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Ultima Online tried to have player actions affect the world. For instance, overfarm the animals in an area, and the wildlife would react in a realistic fashion.

So shortly after game launch, dragons started attacking the cities since the players had killed all of the prey animals to level up their leatherworking skill.


And, as Eve has made clear, some players are more than happy to be backstabbing jerks who build themselves up by slaughtering defenseless newbies en masse when they can get away with it.

Over the years, I've repeatedly seen developers talk about how they have these simply amazing ideas for implementing PvP in their upcoming MMORPG, and how it's going to revolutionize RPGs. And then I look at the details and realize that the developers are, in reality, clueless, and not paying a bit of attention to why all of the previous attempts at doing the EXACT SAME THING have failed miserably. The developers always assume that there isn't a small core of players who are quite willing to play 16/7 (gotta sleep sometime, even with energy drinks), and upend the entire system just because they can.

Hand in hand with that is that a meta-plot advancing binary choice ends up not seeming like much of a choice if the choice that *you* made to advance the plot consistently ends up getting overruled by the majority of players who picked the other choice. *You* may have always made the decision to save the princess. But more players decided to run off with the dragon's hoard instead. And so canonically, the princess - tragically - didn't survive the experience. There have been games that tried things along those lines (note that I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I know there have been at least a couple). But it never quite works out for the reason I outlined in this paragraph.

Incidentally, Final Fantasy XIV has fun with the idea of binary choices. NPCs will ask you a question, and frequently one of your possible responses will be to snarkily note that no matter what you say, you're somehow going to end up going along with the suggestion anyway.

Eumerin wrote:
Ultima Online tried to have player actions affect the world. For instance, overfarm the animals in an area, and the wildlife would react in a realistic fashion.

So shortly after game launch, dragons started attacking the cities since the players had killed all of the prey animals to level up their leatherworking skill.

Yeah, never underestimate the ability of players to destroy a world