Multiplayer Touches in Single Player Games.
A remote-viewing portal that lets a player see into another player’s world.
The concept of single player multiplayer games is not new. For example, Death Stranding features in-world buildings and amenities set up by strangers, and you can help them with lost deliveries. As far as I know, that’s the best example that took it the farthest. A smaller use of the concept is found in Subnautica, which has a neat Time Capsule feature that lets you send an item and message to the stranger who finds it.
But I like the world-element, and I hope to see it used more often and in different types of games. It’s tricky, of course, as is anything with a multiplayer component. There are several issues:
- Requires a server to mediate the multiplayer data.
- Requires some level of moderation depending on how players might interact.
- Requires players to participate: if there isn’t an active game population, the multiplayer features are a dead-end.
There are some ways to limit the troubles in implementing it. Message lengths can be limited, or composed from preformed parts, to avoid moderation problems. Reusing data (along with sample data) can ensure an adequate supply of the data if player counts run lean.
Gameplay Ideas
Change the World.
The world or levels change based on past playthroughs. That might mean in a racing game that the dirt track gets muddier on lines past players took, so that the track evolves over time, or it might mean that where players died spawn little loot opportunities, or other things like that. Or you could find their corpse and bury them for a karma bonus.
It could also be more intentional, like letting players perform an action that will place monsters or in-game events for the next player to run into.
It could be more decorative. Deaths could leave behind statues reflecting how the player died. Or if you healed at a spot, it could leave behind a burned-out campfire or a food wrapper. Or if you have a fishing mechanic, maybe you can catch a fish that has a second hook in its mouth, from someone else who let it get away. If you’re at a shop, you could find a shopping list someone dropped (generated from what a previous player bought in that shop).
If you have character design tools for players, one cool thing would be to pull player-characters into other players’ games as NPCs rather than using a randomly generated look or a static one. (You could do this for enemies, too, if appropriate.) If you have unique player looks and a leaderboard or similar metrics, you could have in-game statues of those player-characters.
You could also try audio-decorative. In a play-as-a-robot game, you could recover the audio from a dead robot, to hear what happened right before they bought it. Or you could have an item that lets you hear the footsteps of ghosts at certain areas, helping you find your way through a maze or find hidden rooms.
Change the Player-Character.
These seem to fit best with Rogue-like games, like The Oregon Trail. The basic idea is that players wouldn’t roll their own characters, but would inherit another player’s that died. (You would seed the base game with samples, for if the player opted-out of the multiplayer feature or lacked a network connection.) There are other ways that could go, including having a procreation event in the story, and new players would enter their game as offspring of previous adventurers. Or if the game had an imprisonment mechanic, you could be a previous character after serving their time.
It could be used in a Japanese-style role-playing game, where party members are hand-me-downs, while you roll one new party member (party leader). When you die or complete the game, your new character could become the fill-outs of new players’ games.
The Revenge Play.
In this game-concept, you come into the world as a loved one of one of the many creeps that a previous player killed in their own questing, and the game uses their playthrough as a blueprint of where you have to go, tracking their player until you exact your revenge. And one or many of the baddies you kill as you go will then be tracking your player.
You could try to play pacifist (other than the final revenge), in which case you would end a cycle of violence. Neat.
These kinds of low-stakes interactions across a game’s playerbase seems like a fun addition that gives you some sense of world beyond the simple creative strokes that developers put out. It lets the world of a game shift and feel lived-in. It makes the player feel less alone, like seeing footprints in the sand on a deserted beach. Designers should look to do more of that.