I was thinking about the possibilities with Exult Studio, and having the entire Exult community getting behind the project of building a massive single player RPG, and I got this idea...
You could have a central Game Design team, that would put together an outline of what the game is about... like this (lame) example: "There is a large island with 6 cities, each containing people from different factions. Each faction must be united to battle the Evil Menace(tm) lurking in the dungeon located at the dead centre of the island!!"
Once a (hopefully better) loose plot is written, it could be presented to us, the Exult community, for the following purpose: to populate it with interesting NPCs! Anyone interested in the project could be given a single NPC to write - specifying the characters name, occupation, which city the character lives in, what schedule the character follows, what the NPC can add to the plot and central character, what dialoge trees the NPC has etc.
This way, as plot elements are added to the rpg, everyone responsible for an NPC can update his/her dialogue trees to accomadate the plot. We could have forums set up for people to discuss the relationships between their characters etc.
I think this could be a lot of fun, and allow us all to have a small part in what could be an awesome project - not to mention taking away some of the workload from the Design Team. Of course, the whole thing should be overseen by someone who could delete all the d00dz NPCs that get created.
I can see it now... "MagicMop, the lowely janitor with the magical cleaning implement!" Yup, my NPC has a nice ring to it already...
Anyone else got some ideas?
MM