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Incrementally developing persistence.

Started by Blossum Jul 3, 2011 at 1:56 AM 4 replies 2.2k views

Original Post

Jul 3, 2011 at 1:56 AM

Quite a number of indie and/or open source game projects benefit greatly from publicity and formation of a following previous to their actual, final, release. This is especially the case for open source projects that rely on the generation of a community of followers from which to draw developers. Many of these projects begin releasing versions as soon as they have something that's barely playable. However, with the growing popularity of indie/open source online games featuring persistence, I've been trying to think if it's possible for this same approach to be applied to this style of project. Is it possible to garner interest by releasing these super-early alpha versions if your game is to feature a persistent world?

Just to make things concrete, I'll point out one of the obvious problem with persistent worlds. If you make a dumb alpha-release decision, or have an exploit enabled in an early alpha version, the effects of this stick around. The problem comes up with fixing the blunder, which involves effectively resetting things.

A few routes I can think of to deal with persistence in projects of this style:

1) Before final releases, be forward about the fact that players will see a full reset every x days [say, once a month]. This gives an opportunity for developers to cleanly break from early bad decisions, while not making it seem like your robbing your community..

2) Each major revision sees a new world instance start, with a specific future end-of-life of the now deprecated world. This gives the community more of chance to migrate, but may put a fair bit of extra burden on developers having to keep old stuff running until it's end of life.

What is your opinion? Is this sort of development pattern reasonable for persistent online games?

Endar

Jul 3, 2011 at 2:24 AM

It really depends. I mean, if you're resetting the world and not the character states, then it's not a big deal at all. I mean, most worlds will be in a state of constant reset anyway. Once you've completed a quest, then another character/party can complete that quest and you move on.

But if you're talking about resetting the character states as well, then absolutely not, if you do that, then there's not incentive for your players to play the game. They won't be able to keep anything, and even though you're saying it up front, you're effectively robbing them of anything that they've been able to achieve. The fact that you're robbing everyone at the same time doesn't matter, in my opinion.

Storyyeller

Jul 3, 2011 at 4:47 PM

But sometimes you have to reset characters. It's very easy to accidentally unbalance something in an early version of an MMO, and if you let the effects stick around, it will permanently ruin the game.

TechnoGoth

Jul 3, 2011 at 6:29 PM

I'd probably introduce a credit system where by regular players are rewarded play credits after the reset based on time player/level/participation in the last version. The players can then spend those credits to get an accelerated start.

The key is allowing your regular player base get back their favourite things, skip the boring early bits, or get right into the new functionality.

A good example is if in the latest version you have added castle building game that is available once payers reach level then give your regulars the option to buy a castle builder booster pack that starts them at level 10 with 1000 bricks enough to build all the level 1 castle buildings.

taneugene

Jul 4, 2011 at 3:54 AM

Have you played A Tale in the Desert? It resets both the world and the player-character periodically.

Ashaman73

Jul 4, 2011 at 6:05 AM

Quite a number of indie and/or open source game projects benefit greatly from publicity and formation of a following previous to their actual, final, release. This is especially the case for open source projects that rely on the generation of a community of followers from which to draw developers. Many of these projects begin releasing versions as soon as they have something that's barely playable. However, with the growing popularity of indie/open source online games featuring persistence, I've been trying to think if it's possible for this same approach to be applied to this style of project. Is it possible to garner interest by releasing these super-early alpha versions if your game is to feature a persistent world?

Just to make things concrete, I'll point out one of the obvious problem with persistent worlds. If you make a dumb alpha-release decision, or have an exploit enabled in an early alpha version, the effects of this stick around. The problem comes up with fixing the blunder, which involves effectively resetting things.

A few routes I can think of to deal with persistence in projects of this style:

1) Before final releases, be forward about the fact that players will see a full reset every x days [say, once a month]. This gives an opportunity for developers to cleanly break from early bad decisions, while not making it seem like your robbing your community..

2) Each major revision sees a new world instance start, with a specific future end-of-life of the now deprecated world. This gives the community more of chance to migrate, but may put a fair bit of extra burden on developers having to keep old stuff running until it's end of life.

What is your opinion? Is this sort of development pattern reasonable for persistent online games?

There was once a post-mortem about an indi MMORPG (can't find it at the moment). As far as I rememeber the developer got almost killed after a reset cause he does not warn the player base enough about what will happen. In fact a warning when starting the game about the reset each X days seems to be important.

The second pitfall is nerfing. When you have many freedoms at start, even when you tell the player base that this will change over time, nerfing a feature is always a bad idea. Best to start small and add new features instead of adding a placeholder feature and nerf it afterward. An example would be crafting. Adding a overpowered crafting system at the start and "nerfing" it to the desired form is not the best idea, it would be better to add a "working" crafting system later.

I would never reset a game world each X days automatically, this would lead to mischief. Nobody wants to start leveling his warrior to level 5 each week by killing the same old goblin camp again and again (unless you pay them). Try to combine a reset with new features/classes etc. Even if you have many features ready at the start, it would be better to hold them back when you plan to reset frequently: "Get you hands on the new rogue class after the next reset next month!"

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