Real Life MMO FPS
father.io
father.io
As a zombie, the fun came from having unlimited lives. You grab 2-5 friends and you charge a group of humans. And then you spend minutes wearing them down, taking their ammo, waiting for a mistake. Occasionally you'd dodge a shot or two and then you'd be close enough to tag them. It's very rewarding when you finally do get the human, because they are so much stronger than you. The infinite lives means you don't get discouraged, and it also means its okay to make risky attacks.
This game looks like fun, but a few mechanics worry me. The first is dying. If your opponent is a lot better than you, can you have fun? How long do you stay dead? You are almost certain to have interactions that you aren't prepared for, or you drop your phone, or some set of frustrations happen. Is the game built to prevent frustration?
The second is that having to hold your phone with two hands seems really clunky. In HvZ, the (for many players anyway) blaster is everything. It has to feel good in your hands, you have to trust it, you have to be able to sprint while firing. You can't sprint and aim with two hands. If you stumble, having two hands out means you have nothing to help you hit the ground smoothly. You can't grab a tree and use it to turn faster. You can drop a nerf blaster because they are tough and cost $5-$20 for the small ones. You can't drop your phone unless you really trust the case. You have to be a lot more careful, and you have to trust your grip. Phones don't have handholds the same way that blasters do.
Cool idea, but not excited by the current demo video.
I'm surprised your college let you guys get away with this. Mine included nerf guns in the campus 'zero tolerance' weapons policy.
We were very aggressive about complying with the administration. Any request was immediately honored, and if it was unfair we'd request a change in policy on a later day. We were very diplomatic and worked very hard to be on the good side of the administration. I think this helped a lot.
I'm not sure how that would scale to a city. Trying to be compliant with many police forces in different residential areas sounds a lot harder than trying to be compliant with a single college campus administration. Especially because it's a lot harder to enforce a diplomatic attitude among thousands of random players than it is among 50 people who are all either friends, or friends of friends.
The streets were very strictly off limits. And if there was a car (like a Public Safety vehicle) patrolling the campus sidewalks, all play stopped until the car was a certain distance away. No running, tagging, or shooting on the streets or by a moving car (parking lots were okay IFF there were no moving vehicles). Anybody in violation was immediately thrown from the game and banned from the next.
Safety under these conditions was not ever a problem. A sprained ankle was the worst injury we ever had, and that's going to happen in all sports.
"simulated killing" can be banned by communities here, the european rights court found that legal about this 10 years ago (C-36/02). Laserdrome was the game in question back then. The decision goes down to §1 of the german grundgesetz (our constitution), which is the inviolability of human dignity.
While Laserdrome and Paintball is rather commonplace nowadays, often, one of the provisions expected to open such a space is the exclusion of anyone not involved in the game.
I don't want to know how the reaction to people running around town "shooting" at each other will be.
Ingress is much more tame in comparison, and the forums are still full of people talking about being stopped and questioned by the police.
If you're in London, Howard, the founder will be speaking at #geomob on 13th of Jan. http://lanyrd.com/2015/geomob/
Love the concept but I am sure this is asking for trouble. Trigger Happy cops incoming.
They also got the introduction site very right -- I was seamlessly pulled into learning about the product, no sroll-shenanigans, just a quick (and painless/not-awkward) introduction to the product
You mean they don't do that already?
Honestly, it seems irresponsible.
Doesn't seem irresponsible at all to me. The creators are just trying to run with something new and ambitious.
#slashdotted!
Besides, what possibilities? I'm a huge proponent of open source but there's more or less nothing else that you would be able to do if it were. In an MMO, you abide by the rules of the central server, no matter how open its source is.