General principles
The core idea is a radically social and organic game world, within an engaging, disbelief-suspending setting. This has several corollaries:
NO RPG GIMMICKS. No stupid missions you have to do repeatedly to gain points, etc.
We want players to do actually meaningful creative activities.
Not lure them into some dopamine-generating loop.
Intensive, simulation-based procedural generation to "fill out" the world
Highly polycentric game infrastructure run by players
Implies: everything open-source, no "anti-cheat"
Implies: game mechanics must be designed around things like "aimbotting" being pervasive
"Single shard" persistent world
Detailed, handcrafted setting that nevertheless does not have a fixed storyline for the future
See: Kaiserreich HOI4 mod, which does this beautifully
Vast human-directed automation
Basic model: a hierarchical "chain of command" ending in some sort of in-game sovereign polity. Every node in the CoC can either be AI-controlled or human-controlled.
Orders are "mid-level", between grand strategy and RTS. HOI4 is again a good guide.
AI units will blindly follow orders, modulo their own algorithms' calculations of how best to reach the goal.
Humans see orders but may or may not follow them.
First reason: nobody wants to do manual labor in a game
Second reason: this fixes the false dichotomy between a rich, ordered world and a Second Life-style "real-life social media disguised as a RPG".
See: Distant Worlds
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