Tag: player

Get to da Choppa!

Gaming

I know I promised zombies, but I lied… you get this instead…

I signed up for and am participating in an online game design class.  On our first day of “class” (which I actually read a couple days later), part of the reading was an example to show you that making a game is not a Herculean effort.  Simple games are exactly that: simple.  What follows is the game I designed in less than 15 minutes.

Get to da Choppa!

Welcome to the jungle!  You are in the thick of it, and something is after you.  But if you can be the first to the helicopter, you can survive.

Supplies:
26 Game Tiles – 1 “Start” tile, 1 “Choppa!” tile, 14 blank “Jungle” tiles, 2 “Tunnel Entrance” tiles, 4 “Lose a Turn” tiles (tangled in vines, stuck in mud, broke through bridge, and lost my way), 2 “Advance 1 Space” tiles, and 2 “Retreat 1 Space” tiles.
12 Opportunity Cards – 3 “Cover Fire” card (Advance another player 2 spaces), 3 “Decoy” cards (Advance yourself 3 spaces), 3 “Rest Up” cards (Do nothing this turn, next turn move 5 spaces instead of rolling), and 3 “Frag” cards (Cause another player to lose a turn).
1 Six-sided die.
12 player pieces (green plastic army men if you have them).

Game designed for 2 to 12 players.

The Rules:
The 26 tiles are placed in a pile, face up, on the table.  The 12 Opportunity cards are placed, face down, on the table.  Each player chooses a playing piece and roles the die to determine play order.  Highest first, roll again to break ties.  The “Start” tile is placed on the table and all playing piece are placed on it.  Starting with the highest rolling player, each person in turn will take a game tile from the tile pile and place it on the table so that it connects to the previous tile.  The game path can turn left and right, however when a tile is placed it must only connect to one other tile.  When tile placing is complete, and the last player placed the “Choppa!” tile, you should have a board that takes 25 forward movements to complete.

Beginning with the next player in the rotation, each player draws an Opportunity card from the face down pile.  Do not show your card to other players until you play it.

After each player has drawn a card, the game moves into the Movement rounds.  If the player is on the “Start” tile, they must roll the die.  A roll of 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 allows the player to move their playing piece forward that many spaces.  If they land on a tile with an action on it, they must adhere to it (Advancing 1 space, retreating 1 space, losing their next turn, or moving to the other end of the tunnel).  Tile actions “stack” in that if you land on an “Advance 1 Space” tile and doing so lands you on a “Lose a Turn” tile, you lose your next turn.  If a player rolls a 6, the player believes they have been spotted and hides, not moving that turn.

After the player has moved off the “Start” tile, on their turn they may choose to use their Opportunity card instead of rolling the die.  Any player moved by an Opportunity card onto a tile with an action must adhere to that action.

The game ends when a player “Gets to da Choppa!” and leaves the rest of the players in the jungle.

—–

My first prototype of the game was as basic as possible.  Sticky notes for the game tiles, more sticky notes (folded in half to hide the sticky part) for the cards, a die and some army men.  If I am inspired, I may make a “better” prototype and post some pictures.

If, my dear reader(s), you are so inclined, feel free to make your own copy of this game and try it out.  I’d love feedback on how it plays.  I feel it might need more special tiles, or some other game element to spice it up.  If you do play it, please come back and let me know how it went…

Finding Each Other

Gaming

I am a big fan of the idea of having one world for MMOs, and I don’t mind if they use instances to achieve it.  The biggest concern when it comes to breaking the world up that way is the potential loss of community.  If all 100,000 of your users are on the same world, and they all go to town at once, your game might have 100 instances of that town (as opposed to needing 100 servers to make sure your population levels are such that town doesn’t exceed 1,000 players at a time), the worry is that the 1,000 people you are in the instance with will likely never be the same 1,000 the next time this happens.  Even if only enough people ever go to town that never more than 5 instances are needed, the chance you run into the same people over and over is pretty low.

Fact is, even on a game that limits players to 10,000 per server, no one knows everyone.  But finding your 100 “friends” out of 10,000 is easier than 100,000 or 1,000,000, even easier when only a portion of that 10k plays in your timezone.  An instanced game gets even worse if you leave town and enter an instance designed for 75 people max, the chances you’ll play with the same 75 people is even smaller.  So how do you meet new people and make friends?  How does a community build when everyone shares?

