Multiplayer. My personal plea to wolfire.

[Jacktheawesome]

Well you could just have toggleable server settings for that, you wouldn't need a different mode...

[adwuga]

Hmmm... Interesting. M'yes I do see what you are saying... Good, very good.

[Korban3]

...who will be controlled by the party leader...

Wait, are we playing Dungeons and Dragons; Overgrowth Edition?

Korban Glenwalker
Wanderlust Fox
Level 32 Close Quarters Combat Mage

Code: Select all

Bad ass Ascii art pending

Alright, who wants to roleplay? First Overgrowth RP or fan fiction? Anyone?

[adwuga]

I think there already was one, but I'm not sure. Wait, no, that was for Lugaru.

[Korban3]

yEAH, i HAVEN'T HEARD ABOUT ONE FOR og YET. sORRY ABOUT THIS. i'M KEEPING MY CAPS LOCK ON WHILE i DO MY ascii ART BECAUSE IT'S EASIER. uNFORTUNATELY, MY CAPS KEY IS STUCK DOWN RIGHT NOW.

[Jacktheawesome]

Do any of you older folks remember devilsclub's fanfic? That kid was the most genius troll I have ever seen on these forums. He fooled everyone for so long. Look back at his posts, and watch all of the respected forum members blow their tops at his stupidity...he must have been laughing his ass off the whole time...

[Count Roland]

was devil's club the romanian one who pirated lugaru?

[Korban3]

I have realized 2 things:
1. ASCII art is a pain in the ass.

2. I really wish I had a scanner and a pen tablet, because I wanna paint on my PC. I tried with my mouse pad thingy, but...

portrait.jpg (7.06 KiB) Viewed 3964 times

That took me half an hour. I used OpenCanvas 1.1 because that gets the closest strokes to what I intend. Half an hour for that self portrait. Took so long for crap. results. I could a drawn a much better picture on paper, but I have no scanner. RAGE FACE!!!!!

[Endoperez]

Although admittedly Mount & Blade didn't have multiplayer until Warband, I imagine it saw quite a rise in popularity and marketability with that addition

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/taleworlds.com
Change '3 months' to 'max'.

There is a noticeable spike in March 2010 (when Warband was released), Unfortunately it doesn't show any info from before late 2009 so there's only half a years' worth of data from the "before warband" time. However, based on that data, the amount of page views/visitors/reach doubled or tripled for that month and then quickly fell off to just slightly above where it started from.

87% of the site's activity is in the forums, and if the addition of multiplayer affected the online community only slightly, I'd have to say multiplayer didn't add much to popularity or marketability beyond the initial release of the expansion.

It did bring in lots of people to the forums initially, so it probably increased sales a lot, but I don't know where I could find numbers about that.


So what does Warband tell us? Adding multiplayer in an expansion boosts your sales for a little while but doesn't increase the long-time community involvement that much.

MineCraft is similar to Dwarf Fortress, which is immensely popular despite having no multiplayer at all. In fact, Dwarf Fortress is more popular than Overgrowth (...), despite having no graphics to speak off. Well, by modern definition of graphics, any way. The animated waves and fires and seasons are an accomplished by ASCII standards. There's also Terraria, which seems to have multiplayer, and that's all the sandbox build-things games I know of. With 2-for and 1-against for multiplayer, it is leaning in towards multiplayer option helping things along...

Never heard of the third team, and after checking their wiki page, I've got no idea which of their games you're speaking of.

[polyoptics]

I'd love to see a small scale arena environment and some 1v1 combat footage. Super curious how it will differ from all the Human VS AI fights we're seen.

Things are def heating up a bit on the multiplayer front! YEAH!

[Korban3]

Why combat? Why not a build mode for MP? Maybe a group modding one. There's project leader user who approves file overwrites, everyone makes models, textures, script edits and uploads them to the server level and it is updated in real time so multiple people can work on a single OG mod simultaneously. We really shouldn't limit ourselves to combat. This isn't a tripla A game that has a closed engine. We can do a lot of amazing things with Overgrowth that no one considers when talking about gameplay.

