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Check out the games by Jeff Vogel [1] of Spiderweb Software [2]. His games may not be pretty to look at but they feature worlds that are full of life and rich with detail. Monsters attack and damage towns, destroy buildings, leave citizens homeless and shopkeepers jobless, and may eventually wipe towns off the map.

Meanwhile, the world is also full of outside areas to explore and dungeons to plunder. However, no town is safe. Spend too much time delving dungeons and you may return to a smoking ruin instead of a town. Or you may arrive in the middle of a monster attack on the town and get to participate in its defence!

Of course, the townsfolk aren't helpless either. They have town guards, soldiers, and even imperial wizards who arrive to help out. The wizards even create magical barriers to patch up the holes in the town wall!

As for how the games play, they're very reminiscent of old school Ultima games such as Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. As a fan of UO, you may really enjoy some Spiderweb Software games. No multiplayer though, these are strictly single-player turn-based affairs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs

[2] https://spiderwebsoftware.com

Many years ago I played Escape a from the Pit which was good but I played it on an iPad and eventually bounced off. Where do you recommend starting today?

You could try the new remake of Avernum 4: Greed & Glory (first part of the second Avernum trilogy - no need to have played the first trilogy as this is entirely standalone): https://store.steampowered.com/app/3882020/Avernum_4_Greed_a...

Nothing too recent that I know of but a couple of discussions:

https://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/topic/26438-good-first-g...

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/what_are_your_favorite_spi...

My favourite in the series was Exile 3: Ruined World. It had all the elements I was talking about. I would give the 2nd remake of that one (Avernum 3: Ruined World) a try!

I don't think you're _wrong_ for wanting these things, but I think the largest game developers avoid them and provide more "on-rails" experiences for good reasons.

The thing you described about events occurring out-of-view reminds me of the "Radiant AI" system which Bethesda promised, and greatly underdelivered, for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Allegedly the game was going to be full of NPCs with their own wants and needs, and they would take actions to fulfill those wants and needs regardless of whether or not the player was even watching. It sounds like it would lead to a very interesting world, but in practice it led to criminal NPCs being dead before the player can meet them. (The truth to this story is debated: https://blog.paavo.me/radiant-ai/)

Likewise, the concept of an MMO where you aren't necessarily safe from other players in a town sounds interesting, especially in a game with a relatively small community. Applied at scale to something like World of Warcraft, I think that it would either be penalized so heavily that no one would do it, or not heavily enough so that new players have difficulty getting anywhere in the game because they are murdered by high-level trolls as soon as they log in.

Dwarf fortress proves you can totally do things off script without player interaction. Poor Ragnar.

As for the scale issue with criminality. You are describing exactly what happens when you put people on rails. They all end up in town. At the same time.

If a game cluster has a population of 200,000 players monthly - it should have the space for it. No instancing. No sharding (other than maybe regional boundaries). Don’t spawn everyone at the same starting point at the same time. Change it depending on their character creation choices, backstory, profession, etc. Let them naturally come to towns. Let there be enough land to support 200,000 inhabitants. These kinds of things I wish for. Space games are the only ones that manage to have enough room for everyone to live angrily ever after.

Ashes of Creation is trying its best in this area.

Land scarcity becomes a thing. Like in UO. You see what Eve has done, just let structures live so long as no one blows it up. In UO, they introduced decay timers so if you abandoned the game, you forfeit your lot. Games were smarter back then.

> They all end up in town. At the same time. ... Don’t spawn everyone at the same starting point at the same time.

I hadn't thought about that. The perspective I am coming from (Runescape, Final Fantasy XIV) has players starting in one (or three) locations when they begin the game.

Thanks for the Ashes of Creation name-drop. I don't know if I'll play it but I'm definitely interested in watching the trajectory of this game.

Buyer beware, this game has been in alpha for 10 years despite sufficient funding. The cash shop is charging $25 for skins in a alpha game.

Real cities have redundant opportunities. I live in a city of around 120k people. We have three Walmart's spread across the city and two Target stores. These are just the main big players obviously. There are dozens of smaller stores offering various goods. In game settings there tends to be one primary shop of a type per "area" forcing people to congregate around very specific places. Same with quest givers. There is zero reason for every warrior to have the exact same "warrior mentor/trainer". There could literally be dozens of different warrior trainers spread across the city and you're randomly assigned one of the lower utilization trainers on character creation. You get to know the local shops and resources around your particular trainer before branching out.

This is how well designed MMOs do things. Guild Wars 2 for example. Big city, tons of shops, many of the same “type”, slightly different goods.

You are 100% correct that that is how it should be modeled.

Check out Kenshi.

