How Will Balance Be Handled Between Solo and Multiplayer?

One of the MMOs out right now is Star Wars: The Old Republic, which has a strong focus on single-player story. Unfortunately, it's got the problem that all of the content is balanced for single player, except for a few small instances in each area. I played with my younger brother, and it practically ruined every epic boss fight when there was just the two of us.

SOTA is supposed to force you into single-player for some major story parts, I understand, so that'll balance the challenge for your epic one-on-one duels, but what about the rest of the time? Since the game is going to be made so that you can play it all offline, that means that all of the content has to be solo-able. Won't that make playing online with friends terribly easy? There must be a way you're intending to scale the difficulty with additional players. What is it?

 

very good question, would like to hear an answer too.

 

Given the two scale map and the instanced nature of the game perhaps some kind of difficulty scaling with the number of players would be in order. Made popular by Diablo and it's clones, as well as GW2 with it's story quests and dynamic events that scale with the number of participating players.

Another possibility would be having companions that can fill the party to a given maximum size, with the difficulty based on that size, and extra players then taking the place of companions. This is done in various multiplayer games, including Baldur's Gate and other Infinity Engine games, as well as a few MMOs like the original Guild Wars (though only from the second campaign onwards).

 

Ya, it strikes me very much like GW2. You had a set of "personal story" instances which your friends could join you in if you wanted. These were driven by your race several choices at character creation and sever choices through the story. But beyond this there was a whole, huge game to explore.

Aion had a main story thread as well.

 

Based on the comments about moving from companions to pets being 'a step' kind of implies that in the game there will be NPC plot characters to join you from time to time.

Other than that, I'm not sure what you mean by balance. If it's like most Ultima games then the balance is do you run when you're in over your head... With no 'levels' to speak of, it's kinda on you to know what you can and can't do.

 

I am in favor of dynamically adjusting the difficulty based of number and strength of players in the party. I have also found recent games with small party limits a problem for my group (also KS contributors) . We have 3 to 8 players on and it makes an issue in forming parties. Again dynamic content scaling would be just the thing with a max party size>8

 

You should have the possibility to play online all the time if thats what you prefer.

And also choose your kind of gameplay, open full loot PvP if that is your choice or no PvP at all if that is your cup of tea.

 

I just hope, even for solo play there will be challenging and difficult quests, too (+ I support a dynamic difficulty adjustement; more enemies + stronger enemies with more cooperative players; a bit weaker AI enemies in PvP areas to balance out, etc.)

 

Dragon's Dogma had a pretty good system for building a party. Thousands of npcs (pawns) to choose from including other players offline characters.

If we can choose 90% of the npc population based on virtue it will be about as fun as online play I would think.