A game mechanic concept

[Drighton]

My friend and I were talking yesterday about possible game mechanics to implement in my game. There was one that interested me particularly, but would be kind of difficult to maintain.

The game would require an internet connection (dial-up would work fine) to sync with a central server, grab the current day and time, then disconnect. This is important for the mechanic.

I most games, your arrival in a city begins an event or cutscene. No matter how long you wait before going to that city, the event will always execute upon your arrival.

Well, what if that event was set to take place at day 30, hour 10, minute 3? That would mean that whether you are anywhere near the town or not, that event would occur. Your presence in the city is not required for the event to take place. In fact, your not even required to be logged into the game.

Lets say said event takes place while you are at school or work or even sleeping. When you log into the game, and the time-sync is done, the game will have changed around you. People, shops, and even cities may be changed or gone entirely. Now the changes that take place could be small and insignificant, or huge, and a major part of the story element.

Whether your character, and you yourself, are present or even involved in that event depends on the actions and opportunities you've taken in the game. For example, lets say someone in the game is murdered. It is going to happen no matter what, but you may be a witness to that event if you are playing in that area at that time. Now lets say the person murdered was a government official. This would, of course, be a major plot turn. Not only would you be there to witness it, but you may have more information than someone who didn't witness it. That is because for a player who was not in that area, or not logged on at all will only hear about the event through casual gossip.

This allows for one other unique game concept. Most games last about 30 or 40 hours in length. With a scheduled game like this, the entire story could take 2 months or more to reach the finale. There would be more play value out of a game like this than any other.

I know this is long, but please tell me what you think. Would you play a game like this? Ask me questions if you don't understand the concept, because if I don't get enough feedback and get an "its okay" reply, I just may implement it into the game.

All your help is appreciated. Thanks.

[Drighton]

Bump. You can read now. Please give me your feedback.

[Blademon]

Is this for an RPG2k3 game? I think you could do it with a day/night system where you increment a variable and some events only kick in after a number of days pass.

If it's for just a game in general, well MMORPGs do have events happening at a specific time, whether you're there or not.

It's a good idea in general... but I don't see the fuss about it. If you want a murder to happen at a set time, then make it so.

[Almeidaboo]

Originally posted by Drighton
Bump. You can read now. Please give me your feedback.

Do not bump threads. Its bad.

[Drighton]

Good point Bluhman. But here is the clencher.

You can't go back. In most MMOs you can take a quest at any time you want, sometimes more than once. In any RPG, there is a point in the game where you can go complete every sidequest before finishing the game. With this, when an opportunity arises, if you choose not to take it, you will never get that opporunity again once the time runs out on that event. If you do take that opportunity, you may miss other opportunities. If you are grouped with other players through LAN, then you have a completely different opportunity, but will miss out on the others.

Thus, the sidequest you go on will be unique in comparison to that of another player, due to the circumstances of your character.

[Blademon]

I think you could run into the same problems as the MMOs developers    In most MMOs, you have events, they're not just balloons and christmas drops, they're also story progressions, that might only last 1 week. They also change the gameworld to a degree, we might see them more in the future.

Here's the beef, they don't do it that often because #1, it's a bit new, #2 time & money!

Go ahead, that level of open-endness might be fun. I have a similar idea in a huge RPG project of mine that if it ever gets off the ground, you basically play 1-3 years as a young adult and choose your career. Like being a pirate, soldier, thief, and they affect quests, your class as well as who likes you and the story as a whole. It will evolve and we'll see if I get to it.

I don't get the online part, it just means more trouble for you / your team. MMOs don't have the resources to do daily updates. They only do events every few months.

[charaman]

i would play that game... I love that idea. maybe you could also amke it to download updates to the game, so that it coyuld be in constant development.... there is so much that can be done with this idea.

[SaiKar]

It's a pretty cool idea, but I can see a major flaw: what if the players get lazy. What, for example, a player that would be a key witness to that murder decides to quit the game? Maybe he has real life, maybe he thinks the game is boring, who knows. If this player was important to finding out who murdered the official, and he's just GONE and nowhere to be seen, the whole thing collapses.

