Picture a video game that's some combination of KISS dolls and Pokemon, or an all-digital Gundam Build FIghters/Busou Shinki/Angelic Layer. I'll call it Waifu Wars for the moment because I'm bad at names and cute girls (or guys, but Husbando Wars doesn't alliterate) plus explosions sells.
A lot of emphasis is placed on the player creating unique characters to use in it with the parts and animations collections, and aside from a blacklist vocabulary the dialogue is entirely open to the player to rewrite from a few archetype examples - to the point that the character designer and story mode/networked arena are two separate programs, and the output of the character designer is itself a stand-alone mini-game containing just the specific parts, animations, scripting, and so one for that one character, plus a couple of backdrops for a training area, a living area, maybe (depending on complexity) some kind of AR feature for the mobile phone version but that's a whole new rabbit hole to explore another time. Stand-alone mode lets you use all the attacks against dummy targets for testing purposes as well as viewing the model and animations with a free camera and probably changing between a few different outfits and hair styles/etc. but doesn't have any real depth to it beyond what gets put in the dialogue tree.
Anyway, the point is that it's not just a puppet that moves on the screen in time to your controller inputs or picking off a roster of pregens and fighting or following a premade script, you're supposed to make an at least nominally unique character, and can interact directly like with a virtual pet or a Furby, with the stand-alone keeping a record of what you do with it so the character seems to have a real memory, including going back into the character editor to fine tune things after seeing them live. Hopefully in a more believably human, or at least believably anime archetype, way.
(Yes AI is hard, I know, this is still just the background for the hypothetical.)
So, character creator, stand alone virtual companion, impossibly good rhetorical AI scripti-- (oh shut up) you've gone through that and the "get to know each other"/beta test in stand-alone mode to make sure everything looks right and the animations and effects go off properly, it's time to hit the arena! Just one thing, your character must register with the official sever. Players are not tracked, career scores and history are written to each character, even if working as a party in RL solo play, even if characters are traded or given to another player.
(Transfers keep their own history, an officially cloned character resets skills and records to the base but "knows" their "parent" did various things before, in a "Oh, I remember this event a bit! It was pretty hard," sort of way - depending on the result score of the parent's actual run and/or aggregate for repeatable things. Possibly their starting stats would be higher like a reincarnated Disgaea character, though that might end up disincentivizing new characters too much.)
A checksum, some portion of the character data, and the chargen app serial number as recorded in the waffle -- Oh, I forgot that, I've been calling the stand-alone character/app "waffles" in my head -- then get hashed into a unique ID and stored server-side, so if you skipped the chargen part and thought you were just going to use a copy of one downloaded off the internet somewhere (as opposed to being officially transferred through the network play app) they get turned down, and (in the default AI packages/templates at least) angry, upset, or confused about "being a fake." You can still play the story mode, but multiplayer areas are blocked off.
Some kind of explicitly-a-clone copying process would probably be allowed, and probably provided for the never-played-before introduction/tutorial, but isn't relevant here. A "make unique" option would effectively run the character through the clone process, resetting all event flags and skills, again provoking an AI reaction ranging from "Did something happen? Well, it's letting me enter now, so I guess it's fine," to "Whoa! That really took it out of me! You'd better play with me a lot so I can build my strength back up!" depending on whether there actually was a copied history (or I supposed hacked skill levels without history backing them up) to knock down.
So, now at last comes the question: Is this a great piece of game design to incorporate anti-hacking measures and the lore elements of each character being unique into mechanics, or emotional blackmail dickery on a scale that could only be exceeded by having the character turn to the player and use their "Oh, what's that?" "Amazing!" "I like it!" emotes to shill for the cash shop?
A lot of emphasis is placed on the player creating unique characters to use in it with the parts and animations collections, and aside from a blacklist vocabulary the dialogue is entirely open to the player to rewrite from a few archetype examples - to the point that the character designer and story mode/networked arena are two separate programs, and the output of the character designer is itself a stand-alone mini-game containing just the specific parts, animations, scripting, and so one for that one character, plus a couple of backdrops for a training area, a living area, maybe (depending on complexity) some kind of AR feature for the mobile phone version but that's a whole new rabbit hole to explore another time. Stand-alone mode lets you use all the attacks against dummy targets for testing purposes as well as viewing the model and animations with a free camera and probably changing between a few different outfits and hair styles/etc. but doesn't have any real depth to it beyond what gets put in the dialogue tree.
Anyway, the point is that it's not just a puppet that moves on the screen in time to your controller inputs or picking off a roster of pregens and fighting or following a premade script, you're supposed to make an at least nominally unique character, and can interact directly like with a virtual pet or a Furby, with the stand-alone keeping a record of what you do with it so the character seems to have a real memory, including going back into the character editor to fine tune things after seeing them live. Hopefully in a more believably human, or at least believably anime archetype, way.
(Yes AI is hard, I know, this is still just the background for the hypothetical.)
So, character creator, stand alone virtual companion, impossibly good rhetorical AI scripti-- (oh shut up) you've gone through that and the "get to know each other"/beta test in stand-alone mode to make sure everything looks right and the animations and effects go off properly, it's time to hit the arena! Just one thing, your character must register with the official sever. Players are not tracked, career scores and history are written to each character, even if working as a party in RL solo play, even if characters are traded or given to another player.
(Transfers keep their own history, an officially cloned character resets skills and records to the base but "knows" their "parent" did various things before, in a "Oh, I remember this event a bit! It was pretty hard," sort of way - depending on the result score of the parent's actual run and/or aggregate for repeatable things. Possibly their starting stats would be higher like a reincarnated Disgaea character, though that might end up disincentivizing new characters too much.)
A checksum, some portion of the character data, and the chargen app serial number as recorded in the waffle -- Oh, I forgot that, I've been calling the stand-alone character/app "waffles" in my head -- then get hashed into a unique ID and stored server-side, so if you skipped the chargen part and thought you were just going to use a copy of one downloaded off the internet somewhere (as opposed to being officially transferred through the network play app) they get turned down, and (in the default AI packages/templates at least) angry, upset, or confused about "being a fake." You can still play the story mode, but multiplayer areas are blocked off.
Some kind of explicitly-a-clone copying process would probably be allowed, and probably provided for the never-played-before introduction/tutorial, but isn't relevant here. A "make unique" option would effectively run the character through the clone process, resetting all event flags and skills, again provoking an AI reaction ranging from "Did something happen? Well, it's letting me enter now, so I guess it's fine," to "Whoa! That really took it out of me! You'd better play with me a lot so I can build my strength back up!" depending on whether there actually was a copied history (or I supposed hacked skill levels without history backing them up) to knock down.
So, now at last comes the question: Is this a great piece of game design to incorporate anti-hacking measures and the lore elements of each character being unique into mechanics, or emotional blackmail dickery on a scale that could only be exceeded by having the character turn to the player and use their "Oh, what's that?" "Amazing!" "I like it!" emotes to shill for the cash shop?
--
‎noli esse culus
‎noli esse culus