I hate to be the one to say it, but...

This all sounds a bit too much. I''ve seen teams of 10s of people attempt to do this and end up with about 5-10% of these features. Origin, Sierra, neither of these could come up with something that comes even close to it, with thousands of dollars at their disposal. I''m not saying that make it impossible; The Realm, Sierra''s venture, was massively mismanaged, so the development ended up stagnating, but what you''re talking about is a system that is EASILY multiple times more complex than many operating systems (at least on a kernel level).

But i have a fundamental question to ask, is it worth it? Frankly, i see the point of Total Freedom in a MMORPG, but in a single-player game, what you''re likely to find is that 3 other games each do the parts of this one game that you want to play, only better.

In a MMORPG, the game starts breaking because every possible limit is stretched, so anywhere the game is inconsistent with itself, people take advantage. If any part of the game is dynamic (and it will be), then all parts must be. People will capitalize on any oportunity that is available, and a common target is NPCs. NPCs, when static, are a source of money to the MMORPG player, or useless. Players can always conduct business with other players, and with NPCs, so players will opt for the more profitable solution. One secret to making people work within the system (and thus role-play) is to make NPCs have the same abilities as PCs, and thus conforming to all the usual rules, making one less snag for the players to use to break the system.

In a MMORPG, players will start businesses to make money. This is because the basic drive for MMORPGs is to Beat The Joneses, or, to put it another way, to become more powerful than the next guy (or gal). One way to power is through money (at least if the MMORPG doesn''t have a defunct economy), and so making money is fun. However, in single player games, once you''ve become so powerful, it loses its appeal. So, what''s the drive? In traditional Sim games, it''s the strategy involved and the puzzles presented, but do you really think that this is good in an RPG setting?

I''m not just trying to bash; i would really like to know the reasoning behind the Total Freedom idea. I spent (some would say wasted) 3 years-- plus or minus some months-- of my life playing The Realm, and what i found was that a great deal of the game needed to be more like reality just because reality, if nothing else, is consistent (well, at least in the matters we''re talking about here). But i also learned that reality really isn''t that fun, or at least not fun enough to play a video game about it when you could be doing other stuff.

Good luck with the project, but remember that implementation isn''t just a detail.

Crackpot Productions--
Senior Cracked Pot--
Benc

If you can tell a computer how and why it wants to kill you, you can teach it to talk. Thus dialoge is no longer a problem. As for a conflict tree. ehhhhh im thinking that locks the game into to much of a linier state. Give the computer history, people and a world to work with and it is fully capable of creating a plot of its own.

C-junkie- Have you read the Linear v. Interactive thread? It might help give some perspective on the enormity of what you are trying to do. I don''t think its on the "past 5 days" listing, but its down there somewhere.

I wanted a game w/ Total Freedom for a long time, and struggled w/ how to implement it well, but for now, the main reason you won''t see a game like this for at least twenty years (if ever) is that it would take that long to code! (could you imagine just writing the dialogue databases? I''m still working on a game w/ NPC communications this rich, but that is just because it is central to the gameplay. If I was working on a funded project, my investors would probably tell me to get my head out of the clouds and use a simpler tree)

However, I disagree w/ Hans. It is quite possible to have an entertaining game where you play a shopkeeper. (well, a merchant anyway) In fact, many old BBS games had you playing a stellar version of just this. A game where you are high priest might be difficult, but I wouldn''t be so quick to say its impossible. I wouldn''t have thought a game where you played a weak thief w/ limited combat skills would be fun either. . .then I played (well, you guessed it) Thief. This game is a good example of how the player can feel like they have near-total freedom when they are in fact quite limited.

Fantasy Edge, I''ve got to say you''re so very right yet so very wrong. . .plot is a perception, not a real entity. Sure, if you "give a computer people, world, and history" you have the makings of a plot, but to say that if you somehow feed the computer this data, it will spit back a plot? If you''ve found some way to do this, please don''t tell anybody until you''ve patented it. For one thing, the suicide rate among writers could become astronomical upon the breaking of this news. For another, you''ve just made yourself a very rich man.

Then, to use the "goblin''s in the city" example, how would these goblins "know" that they are there to kidnap the princess, or where to hide in the meanwhile? That is, unless you''ve programmed them to do so. And if you''ve programmed them to do so, their behavior will be more or less predictable, (at least to the programmer) thus more or less linear. Its a Catch-22. The computer knows nothing until you explicitly tell it, so if you explicitly tell it how to generate a world, you''re doing nothing radically different from the programmers of traditional, linear games.

Like others have said, I''m not trying to dog on anyone here, and if you have a good explanation on how this could be done, I''d love to hear it.