain an ecology based on budding or fission (i.e., one parent spawns a child, or simply splits in two). Or you could require pairs of animals, but have only one gender, so any pair will do. But even that much doesn’t seem worth it to me, unless you think players are going to (a) notice and (b) care.

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Yeah, that would work. You could have certain areas tagged as good for various species, i.e., this cave is good for spiders. And also note how recently each area has been visited by something large (like a player or another giant spider). So then spawn new monsters out on the borders, and have them head towards the nearest area good for their species that hasn’t been visited recently. (While avoiding whatever they consider to be hazards along the way, like heavily populated areas.)

To a cursory observation, this would look very similar to the classic spiders-respawn-here system… but when you get more involved in the game, you find it’s quite different, as new spiders would have to actually cross other areas to get to the cave. If you fence the cave off, or simply patrol that area a lot, then no new spiders appear in it, which is realistic and fun.

But then, I’m the sort of player that really enjoys messing with the game world like this… it’s entirely possible that most players wouldn’t care.

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You could do it that way, having the spiders cross areas to get to their home land. Or you could just have them spawn in the cave or hole or whatever. Players won’t see them wandering, but they won’t care, will they? :slight_smile:

The other way could be to spawn the spiders in other areas, give them a path, head them toward their homeland, but don’t actually go there. Players will see them and smash them anyway before they ever get there.

I am a big promoter of perception rather than reality in games. :slight_smile: You can go to a lot of work to make something absolutely real, such as requiring two genders for animals to propagate, but really the perception of the animal population increasing is enough. The vast majority of players won’t notice and if they do, they will notice once. Why put in a lot of work for something that can be “fudged” to appear the same. It is sort of like throwing away time, imho. I can use that time to add other cool features into the game instead, ones that the players will all or mostly notice and will actually impact game play a lot more.

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Wasn’t this most of what Wakfu was trying to do? I stopped paying attention to it about six years ago when it was knee deep in development, so I presume they gave up on it.

Ecology in a fantasy setting has always been a fool’s errand. Why would any dungeon contain a large number of massive, carnivorous monsters? It’s because they wouldn’t. Unless just outside the dungeon was gigantic… tracts of land being farmed for livestock, the three dragons, ten minotaurs, and five battalions of orcs would have eaten each other. So what was once a high level dungeon now just contains two enemies that are now starving to death and can’t fight do to fatigue.

So long as the main mechanism for progression requires killing anything and everything in sight, it doesn’t make any sense to try to make mob spawning something that only happens under tenuous circumstances/conditions.

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RockoDyne, you have your own ideas of what is a fool’s errand, what makes a fun game, and how we should all do things. I completely respect that. :slight_smile:

However, one of the most requested feature in our game is a realistic ecosystem. They want it and want it bad. I agree that is very difficult to totally create such a thing in an MMO with lots of other stuff going on, but in Joe’s idea, the ecosystem is the main subject of the game. The game centers around this issue, so the developer can focus on it and make it as realistic as possible, within the confines of game development. And I think he is talking more than one dungeon…I think at least.

Most games spawn creatures that every one kills and kills and kills. Monsters are resources. They can be spawned through spawn points or they can be spawned using more complex systems that might mimic an ecosystem. The number of prey vs predators can change and grow based on factors in the environment. So what if they are all killed? The ecosystem is simply a complex way to respawn them.

You say this is foolish? I think it is thinking outside the box and many players might find it fun. The problem with modern games is that so many think it is foolish to do something “different”. I guess they don’t want to do all the work for minimal impact, which makes sense. On the other hand, if we all do things the easy way and never branch out, how will games evolve? Really, most games now are pretty much exactly like the were 20 years ago, only with prettier graphics and physics.

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I wasn’t actually proposing that managing the ecosystem be the central point of the game. Just that the common pattern, of killing the same monsters spawning in the same places over and over again, is old and tiresome and perhaps we can do something better.

