[MUD-Dev] Secondary characters as a mechanic

[Brian Hook]

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003 09:35:47 -0000, Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com

> That's one good reason it may not work, the other is interface
> difficulties.

I think interface difficulties is actually the most serious of the
problems.  While you can play a game such as Baldur's Gate in real
time, at some point it ends up feeling like kids chasing a soccer
ball.

If you slowed down the pace and/ore removed unit complexity I don't
think it's that bad -- you can use RTS games as pretty good evidence
that you can manage complexity, but the trade off is that you can't
have as much per-unit complexity/depth.  Which is probably a good
thing, in my book.

So maybe the right way to think about the UI and per-unit/character
interface is somewhere between a single character RPG and an RTS.

As John Buehler mentioned, another interesting aspect of this is
that you (you==party) can be partially injured when one member of
your party is incapacitated.  The dynamics of gameplay are radically
affected, lending itself to what would probably be some interesting
tactical combat, unlike the autoattack situation we have today in
most graphical MMOGs.

Another minor technical hurdle is handling a party that gets
scattered over a large area, especially in a game that is zone
based.  You can either try to maintain party cohesion across zone
boundaries, which is probably fraught with technical issues, or go
the easy route and just force the party to remain together through
zones.

Brian



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