Wikipedia blurb:

> Kenshi is a real-time strategy action role-playing game developed and published by Lo-Fi Games for Windows. The game focuses on sandbox gameplay features that give the player freedom to do what they want in its world instead of focusing on a linear story.

https://youtu.be/_E4nKWxSG8o?si=t93p3FtBlh4Cxcvm

I have commented on Todd's failure to deliver on such promises in skyrim before.

But this is definitely where generative ai will be a boon to games, once it's stabilised enough to trust.

I'd love exactly the same; the game should still tell a story or have a point (unless it's a complete sandbox), so key plot points can be included but otherwise it's a simulation and the player can do things with their agency, but so can the npcs.

Would be cool to come back to a village, and now the leader has changed because the previous one insulted someone at the tavern, who killed the leader in a fit of rage. The village then chose a replacement leader, the assailant was publicly executed for their crimes. But the villagers decided this was too brutal a punishment so they removed the leader, who resisted but got driven out of town. The ousted leader wants control of the village back so they've been planning to enter with a crew of mercenaries.

When you get to the village you get given a quest to go take care of the problem, based on the hearsay. Hell, when you get to whatever hideout they're holed up in maybe the npc has even decided to just give up and move somewhere else.

So many opportunities for awesome narratives. I've done experiments with this stuff in text, but not in engine with an actual game.

Oh I totally agree. More so I think the ability for AI to generate any kind of game you wish is in the not so distant future.

Dwarf Fortress has some wonderful world events and npc choice trees. For example in my biggest fortress, Ragnar was bored. Ragnar got really bored. Ragnar stared at a rock for almost 3 months game time. Then Ragnar got inspired so he ran over to the bowyer workstation, fetched a few gems and wood from the nearby piles, and started crafting a masterpiece crossbow. 6 months later, this thing comes out decked in jewels and gems, it’s got a +++ rating on the end. It’s wonderful. Then Ragnar loads a bolt. Pulls the trigger.

O-oh boy...well I guess he'd achieved his ultimate goal, perhaps there was nothing else after that.

That's what I love about these sorts of emergent systems. Although I was discussing it with a friend, there's a great ars war story on ultima: https://youtu.be/KFNxJVTJleE?si=GXkjTKZNN6H_xoUe

Won't spoil it for you but we did have a great discussion from that around how emergent gameplay can be amazing, but player agency means that you'd still need the "hand of God" to be involved in fixing things and making adjustments so that major plot points and still enabled and the player doesn't kill the entire world (unless that's the point of the game I suppose).

Shadow of Mordor (and the sequel) had something called the "Nemesis" system where some of the Orc Captains you kill (and the ones who kill you) might survive off screen and get stronger and come back with scars and buffs and new nicknames. It didn't do the village/town stuff you are talking about. They talked about doing it in future games but never did.

Didn't find any good technical write-ups. Although apparently it's "patented".

Here's a decent video overview. I hate that everything is video now but this is the world we live in I suppose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fh5qc-ZnaM

Yeah, good game mechanics scarred by an IP royalty agreement.

Yes here's the patent. The independent claims are frustratingly broad if you're trying to think through practical NPC world sim systems.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160279522A1/en

Yes I agree that the patent system now exists for parasite businessmen and finance people rather than inventors.

But on a more positive note I loved SoM so much, played it on release - the nemesis system, movement and general open worldness of it was all so satisfying. I never got to the sequel but I'll have to check it out.

> But this is definitely where generative ai will be a boon to games, once it's stabilised enough to trust.

The problem is most deployments will likely be sloppy shovelware and every now and then we’ll get half decent games with it, maybe a great one every few years. Just like how we see now with garbage unedited LLM outputs flooding the internet and dominating searches as “articles” or “blogs.” It is just far too easy flood us with trash while any decent work gets buried in it and can’t be found.

Oh for sure, but remember when Steam opened the green light thing more and a flood of absolute trash started pouring in...I feel like there'll always be shovelware, poor implementations and scams regardless of AI or any other technology. Seems it's just something that comes along with human nature, inside and outside of games.

One problem with the simulation route is that games in the D&D lineage are usually wildly unbalanced. A, say, level 5 monster could run through endless level 1 NPCs. Also, much of the machinery of our world (e.g. commerce) doesn't really work when then there are incredibly dangerous and malevolent critters scattered throughout.

It's more about the combat model. Everyone is a fanatic who fights until death, despite any casualties their friends and allies have suffered. And weapons and other attacks are mostly harmless. They deal limited damage measured in hit points, which does not affect the combat effectiveness of the target, heals quickly, and does not leave any lasting effects.

