Jerron James
4 October 2011
Circumstantial Multiplayer Intervention (CMI)
Point of use: Resurrecting solo RPG games from the past. Invites opportunity to invite or join to repeat.
Circumstantial Multiplayer Intervention (CMI) is something not brought up in the gaming industry. In fact, I developed the term of CMI recently while wondering where gaming should go. So, what is it?
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Players must pass the initial mission solo, only then can they repeat the quest (quest diary would be saved for future game play). After finishing the mission by themselves, the player would have the option of going back to the start of the mission and open a multiplayer initiative (in the case of Oblivion, only a party of two could envelope for most missions).
Example using Oblivion: while on the side quests of the Assassins Guild, one is asked to enter a building to silence all inhabitants. This mission could easily provide a team effort while removing targets from the goal. After soloing the mission, the state would be saved in an internal database allowing the player to select the mission for multiplayer intervention.
The multiplayer intervention allows one player to invite or join someone else on the mission who has completed the mission on solo. This does several things: it would invoke frantic mode, provide better loot, and separate loot collection between players.
Frantic mode would increase sensitivity of danger developed by NPCs. While increasing spread of surrounding danger, the NPCs calling of other NPCs is also increased. More monsters would have to be dealt with if the original group is not taken care of.
Better loot would be provided because the objective of the mission would be harder to achieve due to stronger opponents and more frantic options obtained by the NPCs. Team work would be absolutely necessary in order to achieve victory. Thus, extra rewards would be given.
Separate loot collection divides what can and cannot be picked up by the current player. Since there would be multiple players in the same instance/mission, separate objects would be dropped between the two. This relieves two different objections: the quality of the items would be determined by character level (remember you will have already finished the mission before), and remove the possibility of over-indulgence.
