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12/15/2018 6:01:40 PM
6
Live Gaming Actors:
I was thinking about gaming. Gaming as an art form, if you will indulge me. the way we play games; interacting with NPC's and fellow players, completing an objective, filling a bank or status bar, creating a form or avatar through which we identify ourselves to others in the game: All of these things represent a blending of creative, destructive, cooperative and competitive elements. This is the way gaming has become these days, regardless of gimmicks and game play, buried stories for the daring, and untold loot for the brave, this is the model upon which all major commercial games are being based. And I have to tell you I am getting sick of it. Just my personal feeling; some like the way things are and that's just fine.
But what if a knew element could be added to the cultural dogma of games? Now before you jump to conclusions [I know you read the title] take a moment to imagine: You load into the game (any game) you create your Avatar to represent you in this world, whatever that may be; You link up with friends to complete an objective- to cooperate- you walk up to an NPC only, it's not really an NPC, it's a dedicated server Player Character with an established backstory and persona, who is hired to immerse themselves in this world, and provide a next level gaming experience for the Players, Not only do they provide an organic and near completely personalized player experience but the players can also participate in scheduled events and activities along side them with Strong abilities and dramatic gaming experience. Imagine; You are exploring the moonlit ruins of an ancient civilization untouched and unexplored by anyone, no NPC no player, no mob; and the form of a divine goddess speaks to you. You could ask it whatever you want, and the LIVING character would respond with mystical and cryptic wisdom of unfathomable ages! you would virtually developing a relationship in-game with a goddess.
This is just a concept, but the idea of Living player characters LPC's, deserves exploring; if only for a concept piece...
What do you think?
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Edited by LahDsai: 12/17/2018 2:12:46 AMIf I remember correctly, Lord British in [i]Ultima Online[/i] was controlled by a real person. For an entire game though, I don't think it's financially feasible. Say it's a subscription service and you have 5 million active subscribers. If you're charging roughly 15$ a month (USD) that's about 75 million a month. That may seem like a lot but it'll burn quickly. For the sake of argument we'll assume you ship all your LPCs overseas and only pay them 5$ an hour. There are two ways to look at this, the number of LPCs per player and the number of LPCs per zone. If a subscription is $15, that's 3 hours of an LPCs time. To have one LPC up all day, you'd require 8 players to cover the cost. To have one LPC up for 30 days, you'd need 240 players. That's a 1:240 LPC to player ratio. Ok, but they don't need to be evenly packed, right? You should distribute them so there are more in hubs and less in the wilderness. Well, let's see how far we need to spread them out. At roughly 30 days a year and $5 an hour per LPC, a game like [i]World of Warcraft[/i] (currently the largest MMO having 5 million subscribers) could keep 104,166 (and two thirds) LPCs active at any time. [i]WoW[/i] has 230 realms (servers) with roughly 111 zones each. That's 25,000 zones to cover, meaning you could on average have 4 LPCs per zone. That might be fine for some remote woodland wilderness, but not for a city. Now, granted, we're not counting revenue from microtransactions (which you'd likely need to have), but this is also not considering anything outside paying LPCs (under US minimum wage, mind you). We're completely ignoring other costs such as server maintenance, paying people to develop new content, electricity, advertising, taxes, possibly rent, etc.
