As in most RPG''s around to when a character is made they are very much preserved in time. They really don''t age enough for it to be very relevent to the game. I would like to see more rpgs where time management is an issue. So the player will notice after a week or two of playing that there character is getting more mature in there acts and appearences. Bring back the Potions of Youth I say!! I love Game Design and it loves me back. Our Goal is "Fun"!

That''s an interesting concept, but then you either have to play for a very long period of time, or allow time to "accelerate" in some parts of the game, so that it is not advancing linearly.


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Usually the story is so short that characters aren''t going to age very much. If you have storyline that goes for years or decades then you have to change the way of playing somehow.

You can''t just play every situation in a game that lasts five years. Perhaps the game should go like this : you have some kind of mission that lasts for couple of days or weeks, then you go home and live normal life (no need to play explicitly, you just give general orders). Then after few years of normal living comes a new mission etc.

Wouldn''t that be nice? The game would become some kind of life simulator. You could start with newborn character and decide what kind of education he/she would take and so on.

Still, age can be used in game whether the character is ageing or not. If you start the game with older character you have more skills but are maybe weaker or something like that. Also other characters react differently to characters with different ages.

-Ratsia

I''m thinking of like finaly fantasy and diablo...
but i wish they showed change based on time, not game events
who cares if the seed or flower was found as a kid or old aged person, of course dependning on game, some way to preserve or slow growth. i''d like to see it time based.

quick to change during teen "years" and slower change later.
even if it''s just a model or sprite changes.

also wish teen years was when experience was given/taken most.
such as muscle building heh.

It very much depends also on how much travelling your character does (see fallout). So the player must chose to take the most optimal routes as we do in real life (erk).

Character aging should also allow for role development to boot which could be implemented in code. Changing stats with age would bring a new element into the realm of powermaxing as well or it should i think.

There''s also the problem when a character gets too old to continue play. Character death by age, but then you could always bring in reincarnation i guess? or creating families in game so the player manages more than one main character.

I love Game Design and it loves me back.

Our Goal is "Fun"!

quote: Original post by Paul Cunningham

As in most RPG''s around to when a character is made they are very much preserved in time. They really don''t age enough for it to be very relevent to the game.

I would like to see more rpgs where time management is an issue. So the player will notice after a week or two of playing that there character is getting more mature in there acts and appearences.

Bring back the Potions of Youth I say!!

Paul,
This is another issue that we have been discussing for our MMORPG
I think that this could have inpacts on all aspects of this type of game. For instance, a player enters the game (Lets assume a lvl system for easier explanations) at lvl 1. He plays for 2 years real-time and around 2000 hours game time. Lets say that our worlds day is 2.5 hours realtime. This guy has played for 800 game years (which is quite old).
By this time he is lvl 60 and can take out everything that is in the game, he has some "speacial items" in his possesion and lots of gold in his bank account
He would continue to play this character without much "effort", if you didn''t implement an aging system.
The same scenario with aging added would eventually have this character passing away (some natural causes or not and sort of forcing this player to start a new character... maybe a graveyard could be placed in the world for all to view... sort of a way of creating a continuing history for the world...

For, CRPG''s I agree that the play time is typically based on a small time period and wouldn''t lend itself well (if the story is linear).





Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

As Dak has eluded to, the hardest part about answering how time affects your players is answering the question of time being something that can permanently kill a character. Aging can be so powerful because aging forces you to think there is a finite amount of time for your character to get something accomplished and do something with his/her life. If implemented right it can add a layer to the game that can increase the immersiveness of the game. If done wrong, however ....

Initially we planned to have aging affect the character''s statistics as time went on. If we based our calendar on a 2 - 2.5 year span of playing, extreme old age would more than likely not play a factor in our game. Though this being said we still have to answer the question for the player that wishes to play for 5 years.

Questions left unanswered.
How long is the timeline of the game? In the case of MMORPGs, how long is the average time played for any given character in the world.

If aging affects are based upon Humans then how do you allow aging effects for Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes?

What happens when a character gets extremely old?

What happens when a character gets hit with an age increasing or decreasing spell?(obviously you can leave these out but they have interesting applications in an MMORPG)

Most importantly, is age implemented in such a way that it adds to the customer experience during the customers playing time with your game? If it is only for realism, sometimes realism is best left out of a fantasy game.

Kressilac

Hi,

Here''s how I plan on generally dealing with time in my game (excerpt from the design web page):

There will be schools in some modules. When the player''s character (or any NPC) reaches a school he will be able to study and perfect his character''s abilities (skills). The studying will usually require months (maybe years) and his character will thus age. Modules will also contain "exits" wich will allow the player''s character to move from module to module. So the player''s character will be able to interrupt an adventure, go for training and return to complete his quest. When doing so, the player will have the option of playing "in time" or "out of time" when returning to the original module. This means that, if he chooses so, the World Simulator will simulate an equivalent of time that the player''s character was out of the module before allowing him to continue play.

I would like to add that when the player travels, time will pass according to the speed and distance between the place of departure and destination. Turns will usually be measured in seconds. And finally, time spent sleeping will also age the character by the amount of hours slept.

Octarinne,


Interesting ways to have time effect the character are nice, but what happens if I slepp my life away. Someone will do it just to see if you have planned for death or something when they are 90 years old. If you don''t do something about old age then it can become this sort of trophy. "I played the game to completion and I was 300 years old." If you''re gonna have time effect your game then you either have to make sure your story forces them to complete the game before a reasonable amount of time, or you have to deal witht he inevitable player that wants to sleep his way through your game.(or travel back and forth, or whatever)

Kressilac

I don''t think the issue of character aging should be exploited heavily, its just something that adds a bit of depth to the game. For example: Having a time limit in the game is bad true but if the time limit is based off something such as character age then the player can understand it.But if the time limit is just placed in the game such as a clock in the top right of the gui then i think thats very bad for a crpg.

You can always have quests for older character to track down the fountain of youth or something along these lines anyhow. Maybe something that reduces the characters age a little bit at a time so the player won''t feel cheated on all the work they have done on their character.

I personally wouldn''t mind if my level 43 character in diablo got old and i had to hunt down the exilir of youth that would give me back 5 years (2 months of playing time or what not). I think it would add a bit of thrill to the game myself (i''m not talking about diablo here).

I love Game Design and it loves me back.

Our Goal is "Fun"!