Instances are bits of content that can be locked by players such that they are the only ones who get to experience that content. These days, they are used to provide lots of different people access to the same content without everyone getting in each other's way. Imagine working your way through the Caves of Xippy, trying to reach the heavily guarded chest of valuables at the back of the caves - when some individual or group comes along and ruins the whole thing. If you're an experienced player, you can well imagine all the ways that other players can ruin your fun. If you're in an instance, you get to play with the instanced content your way.
Instances contrast with shared content which is the stuff that people can converge on. Two players see the same named monster and they can both beat on it. They can both walk down the same road. They can enter the same building, use the same merchant NPCs, etc. That's the shared content. Shared content is usually pretty straightforward stuff.
The most critical element of instancing is the locking. When a group enters an instance, nobody else can get in. It's been reserved (created, actually) just for them. The theory goes that if the players have decided to form a group, then they are all interested in the same goal. That might be sneaking through the instance, or seeing if they can aggro all the monsters at once, or doing a timed run through the instance, etc. No matter the goal, the theory goes that the group has the same agenda.
Note that some games even lock shared content on-the-fly. If you start whacking a monster and I show up and try to whack it harder than you in the belief that if i do the lion's share of the work then I can steal the experience and loot of the kill, locking says "first come, first served". The game has locked the monster for you, excluding me from ruining your fun. Well, to a limited extent, anyway.
So where do I see beauty in instancing? In the fact that instances are miniature games. They usually aren't massively-multiplayer at all. They're generallly focused on a group or a group of groups (a raid). As claimed above, the people in the instance have a shared agenda; they agree on certain points. The small size and implicit shared agreement lend a certain power to the game developers.
How would you like to have as much freedom of action as in Crysis while playing World of Warcraft? Your spells blast down trees, start fires, your warrior can pick up and throw big rocks, you can climb rocky cliffs (okay, that's not in Crysis) and so on. Those things aren't done in MMORPGs today because of the computational demands. Just the idea of implementing collision detection in an MMORPG is a daunting thought. It's daunting because MMORPGs are massively multiplayer. But instances aren't anywhere near the same scale. At worst, they have 100 characters in them. They may well have as few as 10 or 20, which appears to be the sweet spot for groups in instances (ever try to organize a large raid?)
How about this for an instance: change the rules of the encounter. Suppose you could reserve an instance that had a danger level to it. You could go from Carebear to Permadeath. That would change not only the danger of the encounters, but also the rewards if you succeed. How about changing the physical laws so that there's no gravity? How about choosing the lighting level or time of day? How about setting the preference for style of encounter, from stealth to in-your-face-slugfest? Maybe you want to declare an instance to be a PvP area. You can do all these things because the alterations only affect the group entering the instance. So long as there is no competitive advantage conferred by the changes, it's all good.
Oh, and with more computes available for a smaller group, better artificial intelligence could be brought to bear. There is even hope that the client machine could be used to help out with all these computes, despite the axiom that the client machine is the enemy of multiplayer game designers.
Another one for you: procedural content. What if every time you entered an instance, a new one was created for you? If a cityscape, the city would be different. If caves, the cave layout changes each time. This means that the pathing of the monsters changes each time, and you can't assume that a monster is going to be at a particular location each time you enter an instance. Maybe the monsters are created procedurally, as with Will Wright's upcoming game, Spore.
Here's one more interesting thing about instance locking. What if instances weren't created when you entered them, but were simply locked? This would mean that when your group is told to go on a quest to retrieve the Lord's stolen sword from the vile ghouls in the Cursed Mine, you're the only ones who are going to do it. You get a certain amount of time, and the instance is locked while you have the quest.
When you succeed on the quest, the sword is returned to the Lord - and that's the end of the quest. It is non-repeating. Nobody else retrieves the Lord's sword. The ghouls may have a regular inventory of junk stashed away in the Cursed Mine that will be the source of other quests, or some engineer type may need a bit of ore from a room in the Mine, or the Mine may be used for some other quest, but the world state was just advanced by what your group just did.
That's really why I see instances as beautiful things. They permit a more varied and enjoyable experience than is possible in the shared content. The key is the locking (so to speak). Grief and unfortunate chance encounters with other players are no longer a complication. One-off quests can't be done without content-locking. Smaller groups can use algorithms that don't scale up well.
In brief, instancing lets an MMO become a GMO - a Group Multiplayer Online game. And when we get to that size, many possibilities open up. It is my fervent hope that game developers will begin to explore those possibilities.
