The current state of the art in this industry is to have a few automated or partially automated systems that supplement the primary means by which the player experiences the narrative of the game. Rift has a system wherein the world is divided into zones and each zone experiences some level of invasion from one or more other dimensions. These rifts spawn invasions and players can choose to attempt to stop the progression of the invasion or to ignore it.

There are a few other examples out there of procedural content/narrative automation however they all fail mostly at the same point; when the randomness or uncertainty would change the core behavior of the rest of the game. The mainstay of the CRPG industry is the hand crafted quests and story lines, and they rely on things staying largely the same, or changing in predetermined manner..

The cost of writing and implementing these quests is one of the primary costs for any CRPG production. It is my belief that this practice as well as the costs associated with creation of the narrative in this manner can be eliminated by instituting a robust, dynamic, game-complete simulation of the game environment, societies and NPCs. The resultant simulation would be more effective at engaging the player and present a more profitable model for MMORPG sustainability.

2/18/2021

A robust simulation would be stable, and able to modified by any action that the player may take in the world. For instance if a player decides to eradicate some sort of animal hazard that is hampering a village from growing or using a resources, once a player removes the hazard the village should attempt to grow. As a village has more resources available to it, it should house more citizens, etc. This example illustrates the level of simulation that is needed. Every element that the player interacts with should be simulated, every; citizen, tree, flower, animal, resource, etc. In this way the simulation can present the current state of the world to the player, allowing emergent game play, quests, alliances and more. Robustness will be covered more here.

8/13/2021

Game environments can take many shapes, here I will be concentrating on world sized environments, though with some small tweaks these guidelines can be applied to any scale. To simulate the game environment well we need a good specification for the data and how it will be structured.