Unconventional Multiplayer: Sharing Planets
Will Wright announced Spore’s asynchronous multiplayer plans a while ago: everyone’s game will upload content to a central server, and then your game will pull down content to populate your world or galaxy as necessary. There may be some sort of content ranking system. The idea is that the game will be so amazingly customizable that no one could explore much of it all on their own: there will always be things you haven’t tried, and you can go see what someone else has done with them.
This is a very neat approach to the player-generated content question, and great for a single player game. However, it’s also a good step towards encouraging a metagame: getting people to think about your game while they’re not playing it. If you imagine a similar multiplayer model with a more goal-oriented game, several possibilities fall out. I’ll describe a cooperative multiplayer possibility, because it’s my favorite.
Say that a planet’s inhabitants are a valuable resource: some types can create fantastic weapons, some create fast ships, some generate wealth, and so on. It’ll take too long to create all of those planet configurations yourself, but you’ve got a trick up your sleeve: you can share planets with friends. Each of you assumes a role. You discuss your strategy over e-mail, at work, at school, wherever, and then head home and get to work. It’s a single player/multiplayer hybrid, with the added bonus that you’re getting people to talk about your game all the time.
September 21st, 2006 at 2:30 am
My only concern about this is when you consider the posibility for the sad tale of public-access planets. Think “When Spam comes to Spore”
Remember, USENET was once a valuable resource.
Granted, you don’t actually HAVE to get involved, but Captain Cynicism always says that for any human interaction the politics of bulls**t aren’t far behind.
September 21st, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Yeah, I don’t know how Spore’s going to work out. Will it become a game to see if you can get penis planets to show up in everyone else’s universe? Can you tell if it worked, to get the thrill of ganking?
The co-op concept I described would be entirely opt-in, so you could still play on your own if you wanted. And if you just ended up with a bunch of penis planets, it’d be because you have dumb friends.
September 21st, 2006 at 10:03 pm
As I understand it, Greg’s entire desire to play Spore (or any other game with user-created content) is to create things that look like cocks — which would at least be humorous. I assume most Spore critters will be relatively bland shark-man hybrids that spit acid.
The multiplanet-multiplayer is interesting. You already have MMOs that require coordination between classes, requiring coordination between planets would be similar. It might be tough to make sure everyone has a good time, especially the guy who is tasked just to build farms.
In case you haven’t seen this already: http://cruelgame.com/
September 21st, 2006 at 11:10 pm
Fine– you’re never meeting Sharko, my pet shark-man hybrid that spits acid. And you probably wouldn’t want to, now that I told him what you said about him!
Right, you definitely wouldn’t want to create the “Priest” planet. The easiest way would be to have all of them have similar gameplay, just with different resources. “You go conquer the Zonglarms, so we can enslave them to mine Zonglarnium. I’ll conquer the Ugnuts, so we can enslave them to mine Ugnutium. With our combined resources, we can finally create the only ship design that utilizes both Zonglarnium and Ugnutium: the Mansharker! And then we will take over the universe!”