In a different combat model, an equally unbalanced monster would avoid unnecessary fights agains groups of armed opponents. Not because it's afraid it would lose, but due to the risk of permanent injuries. Determined defenders could then try to take advantage of that behavior to drive the monster away.

Yup. Same reason I feel safe hiking in big cat territory. You look like a large predator. Only things that consider a large predator as possible prey will seek conflict--and most of the US has no such animal.

The cats know they would win, but a predator at our size range might injure them and keep them from getting their next meal. Thus it's virtually certain they will not attack--and the news supports this. People get hurt when the animal feels it needs to defend itself.

This is one of the things I like about Kenshi. Losing a fight doesn't mean you died in a fight necessarily. Sometimes you're just knocked out and the enemy is satisfied and moves on. Sometimes you're just knocked out and made into a slave which gives you another story arch to follow and challenges to overcome.

Isnt this what Dwarf Fortress aspires to be? Simulated from the internal organs of dwarfs up, of course.

I haven’t played it, but my understanding is that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 works this way. Meet a person who tells you something’s happening tonight, and you better get there tonight if you want to see/do it. Maybe someone who’s played the game can chime in.

It’s a great game, much like its predecessor. However, it’s still linear in most ways. You miss out on those small side quests but that was true of the first game too.

I’d love for a game to set the stage like: “Bad person/thing does bad stuff to good town” like intro, then it’s just you in a field by a small village where you live that is now in ashes due to bad event that happened while you weren’t there. Game On…

From there, don’t give a single hint until a player did something that could actually do something if they do it right.

An example would be early days of Minecraft before notch sold his soul, you wouldn’t have a guide or achievements or anything to help you. There were no wikis, only a small forum of people asking why are people punching trees?

Games need to feel more exploratory without giving everyone GPS direct to the next XP machine.

One problem is that the more you have happen without it being caused by/linked to player interaction, the more you need to have be possible to happen. Then you're either wrestling with a small chaotic world that doesn't make much sense, or you need to scale it up so much that there's no way the player will actually get to experience most of it. If you have 10 villages in your game world, then how many off-screen events can you realistically fit in while the player is away and have it still be interesting for the player when they come back?

>Then you're either wrestling with a small chaotic world that doesn't make much sense…

Much like in modern times eh? It’s all RNG. I take it you never played Daggerfall.

I think what my ideal is basically DnD, but with an AI DM.

This is something that I'm hoping the current LLM and future AI work eventually get us to. If we can get persistent context and memory, or at least a simulacrum of that, we could get to truly dynamic reactive worlds

I think I turn more to story generators like Rimworld and DF than organic MMO or even basic multi-player these days. Especially in an MMO, there are just so many people whose entire goal is to make your play experience worse. People suck.

You might want to check out "Depth of Peril". kind of a cluncky diablo 1 like game. I liked it because of that dynamism. Graphics and gameplay are now dated, but if you talk fondly about ultima, you might enjoy it.

Din's Curse and Din's Legacy (by the same developer as Depths of Peril) are other entries worth a look. They have a dynamic evolving world as you go about your business: https://www.soldak.com/Dins-Curse/Overview.html

It sounds like you want to play EVE Online, but as a guy with a sword rather than a guy in a spaceship. There is a story, but it doesn't really matter and there's no direct way to interact with it. Systems are given safety ranking from 0.0 to 1.0, depending on how fast the NPCs show up and destroy your ship. Even in 1.0 space you're not really "safe" from someone deciding they just want to blow you to smithereens.

Not quite. I want a story. I want that story to unfold as I play in an organic way.

I played Eve a lot when it first came out up until about 2010 or so. The Alliance politics isn’t my cup of tea. The sandbox is great though. It’s just sad that gamers no longer see that and only want quests or missions or some direction on what to do next.

I’m hoping that with LLMs and AI, we’ll break free of this “waiting to be instructed” mentality of the youth and we can make games that are more diverse and open. Rock Star Games does some wonderful little scripted events and things in their games, they know how, but they still force you down this linear story arch. RDR2 was as close to the kind of game I’m talking about except for that fact. The fact that each “chapter” was a linear progression across the open world map.

I'm not sure how LLMs or AI could solve that. If anything it would make the problem worse, because kids will be more used to getting instantly generated plots.

Either way, if it does come to pass, I hope it doesn't become the norm. I am not interested in playing a game nobody was interested in making.

Ah, UO memories. PK killing as a Great Lord, Blackthorne shield in hand. Visiting town was all "bank" "bank" "bank" "lfg" "bank"

Everyone I played with had a macro key program that when you pressed F11 would chat “bank guards!” So when you were in Briton, you just spam F11 for safety.