I recognize and respect that some people enjoy the classic formula. Kill mobs (which are always there in abundance) to collect XP and loots and level up so you can kill higher mobs (which will always be there in abundance). OK, cool, that works. But as Teila said, if we never branch out, how will games evolve?

One shortcoming I’m constantly seeking to address is the minimal impact you can have on the world in most games. We’ve talked about this in other contexts already (such as, whether there should be unkillable NPCs, or how quests might be generated based on what’s going on). This is another one. In the classic formula, you can’t affect what monsters are found where, except over the very short term. As soon as the respawn delay is past, those monsters are right back where they were. I find this unsatisfying.

Now, I do agree that realism shouldn’t be added just for realism’s sake. Some levels of detail are beyond what players will notice or care about. However, I don’t think that necessarily applies here. When I play, I like to feel I’m having an impact on the world. So, look around the world and see where an impact is needed… why, it’s crawling with ravenous monsters! Surely that’s not a good thing. So I am intrinsically motivated to try and clear them out… except that in most games, this is impossible.

This leads to our current exploration of how we could design a game so that it is possible to clear the monsters out of an area, without rendering the game completely unplayable. I think it’s true that the classic RPG XP-grinding formula can’t be the central mechanic. But if you look at any RPG equipped with alternative activities (fishing, farming, crafting, etc.), you will find players who enjoy doing those things much more than constant combat. (Oh geez, “Constant Combat” is a great name for a game… I may have to use that someday, but not for the game we’re discussing here!)

So! Suppose you design a game to actually welcome and encourage those non-combantant players, rather than sort of tolerating them as a quirky subculture. I would suggest, let’s still populate the world with monsters, but put in just enough realism that the players, if they so wish, can make a safe zone by clearing out an area and putting up appropriate barriers (or regular patrols) to keep it clear. And if their barriers crumble or the patrols get lazy, the monsters should make their way back, in a believable way.

In other words, rather than developing my character so he has 1200 HP and hits for 5x30 damage, maybe I want to strike off into the jungle, clear some trees, pacify the local fauna, and develop a house or village I’m proud to live in. It’s still development either way; just a different kind of development, which leads to different design decisions.

Sounds like fun to me, at least!

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The problem is realistic ecology is immediately handwaved away in just about every RPG in favor of combat driven experience. You have to completely subvert every RPG trope just so that you can have an accurate food chain. Activities like adventuring would be meaningless as most unintelligent monsters would be few and far between, while the more intelligent ones wouldn’t stray far from groups. Most players would be lucky if they can ever come across an encounter they could handle. You would be looking at D&D campaigns where all the player characters die of old age at level 4, and even that would probably require them to conscript into some military faction.

The tried and true formulas don’t work for this, so both designing the game and playing the game are radically different exercises than either party is accustomed to. Hell, it would be easier and make more sense to players to do something that was just PvP or focused combat toward wars, than have some pretense of PvE. If anything, what really needs to be explored are other avenues of player driven gameplay, before we get to figuring out how to prevent genocidal monsters from committing genocide on the monsters.

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Apparently not. Looks interesting… I may have to give it a try sometime!

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Hack and Slash games that called themselves RPG’s subverted the RPG part of games long ago. Some us want to put the RPG back into a game. We do not have to use the tried and true to define an RPG game. We can make changes you know. :slight_smile:

I don’t see Joe saying he wants to make an “accurate food chain”, just that he thinks it might be an interesting alternative to the way it is usually done.

Why? Why can’t we make games that are different? Why do we have to spend time doing war?

Joe’s idea gives players a way to impact the world. It IS player driven in the sense that the player’s actions influence the ecology. If this were combined with a survival style game, it could be very exciting.

Not all games have to be about war or PvP or anything else. And yeah, I would love to see people do new stuff rather than take the old and try to wring something out of them. Time to move on.

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I guess another way to go is like monster farms were they breed monsters and you have to get a ‘licence’ to hunt them.