It would be nice if someone could take the one world/instance design and then pair it up with a player matching algorithm, so that if you play with someone in a group or raid for any signifigant length of time they’d earn a rank, and you can flag players as good or bad, coupled with your friends list resulting in the game choosing an instance with the highest matching score.  This way, you would tend to play with people you’d played with before, except of course when the game cannot let you (instances exist for a reason, and sometime you just can’t let more people in), but you can allow for player overrides so even if the game chooses to put you in Wilderness Instance 27, you can swap to join a player you know who is in Wilderness Instance 19, or they you.

Its a thought… just need to figure out how to build it…

Possible but not Probable

Gaming

Before I begin, let me say that I am not advocating that all MMOs implement what I’m about to describe, however, it would be nice if some more MMOs (the ones not published yet) were to implement models of design that weren’t yet another clone of the same model that the majority of games are putting out.

What I suggest is, in rough terms, a model that allows for everything to be possible from the moment your character enters the world, but not necessarily probable.  This all springs from a couple of posts and the comments over at Kill Ten Rats.  Post one is here, and post two is here.  Read those and make sure to read my comments, I’ll wait.

Okay, so to rephrase and refine what I said, what I’d like to see is where, from day one, any character has the possibility to fight and defeat any monster in the game (obviously not all solo, but even in a raid a new character should be able to contribute), what changes throughout the life of the character is their probability to do so.

At level 1, if you engage a level 50 monster, you are highly unlikely to win, but if you’ve been twinked out and know how to play your character well, there is a tiny chance that you’ll win.  And when you win, you’ll be rewarded, and rewarded well.  Obviously you wouldn’t earn “level 50” experience, but you’d earn a scaled amount that would indicate that you overcame a great challenge without being obscene.

Conversely, at level 50, if you engage a level 1 monster, you are highly likely to win, but if you are poorly equipped and screwing around, there is a tiny chance that you’ll lose.

If a game were to implement this sort of scaling, there are a few odd benefits that can come of it.  First, you can artificially tune a raid encounter by setting its level high.  If your max level is 50, you can make a raid mob level 60 to reduce the effectiveness of the level 50 players, but just like the rest of your game they’d still retain a probability to win.  Second, you can use underleveled mobs with “better” AI to create different types of encounters.  Mobs that appear to be easy, but are in effect “NPCs who know how to play their character well”.

Another element this brings to a game is that nothing ever really becomes trivial.  At no point would a single player be able to go into a low level zone with a high level character, tag all the mobs and AE farm them for loot (or grief).  In a PvP environment, it means that a level 50 player camping the newbie area could get his ass handed to him by a small group of level 1 players.

I think its definitely a mechanic worth exploring, and I would love to see someone take a stab at implementing it.

That Which You Must Do

Gaming

Time is running out. This describes both my entry for the February Blogs of the Round Table, and also the subject of my entry.

Turning Over a New Leaf: (We’re trying something new with the topic this month, so please read carefully.) February’s BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month’s Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the original game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

So, despite two people already choosing this one, I’m taking Living Epic’s entry on Oedipus.  Only, I’m just stripping a couple ideas out of it and mixing it with a few thoughts stolen from other games and hopefully producing a design that is unique.

What I’m stripping out of his design is in two parts.  First is the idea of a fixed timeline.  Now, this isn’t new to games.  Anyone who has played Dead Rising has dealt with this: the helicopter arrives in three days, exactly, and if you aren’t there you get left behind.  But what makes this different in the second idea: that you are not the main character of the main story.  Imagine if Dead Rising wasn’t about Frank getting on the helicopter in three days, but that someone else had to be on the helicopter, and Frank didn’t matter.  In Roger’s Oedipus, you don’t play Oedipus, or even one of the other named characters in the play.  He has a fixed timeline where some version of the story will happen even if you do nothing, but you can affect the outcome by participating.

My game based around these two elements is set in a medieval world.  At the beginning, you choose a character, of which several will be available, ranging from the village drunk to a member of the city watch, from a peasant farmer to a wealthy noble.  Each character has a brief story in which they are introduced to the other people in their immediate lives, shown how little they matter to the world around them, and informed of the upcoming coronation of the new king.  The old king died, and his son, just eighteen, is set to take the throne in three days.  Just as the player finishes the introduction of their character, a haggard old wizard appears before them.  “There isn’t time,” he says, “but time is all we have.”  He reaches for the player and upon his touch a burst of energy flows from the wizard into the player.  The wizard’s voice fills the player’s mind, “There exists a fragile balance, and there are things that must be done.  The boy must become king.”  The wizard dies and the player is given access to The Timeline.

