Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Comparing stats

cliffski

One thing I reckon is pretty neat about Battlefield 3 and other modern man-shooters is the stats stuff, and comparison thereof. I like the idea of beating my friends highs cores in a game, and the great thing about lots of stats, is that even if your buddy is 10x better than you, can always say “yes but who has the ‘fallen in a ditch achievement? it’s me isn’t it?”

Many of the things I’m excited about in Gratuitous Tank Battles are things that I wish I’d done from the start for Gratuitous Space Battles. GSB had some online integration built around challenges, but not much. The center of the GSB community is the modding forums on my website, not the game itself, which means a lot of people miss out on it.

GTB will correct this a bit. There will be integrated friends lists in the game (hurrah!) so you can add some people as your friends, and then filter online challenges only to show your friend’s maps etc. Their comments should probably show up with an icon when you read their thoughts on other maps too (must make a note…)

One feature I put in today (still needs some tweaking) is this in-game ability to compare stats with a friend:

Right now, the comparison is between XP, rank and achievements. Maybe I’ll add other stats in there too at some stage. Like battles played etc. The UI needs a little love too. The biggest issue for this sort of thing is the multithreading and php web coding, two areas I am relatively inexperienced at, compared with normal C++ game coding.

In other news, Ubisofts shit DRM meant I couldn’t play Anno 2070 for 7 hours this weekend. Online DRM doesn’t bug me *that* much, I understand the argument for it, and so do the shareholders earning money from MMOS, but I understand why people hate it. What really makes me hate and despise ubisoft is not their usage of that DRM, but their total inability to fix it within 60 minutes (absolutely TOP whack requirement to fix a server problem if you have dedicated server staff). And where is the big grovelling apology to all their players for their screwup?

Maybe we should just look at funny pictures of tanks* to bring back a smile eh?

*thanks andrew :D

8 thoughts on Comparing stats

  1. you dont strike me as the kind of person who would play bf3 :o

    Also are those emblems there premade or are you going to be able to make your own a la blops or bf3’s platoons?

  3. May I suggest more stats? Lots more, and useless ones. Like number of troops stomped by walkers, ambulance kills, tanks vapourised, trees burnt, watches looted, tons of explosives exploded. And so on. Don’t just let us compare against a friend, but let us rank them against all our friends, or against everyone in our country, or the world. Then add achievements for crazy things you’d never try normally (it took me a week to get that bloody gnome to the rocket in HL2Ep2 and I loved it). Give us emblem images for achievements so that we can gloat about them to strangers.

    All of this allows us to invest personally in the game and makes many (not all) strive to compete where we normally might not, even if it’s only against ourselves.

  4. “Where is the groveling apology / fast fix?”

    Both are lost in space, because they aren’t sorry. They’ve got your sale / subscription fee, and nothing else matters. Big Business 101.

    I should think you’d be used to this attitude, being British.

  5. Will the friends list and achievements be integrated with Steam? In my opinion, a single cohesive friends list adds a lot to the convenience factor.

  6. Playing Anno 2070 is like eating a Rivita – in spaaaace!

    Anno 2070 can be played in offline mode. This is located in the bottom right corner of the login window when you run the game.

    If the online connection is lost during play, the game continues with a small message in the top right corner, until the connection is re-established. The -only- game functionality that is lost is “Ark Storage” – which is only accessible in “Continous Mode” in any case (and only then if it is set to ‘On’ in the game options).

  7. switching it to offline mode makes NO difference. the game then asks you to login when it starts. How does that possibly make any sense?
    Do I have to physically pull out my network cable for that to work??

  8. “the game then asks you to login when it starts.”

    So…. login! It stores your login locally.

    Once logged in, you will notice the message in the top right corner of the screen. Profile customisation and multiplayer becomes inaccessible. You can still access the single player scenarios and the campaign.

    The game will always try to connect to the Internet during play. You must disable any link that your computer has to the Internet, in order to force offline mode to stay offline.

Comments are currently closed.