[MUD-Dev] Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server

[Freeman]

From: Michael Tresca

> As a designer, can you say "your playstyle isn't valid on my
> game?"  I think you HAVE to, or the playstyles will always follow
> the same GOP (i.e., multi-char) path every time.

Yeah, I think you have to.  Or at least you have to say, "Well you
can try to play that way if you really want to, and I'll do X, Y or
Z to help you...  but I'm not going to do more than that to
accommodate you, because that's not the game I'm making."

Taking it to the extreme: I prefer FPS to RTS.  A designer making an
RTS would be making a big mistake to try and accommodate my
preference too much.  At some point it's just, at most, "Well,
there's a first-person mode, but you can't really play the game that
way, and you'll lose if you try to."  I can't think of more than a
couple that bothered to throw in a first-person mode at all
(DungeonKeeper II and... something).

Imagine you're making a game in which you get a minor village full
of characters, all yours to play when/if you wanted to.  Players
prefering the single-char game might not enjoy it very much, but it
would still be a mistake to spend much time trying to accommodate
them.  You draw the line somewhere and say, "Well this is all you
get, because I'm making This game, and I can't afford to spend any
more time on the game you're thinking of."

NWN Persistent Servers, for example.  "Yeah, that would be cool.
Here's some of what you need to do that.  That's all you get though,
because the game's actually this other thing.  Hope you got enough
to keep you entertained."

It's a wonderful ideal to shoot for making a game that can be played
any number of ways, with playstyle being better or worse than any
other.

But then on the other hand, there's reality.

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