General Category > A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2
Multiplayer?
Kemeno:
First of all: I read the preview of A Valley Without Wind that you wrote up, and like everyone else around here, I'm pretty excited about it. I'm sure the excitement level will only increase as you guys reveal more details! :D
I was a little surprised that there was no mention of multiplayer in the preview, though, especially given Arcen's track record with multiplayer in their games, so I figured I'd just come out and ask:
Is there any multiplayer planned for the A Valley Without Wind? If so, is it going to be a ground-up multiplayer design like AI War or something different? How many players are going to be able to play together?
dumpsterKEEPER:
There's some information posted here. Full post:
--- Quote from: x4000 on January 27, 2011, 12:09:11 am ---
--- Quote from: Fleet on January 26, 2011, 11:56:39 pm ---it will have online multiplayer, yes?
--- End quote ---
That's something we aren't promising yet, but hopefully so. That will involve a very new kind of networking for us, and if the project isn't gaining a lot of traction that's something we're likely to cut. Also, it's unlikely the multiplayer component would be there for alpha. But we are making notes in the code for places to go back and fill in networking code at, if we get to that point, so it's certainly something we're thinking about.
And we're specifically not doing anything to make the online networking impossible, or any more difficult on ourselves than it has to be. But it's definitely different programming an action game, which is something we managed to avoid with AI War and Tidalis. Most game developers seem to think that the strategy game way of network programming is vastly, intensely harder than the action game sort (one word: desyncs), but that's what I'm used to programming so it feels the opposite to me at the moment.
You know me, though: I love co-op in gaming. So it's definitely something I really want to have there, and I know Keith feels the game. We'll just see if reality matches up with our desires. At worst, if AVWW has a similar amount of popularity to AI War, then we can probably implement the multiplayer as a free DLC addon in tandem with work on a paid expansion, or something like that. Who knows.
We're hoping that the game will be massively more popular than AI War, though, and in that even the multiplayer would be an absolute 100% no-brainer. Me being wary and without a crystal ball, I'm not ready to commit to that feature yet, though. If we have to make an amazing non-networked adventure game, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Though I'd have to find some clever way to get some form of local co-op in there, in that event (otherwise it would be network-only, not local).
--- End quote ---
Fleet:
I'm pretty happy with that response, seemed honest and comprehensive.
A co-op multiplayer game from Arcen? Insta-buy for me, since I buy for the experience I have with friends on off-time (when we are not studying).
x4000:
Well, as it turns out, we're starting to think about the multiplayer component more and more. We suspect it might be rather critical for the game to really take off, and plus you know how I love co-op. Since I want to avoid a lengthy refactor period later (as has happened to Minecraft, for example), we might have some multiplayer available in alpha. Of course, it's probably going to be pretty buggy if it's even in there at first, but it will still be quicker to test and fix up than what happened with Minecraft.
We'll see. A lot of that makes suppositions based on implementation work that we haven't done yet. We should know more next week or the week after.
getter77:
I'll be "that guy" again:
Reckoning on "bots" for the co-op/party/community/community+ experience when other, or not enough to taste, real people are not quite around? Seems ripe to make use of all that AI War AI experience for a more potent and "living" than most NPC and the like---and surely more nuanced possibilities than the examples of FFXII and back in Secret of Mana/Seiken Densetsu III....
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version