I have recently been toying around with the idea of an MMORPG with MUDD like qualities in order to be more involving and a little less repetitive. The idea is that the game for the most part would be like WOW in the sense that most quests would be "kill/retrieve this" kinds of quests, but some quests would be something more involving and not as straightforward. An example would be something I classify as a mystery quest. Here is an example quest.

You come into a village in which a plague has taken hold. People are sick and dying all around you. You find the village elder and speak with him. He tells you the story of the plague and asks you to find out where the plague came from and to find a cure. You start by speaking to different people in the village. Most are not interested in talking and tell you to leave them alone and let them die in peace. You finally come across a man who is willing to speak to you. At first he doesn't say much. The dialog box popups up with

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Man: We are all going to die. The end of the world is coming!!!!
The man seems frantic and hysterical. He smells strongly of drink and hasn't bathed in what seems forever.
You think he may know something but he is one nut short of a loonie bin. What do you want to do?
1. Try to calm him down by speaking soothing words.
2. Slap him in the face as hard as you can.
3. Offer him some food and water.
4. Join him in frantically screaming "We are all going to die"
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You choose an action. That action is processed and a followup dialog is shown. At the same time of all these dialogs, the characters are moving with appropriate gestures for what wording is being displayed.

The idea is that the narration in the dialog provides greater detail of what is going on and can really involve the players. There would be several pre-programmed gestures such as shoulder shrug, finger point, throw hands in air, angry hand gesture, etc. These would be used appropriately as part of the dialog. My questions are

1. Has this been done before?
2. If so, what game and was the feature considered a success?
3. If not, can you see any reason why this couldn't be technically achieved relatively easily?
4. Is this something you as a player would be interested in.

I know that no MMORPG is easy and to be honest i doubt I would pursue this in any ambitious way. I would probably just make a proof-of-concept by myself using whatever shortcuts I could find.

I hope I explained this well enough and was not overly verbose in the process.

1. In other genres yes. Almost certainly in MMORPGs as well though i can’tthink of any already published, i do know that Star Wars the Old Republic has asimilar system of choice.

2. It’s a half decent way of engaging the player and has been wildly used inRPGs so i would say it is successful. Not sure if it would have the same appealin an MMORPG and SWTOR hasn't been released yet so can’t comment on that.

3. In an MMORPG the player will do thousands and thousands of quests, if you’retalking about a WoW like MMORPG anyway, and most likely be playing in largechunks of time. The sheer number of quests a player does devalues them andunless the choice really means something player may just hit 1 over and over,after the 100th quest you do in 8hrs i think anyone would. If it was to meansomething there’s the whole idea of branching quests which means more contentto make that only a % of the population will see. There’s also the technical sideof how you distinguish between a player who chooses X and on that chooses Y.

4. Maybe but it there would almost certainly need to be more to it to make abig enough impact on the game to justify the work involved.

1. In other genres yes. Almost certainly in MMORPGs as well though i can’tthink of any already published, i do know that Star Wars the Old Republic has asimilar system of choice.

2. It’s a half decent way of engaging the player and has been wildly used inRPGs so i would say it is successful. Not sure if it would have the same appealin an MMORPG and SWTOR hasn't been released yet so can’t comment on that.

3. In an MMORPG the player will do thousands and thousands of quests, if you’retalking about a WoW like MMORPG anyway, and most likely be playing in largechunks of time. The sheer number of quests a player does devalues them andunless the choice really means something player may just hit 1 over and over,after the 100th quest you do in 8hrs i think anyone would. If it was to meansomething there’s the whole idea of branching quests which means more contentto make that only a % of the population will see. There’s also the technical sideof how you distinguish between a player who chooses X and on that chooses Y.

4. Maybe but it there would almost certainly need to be more to it to make abig enough impact on the game to justify the work involved.

Thank you for your input. It has given me some things to consider. My plan was to only provide the quests as a break from the monotonous quests. So maybe 1 out of every 50 quests would involve making choices. The choices would have an impact from the perspective that if they choose the wrong one, they will not get the outcome they desire or need to move on in the quest. For instance, screaming frantically may only get someone else to throw a boot at you to shut you up. Offering the man food and water may be the answer to loosen his tongue so that he gives you another clue. One concern I have is that these types of quests can be more work and therefore I would want to give a larger reward, but the work can easily be circumvented by looking up the answers online and therefore giving a bigger bonus to those who circumvent the work would not be fair either. I can force them to complete all steps such as talking to all of the right people in the right order but I don't think I can do much more. To be honest, WOW is the only experience I have with an MMO. I should probably try out others to see what kinds of things already exist. Maybe I will try out SWTOR when it comes out.

Just started playing the Rift early start today after i replied to youearlier and encountered something similar to what you have talked about. Earlyon you have a quest where you have to talk to a prisoner to get someinformation from them. You basically talk to them and reply with one of threeanswers and then he gives you the information, as far as i can tell the replyis the same each time although i sadly wasn't paying attention the second timethrough.

[size=2]Nowthe choice was nice but it really didn't seem to make any difference to thegame at all making the whole thing feel a bit redundant. There is the bonuseffect of making it build up the players character in their head, a player witha more aggressive character in mind would take the more aggressive responseetc. but the fact the designer is still putting words in the players mouth doesgo some way to undo what i talked about. it didn't help that the flood ofplayers using the NPC meant he would reset every 2 seconds stopping any realinformative choice from being made, but that is more of a technical issue. Iwouldn't say the whole thing is bad but it, like your idea, doesn't fit all toowell with the current MMORPG trend. If you were going to put it into a game ithink it would need to be a more story centric one, SWTOR being the mostprominent example but there have been other small MMOGs that have tried to dothe same (can’t think of any names sadly otherwise i would have put them in theprevious post ).

You present 10 such dialogues/choices to a player per day. Not much, assuming minimalistic game. There are 30.5 days in a month. Assuming the player plays for a year and then quit you would need 3000-4000 such dialogues and corresponding reactions coded total, assuming totally linear scenario with no branches and no areas.

Troublesome cases like people wanting to play longer than a year or the storyline being not linear not taken into account.

There is no way you can make it...

Yes this has been done before in other games. Off the top of my head, The Neverwinter Nights series did this. When dialogues in the level editor you could give the speaker a pre-set animation to play when they spoke (although not technically an MMO, you could still have many player in a shared world).

Also, in Second Life, player could upload animations for their characters to perform and have them triggered by various events (including text typed into the chat bar, or even what other people say).

But, just because it has been done before is not a reason to not do it yourself. As the saying goes: "there is nothing new under the sun" (even if that sun is a virtual sun in a game ).