Engaging & Impactful Quest & Open World Content Design

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

I perceive what you call 'public knowledge' as saying 'what we have seen is what we will get'.

I choose to see it as 'here is a demo of what we have in mind/where we are now'. That 'faceplate' we have been shown could be the 'faceplate' of either what you described, or a BGS style/tier of thing. I know this because FFXI Campaign doesn't even look as 'good' as what Ashes showed, but has the complexity type that the OP is talking about.

I think therefore that your answer is 'no this isn't from a Dev, this is my interpretation of what we've seen so far', and I should, in fact, add more data if Sengarden cares (it would be 'my advice/experience about how players respond to these things, which might hold no weight to the discussion OP is trying to have).

Then may I suggest changing your style of writing from:

"Ashes will []"
"Ashes is going to []"

My group would appreciate it.

Azherae wrote: »

Then may I suggest changing your style of writing from:

"Ashes will []"
"Ashes is going to []"

My group would appreciate it.

Yes, please. Because by implying that they are AI and tech limitations on something that has not only already been done, but that I can do by myself in a week, it is the equivalent of saying that the Intrepid developers are incompetent.

You can easily do things like generating a cloud of 'controlled points' to represent what factions (player or otherwise) control a given area, and drop them into a spatial tree data structure (there's plenty) to let you efficiently pull out the nearest marked point to ask things like "who controls the space I'm standing in?" or "what enemy race has the most influence at this point where I want to spawn something?". You can do some pretty detailed borders in only a few hundred points per node-sized area, since you only need real density on the borders. Recalculate the entire thing even every 5 minutes if you like. It's only gonna take a few seconds, even if your 'influence adaptation' algorithm is rough.

I'll spare you a diatribe on clustering events and generating gradients of influence in real time, but I could do the "control graph" in a day, and the rest in a week. Intrepid can definitely pull it off.

The real question is the creativity to decide how you want the world to behave, not the tech to pull it off.

I don't like when you claim things like "Ashes won't be that game", simply because there are a lot of hard-working developers at Intrepid that you are basically disparaging for no reason, if you don't have some word on this from them directly somehow.