Is it even possible to have that much detail in a game?  Could you make a game that is so immersive that when you are building a house you are building it brick by brick?  You have to think with some reality here.  To have a game to were I can play as a human and my needs are to build a home and to become friends with so many people and make a life with this group of people.  While at the same time another player is playing as a brown bear in the woods and in his own little world.  It sounds good sure, but it is impossible to actually make. 

      Think about what you are actually saying here.  On paper it sounds like it would be so refreshing and exciting to play in but you can honestly really do so much.  MMOs are the worst games ever made.  MMOs are made to keep people busy and to feel that they are working towards something.  For example, most mmos offer really long drawn out story lines involving quest.  Or, you fight (grind) to build reputation towards a certain group for items ect.  That is what people want because they for the most part dont have to be unique and can be apart of a crowd and feel good about what they have done.  For example, say you raided a dungeon for weeks and you finish your set.  People will envy your character and for most MMO players that is all they want.  They want to look cool in a virtual world where people wish or already do look like their character.

    The game you are describing to me sounds like Ultima Online when it first came out.  Even though you couldnt play as a bear or an orc it was basically a person ran game.  There were no quest, there were only way to increase your characters skills and what you had to offer to the community.  As time went on and MMOs changed soon UO went down the path, and that is what killed the game. 

    But what I am just trying to say is that your idea is awesome, and there is no one who could say they wouldnt find themself immersed in your world.  The only problem is, it just wont happen.  There is no way to get it started.  With MMOs you have to guide people, and you have to tell them where to go, how to fight, and what to do.  I know it is sad, but that is what most of our gaming world is.  So, I do wish you good luck on your game, and if you ever do get it out I can tell you right now I will join the ranks of your game and have a good time. 

Lol Plasuma!!! you don't get it at all... hunman-like gameplay is only a small part of gameplay for those who don't like to try new things. I have actually 8 choosen races, all different in their appreciation of good and evil, relationship to the wilderness, sensibility to their surrounding, intelligence, etc... but you see all this isn't for variety's sake. All of my choices have a profond meaning and it is up to the player to find out what I believe and maybe think about it a little. The gameplay fundamental pillar is experimentation, if you want to be enslaved and told what to do all the time, fine you can, but if you don't, the option is there waiting for you. What you are saying about realism is funny because that's precisely one of the reason why I am not part of Ironore's project, it seems far too real for me. While I tried to understand why it can matters for some people, it is simply not my taste at all, mainly because I may not have the same gaming background history than most, on this forum.

Ultimately it is up to the player to choose what his (or his character's) life should be. What I am doing is trying to offer an answer to those questions you didn't find an answer to yet. I am not that old but what I understood about life, I want to share it with others. You seem to imply that only a few people will enjoy teaching for example, and that's fine. The point is to discover things by yourself, to discover you inner strengths (and weaknesses) and take your place into the world, but when you need help to figure things out, what to do ? And that's where the mind game starts... if nobody want to teach you something, is it all that important really ? In real life you adapt or you say that it is God who don't love you. Through your whole life your opinion on this subject may change, but ultimately it is only a matter of perception. Nobody holds the truth, it is up to you to choose what is true or not, etc...

I will go a little further here. Do you see how much time we past going to school and such, until suddently we are confronted with real life ? While I understand the need to protect children from harm, overprotection isn't good in my opinion. I would be happy to have a playground to let my inspiration and creativity flow, without the constraints of being so young that I can do nothing at all, this is a lot of time wasted. Games offer us this freedom, and more than their entertaining value, they also have a teaching value. However your mind has to be open for your eyes to see beyond apparences, like for example how Neo wasn't ready to accept his new reality in the Matrix movie. I am going to break a lot of molds for those who accept the challenge, and this NPC discussion is one of them.

Back to topic now. I disagree with your DnD example. DnD is good and all but you know what ? The DnD developers tell you that DnD rules are just a tool to create an experience, and make it easier for the dungeon master to handle. If you don't like something in the rules you just rewrite them, the dungeon master can and will do it if he is intelligent enough. It saddens me that you seem to be so old school. I am not using classes, if you want to teach today and hunt tomorrow you can, this is what a class system don't allow you to do ! So your DnD example is really poor...

