I've been stewing this game idea for a good while now, and while I'm not gonna bore you with the entire GDD, I am going to display the main concept and hopefully set of a discussion for an old style of gameplay that we can all agree is getting stale - hunting.

In most games this means grinding mobs to level up or whatever semi-rewarding reason, but I've had some experience with games that have mobs few and far between and there was a certain mystique in finding them - the reward however is different from game to game, where one might not have traditional XP and rely on skill usage for gain, and another the typical XP fest (which does not suit a slow methood of gain such as this). I have in fact employed a bit of both, and hopefully in a way that would suit the game's style... and now for a little game backstory.

It's a prehistoric-life simulator that uses the Guild Wars method of PvE, where players venture solo or in groups to hunt creatures, forage, scavenge, even build. Not gonna get into anything but the hunting part in this thread, but the important thing to keep in mind about this game is that it's uses extensive action-based combat much like a "Monster Hunter Online" would do it... man I would play that. There is a major point to needed to stay fed/hydrated, and players are well taken care of when they meet in hubs (where many actions are disabled) and from there they can team up and venture out into the surrounding areas that play out as linked PvE zones to the other hubs in the game, where they must fend for themselves.

When players enter one of these PvE zones there are a random set of mobs placed in a range to suit the group size, and upon entry players are best suited to make a "base camp" anywhere on the map face to serve as the place they return goods to for tranport back to the hubs to sell or as quest materials. This consists a circle of yurts (which is this games portable housing units) around a fire. The game has heavy emphasis on procedural crafting/building, so making a base camp takes a minute in finding enough materials in the environment to build it - and during this time there will be hostile or docile creatures to hunt of various sizes. When you kill things, they do not respawn until you reenter, but even then the majority of them would be on a considerable timer and make grinding an area out grant measly rewards.

Size for creatures would range from knee-high things you whoop on, to things as big as you (even other NPC humans) that pose a serious threat alone, to giant monsters that will hunt you (and require a very large group and assortment of prelaid traps). With all this in mind, no matter the group size there is always something that will crush you and needs to be outran or taken down, but you can only do so once for every long while and it affects your groups chance of spawning one. The entire point of the zones are no longer to run from quest objective to quest objective - rather a sandboxy element in a theme park map that has you find craft resources and good ol'd meat and water. Having to stave off hunger and thirst meands taking breaks to come back to camp and cook (a craft), creating a very nice social element as teams can work together or seperately while maintaining a makeshift enclave on the map. Healing is a tough issue as well, since wounds must be bandanged and will bleed if not tended, and regenerating the lost health takes time. Your staying safe relies on group size or skill.

Do you guys think this is a proper way to go back to the roots of mob hunts?

My most fun I had hunting something was in Batman Arkham Asylum, they were people with guns mind you but the principle is the same.

The the basis that made it so good was the fact that you stand little chance in a straight up fight and have to use your intelligence to defeat them, you are both vulnerable and empowered at the same time, there was also plenty of ways to manipulate the environment and the villains.  The mental aspects are what make it fun.

I do think that having to return to camp too often especially micro managing hunger and thurst could be potentially annoying.

But I like the idea.

Can't say I played any of these olden hunting games you are thinking of.

Admittedly, the idea that mobs are just sitting around waiting on you is silly.

I've been working on something similar with my game - no spawns but instead learned skills to spawn mobs.

You learn about the animals and with practice you can weasel them out of their hiding areas. This sounds like something you are thinking of in a roundabout way.

The advantage to this system to me is that you dont have 5000+ mobs all standing around doing nothing but pathing. Players can spawn mobs as they need them with the proper hunting skills. Without explaining my system I'll be brief. The zones can be more compact because you aren't spreading out wolves here, platypus there etc. Instead you spawn mobs according to weather and scenery has been my idea, on call. I have an idea that nothing is on the ground without a reason.  One day I was examining all the objects in an mmo I was playing and thought WHY are all these things here - they do nothing. If I plant a tree - I want it to serve the purpose of shade to direct hunters to spawns there etc.

The only downside I see to less spawns is that the environment has to be rich graphically or interactive to be enjoyed and unless you have some shadowed creatures that occasionally popup - someone can just run thru the area w/no danger. Playing devils advocate here - lots of games have safe areas to run on roads that are creature free that fit that no danger time but no one is saying let's remove roads because they are boring when you have to travel 15 yards to find a mob.

The way you are relating your version of hunting it sounds like something guilds could really get into for events. For yours I would do something wacky with aggro to make it more fun not knowing who might be attacked. Perhaps shaggy creatures like orcs and smooth-skinned love the taste of elf etc. Some extra parameter that would change roles to supportive according to the player that draws the most attention. This would give more ppl chances to be involved. You could also go into baiting and combine items created by different types of characters to create a specific bait for a spawn that can only be managed by multiple professions/class skills/ racial skills/ male-female skills even.

There are tons of things that could be tried other than plant 50 mobs that walk this way and that - insert players. rinse, repeat.

Well the problem with this setting is that mob hunting needs to follow a route of being "believable". In my setting there are no constantly respawning creatures, though some may trigger once at a certain area from out of view, and once you kill a majority of a certain type of animal they will not return to the same map for a long timer upwards of a day or so. They will also flee the map if getting whooped on, forcing players to go after them or select a new target, and this means pack herbavores will scatter if they all catch wind of an attack and may no return to the area until you return to it after an hour+ timer. It's still the old pathing, scripting, pathing malarkey for sure when it comes to these roaming mobs, but the idea is to put it an essence of tactical need and observance to being an efficient hunter. Your also not farming xp for leveling up (though you do for specific skills), the main reason to hunt is for repeatable quest objectives, craft materials and sellables.

