Alright have some tea and chill.
Offline mode would work great when for some Latin American reasons Internet goes out for a week.
CIU is naturally F2P game, so there’s no profit for iA on people downloading the game and playing purely offline (no income from ads)? Fine, make it CHL only, then you would be able to play offline as you would play regular CI episodes. You paid the 10 dollars, here, you can play anything with that’s existing already in your local storage, purely as arcade mode (it won’t update to servers when going online).
Since I bring older episodes into equation, someone would ask to why not just play old episodes then? Cos old episodes are unbalanced as shit and you pretty much have to ignore 80% of weapon roster to succeed. Which by the way is why I would love to see an integration of old episodes and the newer balanced CIU, provided you have the episodes installed, but that’s a talk for another day.
I’m going to make a look of a person who thinks that he knows how computers work and ruin everyone’s hopes and dreams. Currently CIU politely asks the server to generate all the stuff it needs, which we have no idea how complex is, because it’s the server. This includes missions, waves, challenges, budget constraint equipment, while also controlling almost everything else (movement sync, anti-cheat checks, RNG probably?). So in order to make it an offline game all that stuff would have to be embedded in the game client itself, which I personally have no idea of how hard it would be. Probably quite hard. Especially to debug.
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That would make sense, in which case a fair compromise could be as OP suggested, have a batch of pre-generated missions set bundled in the game, which as a person who knows nothing about coding and that stuff, it shouldn’t be that hard.
Don’t worry
But something missing point:
What about downloads data game like(music/background/tools ship/weapons/galaxies/missions/etc…)
It better play game without online mode
So if I poll it let’s see
Do you want IA set up download data game?
- Yes
- No
0 voters
Well this would be great considering the protests here… and the lack of interest connection because of it most the time.
Sounds like a great idea tbh, I do sometimes end up with no internet in a lot of cases, I’d like to see something similar in game.
But again, the game is currently online only for a reason, all of the player’s account data (missions, score, fleet, etc…) is saved on servers because having them stored locally means people at some point will be able to modify the save files for infinite resources, score or game completion, which is certainly not something we want to see.
It can be a thing if offline missions won’t contribute to the player’s progress, and as for what the missions might be, the player can choose if it’s a challenge (like luck pot or space race or anniversary) or a normal mission, and gets to choose the difficulty, length and the build/fleet (or use the actual build from the online save), and the waves are determined by some seed the player can pick.
I might’ve described a level generator of some sort, but that’s kinda what I have in mind for offline gameplay.
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That talk already happened few times and I’m still wondering why it’s not done in CIU. It’s so much better in-app purchase than some keys that you’re gonna waste in few minutes. And players that already have the episodes could receive a key to activate them in CIU so that’s another plus.
Choosing randomly generated waves from a wave set is nothing hard. Just bundle it up into a mission and voila.
And you don’t need to verify anything at all since it’s offline and the progress there won’t transfer to the online account.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I am certain you don’t download that from server. It’s already in the game since it takes more space than some ping checks and verifications. Unless you meant something different.
Yes, but this can be easily avoided. Let the player have the data also locally, used only for offline mode. Even if you would modify the data, when you get online you would still get the new (old actually) data from the server overriding the modified data from your PC. Everything can be done locally, generating new missions, modifying your fleet, whatever, but none of that would be reflected in your actual profile cos the true one is still stored in the server.
I believe iA said he wanted the episodes to have something to stand on their own -which makes sense both in a pride matter and in a financial matter, cos who would buy the episodes if the free to play CIU has it all? But that’s where the keys enter into the equation. If you could play the episodes campaign on CIU only after proving you had bought the episodes (entering serial key), the financial aspect is perfectly covered by this, and about what I call pride matter… I get someone wouldn’t like to see their own work being overshadowed by newer work, but as I see it, it would be a great complement instead.
Imagine doing the campaign with the bomber or the newer raven, or being able to actually use a gun that isn’t neutron gun or utensil pocker on CI4 and 5. Because that’s a sad thing of CI4 and 5, there are a lot of new guns that you almost literally can’t use if you want to succeed. Get a laser cannon, that’s a death sentence. Having the new balance parametres would give all of this stuff a viable use.
Please don’t get me wrong, the episodes are GREAT, but they have balancing issues, and doing this instead of saying ‘You know what, let’s do a patch for them with the new balancing if that’s what you want’ would keep both options completely separated, for both people wanting to play them in their most purist way or in new, almost unintended ways.
If offline mode exists, you need to decide if
A) progress is totally separate from online play
B) returning online copies over offline progress
And consider the ramifications of B) to the servers.
2 Likes
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what dedicated servers do?
I don’t understand the question. I’ve explained that most of the game info is being made by the server. Therefore, to make an offline mode you have to make an offline copy a server part.
The possibility of an off-line mode has been considered from day one. I’m periodically coming to back to it, but the benefits never outweigh the problems. Some random thoughts on this:
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Most of the MMO aspect of CIU is kept on the servers, and client can’t even run a local simulation. So any potential off-line mode would be constrained to the arcade (mission) portion only.
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Due to cheating concerns, you would not be allowed to merge your progress with your career even if you later came on-line.
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Since the game is free-to-play, there is no business incentive to do this because there would be nothing to gain (and, in fact, a lot to lose from an advertisement/IAP revenue standpoint). It could of course be tied into CHL, except you see how popular that is in the poll.
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The technical work required to get this working would be about half of creating a brand new episode, and I’d much rather do the latter if it ever came to that (again, see above point).
It’s still an open issue, however.
18 Likes
I don’t see a problem with that. I even mentioned in the first post that a basic random mission working like budget constraint would be good enough.
I mean, sure. I don’t think anyone that voted for “yes” imagined that the progress would carry over. It’s just to kill boredom when without internet connection.
Well, the vote above was probably for “the best case scenario” for players. That’s what we would want most. But I’m sure if you made your own poll asking if “offline mode for CHL-only is acceptable” then there would be much more votes for that. Probably not that overwhelming number but I think it would still be in favor of CHL-only.
This actually seems in line with what few of us think about DLCs for CIU. But it’s too messy to write about it here. Maybe I’ll also make a topic about it since quite some time passed from the original idea.
3 Likes
I was going to reply, but koko’s post is exactly what I would have said.
It could of course be tied into CHL, except you see how popular that is in the poll.
Obviously if you ask people if they want something for free or have a paywall for it, it’s going to win for the free. For some things, as rude as it can sound, you cannot make a poll for it. It’s your business and you know what would be the best balance between financial sense and community love. Like, you wouldn’t just give it for free because that could potentially hurt the whole business, but you wouldn’t go EA on it because that wouldn’t be accepted. On this proposed case, giving it to the CHL makes perfect sense in both ways, at least from my point of view.
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