Spread the word! Demand more from the instances!
User Comments
While instancing has its place, I do love a good non instanced dungeon. I understand people like to have their own space in an MMO especially when it is to dungeon dive, but I just wish more developers would also include dungeons that are shared by the entire player base. It is nice to have that kind of competition from time to time or just knowing that maybe this one time, your group doesn't have to clear out the entire area by yourselves (a task that gets tedious after rinse/repeating the same dungeon multiple times).
Again, while instancing promotes group oriented game play, so does non-instancing, but in a very different way. Instancing is more of a safe/non-confrontational way of handling multiple groups in a dungeon but many of us like to be confrontational. Who is that other group in the dungeon? What is their intention? Will they work with us or against us? Who will get to the bosses first? That kind of mentality exhibits a different kind of PvP...one in which players actively compete against each other for common resources (i.e. quest rewards) in the game w/o resorting to fighting each other. And while I understand the frustration that may happen as a result, or the frustration that will arise when another group doesn't play fair, I suppose I'll take the good and the bad over having developers use instancing as a way to police people's behavior. I mean we are all together playing in an MMORPG - human social interaction doesn't end and definitely becomes part of the game. To limit our interactions is wrong.
So while instancing has its place, it should never ever completely replace non-instancing.
BTW, I do definitely like all of your instanced game mechanics ideas. I really do think developers need to add options like these. Making an area instanced and keeping the content static is just kinda...stupid and really does go against the potential of what instancing can be.
I agree that unstructured and shared environments have their place. I wouldn't want to see every bit of content in a given virtual world structured as instances. Something that I enjoy more than almost any other experience in MMOs is the ad hoc alliances that form in a hunting area. That is, no formal grouping, just a shared effort towards a common goal. Some good-natured competition towards that common goal can be fun as well. These sorts of interactions are often the very thing that leads to the formation of friendships, groups and guilds.
Structured instances are an effort at acknowledging that some specific formulas of group interactions are fun. The very act of structuring them is an effort to make sure that the specific kind of fun takes place - as opposed to being demolished by somebody who actively or accidentally gets involved. Competition has its place, but only when everyone involved wants to compete.
With that in mind, consider that an instance could be a competitive instance. Two teams sign up for an instance that will be unlocked for them at 8PM sharp next Tuesday. The competition could be a simple case of a race to the final encounter or it could involve direct PvP, trying to take out the other team as part of the race. That's part of the beauty of instancing - many different sets of rules can be put into place within the instances. All it takes is for enough people to sign up for a given instance.
Raph Koster's Metaverse is an attempt at getting many experiments in virtual worlds going all at one time. It's a very Web 2.0 sort of act that will yield a lot of trash environments and a few interesting experiments. They'll get better as people get skilled at working with them - just like the web itself. Me, I'd like the folks who are already investing the money into the infrastructure and content to have a lash at implementing lots of variations within their MMO environments. They're SO close now, and things like Metaverse are still a ways off.
problem with procedurally content (at this time) they seem very repetitive. City of Heroes claimed to randomly generate their caves and stuff but they still felt like boring caves.
only nice thing with their instanced missions you could set the diffculty. I'm personally no big fan of instances however, what you propose sound interesting.
Hellgate London also claims to procedurally generate everything but I'm not sure if reviewers approve
Instances could be employed in a successful manner possibly but they seem way to anti-MMO too me. EQ2 did an interesting thing with how dungeons work. only the boss encounter itself was instanced. that was decent for the game they had
Coh did not have the best way for instancing. Instancing allows the developers to create a very, very large world. I've thought about it similar to how JB47934 talks about it. Following those general ideas, the procedurally generated contents can be used to create an entire region of world land/space. Different rules for content generation for different regions. So a group will be entering those instances by the illusion of a means of travel (versus COH, where you enter the same place, but it looks different each time, which doesn't make sense); so they can get a quest, and once they step pass that zone, they are transported to a specific instanced location.
Furthermore, just because there hasn't been any or much cases where instances can effect the shared world, doesn't mean it can't be done.
And these instances or actually zones can be used for some rvr stuff as well, so that players can choose to go into it willingly and not have to worry when they adventure in the shared world.
Admittedly, there will be less collision with random players who aren't with your group, but there is a big portion of the world that can be shared rather than instanced. But overall, I think it will result in longer lasting play and an overall better MMO experience.
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