And besides, two months real time is a long time to wait for the end of a who-done-it. People want results. If the game moved too slow, people would get sick of waiting. If it moved too fast, people's real life would conflict and they would miss important details. Either way would be big trouble.

[Drighton]

Originally posted by charaman
i would play that game... I love that idea. maybe you could also amke it to download updates to the game, so that it coyuld be in constant development.... there is so much that can be done with this idea.

I like your enthusiasm. :p The idea that the game's story would stretch over time would give any developer that ammount of time to develop the next chapter of the story. AND, if the game isn't released until the second chapter has been developed, then the developer has even more time. He/she could develop the third chapter while people are still playing the first with that head start.

Originally posted by SaiKar
It's a pretty cool idea, but I can see a major flaw: what if the players get lazy. What, for example, a player that would be a key witness to that murder decides to quit the game? Maybe he has real life, maybe he thinks the game is boring, who knows. If this player was important to finding out who murdered the official, and he's just GONE and nowhere to be seen, the whole thing collapses.

And besides, two months real time is a long time to wait for the end of a who-done-it. People want results. If the game moved too slow, people would get sick of waiting. If it moved too fast, people's real life would conflict and they would miss important details. Either way would be big trouble.

I like this fedback Sai. Thanks. But the story has to move forward irrelevant of the player's actions (or inaction... is that a word?) so no big plot turning event would involve any player directly. Events that involve the player directly are most likely side quests that are irrelevant.

Ive been thinking about how this would work and the only real way for me to implement this into any game would be with an MMO, and I'm not looking at doing that right now. Plus it would require way too much detail than I'm willing to devote to a simple project for now. But I may pick it up later.

The hardest part of this concept is that I want everyone playing the game to be in sync with each other. In this scenario, no one player should be 2 or 3 hours ahead of another simply because he/she has played the game more. It would complicate things.

However, I may implement the time-delayed plot turning events into my current project (this will be simple), and it will definately have a few expansions or chapters to the storyline (my friend is a genius at creative writing ). All this will, of course, be added on after I acheive my inital goal: an RPG that is playable both solo and multiplayer.

If you want to keep with the feedback and input, I encourage all to do so.

[DragonBlaze]

Everyone may hate me for saying this, but this can be done with the real time script with RMXP, or it can be easily modified to do just that. If you decide to use RMXP, use the legal english version when it comes out  

Anyway, I really like this idea, if you don't make it an MMO, it might be cool to have a pause feature in case you can't play for a week or so. It may take away from the game, so maybe you could give the player a few pause tokens, or just have certain points in the game where you can choose to pause or not, that way the player can only do it a few times, and won't missuse the system

[Drighton]

Originally posted by DragonBlaze
Everyone may hate me for saying this, but this can be done with the real time script with RMXP, or it can be easily modified to do just that. If you decide to use RMXP, use the legal english version when it comes out  

Anyway, I really like this idea, if you don't make it an MMO, it might be cool to have a pause feature in case you can't play for a week or so. It may take away from the game, so maybe you could give the player a few pause tokens, or just have certain points in the game where you can choose to pause or not, that way the player can only do it a few times, and won't missuse the system

The idea is that everyone in the world who is playing the game is on the same page at the same time, thus the requirement of an online sync. That is why an MMO setup would be better.

But for my game, I still need to develop a way for multiplay games to be in sync. For instance. If Player A is beyond Event 4, which has made Town A non-existant, is playing with Player B who has no yet reached Event 4, how do you get them to play in the same world with each other. This proves difficult, especially if Player B's last location was in the Town that is no longer existing for Player A.

The conflict is that you don't want Player A to have access to that town, but you don't want to give the story away for Player B or thrust Player B ahead, skipping all plot points along the way.

[Bluhman]

Originally posted by Drighton
Good point Bluhman. But here is the clencher.
B]

Did somebody say my name!?

[charaman]

i think he meant blademon.

[Bluhman]

That makes sense.

[Moosetroop11]

This sounds awesome, truly. Whether you'll find the time and effort required is another story entirely :p