What the player learns is that they have gained the ability to affect time in two ways.  Firstly, they can open the whole timeline and send themselves back to any decision point within the game, even all the way back to where the wizard lays at their feet.  Second, in a Braid-like fashion, they can reverse time backwards at any time, up to a few minutes.  Like it is used in Braid, the purpose of the second ability is to let a player quickly be able to undo immediate actions.  Did you punch a guard when you should have hidden from him?  The purpose of the first is to be able to jump all the way back to any major decision point (quest objective) and proceed from there, wiping out everything you’ve done since then.

There are stories going on around the player, events that if the player doesn’t interfere will happen on a schedule.  If a player chooses, they can ignore the entire rest of the game, follow the boy who is to become king around, protect him from any plots against him, and win the game in the most boring way possible.  Or… the player can explore the whole city, undertaking tasks and quests and unfolding smaller stories.  Periodically, the wizard’s voice will tell the player of an event that must happen.  “The chef should cook the chicken.”  It is left open to the player how they get the chef to make chicken instead of the steak dinner he is planning.  You can steal the steaks.  You can buy the spices from the spice seller before the chef can get them.  Physically threaten the chef?  Each character (the drunk, the noble, the peasant, etc) will have different avenues available to them for each puzzle.  With any event that does not directly stop the boy from becoming king, failure doesn’t lose the game, but simply puts the player down another avenue.  For example, if you don’t stop the chef and he cooks the steaks, later you might get an objective like “The steak might kill the boy.”  In this case, you can either prevent him from eating the steak in some way, or try to discover why the steak shouldn’t be eaten and make sure the steak is safe.  In addition to the main storyline, each player character will have their own stories.  Perhaps the farmer peasant wishes to marry the butcher’s daughter.

The game ends with the coronation ceremony.  No matter who gets made king.  The prologue of the game will be crafted out of the successes, failures and choices you made along the way.  If the boy becomes king but you didn’t reveal the conspirators, he may not be safe.  If you are the noble and you steal the steaks from the chef, the drunk is blamed and is thrown in prison on charges of theft.  Did you leave him there?  Did you admit to the theft to set him free?  If you’ve played Marvel Ultimate Alliance, you’ve seen this sort of thing, as at the end of the game the “future” is told by the Watcher based on the results of your game and all its optional quests.

And there you have my idea… an open, sandbox type world, with personal and external story lines, all of which happen on a fixed timeline, and the end of the game is built out of what you did during the fixed time.

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Fast versus Slow

Gaming

One thing I have found in a few places in comments about the new game Left 4 Dead is disappointment that the zombies are fast zombies instead of slow zombies.  Sure, Dead Rising had slow zombies and it worked fairly well, but then again it was also an entirely single player game with a storyline that lasts for many many hours of game playing time.  Each of Left 4 Dead’s scenarios can be completed in about an hour (more or less depending on your difficulty setting and the people you have chose to play with).  I’m not sure I’d want to play Left 4 Dead in a story that lasted for twenty hours of play.  I mean, the story as it is is “four people wound up hiding together and have decided to make a run toward [insert possible rescue destination here]”, and it works for the time it takes to play it.  Dragging out a single run to rescue for twenty hours would likely be horrendously repetitive and tiring… just like Dead Rising is if you choose to just hang around for the helicopter, killing zeds and run none of the missions and stories (heck, even with the missions, sometimes Dead Rising is kinda dull… but I still love the game).

But could a Left 4 Dead style game work with slow zombies?

