I've been tossing this idea around for a few days and finally came to a decision(an inital one at least) as to how it should work, I want you guys' and gals' comments, criticisms, and suggesstions. We all know that in a multiplayer game that the way one person plays has an effect on the way everyone else plays. What if this was toned down a bit so that you don't directly interact with the other people playing the game. For example, let's say I've started a mission on a game and I start playing. If someone, somewhere is playing the same mission at the same time and he kills a guard or something, when it's my time to get where the guard would be, he's not there. Or if he alerts the guards in his game, it alerts the guards in my game which make me adapt to ever changing situations. I think the possibilities here are very wide which would lead to a game with a greater replay value due to the fact that you'll never play any mission the same way twice. So tell me what you think and let me know if you think I've got something here. Thanks for listening. -AJ

very interesting path to go down ...

but imagine a few of the difficulties you will need to solve ... for instance the alert situation ... people will sabotage other players by alerting all thr guards and such ...

Although I have worked on a game design that is about 1/3rd of the way toward what you are talking about. In a scifi idea I was working on a few years ago, I wanted to use a system where people played single player, but what they did populated the universe with game data which would have cost too much time for me to create up front ... a little like the old MUDs where players created content, and a little like the old Unreal Tournament scoreboard system, where everyone was rated on the same boards, even though they often played seperately. In my case I was going to use occurances of players in each area / quadrant to generate news / summmary data for players in other quadrants.

I was also going to use peoples gameplay choices such as trade puchases and selling, and tech research as minor modifier inputs for others ... so each time any player bought things, it had a minor modification on everyone (like 1/20th of the price adjustment I was thinking). So it would be like a situation in which everyone played a game affected by everyone else, like a MMO, but much less so, cause the effects we're fairly minimal and noone could do anything to truely screw you up (there would be limits to the adjustment level). Basically I was simply going to use player data based variation instead of random variation. I thought that way the game would baland itself ... for instance if one good is super usefull and cheap, everyone buys it a lot and the pirce rises slowly, to rebalance the game a little. If certain weapons aren't very good and noone buys them, there price goes down until they become attractive to players who want to play a mass unit strategy instead of a small but powerfull unit strategy.

Good luck with your idea.

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Original post by Xai very interesting path to go down ... but imagine a few of the difficulties you will need to solve ... for instance the alert situation ... people will sabotage other players by alerting all thr guards and such ...

It could be random. If the guards are alerted, two random numbers are generated between, let's say 1 and 10 inclusive. If they match, the guards are alerted. This would result in a 10% chance that the guards will be alerted. Obviously this design has alot of room for tweaks and improvements.

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I was also going to use peoples gameplay choices such as trade puchases and selling, and tech research as minor modifier inputs for others ... so each time any player bought things, it had a minor modification on everyone (like 1/20th of the price adjustment I was thinking). So it would be like a situation in which everyone played a game affected by everyone else, like a MMO, but much less so, cause the effects we're fairly minimal and noone could do anything to truely screw you up (there would be limits to the adjustment level). Basically I was simply going to use player data based variation instead of random variation. I thought that way the game would baland itself ... for instance if one good is super usefull and cheap, everyone buys it a lot and the pirce rises slowly, to rebalance the game a little. If certain weapons aren't very good and noone buys them, there price goes down until they become attractive to players who want to play a mass unit strategy instead of a small but powerfull unit strategy.

I like that idea, but it would be hard to make it balance out for combat gameplay. Something to think about and play around with.

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Good luck with your idea.

Thanks.

-AJ

This reminds me of somthing that I always thought would be cool. It takes place in a MMORPG environment. I'll put this in World of Warraft terms but it could obviously be adopted to some other game.

Basically, a player is given a quest (lets say an Alliance player). To go kill 10 Blackrock Orcs (a world spawn). Now lets say that the horde is allied with these orcs so obviously they don't want the orcs to die. So a horde player gets a quest at the same time to go kill 1 alliance player, pitting the player's against each other. I think this and variations on it could create very interesting gameplay.

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Original post by u235 I've been tossing this idea around for a few days and finally came to a decision(an inital one at least) as to how it should work, I want you guys' and gals' comments, criticisms, and suggesstions. We all know that in a multiplayer game that the way one person plays has an effect on the way everyone else plays. What if this was toned down a bit so that you don't directly interact with the other people playing the game. For example, let's say I've started a mission on a game and I start playing. If someone, somewhere is playing the same mission at the same time and he kills a guard or something, when it's my time to get where the guard would be, he's not there. Or if he alerts the guards in his game, it alerts the guards in my game which make me adapt to ever changing situations. I think the possibilities here are very wide which would lead to a game with a greater replay value due to the fact that you'll never play any mission the same way twice. So tell me what you think and let me know if you think I've got something here. Thanks for listening. -AJ

Reminds me of a game.
Clicky

I didn't play this one but it looked good. Cool concept, keep at it!