Let's say I work at Company A for it's flagship video game. Our game has X amount of users who also play the main game for Company B. Both games are primarily online based (MOBA, MMORPG, etc.). What would both companies need to do in order to simulate the idea that a player can go from one game world into the other? A platform like Steam already somewhat does this by allowing the user to have a library of games and they can load up the one they want and start playing it, but I was thinking something much more immersive. Assume that the two companies are already well developed solely for their own games and have just now decided that they want to do this. I'm envisioning a scenario where the user logs into either game and can go to a "shared lobby" where they have a portal to the other game. When they pass through this portal, the user lands in a "landing zone" for the other game. From there they can pick up where they left off (if it's an open world game) or queue up (if it's a MOBA). What sort of software and hardware infrastructure would need to be set up in order to achieve this?
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How could 2 separate video games theoretically send players from one game to another?
27 minutes ago, Zhane26262 said:What would both companies need to do
Cooperate with one another.
41 minutes ago, Zhane26262 said:What sort of software and hardware infrastructure would need to be set up in order to achieve this?
The 2 companies' engineers would have to talk together and figure that out.
This doesn't seem to be a Game Design question, so it's moving to another forum.
I don't think this has ever been done, so you won't find a ready answer. I would suggest that both companies create a shared server that both games use.
9 hours ago, Zhane26262 said:I'm envisioning a scenario where the user logs into either game and can go to a "shared lobby" where they have a portal to the other game. When they pass through this portal, the user lands in a "landing zone" for the other game.
At this point it's no longer two games. Instead it is one game that contains both games within it. It is highly unlikely (I would even say "impossible") that two games from two different companies are compatible enough that they can be combined into one game like that.
One viable scenario that I can think of is that the first game has a feature (the portal, for example) that shuts down the game and runs the other one, possibly with some server to server magic that causes the other game to acknowledge that you came from the first game when it starts. But you would still have to wait for the game to shut down, return to desktop, loading of the second game, possibly logging in to it, it wouldn't be as immersive as "step into a portal and end up in another game".
It could be done, but it would need to be a special circumstance: I could almost see it as an eSport where players from one game compete in the with some special analogous features created just for the event.
As for the business side, I think of the Marvel vs. DC event where each company was responsible for publishing for 1/2 of the issues, in a way that was transparent to the readers.
Artistically? This could be blast.
Something similar to this was done back in 1991 by Omnitrend Software with it's "Interlocking Game System". The first game "Rules of Engagement" had you flying around in your starship and doing starship captain-y things. Squad based tactical battles were then auto-calculated if you sent your away team to fight on another ship. However, if you owned Breach 2, instead it would fire up Breach 2 and let you fight out the squad based mission. After the Breach 2 scenario was completed, the results were reported back to Rules of Engagement where you continued playing.
It's not quite the same thing, but I thought it was super cool at the time and relevant to the discussion.
Right now your question is a bit too general to give any meaningful answer. Basically the companies would agree on an API for what data to communicate and how to communicate it. But the problems to solve would be very different for say two First Person Shooter games. Or one is a first person shooter while the other is an amusement park sim.
This is something that's been done in sports games I can't remember the name of. In one game it was college sports, and you could import your team into an NFL game.
Technically speaking it's as simple as reading the save files and parsing it.
Technically possible, so just a matter of business negotiations and hashing out little details. Most likely what would happen is just a player's profile that's importable, but not so much the in-game character stats/items/skills etc. Doing so require a more tighter integration/synchronization between the two games. Changes in one game may potentially break the other. So it makes the games more prone to crashes and errors.
