Trion World Network Interview
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Q You've said that your first game - a fantasy-themed, massively multiplayer, online role-playing game - will change and evolve based on input from players. Explain what that means and how that works.
A It will actually change and evolve based on direct input from players and based on indirect input from players. The direct input from players is basically what people tell us that they like and dislike in the game. The indirect input is all the data we gather on an aggregate level about what people do in the game - how frequently they visit a certain area in the game, how often they win, how often they lose. . . . Once a game is computed entirely on a central server architecture - in the cloud, so to speak - you have the ability to change the game on a daily basis, at any moment in time, and you can literally change anything in it.
Q What's a specific example?
A Imagine it's a sci-fi game. And there is a certain area that is really not popular. The quests are boring, and all the stuff that you can do in this particular area is nothing that people really like, and people don't really go there. We know this because our games are giant databases. . . . Now we create an event to literally change the face of that area. So, we create, for example, an alien invasion. The aliens change the entire area. The quests become more interesting; it becomes far more challenging.
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Q For the layman, how is a server-based game different from a typical online role-playing game?
A For 20 years, games have been simulated in your local machine - console or PC, any local machine - and all the computing, all the intelligence, resides in your local machine. That also means that once the game is finished and sold through retail, it doesn't change anymore. . . . Then you had the first generation of the big online games, "World of Warcraft," "Lineage," "Everquest." Those are architecturally in large part still very similar to the way you built video games in the past. There is still a large degree of computing that's in the local machine. . . . We have succeeded in designing an architecture that allows you to run those large-scale games entirely on central servers and the local device is only an input-output and rendering machine. It shows you the nice graphics; it allows you to participate in the game. But all the computing and all the intelligence resides on central servers. Once you've succeeded in doing that, like Trion has, you are able to run games that are now entirely dynamic and can be changed at any moment.
Even if the game is successfully being rendered server-side for thousands of people, I don't think broadband speeds over the next few years will support that much data being sent to our machines. The packets would have to be huge in order to include all physics and graphical data, in addition to what's already being sent in a typical MMORPG.