Next is the gankfest, you are assuming that it will be like the far west or sumthin' ? And you know what ? Even in the far west there were rules. The fact that some people can not retaliate when griefed is only a game mechanics problem, but when you can defend yourself because there are no levels, uber items and other weird things, I can assure you that the life of the "evil" guys will be tough. That's one of the reason I want to see Darkfall released. And ultimately with permadeath you will think twice because if you get too much attention, you might even be afraid to log in...

And this bring us to old UO (PvP). I didn't play UO like a lot of you did, but what I understand is that you are missing it. I know the tendencies of humans to tell that the past was better, but the game was really different from what the market offers today. That's why I believe that there is really something there, as far as I know how much I enjoy PvP. But even UO was sort of too classical for me, and there are a lot of things left to improve.

Earadi, I don't know if anyone will want to build a house brick after brick. As you know we are in a game, if I tell you that a house can be constructed with a magical spell once you have all the materials to automatize the process, then the problem is solved. It is getting those materials, and designing the house like an architect does that is really interesting in my opinion. Another fact is that some races don't need a house at all, because they are strong enough to defend themselves against most aggressions (I am talking about getting off-line safely for example). There a lot of other issues like this one to address but I think that only my imagination (and technological feasability) is the real limit.

Did anyone here ever jump in on SOE's Planetside?

They had this weird command system, separate from experience. Essentially, players that led groups, platoons, etc.. were rewarded with greater tools for tactics and networking with their faction. As an example, the transition from being allowed to lead a group to leading a more raid-sized platoon.

It didn't work entirely- part of this were the orbital strikes and emp nukes that one got with higher command rankings. Skills more likely to appeal to any gamer that wanted power. But the idea was nice- a reward for what as essentially non-combat/non-FPS effort that was being put into the game. I'd like to think that it at least HELPED retain some of the more abstract thinkers in an FPS world.

If you give enough reward for what has been traditionally "out-of-game"(1) work, I think you might encourage more of these types of people. The organizers.

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I think your world would still be lacking the "story" department, though. Economics, politics, administration, killing, crafting... People like to do a lot of things. And people can be tolerant of other players doing a lot of different things. To be honest, though, player "storytellers" can tend to creep everyone else out. With the exception of 'Lord British', of course(and he wasnt a real player, anyway). Ever notice the psyche differences between a mud and a mush crowd?

I'm a little bit biased, of course. Who I am in a game never changes, it's just a question of changing moods and tactics. I still think preaching of virtual world roleplay and/or story would drive a lot of people away. Add the fact that the majority of storytellers can't weave a story cohesively with others(or are just plain bad at it), and I don't think it's possible to have an entirely player made story. 

(1)- I.e. Putting groups together, organization web pages, strong communication networking, the amount of networking between players for knowledge. I think Eve was good at attracting these types of people- although I could never really get into the game.

Asheron's Call 1 had a tiny bit of this effect. The pyramid scheme system of experience led to a lot of networking and guilds- albeit some that didn't like eachother. The relationship was such that "upper" players were looking to invest in people that they thought would do well in the game. "Lower" players were looking for xp, gold, rare items, or free comradery.

I think most of you didn't get what my post was about AT ALL.

Most of you seem to have admitted that the fact that different players were both separated (segregated, you might say) and only related to eachother through an interface that would change from part of the game to part of the game, meant that nothing in the game would happen that wasn't prewritten or prescripted.

On the whole, you seem to have assumed that everyone would be playing "let's pretend" and that's all. You seem to have let out what the most exciting part of RPGs is: stories.

It is true that some sort of stories can evolve from the chaos of player interaction. But they can never reach the state of EPIC. The first and most important point of a true MMORPG is the ability of the developper to create an ongoing storyline, if possible through a coherent tread of quests, or GM-guided events. The only game that has approached this, even remotely, that I know of is Matrix Online. They had writers working on an evolution of the game WORLD, continously, and would have GM-guided events every other week-end, I believe. I don't what came out of it, but the premises sounded extremely appealing to me, even though the world in itself felt extremely lame.

If we are to have both GM-guided events AND player-created quests or events, then a simple measure is to be taken for the player created content: these things cannot have ANY sort of individual reward at the end of it, and cannot have, as a landscape, any place that does NOT belong and is NOT inhabited by a human faction. In other words, these "quests" will only have a human-to-human results, and will have a net result of faction reputation. You can hire one of your own thugs to go and kill someone in an other guild's main room, or someone from another guild, or hier a THIEF in order to steal something, and create a situation... Maybe you go and steal an artifact from a guild store, and spread suspicion over someone selling it to you... You can bring the artifact back to where it belonged first, and create dissensions within the group, or you cna keep it in your safe, and benefit from its effects, well, you can create interactions.