As for your idea, it sound interesting, but lemme lay out an issue with it and a similar function I've devised as well. See, with your idea you will basically summon all your fights to you it seems, that means players are given time to say "ready?" and prepare just before doing so, which will no doubt put them on top of the situation from the start. A lot of why the old ways works is that there is the chance for being surprised or caught off guard, maybe even just caught unequipped or ready for the situation, which in turn forces decisions to flee or fight. If you have most combat be some kind of "summonable arena play" I sense many player gripes about the "world feeling empty", etc. I would work with th original concepts of a wild with some mobs in it, maybe not many, and then add these summonable creatures that will take out both the mobs and the players.

It's very similar to a scheme I employed for yet another GDD where hunting in the open worlds means looking for smaller things for food as they flee to hidey holes and typically try to escape player. The mobs that are worth a fight will [find you], and what I mean by that is that the world is semi-barren, but full of instance entrances and resources that randomly spawn, and as you explore you may be jumped from creatures "outside the realm" that phase in and proceed to hand you your ass... and the point is to make them really hard, to the point where unless you are absolutely sure of yourself you are best set in fleeing. Again, this is another game that doesn't rely on efficient mob grinding to level - as all gains are handed as story-quest rewards. I have this fear that players will say "the world is too barren and there's nothing to do", because there would be. Still thinking my way around it, but it all comes back to the standard world mobs walking around and acting stupid as the basis for making the game seem to have "something to do". People without a diehard sandbox mentality that can conjure goals for themselves will find themselves pissed that the only thing to do is wander around aimlessly to spawn a baddie, and in your case, stand around summoning fights in a ladder of difficulty over and over.

Your idea does sound exactly like a Monster Hunter Online. If they decided to go that route you would have your game basically. 

I like the concept.  The "player as hunter" mindset would be a good tack for a developer to take - regardless of whether the  MOBS look like goblins or elk.   When you think about it, most RPG combat is really like hunting to begin with.  No intelligent enemy would act ANYTHING like most RPG MOBs act.  Computer AI that realisticially emulates a human enemy will only be practical quite some time after a real-life Holodeck is invented.  Trying to make AI truly intelligent is really impossible to do, and the effort to do something which cannot be done always detracts from the final product.  But scientists have actually put together models of how wild animals behave - including establishing territories, predation and reproductive patterns.  I would love to see a designer put those into a game, complete with herding and pack behavior.

I once read a science fiction short story about how people in the future all played computer simulation games that mimicked tribal life. The idea was that as society became more advanced, people would have more and more need to return to their roots to keep their mental balance. The men all went out to form hunting and war parties, and the women all foraged and helped keep their men in shape between battles. That is what I think of every time I play an MMO, but I am not sure how many develpers are consciously aware of the primal urges they are really feeding as they design their games.

Unfortunately, the final result would probably be what happened in real life:  primitive people figured out the concept of "raiding" in the form of scaring herds of animals into a pit, and then sorting through the remains for choice bits.  You end up with the same sort of efficient, yet hierarchical and collectivist, end-game that current MMOs all seem to become.

One point, though.  If you are hunting with primitive weapons, there is really no such thing as a "docile animal".  Even a rabbit will try to bite you if it is cornered.  It bothers the heck out of me in dinosaur movies, where the scientist guy tells everyone to not be alarmed by the ten-ton beast with 3-foot long horns and armor plating because:  "This is a herbivore so it is perfectly harmless."  Bullcrap.  Just because it wont EAT you doesnt mean it wont KILL you.  If you walk by a recently-fed lion, it will yawn, stretch and roll over on its back.  But if you come within a hundred yards of what a cape buffalo happens to think of as "his" territory - any hour of any day or any night - it will charge you, chase you down, gore you to death and then trample your remains into a bloody paste.

Edit:  man, my quotation marks and apostrophes really got chewed when I first posted this.  What's up with that?

Originally posted by Nemorsa

Your idea does sound exactly like a Monster Hunter Online. If they decided to go that route you would have your game basically. 

In truth, that's exactly how it started.

I went looking for my ps2 monster hunter, couldn't find it, and said "F*ck, if this was an MMO I'd be playing it right now". So from there I took the idea of "how it felt" and worked around it. I believe I hit something that aims to be a more historical account of the times, with a little bit of artistic bullshitting... but really it's about the idea that it's an online action game.

The only way to break the boring AI of the current MMO throng is to simply make them more twitch in the sense of combat speed and actions. What I am seeing lately is MMOs copying FPS and action games for it's base mechanics, but the AI is just as stupid as ever - the path of mowing them down is just slightly more fun. I for one would like to see games, that even if they had a limited assortment of mobs, they would react in far more curious ways.

Like Herbivores that flee momentarily, then collect up and return the favor.

Or pack hunters that will have one take your attention while the other flanks from behind and does a pounce attack.

Even things that flee and have their buddies leave traps on a pathing the one you are chasing plans to drag you into.

~Just takes a bit of forethought to put a player into a pickle, I could only hope that games in general take up this attitude in their PvE soon enough. I have no problem looking at a concept mob and devising its history and behavior - and then turning that into a function... implementation is always the bitch though, so perhaps they just haven't figured it out yet.