Inventories, how much space? {Editorial}
Posted Saturday, October 18th, 2008 8:14 am by Max
This week, I wanted to take a look at another aspect of the website integration. This one doesn’t seem very big right now, as it only has one tab on the website, but when you site down to think about it, you’ll start to wonder how they are going to pull it off. What is Max babbling about this time? Inventories!
If you are new to MMOs, your inventory is basically for your loot, mounting items, and whatever currency you have. They have always been based on bags, where you receive new bags from drops off of monsters, then drag them to some spot in your toolbar and presto, more inventory space. But if you look on the site, they have an inventory area, how are they going to do this?
They have given you three items, and right now we can only assume that this is the inventory of the character’s who’s portrait is at the top of your right-side bar. That being said, are they actually going to track his bag space? Will your inventory change by getting better bags in game? Or are they just going to give you a certain amount of space all the way until you reach the level cap? The latter doesn’t seem as appealing, because if this game sticks to the tried and true MMO formula, you’re going to be getting a lot of drops off of monsters, and fixed bag slots are unheard of.
Their second option would be to give you an infinite amount of bag space, but this is highly unlikely. Since they are integrating this into their website, that’s almost limitless amount of data that players can store. Even if their were upgradeable bags, they would still cap off at one maximum amount or another. So the data consumption would probably be the main hindrance if they were to do this.
The third option is to, indeed, give upgradeable bags. I believe this is the winning one, but it will be interesting to see how they pull this off. Inventories change constantly throughout one hour of play, so how the server would have to communicate with the game would be at an astonishing rate. Multiply that by all the thousands of players, and this seems a little out there.
The last things to be considered is what the interface will be like. Hopefully a bank will be present, and if it is, will that be displayed? Will each bag have a seperate area on the inventory screen, or will their be only one massive bag that upgrades over time? Also, how often would it update? If it was the instant you did it, that would be the only thing the server was doing. On the contrary, if it was too long between updates, it would pretty much be useless, since what you were seeing is different then what you actually had in the game.
All of this and more is to pondered before the release of the game. But knowing the guys at Meteor Games, they have something. Whatever they do it will be awesome, we just need to have a little fate. Until then, clean out your pockets, they might fill with loot soon.
