Every day is the "End of the Week"

     It was recently discovered that Nintendo had filed a patent last year related to a "massively single-player online game", and when I first heard about it, my mind was blown. In an example used by Nintendo, it's imagined as one player in his single-player adventure finds materials to build a house and does so, and another player finds the finished house but no materials. It's a way to make a truly dynamic and ever changing game (and actually reminds me a lot of Demon's Souls.)


     Lately, creating a dynamic game world has been something that many games have played around with, but haven't quite got down just right. I think one of the most popular examples is the InFamous series, where we see the worlds of Empire City and New Marais change depending on whether the player goes down the good or evil karma path. It was cool seeing the cities change based on the important choices I made, but I still felt cheated, since really it was up to me how the cities changed. Now granted, Cole literally was the center of everything happening in those games, but it still felt so rigid. I yearn for a game world that feels more natural.

     Of course Animal Crossing comes to mind, where control of the world is actually out of the players hand entirely. Sure, the world looks different based on what actions you did (which was actually pretty cool when you could see what people did with trees and flowers), but the citizens of your animal town seemingly ran their own lives and performed their own tasks (mainly wandering around). They could also move away and move in almost anywhere. It was a nice system, but it was almost like taking the two extremes of creating a dynamic game world: total control over your little village, but then absolutely no control in the AI that populated it. Animal Crossing was very much like the SimCity games, but not like the living breathing world it wanted to be.


     When I first heard of this massively single-player online game, I instantly thought of a game like Minecraft when you're playing with friends. When the End of the Week staff and I played on our peaceful server, we designated areas in which we could build our own towns, fortresses, castles, whatever, and one of the coolest things was signing on and seeing the changes that were made. I would love heading over to another "country" and seeing a newly erected village or a giant tower. Of course, with what Nintendo seems to be planning, they might be doing this on a much larger scale.

     Nintendo has given an example of an economy changing based on player's actions. That could have a lot of potential, especially if one of these games had something like shops that players themselves would set up. I would also love to see a town or city in a game where every building and shop is run by a player, but the game is populated with NPC's so that the world feels natural and real, while still being ever changing.

This amazing train station built by players in Minecraft could appear in everyone's game.

     Of course, this is also a way Nintendo could compete against the MMO market in a manner that doesn't actually involve them making an MMO. Think about a game like Pokemon, where competitive item prices varied based on how often they're bought, and new trainers who are actual players show up in the world and towns and always in different locations. Flocks of Pokemon could actually be regional, being in the physical California one day and then moving over to New York (or somewhere) some other day.


     There's a lot of possibilities with this massively single player online game idea. I love it when Nintendo takes something no one has thought doable, because they usually find a way.


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