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Every mob is sacred.
Every mob is great.
If a mob is wasted,
Bob gets quite irate.
Most muds have a small number of mobs which are initialized repeatedly with resets. What if instead of this, we made every mob hardly any different than a player. The only difference is that they're programmatically controlled. Average mobs would have typical resets. When killed, they eventually repop at a pre-determined spot. However, they would all be unique. No clones of VNUM 5763. There would be City Guard Bob, City Guard Tom, City Guard Bubba, City Guard Jim "the ripper" Bobson, City Guard Cletus, and so on. They're still pretty generic, each having only his name changed, but hey they're still unique. Hell, they could even have Other mobs would be world-changing quest targets and won't repop.
Most MUDs and MMOs like WoW have quests that are Epic in scale, yet you can run them fifty thousand times. Killing the boss doesn't guarantee you anything. It's the random drops between here and there or perhaps a reward from the quest master. Fuck that. I want it all. In fact, this almost eliminates the need for quests. (note: there will still be quests)
Now, with these "world changing" kills there are two ways to handle it. First off, we can make it truly world changing. Once they die, that's it. Finito. Final. The End. Lights Out™. Or we can have long term, say monthly or quarterly resets.
The first option puts the task on implementors to continually improve the game.
The second option lets the implementors be lazy.