I think it could, however, it would require a number of mechanics changes.  For one, little piles of ammo, guns and grenades would be out.  As would the unlimited ammo pistols.  We wouldn’t have to remove guns, but we would absolutely need to slim down the supply of them.  We’d also need to add in melee weapons, real ones, not just pushing zombies back with your gun, but bats and shovels and other things.  Each melee item would have a power rating and a weight, swinging one would cause you to get tired.  The more you swing, the slower you swing, unless you rest up.  These things combined would allow for the encounters with slow zombies to be more tense.  If you have unlimited ammo, you can just shoot them all and walk your way to the end (if you have never seen the remake of Night of the Living Dead, one of the major changes from the original is Barbara actually putting to use the idea of “they are just so slow, you could walk right past them” and she leaves the house on her own with a pistol and walks to safety while everyone else dies inside the house), while the “tired bar” makes you sometimes choose to use your limited ammo over your melee weapon in order to survive.  The game would also need more “monster closets”, because as is Left 4 Dead avoids the monster closet by having hordes of zeds randomly show up climbing over fences and whatnot.  In order to maintain a level of creep and dread with slow zombies, you’d have to play up the idea that meeting them in large numbers is dangerous by occasionally forcing the players to deal with large numbers of them… open a door and wham, twenty five zombies are in that room you need to walk through.  Oh, and all zombies must be killed by removing the head or destroying the brain, shooting one in the leg just makes him limp when he walks, shooting both just makes him drag himself along the ground.  Did I not mention you’d need to watch out for zombies pulling themselves around at ankle level?  In fact, the game might be more focused on avoiding the zombies instead of Left 4 Dead’s plow through attitude.

While fighting slow zombies might still be made fun, I’m not sure that playing one could be.  You’d stumble around, you’d be slower than the players, and your only method of attack would be to get close enough to grab at them and bit them.  And if the players shot off your legs, you’d essentially be spending the entire rest of the map dragging after them with little hope of catching up.  However, without the obstacle of the special infected running around and keeping the game entirely co-op, you could have infection.  A player who gets bit is infected.  They will die, and they will become a zombie, how fast that happens depends on how badly they get hurt.  The game would have no health bar and include no healing, so that even the infected himself couldn’t warn his teammates.  So the other players in co-op would need to decide… shoot the infect guy now or wait until he turns?  Sure, killing him now makes you safer since you don’t have to worry about him turning, but killing him now also means that you are going to be short one gun or club as you move forward.  You start the game with four and it tunes for four, so if you have to off one of your own, you are down to three playing a map tuned for four.  Or two on map for four… or all by yourself.  To ease the sting of that, I’d probably keep Left 4 Dead’s survivor closets where you can recover a fallen friend, and from map to map within a scenario all players would get put back in.

Slow zombies in a first person shooter could definitely work, but it wouldn’t be the same game at all.

One World

Gaming

After watching the blogging storm over the problems and successes of Warhammer, I am again certain that one of the major advancements in traditional MMOs that can’t come too soon is that of getting every player on to one single world server.

If nothing else, I think games should have one single master account server and then run the entire game as instances of areas instead of separate world servers.  Warhammer, in my opinion, exemplifies exactly why this is needed.  The game, while maintaining a decent level of PvE style game play, is focused on PvP style game play.  When players are the content, you have to give the players every possible tool to solve their own problems.  And the biggest problem in PvP is population and imbalance.

When playing the game requires not only for you to have a dozen players on your team but also a dozen players on the other team, in the same place, at the same time, it is completely unfun to be on a server where you always have a dozen people and the other side never does.  Even more so when you hear that another server is having the exact same problem, but diametrically opposed: they always have a dozen on the side your server lacks, and never have anyone on your side.

I admit, the first time I logged in to City of Heroes on a stress test day in beta and saw 12 of the same city zone instance, I didn’t like it.  Grouping up and then trying to get everyone in the same instance was a pain in the ass.  Of course, I believe they have overcome much of that now.  It can’t really be that hard anyway… if you are in the same zone but a different instance that your group leader, all the players need is a “Join Leader” option that will zone them to the proper instance, or display a message if the action can’t be performed (like if the instance is already at the hard cap for player totals).  But seeing games that want PvP elements having to struggle because they have erected an iron wall between their players makes me realize that instancing can actually be a better solution.

I’m still against the idea of overly instancing PvE content, letting players go off into their own private areas and hide from the world, but I definitely think instancing in some overarching way is going to be the solution for PvP content.  Give the players the ability to solve their own problems… one that doesn’t include “start a new character on another server” and one that doesn’t require you, the developer, to write exception code to force some sort of cross server matching like WoW has done.  Sure, it fixed some of the queue issues, but you still end up playing against people that ultimately are not part of your server community.

One World.  I think its a design well worth pursuing, and in some cases is absolutely needed.

MechWarrior: An Exercise in Game Design

Gaming

The purpose of this post is simple: If I were to design an MMO for a MechWarrior game, how would I approach it?  Please feel free to point out my flaws, add your own thoughts, or propose your own designs.

If I had to tackle this as a game designer, I don’t think I would bother trying to do any kind of class or archtype system beyond possibly giving some initial choice of a small (2-5%) bonus in certain skills.  But then, what would I do?

