Terra Nova: World Persistence

What if MMO environments were more responsive to the players actions? What would happen if, depending on the situation, the NPCs would respond differently to their player driven opponents? Timothy Burke over at Terra Nova asks the TN community this questions and probes their intellect further by asking what are technical (not design) implication of such a dynamic environment.

When I've ventured out before on this topic, I've found a reasonable degree of consensus on this point among scholars, developers and players, that dynamic, changing, responsive synthetic worlds are what we need. I've also heard on many occasions that they simply are not technically possible at the present time.

Head over at Terra Nova to read more about it : World Persistence: One In A Series of Queries. It's a very interesting post and the comments are even more so.