6. Going It Alone
Pratchett/Josh Kirby/Corgi BooksThese days most publishers are loathe to throw big money at a game without a multiplayer component, but you will have noticed that much of what we have discussed so far is based on the assumption that a new Discworld game should be a single-player affair. This isn't a non-negotiable, but any consideration of a multiplayer Discworld will have to be looked at with deserved caution. We've seen far too many esteemed IPs falter because the developer has felt compelled to tack a multiplayer mode onto the end of a game which didn't need one. Or, worse still, developers trying to drape an established franchise over an MMO framework just for the sake of it, desperate be the next World Of Warcraft. There is reason to believe that an MMORPG take on the this literary universe could work - the story is vast enough, in a world big enough, to support this sort of gameplay. But is it the best way to go about bringing Discworld back to the gaming world? Probably not. Sir Terry's imaginary world is huge and complex, filled with opportunity for MMO-style questing and so on, but churning out a large-scale online role-playing mechanic could kill the connection between the player and the narrative. Pratchett's tales are at once vast and intimate, and would surely be cheapened by the inclusion of the dodgy grind elements and the rest that comes with MMOs. At the first sign of a Discworld character grinding another menial task to gather some hackneyed in-game currency to be able to afford a new shiny hat to wear on yet another pointless team raid, most of us would hit that "uninstall" button right away. No, taking these things in a multiplayer direction just adds too many variables and takes control away from the developer, and the player, when it comes to pacing and structure. Instead, all of the programming power that would go into a cumbersome multiplayer component should be spent on making the single-player world as believable as possible. NPCs who act like they have a life to live regardless of your involvement, not just like actors who turn dormant as soon as the player character is out of site; seamless drifting between scripted events and free-roaming play; a functioning world hinged on cause and effect. We need a world to get lost in on our own. And it needs to be a Discworld void of online game trolls and their endless griefing.