Realtime versus turnbased

[Oni Horan]

I think as a game designer in Second Life this is one of the first and most basic decissions to make: Second Life is so versatile that you can do everything, from shooter, to RPG, anything goes. We see a lot of vastly different ideas being tried out every day as far as multiplayer games are concerned.

Personally though, I feel that due to the technological limitations, like latency issues, realtime systems tend to deliver very mixed results. On one hand it's the most direct way of solving game mechanics, easy to understand, immersive and immediate, on the other results may be completely up to what seems to the user as pure luck.

So I'd like to ask what your experiences are. Everyone has probably tried some realtime fighting system at some point, what was your opinion on that type of play? Also, I think there's a puzzling lack of turnbased multiplayer gamesystems in SL, so it would probably be especially interesting to hear what experiences people have made with those!

[Aeon Voom]

In combat games in SL there is simply nothing other then realtime. I talk real combat games. Non RPG.

We often get critique that SL might not be the right platform for such due to fps and ping, yet everyone demands it in that field.

And that people with crappy PCs and bad Ping often loose is not allways true. I know a user from Asia who has a not too great machine and a horrible ping. But he manages to rip most people a new one in the game we play. So there is still alot of skill involved.

[Loki Eliot]

Actually, that is a good question, where are the turn based RPG games? should these not be quite easy to make???

I personally have never gotten into turn based games, i like the hack in real time stuff whcih is why i made my Bashable System because i wanted to bash things up. But i have always liked the look of Turn Based and i would imagine it could be quite effective in SL. HAs anyone actually done anything along these lines?

[Aeon Voom]

There was one. And it never took off. In fact it remained so small. i cannot remember the name. Roleplay in Sl has two main traditions: MMORPG (mostly some dark mix) and paragraph (who often refuse to use any systems at all)

[Oni Horan]

It was my intention to try this with our cardbased game, LOGOS cards, its in theory a turnbased combat system. There's another cardgame in SL, Combat Cards, which I would also consider a turnbased fighting game and has been around successfully for a long time. I believe for Second Life its more suited for fighting, even though not many try to explore this direction, but I'm sure that has something to do with the fact that you need to develop extremly complex scripts to get it working.

 

[Aeon Voom]

I think it is also on how roleplaying games work these days.

The tradition of SL roleplaying games does not trace back to tabletop RPGs but to Computer RPGs where turnbased combat is gone for the most part. A few japanese RPGs still do turnbased combat, but thats more and more a thing of the past.