More Content?

When one thinks about how to expand the life of a game, the first thought on a designer's mind might be to identify ways to give the player more content for relatively little dollar.

The addition of more content (dungeons, quests, and so on) at runtime and/or the running of periodic in-game events is one commonly cited strategy for keeping players involved. While these are considered expected by the player base and can have many other benefits inside of the game space, additional content and quests often don't help the problem. First, players can devour in an hour content that takes a designer a month to create. There is simply no way to keep up. Second, content invariably has to be aimed at one portion of the player base. An example is creating a dungeon that only high-level players can enter. Putting in content like this can really exacerbate feelings of frustration and fatigue that other players (in this case, low-level players) might be having.

Random content generation is one interesting arena that has not been explored much, although the challenges in adding new content without oversight have some interesting ramifications for a persistent-state world. However, one can make a good argument that the random content (both the magic weapons as well as the dungeon layouts) has contributed mightily to the success of Diablo .

And, of course, the final course to consider is the possibility of allowing players to create and add content to the world. However, this has a number of challenges regarding quality control, hardware costs, and exploit-proofing that implementation of this in a full-scale MMP is unlikely in the near future.