You want a persistent world? I'll show you one. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Monday, March 23, 2015, 06:53 (3625 days ago) @ Korny

Kingdom of Loathing.

Here's a brief history of the annual Christmas time events.

Here's other major stuff:
- Players found an exploit to get bajillions of in-game currency. Rather than reverting the game world back to before the exploit was found (which the devs could have done), they opted to roll with it, and introduced some serious currency sinks into the game. One was destroying a builiding in the main town and letting people donate money to fix the building, another was the ability to put hits out on players for large sums of money, and the last was introducing some "prestige" items that could only be bought for amounts of money so large that they were obviously bug-money.

- The servers went down one day, and when they came back up, the devs had added some "spiders in the machine" as enemies to symbolize the actual spiders that had crawled into their server for warmth and shorted it out the day previous.

- Loads and loads of scripted, one-time events that dropped unique items you can sell or use (sometimes both).

I'll grant that this is a web-based, stick figure drawing RPG that is mostly text, and is thus not subject to needing all of the super high-def artwork, animations, and voice acting that a AAA title would need, but it's the approach to having a living, breathing world that evolves along with the players that I wish "Persistent world" AAA devs would follow.

Also, Asymmetric (the devs of KoL) are staffed by... 3 people? Maybe 4 at their peak. So with 500 people, imagine the level content they could move.