RE: [GD-Design] Re: Gamedevlists-design digest, Vol 1 #67 - 6 msgs

[Neil S. <ne...@r0...>]

> Most MMOG's hover almost at a on most aspects, so that your 
> enjoyment is tightly bound to how long you spend playing the 
> MMOG (and hence how much subscription revenue the owner 
> extracts from you).

I think multiplayer games (RPG or otherwise) have a much more difficult
decision to make in this area because, if you allow novices to compete with
experts by using "implants" (to continue the cyborg analogy), the experts
will want some kind of retribution; for example, a handicap on the final
score for those using implants, based on the level of implants used.

So you've bought yourself the ability to level the playing field, but you're
paying for it in terms of a more complex scoring system. This might not be
all that bad, but it's worth keeping in mind when adopting something like
this.

It is conceivable that you can devise the implants such that an expert can
get better results by doing everything manually if he is skilled enough to
do so. The example of automatic gear changing is a good one; racing games
generally make the automatic changes slightly less optimal than well-timed
manual ones, so experts can achieve slightly better acceleration. If you
manage to make all your implants have this property, then you could have
novices and experts playing together without any problems. The experts would
probably still win, but the game would be more competitive.

I'm sure a lot of people will argue that the simplest way to solve
difficulty in multiplayer games is to keep people of wildly differing
abilities apart, which seems to work well on Xbox Live.

In single player games, no-one is being "cheated" (unless you are comparing
scores, which makes it a kind of poor man's multiplayer game), so you can
adopt whatever method you think will give the novice the better experience.

- Neil.