Excited about multiplayer campaign??!!!

[Bassilisk]

Is anyone else excited for multiplayer campaign?!?! Since medieval total war the first one, I have been dreaming of a grand strategy game with multiplayer campaign. Risk, age of conquest IV have made me super excited for playing with people online grand strategy!

[William Blake]

It is very tricky to create a dynamic challenging multiplayer experience for a grand strategy game.

We will see how it plays out, but I for one would be very cautious to curb my expectations.

[Bassilisk]

2 hours ago, William Blake said:

It is very tricky to create a dynamic challenging multiplayer experience for a grand strategy game.

We will see how it plays out, but I for one would be very cautious to curb my expectations.

I feel you. The best I have played is Age of Conquest IV, very risk-like. Since playing knights of honor the first one, I can't help but be excited lol

[William Blake]

Biggest problem is in fact player perception. Everyone who goes to play cs:go understands what the game is and what to expect, no surprises.

Most people who play grand strategy games as a single have their own pace, logic, attention to detail and so on. It is quite a jump from long long solo game with save/loads/pause/fast forward to something which looks like the same visually but in fact is real time competitive multiplayer.

And in terms of game design you practically have to build another game to fit this gameplay.

[Bassilisk]

Well you are probably right in your assertions. I understand it will take a lot of work and may be pretty difficult, but I still am hoping that they will make a great multiplayer campaign for easy fun and competition. I have played grand strategy and risk-like games enough to still dream of a good grand strategy with multiplayer. I am happy they look to be giving this a try, and I will happily offer my feedback whenever they ask 🙂 fingers crossed lol

[William Blake]

In Veso I trust )  I have no doubt that Black Sea can make it happen, but it is a question on how much effort will be spent on a multiplayer. Original KoH multiplayer was quite unbalanced to my knowledge ))) But only because it was a nice bonus to the main game and a lot of things were corrected after the release with minimal effort.

PS

In fact, if I was running things at Black Sea, I would release single player game without any multiplayer, let it settle down for a month or two and patch the main experience. Only then I would release good rich multiplayer experience as a DLC, paid or not. If I was to make really really good multiplayer it would be in fact a second separate game with assets from the main game, but I would work on it and market and present it as a different experience from a main game. And to make a value proposition to THQ I would say that after the initial sales of the main game, it would be very nice to have a significantly complex and different multiplayer game to make it into competitive repeating long lasting experience expanding the franchise with reused but still high quality fresh assets from the main game. If it is good enough it would open up a completely new potential revenue streams like customizations and all that modern jazz they like to monetize on.

 

Then we would get drunk and relaxed and I would switch the cards saying "lets release multiplayer only as a free to play, slightly monetize it as f2p, but mainly drive different people to the main game purchase". Well drinking and forum post can carry you a long way from the original idea.

Edited December 11, 2020 by William Blake

[Bassilisk]

23 minutes ago, William Blake said:

In Veso I trust )  I have no doubt that Black Sea can make it happen, but it is a question on how much effort will be spent on a multiplayer. Original KoH multiplayer was quite unbalanced to my knowledge ))) But only because it was a nice bonus to the main game and a lot of things were corrected after the release with minimal effort.

To be honest the multiplayer in KoH was at best like you said a nice bonus. The battles wouldn't be very hard to make multiplayer as games like Age of empires, total war series, and others have already laid great groundwork for multiplayer battles. But multiplayer campaign is a whole different animal. Correct me if I am wrong but there is no game that does grand strategy multiplayer. Total war series is only us to 2 player campaign, so not really multiplayer, Age of conquest IV and other risklike games lack depth and real battles, Age of empires lack the grand strategy concept, and crusader kings series and other dont make the game fun in my opion.

[William Blake]

Many people tried to solve this since the dawn of PC gaming. Mostly failed or at least nothing really caught on. The best approach early on in general I know from that time was "play by email" turn based simplistic games. because it could make a game into days and days instead of continuous session as we play now. Yet if all players are acting fast on their moves it can be almost real time game. And a grand strategy kinda requires a lot of time to progress the game state to see differences in player choices and strategies. But as a real experience it is totally junk now.