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Another option is to double down on contrivance and make something even more contrived. Something like summoning mobs to fight. May not do much for player investment, but lets face it, the only time players would actually be concerned about the deeper workings of spawn points is when there is some griefing to be done.

But I hate everything new, and I won’t stop until I see your “new” polygons destroyed in 8-bit hellfire. WAH-HA-HA-HA-HA

Seriously though, the issue isn’t doing something differently. The real issue is doing something differently, but not realizing that there is anything different. I’ve seen far too many games that ended up being terrible because the game the devs actually had and the game they thought they were making were not even remotely close.

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That happens and often an inexperienced developer has a tough time converting his dream into something resembles the game he wanted to make. I am not an artist and if I try to draw something, it never is as good as in my imagination. I think it is okay to make bad games though. Every attempt is a learning experience and the rest of really can’t control whether bad games are made.

However, some of those innovations will turn out to be good. It is how things evolve.

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Ultima Online (one of the granddaddies of graphical MMOs) started with a virtual ecology just like @JoeStrout describes. Raph Koster, one of the designers, wrote an article about how they implemented it (part1, part2). Perhaps more interesting for game design discussion is Tynan Sylvester’s article (“The Simulation Dream”) about why UO’s simulation failed so disappointingly. In the UO wikipedia entry, there’s a link to an interview with Richard Garriott where he says:

I think this is a wide open game design topic right now. I still wonder if things would be different today. Maybe they’d have been able to address the ecology-balancing issues in some large scale alpha release before actually going commercial with the game.

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That was a long time ago. I imagine we have learned a lot since then. :slight_smile: Whether it is possible with today’s knowledge is yet to be seen but worth a try nonetheless.

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I’m so glad you wrote “today’s knowledge” and not “today’s technology.” I’m convinced that it’s a design problem, not a technology problem.

What’s so bad about die-offs and new eras? So you kill off the dinosaurs. Now you have to contend with mastodons and sabre-tooth tigers. Since it’s a fantasy anyway, you can accelerate the process (“magically” perhaps?) to eliminate any downtime due to periods of desolation. Unless perhaps those locusts (giant, man-eating locusts) are designed to come out only when the surface dwellers have all gone extinct…

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Yeah, I think ecology is a tough thing to grasp and even harder to implement so a design problem, definitely.

I think having one species die off and another take over could be really dynamic in a game. Imagine if the prey you hunt for food is over-hunted and you are competing with predators for food. As a player, you know have to think of new ways to survive. As the prey falls, so do the predators eventually, as they either die off or move away, off map. Fewer predators and the prey comes back. As a player, you can influence this. Maybe you can capture animals and breed them or maybe you can find new prey for your food. Possibly you will start killing the predators that interfere with your hunting, eventually causing the prey population to rise, maybe too much. Too many rabbits might mean the food you are growing in your garden is eaten by the bunnies.

In a survival setting, it could add to the drama. Apply that to a game with monsters instead of bunnies and if the player over-hunts the prey creatures, the nasty predators now have only the players as food and become more aggressive. Part of the game would be to try to balance the system. As long as the game allows players to do what they need to do, it could be fun.

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Yep. I’m also fine with “rigging” the system in some way that the players won’t notice, e.g., having a hidden reservoir (off-map for example) with a fixed ratio of species, from which new instances wander in periodically. As long as the rate of that is relatively small compared to the rate at which local monsters reproduce, you’re still going to get population dynamics — you just won’t ever get complete extinction.

However, Tony’s example from UO is an important one; in most hack & slash games, the players are indeed like locusts, killing everything in their path so quickly and thoroughly that there wouldn’t be any boom & bust cycles. There would be just one bust, when the game begins, and then essentially nothing except for the trickle of replacements from the reservoir.

So the challenge is to redesign the core mechanics & incentives in the game so that the players don’t do that. It’s kind of a tough issue though, because it’s likely to be a tragedy of the commons situation.