[polyoptics]

Imo, step1 to competitive multiplayer is to see how 'normal' combat plays out. From there we get a good idea of what could work and what needs work, in terms of environments, spacing, game types, controls etc.

For instance, one thing that always struck me in the gameplay footage, is the massive jump distance. I would like to see how combat plays out for this an many other reasons.

[Garabaldi]

Why combat?

Why not? Same question.

Not having the combat mechanics be a part of the multiplayer seems to me like it would be removing a(n important) feature for no good reason - like you said, Overgrowth isn't just about combat, so there's no need to limit it to just that, but I don't think anybody would ever make that suggestion - similarly, there's no reason to limit the mutliplayer to just a cooperative build mode - that would be awesome as well, and should be included - but you don't need to get rid of one to have the other, and I don't think we should settle for only one of them.

The editor and combat are in the game - what sense does it make to remove functionality from the multiplayer portion of the game? It would be like somebody suggesting a GTA multiplayer that doesn't ever let you leave the car - "Racing is fun enough, why include all that other stuff?" - I would ask "Why remove it?".

Yes, I want to build awesome parkour courses with some buddies - yes I want to race those same buddies - I also would like the option to chase them down while doing all of that parkour and then smash their face in.

Can't I have it all?

So what does Warband tell us? Adding multiplayer in an expansion boosts your sales for a little while but doesn't increase the long-time community involvement that much.

I think you underestimate how much it has the potential to boost sales and expand the community - any expansion of the community is good, but the subset of any community working on custom content will always be a small and dedicated group of people, only because most people don't have the patience, know-how, or desire to learn how to modify a game and import their own content - I'm just going to pull a number out of my ass here and say something like 5 out of every 100 people that preorder Overgrowth would learn how to modify the game in some basic way - that number is probably even be a little generous, but I don't know - you know where I pulled it from

I'm sure Warband was a financial success (it gave them enough to fund another expansion and development of M&B2, anyway) built on the backs of the already established niche community that was attracted by the novel gameplay that no other game provided - Overgrowth is similar to M&B in this regard.

Multiplayer simply made a lot of people who never would have paid attention to M&B before take a look - same thing with Overgrowth - people who otherwise wouldn't ever think about buying the game might reconsider when they learn they can play it with their friends. Surely Minecraft's multiplayer aspect was hugely crucial to its success - Minecraft still may have done very well without any multiplayer component, but I'm positive a huge number of people bought it solely because they could build, chat, and mine with their friends online.

The other company I was talking about is a little different from indie devs like Mojang or Wolfire, as they got their start as a mod team, winning the 'Make Something Unreal' contest granting them a license to use the Unreal Engine to develop their subsequent retail games - those being Red Orchestra Ostfront, Killing Floor, and Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad - my point was that Red Orchestra was initially successful even as an niche game because Tripwire encouraged modding and you had a number of full conversions that greatly improved the lifespan of the game. Obviously RO is a little different from OG since it is primarily a multiplayer game, but RO had the ingredients that ensure a strong and growing commnity - modding and multiplayer.

[Endoperez]

Can't I have it all?

It is easier to implement multiplayer that is not dependent on lag than multiplayer that requires minimized lag. World editing can be done to work even with lag. Combat can't. Racing can be made lag-independent if the players can't collide with each other. Co-op can also be made lag-resistant as long as players can't collide with each other. PVP combat can't.


I'm not saying it won't happen. It's just more difficult. Of course, you could help us all out by having a face-to-face talk with copper and explain to it why it needs to start conducting electricity better.

So what does Warband tell us? Adding multiplayer in an expansion boosts your sales for a little while but doesn't increase the long-time community involvement that much.

I think you underestimate how much it has the potential to boost sales and expand the community

I cited facts. The Mount & Blade forums' traffic only increased slightly - after the initial spike, of course. Even if that isn't the whole picture, if the official forums only get a little more traffic, why would the effect be any greater anywhere else?

Note that I'm not talking about just the modding forums, but every single visit to the site. Including any people wanting to discuss multiplayer strategies or looking for patches or whatever. I don't know how the matchmaking or multiplayer works, but if it brought loads of new people in, I'd have expected more effect in there. Especially as people who buy the game for multiplayer are guaranteed to have a stable internet access.

