02/18/2022
The big idea is to have games that adapt to the strengths and weaknesses of different platforms and allow for players to join regardless of their current financial or infrastructure situation. (The term “responsive” is in this context borrowed from frontend web development, where responsive means a website adapts to whatever device it is viewed on)
Allowing people with slow internet connections to play with people with high-end PCs and fiber internet.
How?
By joining different game formats into one synched world. This, of course, is difficult but there are certain design decisions that can make it technically much less challenging.
Extreme example: let’s say we have 2 players, player A has the top notch absolute latest-gen gaming setup and player Z has a slow, patchy, internet connection that is sometimes out for days, in a city where electricity is sometimes out for days and on a computer that comes straight from the stone age.
Player A can be offered pretty much any experience, so let’s go with a hyper-realistic shooter that requires minimum lag and simultaneous gameplay across a country, similar to Anthem or Fortnite.
Player Z, however, will play a browser game. A text-based, simple strategy game. However, the decisions from that online strategy game will affect the game Player A is playing in significant ways. There must be a significant amount of teamwork and clan-component to make sure that even if a player is disconnected from the internet or electricity for days, they can join after without losing out.
Obviously the Player Z scenario is much more interesting and challenging.
Classic browser MMO strategy games do not exactly fit the bill because even those require certain short-term decisions in battle situations.
If, however, we leave out the battles, this becomes a lot more manageable. If the entire part of the game that is “peacetime” management and strategy is separated into the low-end browser game, then even outages of days can be compensated with smart decisions before and especially when joining forces with players all around the world, the damage from one player being “out” can be completely balanced out.