Wargame vs "Living world"

[Hoofhurr]

That might be dynamic but what impact does it have on the players and their emotional connection to the game? Does it change your gameplay experience from what is currently available other than make things more unpredictable and perhaps more inaccessible as a consequence? Part of the appeal of a static game is that the content is available to you whenever you have time to access it and it's relatively straightforward to learn because the routines play out the same every time. Just playing devil's advocate.

A lot of this is developing AI. You could probably program something like this as a mini-game app for Apple. Define a plane. Set two spawn points. The camps spawn rabbits at set intervals and have random headings, distances, velocity, etc. As you build influence with the spawn you gain more control over those variables. I'm not sure what the goal would be. Maybe the plane would have obstacles that respond better to certain variables (one obstacle would change velocity into heading or heading into distance). Larger planes correspond better to velocity/distance. Planes with many obstacles correspond better to heading. Just kind of brainstorming. Maybe there are 'gravity point's on the field that the spawns would be attracted to and depending on their proximity would have an influence on velocity or heading.

Gravity wells acting on MOBs pathing could be an interesting way to influence but not absolutely predict where a spawn might end up. In a way you would be spawning NPCs with a purpose to assist in combat like in alterac valley but with a lot more of the environment/gameworld dictating the behavior of those npcs.

I suppose my line of thinking is that a living world has an element of randomness to it and not the type of randomness that decides whether or not the Guk Lord has a Yak or not. The randomness of NPC and PC spawns coming across one another in any given environment would really heighten suspense in an MMOG. It sucked to come across super high level Griffons and get chased for 5 miles but you certainly paid much closer attention to what you were doing than in most other games we've played in recent memory.