[QUOTE="Philmon"]
I am sorry but at some point you have to make dissections on what is important to the game and co-op is one of the least important thing in a game like Dragon Age. If you want co-op RPGs then you should be looking at games like Diablo or Sacred where the focus is more on fast paced combat action. Those games work because the story is not central to the experience and there fore it makes no difference if you co-op with one person one day and another the next day, but with a game like Dragon Age where the story told is said to be tailored to the player what happens when the players keep getting swapped all the time?
Bioware would either have to make the second player nothing more than a bit player following the "main" player as he/she goes through the game (who wants to do that?) or change the story so that neither are too closely intertwined with it (which I would say is taking something from the story).
The problem with that idea is that of balance. What happens if the players are of different levels, at different stages of the game, have made different decisions? It is not a simple matter of swapping your single player NPCs for another player. I mean would you want to jump into your friends game and play as one of his npcs, which you have had no hand in building and at the end of the session have nothing to show for it (it is his gameworld after all)? How much freedom should a person visiting your world have over it? Should he be able to take independent action or make decisions that could ruin or change your gameworld?
So you are left with a couple of options,
1) Create a world where the action of the gamer does not really change the world (like MMOs and action RPGs)
2) Make it so that a multi-player game can only continue with all the members present (which means you are at the mercy of all your friends timetable)
3) Each gamer creates his own world which he can play single player and have friends pop in to play as one of his npc temporarily (which could end up being unsatisfactory for the main player or the "visitor" because one is having a stranger play with his "toys" and the other knows he will get very little reward from spending time in this world)
4) Create a single player game focused on telling a story with your main character playing a major role.
They opted for option 4 and I have to say they made the right choice. Games like tabletop D&D work because you have the reliability of friends who are willing to set the time to meet and play (Option 2), and that kind of thing is going to be hard to manage for a computer game (especially when you can have people in different timezones). As for D&D books that is an odd argument to make. By that reasoning could not Dragon Age still be considered Co-Op since your character is still adventuring with companions, it is just that they are all controlled by one person much in the same way that all the characters in a book are controlled by the author.
PsychiKleftis
The only developers limited to those few options are being held down by their own lack of imagination.
You severely underestimate today's technology if you think that is all that's possible.
I was speaking in regard to comparisons of pen and paper D&D and computer D&D. In P&P you have a person more or less in charge of the game guiding the players through the experience. He is there to make sure that the game goes smoothly and deal with any stumbling blocks they come against. In computers the developer has to put a much tighter limit on what a person can do in the game and more so in a multiplayer game because they dont have the safety net of an actual person to deal with all the possible things that can go wrong with a game the more freedom a player is given.
Now off the top of my head I can think of a number of significant obstacles that they would have to deal with in Dragon Age multiplayer.
1) Choices - Who makes the choices in the game? In a game where the choices you make and the consequences of said choice is central to it how do you decide on who makes the choices in a multiplayer game?
2) Sycronisation - This consists of a number of things, from dealing with game saves to missing gamers. For example lets say you and 3 friends decide to get a game going and after your first session you save the game. You all decide to come back the next day but one of you is unable to make it, what happens?
3) Death - How would you deal with death?
This are all problems that MMOs and multiplayer RPGs have to deal with, and almost all of them have done so by removing obstacle one completely from their game, allowing gamers to redo the same area again and again and having the player re-spawn after death. Bioware are trying to make choices important in Old Republic and from what I understand they are having difficulty of finding a way to implement it in a group situation, so it is not as if they are not tring to find a way of doing things it is just that they have yet to figure it out and since no one else has found a solution I would not be so quick to throw the "they are being held down by their own lack of imagination" argument.
Log in to comment