Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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> Multiplayer Online Game - which can also be played solo player / offline

I remember when UO came out...I never played it but I wondered if it would be the end of good single-player RPGs. Luckily, it wasn't, but it was basically the end of Ultima as a series, though arguably it wasn't a causation. In any case, it's hard to imagine an RPG world that could be designed successfully to be a MMO and a good single player experience.

Good single player experiences are bespoke storytelling affairs...and to abstract it out to accomodate MMO interaction would seem to necessarily dilute it.

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I'm not at all against games that just end, rather than try to shoot to be a world in which you can fully "live a life" and in which the world is infinitely evolving. It's not that such a prospect isn't interesting, it's just that it inevitably leads to the kind of feature creep that leads to bugs and outright brokenness (insert reference to SimCity). I'm OK with games ending after 50-100 hours (or even 10, in the case of the Portal series), if those hours were fantastic.

I'd contribute if Lord British were going to make a modernized version of Ultima VII. Even though the limits of its world are obvious in retrospect, it really was way ahead of its time in creating a believable digital world for the single-player, and the constructs it used to maintain that facade (and have a story arc) would not have worked if it were a MMO.

Ultima VII has remained my fondest memory of an RPG. It was a world that, in comparison to its contemporaries, was practically alive, a living, changing place (that I could visit with my specially tweaked CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT). I think TES has done a good job of taking up the mantle that Ultima VII set down, but for me nothing will duplicate the childhood wonder of encountering the level of immersion and detail that Ultima VII offered.

About simulations: after playing MUDs I wished for evolving worlds, player clans with the ability to claim territory and build structures, NPC factions that battled among themselves, ecologies, simulated NPCs that responded to invasions and events, the works. These have been achieved to some extent in recent games, but maybe the magic lies in the storytelling in the end.

Maybe what we need is professional scripters running MMO cities: imagine Lord British essentially playing himself as a full-time job, with the ability to spin quests and stories that permanently change the fabric of the world, fight off invading lords, launch expeditions, rezone areas, fund guilds, run his realm. That way we can have complex world simulations, player-driven clans, and the human storytelling element, all richly combined.

(I wish I'd played UO, it sounds fantastic. Realistically, I won't have the time or energy to play SotA intensively, but I'd certainly like to try it. Too bad it isn't 2.5D isometric...)

I loved U7 The Black Gate. I just hate the fact that all games are 3d now, it just doesn't add anything to the game and it's distracting (in case of RPG games). I'm too old for this s*it :)

I might just be working on your dream game:

http://www.voxelquest.com

Of course, whether or not I will ever get even close to finishing it is another question. :)

It worries me that you're writing your own game engine. Makes me think you might be working on this project for another decade or more ;)

Then again, you might succeed like Eskil Steenberg did, after 4 years of effort: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27871/Interview_Eskil_Ste...

I hope you succeed despite your extensive goals (building a deduction engine in AI?). Really, I'd be happy just to play multiplayer in a fairly self-running world that's perhaps more user-friendly than LOVE. I definitely think multiplayer will attract more interest to your game.

If you haven't come across it, another HN user shared his UO-inspired project, First Earth. It has more of a focus on allowing a natural player economy to emerge, and the client is built in Unity. As someone who never experienced the glory of UO, I'm waiting to give it a spin.

http://firstearthgame.com/

Yeah writing my own engine was a hard decision. On one hand, I hate writing boiler-plate code, but on the other I have become so used to it at this point that I can whip up a basic rendering engine in a few weeks (the most recent iteration of my engine was written in two weeks of free time, in about 80 hours). I have wanted to use existing engines like Unity, but I have found that they pigeon-hole you into a specific type of industry-standard workflow that is not really good for me (for example I do not use any external assets, everything is generated in-engine since I am not a very good artist).

That said, I'm just kind of taking everything one step at a time. When Minecraft was first released, it was just a simple block-based world editor; I intend to release the simplest thing I can first and work from there. As for the AI, it is easier than it might seem to implement and I am not doing anything that novel (primarily the deduction is based off of languages like Prolog); I have implemented basic (test-based) prototypes in the past and I am pretty happy with the results so far.

I'll have to check out First Earth; as for multiplayer, I am prioritizing it last - not because I do not love a good multiplayer game, but because it is the one thing I can safely remove and still have a fun (enough) game while greatly reducing complexity.

Thanks for your thoughtful insights. :)

Yes, my experience compels me to agree. The best compromise I've found are Diablo-style co-operative stories, where multiple people can go through a very engrossing story as a group of adventurers, and progress to the game's final end. I argued that the great failure of SW: The Old Republic was that it removed the one element that made Knights of the Old Republic such a success: the engrossing single player story.

Massive online environments, by definition, prohibit a single character from being important. The natural solution is the instanced single player game, allowing large party sizes which scale difficulty based on the encounter. A corollary of this is that any true, persistent MMO must be sandbox type, allowing individual players extreme freedom to write the stories. The best example of this is EVE, and a lesser known korean RPG Lineage: The Blood Pledge, which allowed players to control castles of each kingdom, creating incredible game histories due to player competition alone.

It is clear that the single player co-op and the MMO are now distinct genres, catering to different play styles. Attempts to bridge this gap have generally failed from a storytelling perspective, even in great games such as Guild Wars 2 and The Old Republic.

I agree with you that trying to merge multiplayer with singleplayer would be a very difficult affair. I think swtor attempted this, but I cannot say because I never played it.

I am excited to see if anyone takes up the idea of making something akin to the elder scrolls franchise and adding small scale multiplayer into it. Not specifically co-op but just where multiple people are dropped into the world together and then left to their own devices. In a game where up to say 10 people were allowed to wander free it would be fun to have rivalries and alliances arise as people try to further their own goals.

What saddens me is that this sort of idea seems to be forgotten completely in lieu of the industry direction that seems to suggest the only multiplayer fantasy rpg games we'll ever get are shameless wow clones.

I would love to be wrong by the way, if anyone does know of any of these sorts of games feel free to correct me.

It sounds like the multiplayer is implemented in similar way to Fabel 2. A single player game, but if your friends were online you would see a floating orb where ever they were in the world. You could interact through game play as well, though I am a little rusty on how that worked.

An implementation like that would be really cool. It would definitely me a nice argument against the EA / Activision(Blizzard) always online approach.

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