Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
game time might be faster than real time, game time must proceed at the same
fixed pace for everyone.
As a result, you must be careful about designing time-consuming activities.
EverQuest
, for example, employs a mechanism called
meditation
, in which players
simply have to wait around for a while to restore their magic powers. There's no
way to speed up this process—it literally does involve waiting. Nor can they log out
of the game while meditating and log back in again later when the meditation pro-
cess finishes. Players can't even switch to a different process on their computers.
Verant, the developers of
EverQuest
, eventually built in a mini-game for players to
play while waiting—a patch but not a real solution. If your game contains features
so boring that you have to distract the players, you need to rethink the features.
Single-player games can be stopped and restarted at the player's discretion—a key
consideration for designers of such games. If the player can save the game, he can
essentially reverse time by going back to a previous point in the game and replay-
ing the game from that point. This robs single-player games of the emotional
impact of events because anything that happens, good or bad, can be reversed by
reloading a saved version of the game. You can design the game to include some
inevitable events, but of course, the more of these you include, the less interactive
the game is.
In an online game, time is irreversible. Even if you had a convenient way to reverse
time, you can't reasonably ask all your players to agree to reverse time to an earlier
point (although the managers of some persistent worlds have had to roll back to a
saved state when the game got into problems). In the ordinary course of events,
when an event occurs in an online game, it's done and can't be undone.
Persistent World Economies
If the players in a persistent world can collect and trade things of value, then
the world includes an economy. Chapter 18, “Construction and Management
Simulations,” discussed economies in some detail. Economies are
much
easier to
design and tune in a single-player game than they are in a persistent world. You
can control the actions of a single person fairly strictly; in a persistent world,
thousands of people interact within your game in ways that you might not have
anticipated.
The original
Ultima Online
had a completely self-contained, closed economy with a
fixed number of resources flowing around and around. You could mine iron ore,
smelt it into iron, and forge the iron into weapons. Using the weapons would cause
them to deteriorate, and when worn, they would return to the pool of raw iron ore
available for mining. This last step wasn't strictly realistic, but it did close the loop.
The designers, however, didn't anticipate that players would hoard objects without
using them. Because unused objects didn't go back into the pool, the iron ore
quickly ran out, and as resources dwindled, inflation ran rampant. The players
