Who wins?

For a lot of games (and presumably game designers), that's a tricky question to answer. Let's take a look at the concept of victory, and how it applies to Worlds Apart:

"Who wins?" is a difficult question to answer because there are a lot of factors to weigh up, a lot of different definitions of "win", and (especially in a multiplayer game like Worlds Apart) a lot of different people all with their own expectations.

One of the aims of Worlds Apart is for players to by-and-large achieve the non-player-vs-player goals that they set out to achieve. By achieving these goals the player "progresses", unlocking more of the game's content - including more ways to compete with other players. Worlds Apart seeks to limit the extent to which players may disrupt attempts to achieve non-player-vs-player goals.

Player-vs-player competition initially encompasses two "areas". The first of these is the elementary building block of conflict in games like World Apart - battles. The second is the meta-goal of progress ("how far through the game" I am compared to you, compared to my friends, compared to the world - "What's my high score?"). The latter of these will be split over multiple arenas and I'll give more detail on it in a later article.

The question I'd like to address in this article is "who wins the elementary conflict?".

In some games the elementary conflict is entirely or partially random. Randomness in games serves as a way to "spice up" the conflict, by adding unpredictability. Many people, however, find randomness arbitrary or frustrating. Worlds Apart intends to avoid randomness in the resolutions of its elementary conflicts (although I should note that the world will still be unpredictable due to the influence of other players).

Sometimes the victor is decided, not on experience, but on time already invested playing the game. This is a subtle trap that many multiplayer games that allow players to join after commencing fall into. For example, in player-vs-player combat in World of Warcraft, a player who has invested hundreds of hours into collecting equipment for their character has a tremendous advantage over a player who has only just started. This is particularly noticable when it spills over into other (traditionally "fairer") games - e.g. unlockable content in first-person shooter games such as Call of Duty 4.

This is something that I am putting a great deal of effort into solving for Worlds Apart. Other games in this genre give huge advantages to entrenched players - who may have already built up large empires by the time a new player joins. Many games attempt to tackle this problem by frequently resetting their universe - although this generally proves unpopular. Worlds Apart aims to feature a persistant universe where a fleet controlled by a skilled new player will defeat a fleet controlled by an unskilled (or inattentive) veteran.

In other games the victor is decided entirely or partially by "skill". Chess, for example, is widely considered to be entirely decided by skill, as is Quake. This is obviously an area I want to emphasise in Worlds Apart. Importantly, skill is often a function of experience - which might lead to confusion with the above point (and indeed, makes the barrier-to-entry problem worse). Different skills, obviously, apply to different games, but there's no need to discuss inapplicable skills here. The victor of a fleet battle will generally be the player who:

• Is good at spotting an opportunity
• Understands the game mechanics sufficiently well
• Can efficiently tailor a fleet to perform its intended role

As a closing point, it's worth noting that in my previous article I stated that it was important to encourage the player to act, rather than to reward them for not acting. To that end, I should say that unlike many other games in this genre, I intend that losing a fleet battle will be more rewarding than not launching a fleet at all.