First off, I would completely and absolutely separate character level from character power.  As a player does things in the game, be it quests, or crafting, or combat (both PvE and PvP), they would earn experience which would go toward a “rank”.  I’d probably steal ranks from the military, and for each rank I’d have a few mini-levels inside, like to move from Private to Private First Class you might only fill the exp bar once, but going from something like Sergeant Major to Second Lieutenant you might have to fill it 5 times signifying the harder jump from Noncommissioned Officer to Commissioned Officer.  This level would largely be a measure of how much ass you have kicked, but without a real relation to the power of the character.  Meeting a Brigadier General on the field as a Colonel doesn’t mean he’s going to win, it just means he’s been doing this longer or more than you.

Second, I would tie the player’s power into sort of an “item level” system.  As a MechWarrior, you pilot a Mech (giant powered robot armor), and if you like your wrist mounted pulse lasers, the more you use them, the more experience you earn with them, and you’ll level up your wrist mounted pulse laser skill which directly would affect your accuracy with the lasers, but indirectly would allow you to use more complicated and intricate wrist mounted pulse lasers.  On the other hand, if you prefered wrist mounted welders and repair kits, you’d get similar skill levels, but with wrist mounted welders and repair kits instead of lasers.  The key here being, if you can level up both if you want to spend the time, but you can only have one equiped when you leave the garage.

In a way, this would mirror Eve Online’s system of skills and things you can attach to your ship and which ships you can drive, but without the forced delay of a strictly time based advancement system.  Think of Eve but also being able to actively grind out the skill instead of logging out one day and coming back a week later when Frigate level 5 is done training.

Anyway, as will the item skills, there would also be rig skill.  Items attach to slots on your rig, rigs come in various shapes and sizes.  As the game expands, more and different rigs could be added, new items and item groups, specialized items.

Because experience given is based on usage (you plus item used plus target of item use times the success of the usage in some formula), there would be no need formalize grouping or raid structures for the dividing of experience points, so groups would end up being just communications channels.  Then you could even add in skills and items to support “hacking” so that you can “tap in” to an enemy’s chat, and of course to monitor for taps and counter them.

I think the entirety of the game would be PvP.  The beginning focus would be on One on One gladiator style combat, expanding into Two on Two, Five on Five, 3 or more Teams, Free for All or whatever.  Then, just like they have for first person shooter and racing games (or for that matter, World of Warcraft’s Battlegrounds), you can add “mission” types.  Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, Marked Man/Escort, anything you can think of.  In fact, the game might go so far as to run contests for player designed submissions for maps and rulesets.

If a “larger” game is needed for people to play, you can make a robust guild system having people swear allegience to an army and fight for them in massive battles.  The guilds/armies can build their own bases, run scrimmages for themselves or against other teams.  Blending that in with the “missions” from above, you can actually throw in leader boards and seasons to turn them from random battles into an organized sport.

Outside of the Mechs, players would have an avatar, a character, to run around “the city” in, to meet up with other people and talk.  Or not… you could also go the route of EVE Online and just have an avatar image, a picture of you, with no animation (although, even EVE is adding in stuff for people to walk around space stations).  The world outside of the combat zones becomes just a simple chatroom.  If you really wanted to get crazy, you could even drop the text and have it all be voice chat.  If you did that, and made the game playable with a controller, you might even get an MMO you could run on a console, cross platform even.

So there, in a completely un-fleshed out outline is what I would do for an MMO based around a MechWarrior style mythos.  Feel free to comment…

Bass Groove

Gaming

When it comes to most games, I’m a team player.  I disliked Quake Deathmatch, but I was obsessed with Team Fortress.  So, I wasn’t surprised at all when I finally picked up a Guitar Hero controller a couple of years ago that I really enjoyed playing the “second fiddle” rather than the lead guitar.  When Rock Band came out, while I did thoroughly enjoy playing guitar, the fact is that I enjoyed taking up the bass in a band on tour much more.  A little thing that makes me enjoy online play a bit more since everyone else in the world seems to want to play guitar.

Rock Band 2 came out this past Sunday, and having pre-ordered it a while back, I went and picked up my copy.  The game is great.  Its like Rock Band, only better… sort of.

