Bah. AoC did so many things right (collision detection, “living” NPCs, healer classes that were actually fun to play) that it always irks me how badly Funcom managed to screw things up with their glacial pace of development and utter disregard for the most basic principles of marketing….

You have to suspend your disbelief to some extent with things like 15 blood bears wandering around an area. If you don’t have a high population of stuff to kill, it’s boring. If you populate a world realistically (even in the context of fantasy), it will be boring as hell.

That can be true (The boring as hell part) but the use of pack creatures might alleviate that a bit. Still, it is a bit of a erf to see all the bears wandering around in parts of Antonica.

I remember in the DAOC SI expansion that mobs actually attacked each other. I remember wolves attacking stags, and you would actually see the health of the mobs go down.

It was pretty cool, but I have never seen it happen in any other MMO’s I have played

Actually, EQ2 has this happen in a number of places.

It was pretty cool, but I have never seen it happen in any other MMO’s I have played.

The mobs that just stand in one place, spaced out, doing nothing bug me. And when you fight one within sight of another and they just ignore you. (to Derek: it seems intuitive that if you engage a fight with a farmer because he caught you stealing apples, his wife comes along to help him) -> this also means rethinking some game mechanics. While you could kill one werewolf one against one, what about one against ten? But this could be interesting: depending on the number of werewolves in sight, you bring more or less friends along. Seems logical … but … definitely against solo-quests

Also, I do like that some games have level one animals hanging around end game zones. I don’t think that you need to have every creature in the zone to be a challenge. -> But you don’t have level-20 animals in level-60 zones. The reason is no level-20 avatar should be able to survive in this zone if you want players to clean each zone after another and not be bored in new zones.

If you don’t have a high population of stuff to kill, it’s boring. If you populate a world realistically (even in the context of fantasy), it will be boring as hell. -> I agree. But there should be realistic reasons for so many monsters to be together. If you put yourself inside a monster’s mind (think you are Lord Kazzak invading Stormwind), why are there so many players only inside cities and not lost in the middle of a lost forest?

Anyway, having smart mob AI his means having a much bigger AI module inside the game than what exists now. I do not think current MMOs have really big AI-scripting teams. WoW dungeon trash mobs have a simple patrol script, but this script existed already in Warcraft II. More complex bosses have more complex AI, but that still could be easily improved. But to my mind, the main question is what has the priority: 3 extra guys in the AI team, or 3 extra guys in the cinematic team? I think the AAA-MMO industry answer might often be “cinematic team”, because players’ imagination does all the work. And for most people, what matters is to kill Arthas, not to camp the stupid static respawn of the mobs dropping an item used to craft the key that might open the door leading to Arthas …

I’ve seen far too many MMO design docs where someone has drawn a couple of random shapes, written a zone name, and the name of a mob that matches.

“Okay… draw a couple of squiggly lines, then write Shatterface mountains… and, uh, we’ll fill it with mountain goats… done” — nothing done to explain why we, as players, as heroes(!), care about the fact that there are goats there.

This is why too many MMOs end up with quests like “help me collect goat bladders, so I can make goat bladder pie!” If you have a zone filled with goats, and you have 5 days to make 30 quests. You tend make a lot of pie quests.

The quests could be much better written if the guy who drew the squiggly lines on the map already knew that the player was going there to collect relics of the ancient gods, so they can summon the corrupted soul of the Sightless One, and use it to infuse their weapons and kill the God of Winter.

I would much rather have a cool story reason to fight Sightless Assassins, and Champions of the Ancient Ones, and Servants of Winter than slaughter a family of mountain goats because it’s a mountain, and mountains have goats, and we already spent six weeks making goats, and the map says goats, so just make quests to kill the goats already!

But to do that (and still ship a game on time and on budget), you need to get that story in there asap.

Critters, on the other hand – cosmetic mobs you can one-shot for fun – It’s cool to have them match the environment – but when it comes to full on Mobs that I am encouraged to fight and kill, I much prefer fighting “evil servants of evilness with evil plans that must be stopped” over “innocent wildlife.”