Facts is facts. I'll stand by them until you find other facts.

I'm sure Warband was a financial success (it gave them enough to fund another expansion and development of M&B2, anyway) built on the backs of the already established niche community that was attracted by the novel gameplay that no other game provided - Overgrowth is similar to M&B in this regard.

Multiplayer simply made a lot of people who never would have paid attention to M&B before take a look - same thing with Overgrowth - people who otherwise wouldn't ever think about buying the game might reconsider when they learn they can play it with their friends. Surely Minecraft's multiplayer aspect was hugely crucial to its success - Minecraft still may have done very well without any multiplayer component, but I'm positive a huge number of people bought it solely because they could build, chat, and mine with their friends online.

That'd match co-op game mode, or online editor mode. Have fun with a friend, do stuff together. If there's a lull in combat/action, you have time to chat.

PVP won't work for that. For one thing, you're trying to kill your friend, so you don't have time to chat. If the best time to chat is immediately after one of you loses, it easily leads to gloating and such.

Co-op is good, and since the player's don't fight each other, lag won't be as big of an issue as it'd be in PVP. So it's easier to do than PVP. It's also the most likely mode we're to see in Overgrowth, as mentioned in the FAQ. Not certain, but more likely than, say, PVP.


Now, why won't the PVP work (as well as co-op/ as well as PVP in other games)?

The combat is designed so that you'll have trouble in any 1 vs many situations, and get killed quite quickly. That's not good for team multiplayer. Once one guy goes down, that whole team is likely to lose. 2v1 is just so big of an advantage it's hard to overcome with equally skilled players. If a player can win even 1v2, he'll likely get the first kill so his team wins even if the others are bad. So you need to stay grouped up so the enemy can't pick one of you off. Which turns Overgrowth into mass-fighting-game, which it wasn't designed to be.

The only modes where that'd not be an issue are 1v1 and free-for-all. And co-op, obviously.

Free-for-all with a friend would be unfair as you'd help your friend even though you're not supposed to. It'd end up as me-and-my-friends-against-the-others. 2v1v1 is not fun for the lone guys. Free-for-all without friends wouldn't be that fun since you're doing it alone.

1v1 won't work either. The combat is fast-paced and kills happen quickly, so 1v1 match would be over in perhaps 10-20 seconds. How many of those matches would you want to play before wanting to do something else? 20? 30? That's about five to ten minutes. It might work with bigger levels, but then it'd become stealth sneaking game, but that ignores Overgrowth's combat (and jumping, since those'd be highly visible) and turns it towards something that's not the main focus of the game.


I'm not that familiar with multiplayer modes, so feel free to give examples of game modes which would work well in Overgrowth.



However, as I can't think of any examples of those, I don't think PVP will be good enough to become a major selling point.

[polyoptics]

1v1 won't work either. The combat is fast-paced and kills happen quickly, so 1v1 match would be over in perhaps 10-20 seconds. How many of those matches would you want to play before wanting to do something else? 20? 30? That's about five to ten minutes. It might work with bigger levels, but then it'd become stealth sneaking game, but that ignores Overgrowth's combat (and jumping, since those'd be highly visible) and turns it towards something that's not the main focus of the game.

Firstly, if 1v1 footage exists, point me to it because that would really help this discussion!
--

An interesting comparison is 2D fighters. They are twitch gameplay based, 1v1, have strict timers to keep match length short,(matches can be as quick as 10-20 seconds) and they are incredibly popular.

What's interesting is that no 2d fighter (to my knowledge) has been able to go fully free walking 3D. Many have tried and all have failed.

OG has 2d fighter style of fast paced combat, but has been successful (so far) in porting it over into full 3d environment with freely moving characters.

Its possible that greater than 1v1 matches may not work, but we haven't seen anything to allude to this. There are currently too many unknowns to say in concrete that it will not work. However, I agree that it looks as if OG style play lends itself better to very small numbers of players, based on the limited information we have at this time.

Things we know already (environment interaction, parkour) as well as things we don't know yet will directly influence what 'seems' impossible currently, and may result in small scale teams (objective based combat forcing teams to split into 1v1 type fights, etc) or even mass battles possible.