The one drawback to the new game is that there is no straight tiered solo playlist.  You can’t just get in and play down the list to unlock songs.  To unlock songs you need to either have two people and do the challenges, or you play by yourself in a band on the tour mode.  Basically, its the old multiplayer tour, but playable by one person.  The drawback is that like the old multiplayer mode, you end up playing the same songs over and over in sets until you unlock more… well, unless you owned Rock Band 1 and a bunch of Down Loaded Content (DLC), because then you can choose from any previous song.  All your RB1 favorites and all the songs you paid extra for, right from day one.  Functionally, the single player mode works like the original game, but the presentation makes it feel different.

The advantage to this system, is that as a single player, I can play bass as my method of choice going through the tour and unlocking songs.  And that totally rocks.

Evolution versus Revolution

Gaming

The first thing to note when talking about Evolution versus Revolution in games is passion.  If a player is passionate about the game he plays, he will strive to make everything about a new game sound as if it is only “more of the same” with some Evolution thrown in.  If a player is passionate about the forthcoming game, he will strive to make everything sound as if it is all Revolution over the old games and that nothing is “more of the same”.

I’ve read a number of posts claiming that Public Quests in the upcoming Warhammer game are a Revolution.  But it all depends on how you look at it.  On one hand, I can see the Revolution aspect because it is encouraging random social behavior in a PvE environment, which most games actually tend to discourage through spawn locking and quests being individualized.  (Its good to note here that while in World of Warcraft, only the quest holder gains the rewards of a quest completed, from the beginning, City of Heroes has always rewarded group members for assisting in completing another person’s quest by giving them a chunk of exp as well as many times giving them badges and/or enhancement rewards.)  But, on the other hand, the Public Quest system, to me, looks like someone took Alterac Valley from World of Warcraft’s Battlegrounds, made one side entirely NPCs and tweaked the mini-quests in the zone.  In fact, WoW could easily implement Public Quests that way, by taking Battleground style content and making in PvE, assigning rewards based on participation, similar to what they do now in their PvP versions.  Whether you see the item as Evolution or Revolution, in my opinion, seems to be dependent entirely on how hard you are chomping and the bit to play Warhammer.

And Warhammer isn’t alone here.  World of Warcraft wasn’t Revolutionary either, except in its broader market appeal, which could be considered just an Evolution of the trend seen in games that came prior: UO, EQ, etc.  But plenty of people do consider WoW to be Revolutionary, either for that reason or because it was finally a fantasy MMO “done right” or some other basis.

The real question, rather than if something is Evoltionary or Revolutionary, is “Is it fun?”  Looking at Public Quests, it addresses the one thing I have found a problem with in games since EverQuest: encourages people to be social.  WoW has its raids, but outside that, you and four friends can do pretty much everything in the game.  In fact, you can play the entire game from level 1 to level 70 without ever talking to or grouping with another person.  In my experience, WoW is the most “silent” game I have ever played.  People don’t talk, people don’t do pick up groups… most of the social activity is based in and around guild raids and battlegrounds, both of which in many cases are a minority of the players yelling at the majority of the players to do things.  So, I probably will pick up Warhammer, but I’m not expecting it to be some huge revolution in gaming… just an evolution backwards toward players actually playing with each other more.

Welcome to Town (US) (PvP) (14)

Gaming

If you don’t understand the title, well, I wouldn’t blame you, I just made it up. But the idea behind is has to do with instancing.

One of the best elements of the game Guild Wars is that as long as you and another player are playing in the same expansion, you can play together. When I see games utilize instancing only to produce an infinite number of copies of Random_Dungeon_X or to produce seventeen copies of “town” to keep the populations low and yet they run a dozen or many dozens of world servers, I see it as an opportunity lost.

Where are the MMOs that utilize instancing as a method to eliminate the need for multiple servers? Worlds where everyone lives in the same place, they simply choose how they want to experience it when they leave “safety”. The title of this blog would indicate that you have entered “Town”, the localization is for the US (American English), its a PvP enabled instance, and it is the 14th of its kind because US PvP instances of “Town” are popular.

Of course, a game like WoW that has worked so hard to eliminate zoning except when going into little pocket dungeons and raid zones, this idea wouldn’t really work. And I realize that putting in a UI chunk that deals with switching instances, be it to join friends or escape crowds, might be off putting to some, but I think the idea has merit if only to avoid playing a game only to discover you can’t play with any of the people you meet at work or a party or wherever without someone (or several someones) having to pay to switch servers or start all over again. People might be resistant to it at first, but overall in the longterm I think it would be better for the virtual world of the MMO.

I hope to see it some day in more than just Guild Wars…