ralphtricky
Posts: 6685
Joined: 7/27/2003 From: Colorado Springs Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Belisarios With its recent release TOAW III has fairly lit up the forums here and elsewhere, which perhaps makes this an opportune time to speculate on the future of that game. There is some talk already of an advanced revamped edition in the not too distant future. Such qualitative improvement could easily make TOAW III+ the flagship game for Matrix. Yet, there’s a whole different direction the design could take by simply addressing another dimension of human expression. Where the classical war-game met a basic wish for creative competition, Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOG) add the social desire for cooperation into the mix. I have no idea how a TOAW III+ could be transformed into an operational-level MMOG. (Obviously, tactical MMOGs like WWII online have had some limited success.) World of Warcraft (WoW) for instance is realm-based; perhaps a TOAW MMOG would be turn-based with scenario-driven “instances” set within any of the historical periods or “worlds” covered by the game. Whatever…I know there’s enough creative genius in the gaming community to make this happen—after all, you are gamers. An MMOG would be extremely difficult. At some point, a model similar to that used by Neverwinder Nights and some FPS games of small clusters of people would probably be a lot better. We'll figure that out down the road. Either a mix of AI and human players, or multiple human players should be possible. It's going to take some work, but I plan to be around. To do online right, we'd have to put out a TOAW : Rapid Play or something like that, it would be TOAW with wego, and the same combat model, etc. I have no idea of how difficult anything like tha would be, but it would be more accessible, and I think I could make the two versions compatible. I happen to like the rounds, but they get in the way for some things, I'm not sure how to make wego and rounds cooperate. It might even be possible to make it work for disconnected play, like pbem, but sending the moves to a central server, or something. I'll put some brain calories into it down the road a bit. Ralph
< Message edited by ralphtrick -- 6/11/2006 8:06:04 AM >
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