What would be great, in ANY MMO world, would be to have EVERYTHING based on different kinds of reputations. Like, the ratio between how many human avatars you have killed and the average of the players on the server, this way, maybe you did kill someone on your session, but if the average is sixteen humans killed in every session, then everyone will overlook that event and will consider it minor annoyance. If you chain kill animals and bring hides everyday, whereas everyone on the server is hunting humanoids, then your avatar will be considered differently. If your avatar trades with Orcs when everyone is hunting and killing them, then you will be considered a traitor, and your human-to-human trading conditions will be modified in accordance.

Simple rules can be issued to have the way the player has his avatar acting really have an impact over the community. It's called averages. You get counters for everything you do, and if your counter exceeds the average of the server, then you get a different bonus. It's not the same as  with UO where everybody was Master Forger, and everybody got the same results out of it. If everybody is a master, then no one shines out. On the other hand, with averages, if everybody has the same amount of points in one skill, then you don't have to spend your own points in it, since you won't get anything more than anybody else would, hence it means that you're wasting them. With averages, what you see is the ranges of skill. If you're on a PvP server, and almost everyone is PvPing, then someone with the highest number of PvP kills will be considered dangerous and will be fled, whereas on the other end of the spectrum, someone with ZERO kills will be considered saint, or innocent, and will be considered differently. If you add to that donations to religions, in order to get the occasional rez, get a year-old character, with zero kills, zero rez, and above average donations to a religion, and you've gotten a Saint Man, which will give different bonuses than from someone with the same kills or rez, but below average donations, which might be considered a Hermit. Saints will benefit from better trades with humans linked favorably towards the religion they donated to and have a lower aggro towards anything humanoidly shaped, whereas hermits will be considered as stinking sissies and easy preys.

Add to that a skill that will permit to "climb" or to have access to different areas if the level is above a mark, and you've got thiefs alright. Catburglars trying to break into a castle, not through the front door and with an axe, but by climbing the backwall, triggering a "disguise" skill that will have them dress as the first mob, player or NPC encountered in the castle, and will limit their moves to those accessible to the copied avatar and known by their own. Through this course of action, every aspect of the game can be seen through different methods. You get different players, different playstyles, and less walk-throughs on the internet...

I think I will have to read your post several times in the next few days to understand your points. But whatever, I will say something about epicness. While I don't really understand why you (and others) think like that, I think that it is always a matter of perception. If you are a gnome and you defeat a bear with your bare hands, this fight might really be epic. Because you don't know if you can do it, and if you aren't sucessful, it means death. Furthermore the underlying reasons for a gnome to defeat a bear adds to the intensity of the action. You don't need dragons to create emotions, in a fantasy story. It is up to the author to create and juggle with the tension, to create expectations and suspense, nothing really difficult here... at least when you know what you are doing.

On another scale you take a group of humans vs a dragon, same deal here, the fight is epic because of the imbalance between the two forces. However when you remove death (I mean permadeath) and you farm said boss week after week for 3 months or more to get the last piece of gear you need (to complete your uber set), all the epicness is gone. It is even worse when everybody start to get epics. Don't get me wrong I understand that making a great story-line require some skills, and that not everybody can do it, but if there is an option for those who want to try, it will be there. I think that even if it doesn't work perfectly, those players who tried to offer something learned from it and it will help them in their future lives, so this time wasn't wasted. We have to make some mistakes to be good at something, but for this, we should not give up. That's what I feel it will never be a bad thing. For sure if one only cares about what he will get from the game, he may not be satisfied.

A game is an experience, an experience that you share with others. That is a really different point of view than what most games show today. I am a dreamer ok, but if we can create a new world, with new rules, where everyone understand that they have a role to play, and that their actions matters, then they can decide what is good or bad for them and my goal is accomplished.

