Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Housing in single and multi-player rpgs

One of the topics that I think needs to be addressed in a lot of rpgs is this idea of housing. Usually in single player rpgs, you play this adventurer character, who completes quests and stays at various inns in the world, never really having a house of his or her own, or a place to call home. Often, early in the game of the single player rpg, the main character or characters gets sucked out of their own world, kicked out of the town or has their home town destroyed early on. This makes the characters into adventurers of some sort. Even if in the story, the characters have a home, they end up so far away from it trying to solve a problem that has somehow effected their homeland to the degree that they need to leave it to try to solve the problem.

One of the things you can do, however in some single player rpgs, notabley in the Ultima series, is establish a sort of home base if you will. This is a place where the character or party of characters can drop off extra items they have acquired, and they will not decay or be taken away from the characters. The characters can return there later to pick up items they find out they need. Perhaps you should not have picked up those twenty rusty swords in the goblin den, espeacialy considering you only have four party members who each have magic swords, but that little girls hair ribbon that you thought had no use, may be a key plot item you need in order to defeat the evil dragon king. The problem is those torn cushions back in the warlock tower next to the water fall that were used for summoning the demon, later do not have any plot value, but you picked them up anyway, thinking they might be important, but it turns out you don't need them. Therefore, it does turn out having a storage spot comes in handy, when you have so many quest items like that and you are not sure what you need anymore.

Multi player games tend to more often option to offer a sort of home-base, so the characters do not have to live our of their backpacks. But in multi-player games, this is not the only, or even the main reason for housing. A big part of housing in multi-player involves inviting your friends over to show them all the cool stuff you collected on your adventures. It also offers a place to train your characters, hold in game events, meet up before that big dungeon trip, or any number of other reasons players can think of for characters to socialize.

These are, of course, in addition to the home base sort of feeling that housing gives to the characters in single player mode. I still remember my time playing serpents isle. There was a house on serpents isle where I ended up leaving extra goblin loot. Their was a chest in the house, and in the basement a naga kept spawning. Even though it had been abandoned and no one was living there for quite some time, I found myself trying to decorate it and make a home for myself out of the place. Another place I espeacily liked, espeacialy in Ultima Nine was Lord Britishes castle. He really knew how to make the avatar feel at home there. In Ultima Nine, I ended up storing all my loot in that one room of the castle. Unfortunately, it got rather cluttered, but that did not prevent the Avatar from falling asleep on the bed and waking up refreshed in the morning, (or night, sometimes the avatar kept some really strange hours)

Crossfire, the original engine that Wograld is currently based on, does have player housing, a feature I feel is a must for a fully imersive rpg. However it needs some great improvements. Given the poor user interface for the game, it is still hard to figure out exactly what needs to be improved, but once that is fixed, features will need to be added, modified (and yes even removed) from the game.

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