Pace of FATES

The pace of a game plays into a lot of factors, and today I wanted to briefly discuss the pacing of FATES.  The pace of the game describes how quickly or slowly the game plays out.  The pace determines how tense the game is or how much thought can be put into playing it.  Many games are very fast-paced and require reaction more than proactive thought and strategy and FATES will fall very much into the proactive thought and strategy category.

FATES should, if our design plays out appropriately, play like a very expansive, very convoluted version of chess.  Most of the major players will be federations each vying for territory and influence in the Galactic Council and economic arenas, however there will likely be a whole host of smaller federations and single players who will fill the gaps in between the large factions potentially even serving as strategic buffers between major powers or even as mediators.

From server initialisation until someone wins should take around 6 months to 1 year, although there are parameters in place that can be tweaked to modify the pacing of the game.  This should produce a pacing appropriate for both busy people who can only devote a few minutes a day to playing and the retired or other people with copious amounts of free time to play.  Players will have plenty of time to consider moves and counter-moves and the only wrinkle that is presently foreseen is the timezone issue, where you have players who can execute actions during night time for other timezones thus limiting the response times for certain players.  We have been tossing around ideas such as standing substitutes and war masters for federations, but nothing is decided yet on whether this issue needs to be addressed or how.

The goals of the alpha and betas tests will preclude a long duration game and thus the pacing will be modified such that alpha and beta games (except for open beta) develop much more quickly and reaction time will be significantly less due to testing constraints.

All of this will be subject to testing and user feedback however.

Later, I will be ready to discuss our plans for how we make use of user feedback and how we will collect it.

á na márië,
gumshoe, out.