Tales to make a multiplayer adventure game?
The idea was brought up. I think it could be very cool but as far as I know every adventure game to date has a story line and also a ending. I don't know how that would provide for a multiplayer game as most have replay value.
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Telltale could easily do that... but I doubt their engine supports that kind of interactive-ness right now. Might be tricky to implement.
A modding tool though, that's hard work, for a adventure game...the average person doesn't know how to code that much, and I don't want to learn how myself, don't know about you, unless of course you're a master coder.
Adventure games are very much a single-player experience, perhaps livened by having someone hovering over your shoulder telling you to poke that polar bear with the pointy stick you picked up 20 minutes ago. As Uru demonstrated, they don't really work as a grand, multi-player experience.
It's not always easy reinventing , but it can be worth it. Yeah, I don't design games, it's not my focus.
So how would you do it?
But would you have players work together or compete?
Would it be direct or indirect?
Maybe a mystery or survival horror type game could work.
I remember in a forum there was a pretty neat game idea.
Basically you were in a haunted house with a group of people.
Each player is given a role, and one of those roles was the killer.
The players would then navigate the house investigating for randomly generated evidence, interviewing each other, and trying to avoid the killer (who goes around setting traps, and generally has many more perks)
It was a interesting idea, but how on earth could it work?
And it's replayable because you can have the bits that other players do a unique gaming experience and your character could have its own unique story line and at the end of the game all the characters could come together in a surprising and bizarre way and people would want to replay the game as different characters to see how they all came together in the end. And I can hear it already, make multiple paths, for everyone, but damn that sounds difficult.
If they did do a Maniac Mansion game like this, I'd prefer that they take more after the original than the remake but to take from both games. And you'd have to be able to die, it would add to the replay ability.
And if the idea could lead to direct involvement with Ron Gilbert.
It would either be separate stories, or you would some how influence other characters paths without spoiling how you did it to other players.
I was thinking along those lines as well.
The only real way I can see it working is if it is in real-time and that certain events happen at scheduled times.
So after say an set time all the survivors get together and vote who the killer is, and if they are right they kill him, and a new killer is elected from the survivors (make it some kind of curse or something that is the ultimate goal) but if they are wrong then the next round begins, until there is two or three survivors left. Then perhaps the killer is revealed and becomes invulnerable, then its a chase for the exit.
To keep that from being stale, I think one could implement a large pool of events, which would then make several possible storylines and "endings".
(Obviously if the killer is never killed, then he can just be a serial killer, but if he is then the sources of the murderous intent would have to come from different forces, like viruses, aliens, magic/voodoo/ghosts, psychology ect)
I'm sure it's possible. I'm not a game programmer, so just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean nobody can. However, there'd be a very distinct difference between doing something like this and doing it well.
I'm also guessing this is beyond the Telltale Tool's current capabilities.
Simple. Extremely difficult puzzles that require two or more people to solve, with the ability to play a single player or multiplayer experience, and no not just have two people step on pad to open door. Seriously, better puzzles than that can be made. One way to do this could be to give each character special abilities, or a class, and let each player choose one. Another way to do this could be to make an area so large that one person alone can not solve his way through it. Crafting the experience so that multiple players are needed and the game is not difficult is basically what the entire idea is about, and that's pretty possible. There are many scenarios that could require multiple people in various places doing various things; perhaps in the multiplayer experience each player could be doing something entirely different, going through a completely different section of the game world encountering entirely different puzzles and characters, and such, in a way that effects the overall gameworld. If an adventure game had an A.I. as great as The Last Express did, then crafting a game in which multiple players actions differently affect the game world would be entirely possible.
I'm thinking marketing-wise, would enough people want to buy this? Because if you don't have a team of dedicated players that set aside a certain amount of time to play, you wouldn't be able to just play it yourself.
Unless, there was a way to have multiple characters in the game that were controllable, and as a single player you could theoretically control all of them, but also having the option to pass out those roles to other people.
I can by no means program, so this is all just conceptual, but I imagine the biggest problem would be if someone just decides to up and leave, someone would have to take over that character to continue the game's progression, unless not all the characters were necessarily needed.
It could be a type of competition though, where you need to find a certain item in a world, and if one person gets it, than the other person would have to change their role and convince the person who found the item, to let them use it as well... I don't know exactly where I'm going with this though. :P
Agreed. But I also think a time-based pressure would help, as it would likely force people to collaborate (or compete) to make the deadline.
EDIT: As for people suddenly leaving, its not entirely implausible for an AI to take their place.
If say, people have ranks, the ai's skills and intelligence could be scaled to the player's rank.
However, if game had a AI Director ala Left4Dead, then the puzzles could be switched on the fly (maybe making an event happen which fufills the need of that missing character), and then the next sequence would be generated for the current number of players that are there.
I'd also recommend that the game keeps and reads a log of an individual players progress.
(cloud technology would be very handy here).
That way, the game could know each player's experiences, storyline wise, and skillwise and scale accordingly.
So a more experienced player could face a similar scenario, but there would be an unexpected twist, that keeps it relatively fresh.
In essence the game would have to be modular, rather than the sequential.
But thats not to say the modules can be arranged to make a campaign. (ala left4dead)
It could work all in one big shared location, or it could be separate but parallel locations like Day of the Tentacle.
As for larger game worlds like MMOs...I played Uru a little bit and don't remember exactly how it worked. However, there's really no reason why an MMO can't also be an inventory-based adventure game. One way would be pretty similar to what they do in WoW. In WoW, you arrive at a dungeon with a group of people and go in, exploring and fighting together. The same thing could work with multiple different self-contained areas with adventure game gameplay. You come to a castle with 5 other people and go in together, working towards a goal with adventure-style gameplay. You enter a portal to a small alternate universe with a group of people, get stuck, and have to solve your way out. It goes on.
There's tremendous potential there. Sierra would have explored it by now if Ken and Roberta had remained in charge (and they came close to trying it 20 years ago).
This is the first problem in your thought process.