Hmm, I wanted to keep this short, but ideas are coming, so I will let them out. When you take a look at level based games, most fights are challenging if you take on monsters stronger than you, but you don't like that, you will fight monsters near your level or below. Hence the fights are always interesting because you can tune the difficulty to your needs. But the problem is that when you reach the cap, the linear progression ends. Now think about a world where the creatures (player controlled) react and adapt their behavior to the players hunting them. If the hunters do not adapt too, it will be more and more difficult for them to kill anything. The more experience a creature has (the longer it survives), the more dangerous it is, not because of straight power but because it is more clever. Add to this the fact that such creatures can use group tactics, and now we have a meaningful fight not a stupid respawning mob. That is precisely what PvE lacks, and PvP offers : a meaningful fight, and I can tell you that whenever you come out of a fight with only 1% hit point, the excitement is there. Maybe not as epic as one could tell, but really intense (with permadeath obviously).

In the end I will stay true to my position, such experience is really personal and far more valuable than doing the same epic dungeon week after week for months. The smaller fights can be as challenging and interesting than the bigger ones.

This is EXACTLY where my first post and your last join! Have people playing a browser-based game in which they have to grow and nurture either a creature or a group of creatures, in order to win points that can be invested in making those creatures evolve, or change towards a more interesting creature. (Let's say that everyone starts with rats, rabbits, or any low level critter you can think of...) You should be able to buy upgrades which will make your animals reproduce faster, or run faster in order to distance the hunter, or a different color of fur, to get a better chance to hide, or make it bigger or smaller, well, in other and simpler words: to fine tune it to suit YOUR playstyle.

What then, are the odds of finding TWO exactly similar critters, if there are, say, five thousand players who are, right now, playing the God of Rats? What are the chances of finding two players playing exactly the same moves? the exact same strategy? What if one decides to keep playing rabbits in order to save more points, and get a headstart with, say, foxes, mongooses or any other small carnivorous, when the other one decides to go for bigger herbivorous available earlier on, like deers, and start again with a different goal and different means?

The population of animals (and mobs, further on...) will be diverse if the browser-based game allows for it.

Who knows, maybe, if later on in this browser-based game of monster breeding, you cna have access to, say, Orcs, or any other humanoid race, you can have access to very different upgrades than with your basic rabbit. Instead of reproducing faster, you can choose to upgrade the basic speed of your particular breed of Orcs. You can decide to modify their lifestyle and hunting style. Instead of being mindless brutes, you can organize them, buy a higher AI for them, that will help them build different strategies. Maybe buying AI level 3 allows you to have access to shamanic magic that will help organize the defense of your village. Every Orc within a limited radius of the Village central fire gets a bonus for defense, and a grouping mentality. Maybe you can teach them skills that will make them more efficient at hunting, or defending themselves. Maybe you can decide to go for a very PACIFIC life, for Orcs, and send them in higher valleys, where they will live a vegetarian life, and try to disappear from human sight. Maybe you can try to teach them trade, and they become a recognized race in the MMORPG world, and they can survive in peace through trade, instead of having to fight everybody off.

Maybe, you can have as an ultimate goal to get enough points to become a dragon. The difference being that dragons are not group animals. You don't get to get offsprings automatically, but you have to get them from other dragons if they exist. The points you spend to upgrade your dragon are lost forever and can't be recovered for the next critter, since there are NO other critters beyond, and you have to start again from the start. But you get prestige in your browser-based game for becoming a dragon, and possibly some other stuff as well.

All this drives browser-based game players to try  to become a bigger creature, because each time they do, they get a different game, whereas if they don't, they get to become stronger on their own scale. And what you would probably get is the exactly same Rat, Giant Rat, Rabid Rat, Giant Rabid Rat, White Rat, Giant White Rat, Enormous Plagued Rat and so on and so forth, just like in any other games, but sooner or later, the players would notice that there are some places in which growing is easier, since you don't get attacked as much, or you would see hunters really HUNTING their preys, who would be able to change from one square to another, say, every season in their game, which would happen like two times a day (just throwing numbers for the sake of it...)

What you would get, from this, is dynamic populations, and a real impact over the game world. If you try to repell the rabbit population from the land, then the foxes and everything that feeds on rabbit on this patch of land will also be gone. Not forever, just for FURTHER. You will get a bigger concentration of stuff, further away. Their growing will be made more difficult, but they will definitely be more numerous than anyone in the original patch could have thought of or handled. Hence, a place with a higher difficulty level. For a while, at least, until something imbalances it.