Mini-Games

[Diggles]

Warhammers battering ram system & Eve's probing interface come to mind.

List some other mini-games and whether or not you think they should be included into a game and to what degree.

[Arsilon]

Don't PVE Raid encounters qualify under the mini-game concept?

[Jakensama]

No, raid encounters are the point of the games.

Mini games in single player games can suck my balls as well, I don't know what it is about japenese games that makes people include this shit. "OOh yes, I would love to take a break from fighting evil to breed Chocobos"

[Arsilon]

No, raid encounters are the point of the games.

I was assuming we were talking about our ideal PvP game in which case the PvE Raid Boss encounter wouldn't be the "point" of the game presumably?

Perhaps a reclassification of thinking about those fights being a mini-game vs. the point of the game is what's actually needed to keep the game from making the same PvP is an afterthought mistakes we've seen before.

[Diggles]

I guess you retards need me to spell it out? A mini-game does not use the games main mechanics at all, hence a MINI-game.

If your game is a WoW clone, a mini-game would not involve your character using pve/pvp abilities, pressing hotbuttons, spells/melee etc.

Only thing close would be the chain/combo abilities like aion/doac have.

[Slamz]

I'm not that big on mini-games.

Crafting could be made into a mini-game but I'm not sure why or how it should be done.

"Hacking" could have been a mini-game in Planetside. Did anyone ever play "Bomb Squad" for the Intellivision like 25 years ago? I always saw a hacking minigame looking like that. You basically have a circuit board and the game guides you through the process of discovering how to rewire the bomb by clipping out some circuit elements, adding new ones, etc.

"Puzzle Pirates" was basically nothing but mini-games meant to drive ship operation. Some guy on your ship would be manning the bilge pump by playing some mini-game.

Interesting concept but I'm not sure I'd like it.


Certainly if you were going to crew a ship, you'd have to come up with a pretty interesting mini-game for everyone (how do you make loading cannons or doing damage control into something fun?).

For a fantasy MMORPG I'm not sure what mini-games you would even need, other than perhaps siege weapon operation.

Though a crafting mini-game might be worth exploring.

[Hoofhurr]

Hacking in Bioshock was basically a mini-game but I thought it was well integrated. I actually think you guys are looking at this the wrong way. What makes a mini-game different than any well-developed game mechanic? Looking at it this way, if you break any game down into its mini-games you'll see that the more mini-games you have the better imo. They just have to be seamlessly integrated like the art from dozens of artists have to be integrated to make a cohesive graphical world.

IMO pet classes are a mini-game of their own. Auction House's are a mini-game. Inventory management is a mini-game. Respeccing your talents is a mini-game. Min/maxing is a mini-game. Manual aiming is a mini-game. Piloting aircraft in Planetside is a totally different mini-game than playing infantry imo. Kiting is a mini-game.

It's the mini-game-type, highly-specified, mechanic development that gives a game the built in variety needed to keep players' attention over time. If a magic user plays exactly the same as a warrior even though the character is using spells instead of arrows this isn't going to reinvigorate the player to resub for another month. If, however, the mechanics involved in magic using are rather different than those in meleeing then you have that player engaged for longer than you otherwise would have because the 'player' is learning something 'new', not the character.

There are really only two main issues I can see with trying to have as many mini-games (substitute mechanics) as possible. 1) Increased development time. 2) All mini-games are not created equal. So if you have one mini-game for warriors and one for magic users, how do you ensure that they both are equally challenging and don't innately give one player a
disadvantage?

Engaging in strategy over simple tactics is also a mini-game. Yes maybe you could just log in, go to the nearest battle and shoot as many people as possible for an hour and have plenty of fun. But maybe you want to be a little more involved than that and form a squad and direct them to various goals. Maybe you want to be even more involved than that and coordinate your squad with other squads to achieve bigger goals. Those levels of involvement imo are mini-games in their own right if the game provides goals of that sort. Anyone who has tried to coordinate multiple squads knows that at that point you're basically not even playing your own character anymore. You spend 99% of your time communicating and directing other people's characters and 1% participating with your character directly. In that way, the social aspect of MMOGs are a mini-game as anyone who has run their own guild knows perfectly well. Assigning ranks, buying guild tabards, structuring your chat windows to streamline your social networking, kicking out asshats, etc. These all = mini-games.

In conclusion, if your 'mini-game' is some tacked-on, ancillary, and otherwise distracting mechanic then I'd say cut it before it goes live. If, however, your mechanic is well developed, seamlessly integrated and it adds to the multi-dimensionality of the game, keep it in!

[Uncle Shags]

Min/maxing is a great mini-game. I think it is totally dependent on mechanics. CoH had a pretty involved build system. Involved enough that I downloaded a character creator and spent hours and hours mapping out different builds, agonizing over how to make it just perfect. My build in WAR? Bleh. Figured out the best one and moved on. There wasn't any room to really tweak it.

The AH is a good mini-game. And crafting. Speaking of which... Crafting and the AH could be done from your phone. I think that's a winner idea. I'm copyrighting it.