The other known approach is some permanent game which runs on turns or ticks regardless of players who come and leave over and over again playing as they see fit. But most of these games are pure cancer since you have to baby sit your kingdom for 24/7 or you have a huge disadvantage. Yet you have very little to do any any given moment of game time. So this is sure dead end too.

The bigger problem with grand strategy is not only the time required to progress the game state, but also requirement to have a lot of people doing that at the same time. 1 vs 1 game on a grand map is probably very lame and repetitive experience if you think about it. You need few people to mess up with each other in a same game to make it into a grand strategy experience. So the pace of the game have to be both fast enough to fit the overall game into some manageable time frame yet make sure that a player can see and react on many other players doing things at the same time. And most of this players better not leave in a middle of a game or they waste effort of people they played against.

There are also bunch of pure technical issues. Do you have a host player or a game server? What happens if host leaves or losses connection on say 10 other player playing? What happens once people start cheating. Can you afford servers? Can you afford development of a game server to begin with. And so on.

So in general I would say great grand strategy multiplayer game design is several magnitudes harder to make. RTS or single player games are proven to work mechanics. Multiplayer grand strategy... not so much.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 11, 2020 by William Blake

[Bassilisk]

Well said William Blake. It is nice to discuss with someone else who seems to have looked into the same game genre and played some of them if not a lot. I never did the play by email, but don't think it would intrigue me. Total war series even if it was multiplayer multiple people I think is too slow after they went away from countries in medieval total war 1. I will hold on to hope as I love the idea of real time grand strategy, and I will hold onto hope even more that perhaps they will delve hard into multiplayer and make it work somehow, maybe with lots of options....who knows....but it will secretly be in my dreams at night 😉 

[William Blake]

Costs and uncertain projected revenue are the main obstacle to be honest. Grand strategy is a niche genre. Multiplayer grand strategy is even more niche, non proven, no previous success to copy or even argue about. You practically have a failed  proposition from the start, commercially I mean. Probably it will stay this way until few very indy people waste 5-8 years to build a game with a new mechanics which happen to be a prove or at least a good direction to go. This indy game will totally fail, but people in the industry might see the diamond in the rough and try to make it into something mainstream.

But why bother, you can just make same stuff over and over again, lame and broken, but spend the budget on hype and PR. Look at Cyberpunk 2077 )

 

[Chinggis Qaan]

One fear could be that bigger nations will have a great advantage lets say all nations where picked, then getting trade agremments might be hard aswell and then both eco and army is less for smaller nations. But else it could be great.

 

/CQ

[Mattie44]

This was a dream already back in KoH 1 to be able to play the map on multiplayer!

I understand it's quite a challenge to create it, certainly because I'm so used to play *10 or *1 all the time and not being able to do that might make it a long dragged game. Also, if you want to play this with more than 2 people, it will be quite hard to find time with all people to play at the same time and this for weeks, since it could take that long until there is someone who conquered the whole map...

Still I hope they get something like this done, although I agree that the main focus should remain to make a very nice single player RTS 🙂

[Bassilisk]

2 hours ago, Mattie44 said:

This was a dream already back in KoH 1 to be able to play the map on multiplayer!

I understand it's quite a challenge to create it, certainly because I'm so used to play *10 or *1 all the time and not being able to do that might make it a long dragged game. Also, if you want to play this with more than 2 people, it will be quite hard to find time with all people to play at the same time and this for weeks, since it could take that long until there is someone who conquered the whole map...

Still I hope they get something like this done, although I agree that the main focus should remain to make a very nice single player RTS 🙂

I agree with you mate, I started another thread of suggestions with one of them being making the pace go faster, yet still retaining some elements. I hope they too can find a way to make multiplayer games that last less than 12hrs or some way to make good multiplayer

[William Blake]

I think full multiplayer game will be around a hour or two. Most likely in MP mechanics would be simplified and starting/victory conditions would be much more limited compared to the single player experience. But as of now, we don't know anything for certain, it is just my guess on what is reasonable possible.

Edited December 21, 2020 by William Blake