Artifical monsters to replace dead ones, instead of respawns

[Callan S.]

I dislike monsters that come back thirty seconds after you 'killed' them. Why bother with the whole idea that you killed them when it's like this? (a nod to city of heroes here, which from what I've heard, you just send the baddies to jail)

I was thinking what if you had something more like a breeding cycle (perhaps slightly accelerated by bad guys, via magic in fantasy, or tech in sci-fi).

In the mean time if the monsters not there, instead your character spars with a artificial version - either your character has magic that replicates the monster so as to train skills, or in a sci fi setting, some sort of hologram/force field projector that does that. Of course with these you can't die (because they aren't going to make the artificial version lethal), but say if you would have died, you lose some money to the guys who lent you the magic/tech (it's how they make their money).

[Jackolantern]

I think monsters "dying" makes sense depending on the mob type. If it is a "sword-swinging orc", for example, then the mob name is not specifying an actual orc, but rather, it signifies one of many. When a real-life hunter goes out a kills a deer, he knows that he may come back to the same place and may be able to kill another deer there. However, if he goes to a place and kills "Bucky the Blue Deer", then it will be dead and will never come back. In MMOs it does seem odd that you can kill a specific, named boss character and then just sit back and wait a few minutes for it to come back. In those cases some kind of magic or something could be used to instead "banish" the monster, where it will be able to regroup and come back for the next player to fight.

[Callan S.]

Particularly if you've taken the named monsters head - wow did that right at the start of the human area..."oh, your alive - don't I have your, like, brains and stuff?"

But on normal monsters, I still don't like it - I mean, some people complain about the most minor not state of the art graphics in a game, or they complain about run animations, for croms sake! With me, that there is an unending supply of monsters is like a horrible, horrible graphical error - it's like single color, eight bit graphics and the screen visibly flashes with each refresh!!! If graphical presentation matters, why doesn't world presentation matter? Is world just skin deep for everyone? I mean, unending orcs - why don't the badguys just invade, instead of pacing around on the same spot, waiting for me to kill them? (I guess guild wars 2 is going to try and change that a bit - indeed I think I saw a video where they were fighting a massive dragon, but it flies away at the end instead of dying (leaving a big chest of loot behind...). Which is great, given that we know were going to fight it tomorrow or an hour from now! Let's just accept the game conventions into the fiction instead of trying to pretend otherwise)

I can't be the only guy who would enjoy the idea of killing a monster, then the next day it's still dead (just a practice construct in it's place, to keep providing fodder for XP and quest targets). And say, if it was a wolf, you can see in some area a female wolf hidden deep in her den, with her pups...and you just enjoy how you just affected an ecology. Instead of a thirty second cool down.

Anyway, I'm going to shoot for that...

[Jackolantern]

I think every game designer would like to have a world that dynamic, but the problem is in the execution, particularly for fully-realized, 3D worlds. It is already a murder trek for a studio to make enough landmass and fill it enough to not get called a rip-off, or to not get terrible reviews saying the world is small and empty at launch. Corners have to be cut somewhere, and it just seems difficult for AAA MMORPGs to spend that much time on each individual monster encounter when most players tear through them like butter, and expect at least in the order of tens of thousands of encounters from start to the level cap. Every single monster fight would have to be thought out and scripted.

It would be awesome if it could be done, and I think some smaller, text-based indie PBBGs and MUDs do go that route, but it would be tough in a graphical world.

[Callan S.]

Every single monster fight would have to be thought out and scripted.

Why do you say that?

At worst, I'd grant some sort of nav mesh is needed for a monster, having grown to full size, to travel from the den to the world position.

[Jackolantern]

It still seems like it would take consideration for every single monster, and that kind of work builds up very fast in a combat-oriented MMO. Now if combat plays a smaller role, and a player won't be expecting to kill 10,000+ monsters in their lifetime, it may be possible. Work like that just multiplies fast. The only other way I could see to do it would be to just apply similar systems broadly across many different monsters, but then, how is that much better?

[Callan S.]

Well, what I'm talking about is a life cycle that replenishes monsters. Just using similar systems broadly across many different monsters, with perhaps a different graphic for the den and for young monsters, is doing that. It's doing what I want, so that's better.

[hallsofvallhalla]

I have always wanted to add a true creature "ecology" or life cycle. Where the creatures breed more or less depending on the weather or time of day or time of year. Where players can guess what creatures they might encounter the most due to certain conditions.

Like lets say i base each location in the game off a large city in the world. The Village of Drimsville is based off of Austin, Tx. If it is hot in Austin today then that breeds more of a hot based creatures like a Fire Newt. Goblins only raid areas when it is 60F or less.

You could also do the same for the Stock Market

[Jackolantern]

That is actually kind of the way FFXI worked. Each zone had its own weather patterns, and that changed which monsters would spawn and when.